This morning's google news served up a nice crash blossom, courtesy of the Times Daily: "Racist language bill passes" When I first saw the headline, I thought it was an editorial inveighing against some bill about language that happened to be racist, rather than a bill about racist language, which, on reading the article, I find to be the intended interpretation.

This discussion of Grammar Taliban reminds me of a mondegreen that I heard a young cousin of my wife utter last summer when we were visiting Malaysia. Said cousin had heard us singing Harry Belafonte's Banana Boat Song to our son by way of a lullaby, and so whenever he would start fussing, she would pipe up with "Come, Mr. Taliban, tally me bananas"

For the most part, I use OpenOffice, unless I am absolutely forced to do otherwise. I've found it to be a good replacement for Microsoft Office (apart from a few annoyances). One thing that has been bugging me, though, has nothing to do with its technical deficiencies. What I want to know is how are we supposed to pronounce "Impress", the PowerPoint equivalent for OpenOffice. In other words, are we suppsed to read it as a verb, with the stress on the second syllable, or a noun, with the stress on the first.