Diacritiques

a site in turmoil
damn Internet Explorer
stand fast, dawn is nigh

This is my reply when asked how I spent last night and most of the preceding day.

Others, in comparable situations, have had similar reactions.

Generally, it’s called a hiatus in Blogese. Despite temperatures of over 30°C (or maybe because of the ozone pollution levels caused by the heat) I managed to catch what is called Sommergrippe in German — summer flu. It hit me pretty fiercely (I’m still coughing), and I can’t blog when my mind is feverish and I’m half asleep anyway. There’s a lot of blogging material in store, though. We’ll all see how it goes.

Meanwhile, and on popular request, here’s a little number I cobbled together to teach myself Python. Careful, it’s not for the easily offended. You have been warned.

A visually pleasant Flash animation about the words of English, ranked by frequency word. It is based on the British National Corpus. If I am not mistaken, the first common noun is time, ranked 66th.

Via James @ The Bloomers.

/ˌser.ənˈdɪp.ɪ.ti/ is definitely taking the risk of becoming, quite unintentionally, something like a Language Log commentary column. It is a little humiliating to admit that I can’t seem to be able to keep up with the Language Log linguists, and today I probably ought to have retired to the bed with a cup of hot […]

As you probably know, there is a law in France, called “loi Toubon” after the former minister of culture who sponsored it, that requires all product descriptions and adverts (“be they in spoken, written or audio-visual form”) to be in French. If several languages are present (read: if the slogan is in English) the French […]

Language Log brings it to our attention that a hoax might be giving millions of web users the wrong idea about the history and etymology of NYC’s nickname The Big Apple. The term didn’t in fact originate with an early 19th-century immigrant from France named Eve, who (supposedly) ran a brothel and called the women […]

Adobe’s site has a beautiful page about the history of the ampersand, the way it developed from a ligature of the letters e and t of the Latin word et. (Via Language Hat, who got it from aldibronti at Wordorigins.) In French, the &-sign is or used to be called pirlouette, perluette, perluète, éperluète or esperluette. […]

Oh the serendipitous nature of blogging! It has only now come to my attention that crime author Ian Rankin’s site provides audio extracts (AmE: excerpts) from nine of his Inspector Rebus novels. If you click here, eg, you will be taken to a two minutes or so snippet (in Macromedia Flash format) of Black […]

Yesterday, I unexpectedly got to duty as a lumberjack’s assistant. Two thirds of an old and creaky plum tree had come down under the weight of its ripening fruit in the backyard of some friends I was dropping in on. So today’s BBC News headline Saws face axe in forests of future caught my attention […]

After last month’s dismal elections, the EU parliament’s (newly renamed) Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality is getting a new member from Britain, UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom. The Guardian tells us a little more about this champion of women’s rights. In his own words: I want to deal with women’s issues because […]