The reason irregardless (a speech error based on a blend of irrespective and regardless ) is that Merriam-Webster now includes it. As I recently said in my blog, Merriam-Webster not only accepts whatever its editorial board hears on the street, it sweeps the gutters for new words. This is what a di...

Flaminus has somehow articulated everything I have been miserably failing to get across. (except I'm not sure that "irregardless" is meaningless noise to standard English speakers, since it is a standard word with a 1-syllable prefix.) It's an interesting idea, that a weakened phonological...

How about the ancient Greeks? We say [?u?s????iz] for Thucydides. They probably said something like [t?uky?dide?s].

...And that totally did not work, did it? Damn Unicode-uncompliant web apps.

Speaking of Brown's prose, here are two Language Log discussions on how bad is writing is. I'm not sure I agree with them, but they're funny

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language ... 01628.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language ... 00844.html

That's exactly the point, folks who use those expressions ARE saying the exact opposite of what they think they are saying. But if everyone in their speech community says it the same way, then everyone understands what it means, right? And its meaning is, for all purposes, what they intend it to me...

ahem... We all have backgrounds in linguistics around these parts, Buster (and no qualifying level thereof exists, nor should it), so attempts at pulling rank will get you nowhere. Fast. I just mentioned it so you know where I'm coming from, that's all! I can't help noticing that you continue to ar...

Denigration, to borrow your term, occurs only when someone insists that--in the real world--there are no standards and all usages have equal merit. There may be no rational reason why one usage wins out over the others, but that's the way it is. I agree with your last sentence. Certain kinds of Eng...

That's what I've heard too. But Burmese has some straight lines as well, not many, but some. So I guess they tore some leaves.

As a point of interest, the Mayan script does have a phonological component, with about 150 "syllabograms" http://www.omniglot.com/writing/mayan.htm This is pretty interesting too: "The Inca used a system of knotted strings known as quipu to send messages around their empire. The numb...

Golly gee batman, I thought we were being serious, we had straight faces; we answered your questions with great earnestness, and made polite... and most of us took you seriously, if we make a pun or two well just get used to it, others have tried to get us to abandon our merry ways but hey Robin, w...

An Italian menu. It looks like they just ran the menu items through Babelfish... "penne all'arrabbiata" = "pens to the angry one".

I'll try not to forget to ask her tomorrow about the pizza [...] A few months ago, Danish pastry and buttercookies, immensely popular in Tehran, got a new name, after the Danish cartoon situation. [...] Pizze: "elastic loaves" Danishes: "roses of Mohammad" (gul-e-muhammadi) Thos...

skinem,

Mayan was written with hieroglyphics before European contact. Many languages have developed their own orthographies after European contact, for instance Cree
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/cree.htm

I am not aware of any cursive varieties, though.

I don't disagree, PW. These examples are nonstandard English, but they can still be interesting. I think they're interesting, anyway. They're examples where the addition or subtraction of negation doesn't change the meaning, like "irregardless" and "I could care less". Since this...

I ran across this site a couple of days ago..."Urban Dictionary" thought Malachi might like it! http://www.urbandictionary.com/ cheers! That's pretty neat. It's not exactly discriminating, though, is it? I have no idea how common these terms are. some of the definitions are funny, though....