Arrrh, me hearies!

Today be Talk Like A Pirate Day, on which day I be wantin' to answer a question that gentlemen o' fortune all o'er the briny blue ha' been askin' theyselves: what be the part of speech of avast?

An interesting phenomenon of language variation is lexical reversal, where a term that normally points in a specific temporal direction is flipped. Hence people will occasionally use ancestor, which points backwards in time, where descendant, which points forward, would be standard.

As dictionaries go, you can't get much better than that towering giant of lexicography, The Oxford English Dictionary. It's always the first place serious word lovers turn when they have questions about the origins or use of a word. Yet really serious logophiles know its limitations. There are certain instances where you need to supplement the OED with a specialist work.

Writing in the New York Times, David Cohen meditates lyrically upon the differences between British and American English. Cohen uses these differences, especially individual words--loo vs. bathroom, bonnet vs. hood, car park vs. parking lot, etc., as a token of a larger cultural divide.

He quotes Victor Katz, noting

There is the illusion that we speak the same language, but we really don't.

This morning my son was watching Sesame Street and I heard Grover ask rhetorically, "Anyone know what 'agglutination' means?"

I immediately had Aran practice saying the word, but he's a little young to lecture on morphological structure, so I left it at that.

While driving in to work this morning, I head the reporter on NPR talking about a sense of "palatable relief" on Wall Street due to the bail out of AIG.

After I finished snickering, for which elitism I will soon, doubtlessly, be punished by the law of prescriptive retaliation, I googled the phrase. It's not very common (only 100 g-hits as opposed to 8080 for 'palpable relief'), and a few are just accidental collocations crossing phrase boundaries, but clearly this is not unattested.

This article from the BBC magazine talks about the decline of the hyphen. The new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has apparently removed the hyphens from some 16,000 words, reflecting a decline in how people use them.

From Wired Blogs comes news that HBO's Chief Technology Officer, Bob Zitter, wants us to stop using the term "DRM" (digital rights management) and start using "DCE" (digital consumer enablement) to refer to the system by which media blood-suckers intellectual property owners make sure that we can only view their material on exactly the terms that they dictate.

If Mr. Zitter is serious he needs a crash course in semantics, and perhaps the history of English.

This is a word that deserves more attention.

Two different senses show up in different on-line dictionaries.

The Urban Dictionary defines it as a small piece of excrement floating alone in a toilet bowl. That's a fairly prosaic instance of derivation, just the dimminutive -let tacked on to crap.

I've been neglecting this blog for a while, largely the result of going on vacation. I spent two and a half weeks in Malaysia, and another two weeks recovering from jet lag and trying to catch up with other work. We went to introduce our son Aran (now 14 months old) to his great grandmother and the rest of my wife's very large clan. We all had a wonderful time, even Aran, who, after getting over some stranger anxiety, seemed to lap up the attention from all his cousins.