Kinetic sculpture. I just thought it would be of general interest as a different medium.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... &plindex=2

Generally, "shut up and eat my/your xxxx" seems to mean "stop complaining." On Google there are far more hits for "shut up and eat your xxxx" In place of xxxx, beans had 764 hits, dinner had 480, grits had 133 and shrimp had 3 On the other hand, the replacement for xxx...

If I feel I have talked too much about something, or if I feel suddenly that I need to mind my own business, or if I suddenly find I am blabbing about a topic that is out of my league, I will find myself saying the following. "Hmmmm, it looks like I'd better shut up and eat my shrimp". I k...

Also, as opposed to some websites where people are just about ready to kill each other over some fine grammatical point, this particular website seems to approach things linguistically. It simply seems to be more of an observational bent, rather than a prescriptive bent. And I happen to like that. ...

If need be, I will be a proud representative of the teeming mongol hordes from the bowels of Kansas.

In reading the various entries on this thread, I was just wondering whether there is simply some kind of "syntactic drift" going on, depending on some regions of the country. I think most languages (e.g. Indo-European for sure....look at decreasing importance of inflection), tend to evolve...

I could not find a reference to the website below on this forum, so I thought I would offer it as an item of general interest. Among other entries are audios of people around the world reading a designed English paragraph. I found it very interesting, and it was good to have phonetic inventory chart...

I cannont recall hearing this with the definitive the . It has always been all of a sudden for me. Never heard "the" either. skinem and others: That's fair enough; I simply did not know. One certainly can't tell very well around these parts simply by listening, as the phrase is all slurre...

Arr, where be all these bars then?? Sluggo, finally soaking in a stash of Sea Dog Riverdriver Porter (yum) Whoa!...my mistake. I was thinking the dialect quiz I took was on this site. I might be mistaken in thinking I linked to it from somewhere here. Anyway, the quiz I was referring to is here: ht...

I can see occasionally, where someone has placed acute accent marks as a diacritical above Cyrillic vowels. Cyrillic is my interest on this matter. I THOUGHT it was done by positioning the cursor after the vowel in question and then typing the "escape sequence" "0301 Alt-x" to in...

I am a budding linguist and perhaps would like to teach English to Russians someday. However, at this rate, that will be a long time coming. Anyway, I do daydream from time to time about certain American English phrases that are used, yet I cannot seem to figure out how to explain them to foreign st...

Here is an idiomatic phrase that will probably forever tag you as a hayseed, whether you are or not. However, it is so vivid it might be apropos for anyone willing to "take that risk": ".....it's as frustratin' as tryin' to push a wheelbarrow with rope handles". I've used this, b...

Welcome, dsteve! ..... although intuition would say that they (the sounds) would be the same. Not only is it odd that interjections are not the same, but animal sounds are not rendered the same, though you would THINK the same type phonemes would be used in various languages. This was straight from...

My parents were both born in Kansas City, Missouri...father in 1927, mother in 1931. They moved to a suburb of Kansas City on the Kansas side circa 1953. They have lived in some suburb of Kansas City on the Ks side since then. This is the way my parents recite the days of the week (note: NOT IPA :D ...

I would be interested in knowing if there are studies on how rapidly a new word gets disseminated from its point of origin. Perhaps someone who studies network theory could point me to a spot.

Thanks.