If the English language made any sense ...
am 05.04.2006 von http://www.aktenvermerk.at
... lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers (Doug Larson). Or if, at least, pronounciation made any sense. Sadly, this seems not to be the case. Consider this lovely poem:
I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead: it’s said like bed, not bead -
For goodness sake don’t call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there’s dose and rose and lose -
Just look them up …
English Language and Creationism/ Englische Sprache: Gott unschuldig
Transblawg / Language Log (Geoff Pullum) berichtet, in Kansas wird schon wieder unterrichtet, dass die englische Sprache vor 500 Jahren von Gott erschaffen wurde (er hat sich wohl einiges von Deutsch und Französisch abgeguckt). Die Theorie heißt “…
Anus motion/Übersetzungsprobleme
Transblawg / Matthew Baldwin of The Morning News reports - or reported - that Spanish-speaking drivers have been getting out of drunk driving cases because of a deficiency in Spanish-language cards used by traffic cops: “But the defense somehow got a copy…
Überbee
Transblawg / CNN reports: A 13-year-old New Jersey girl making her fifth straight appearance at the Scripps National Spelling Bee rattled off “ursprache” to claim the title of America’s best speller on prime-time television Thursday night. Kat…
Spelling book aims for high sales
Transblawg / Lynne Truss’ publishers have now published Vivian Cook’s ‘Accomodating Brocolli in the Cemetary or why can’t anybody spell?’ (I pasted that. I can’t be bothered to misspell). Amazon.co.uk already has a five-star re…
Rejected in a hurry
Aktenvermerk / Who says that the law review article consideration process is slow? Brian Leiter writes about how Ohio State law professor Christopher Fairman’s article was rejected by the Kansas Law Review in only 25 minutes. Apparently, all it took for the e…
Software for less plain English
Transblawg / The program WhiteSmoke will ‘enrich’ your English. The demo on the site shows how you can start with a simple sentence like ‘I admire your work’ and finish with a strangely un-English one like ‘I greatly appreciate your…
Bright line
Transblawg / Mark Liberman at Language Log establishes that the noun phrase ‘bright line’ and the adjective ‘bright-line’ are missing in most general English dictionaries: Here’s another common expression that’s not in the stan…
» Boing Boing: Poems showing the absurdities of English spelling
A weblog about pop culture"/> <meta name="Keywords" content="blog, weblog, search, directory, community, web directory, web search, search engine, boing boing, mark frauenfelder, cory doctorow, david pescovitz, xeni jar…
» Links for 2006-04-05 (plasticbag.org)
» Spelling poems.
Add page summary here." /> <meta name="keywords" content="Add list of keywords here." /> <link rel="StyleSheet" href="./../../style/main.css" type="text/css" /> <…
© 2004-2008 JuraBlogs | Impressum
