Diacritiques

It is possible for the New York Times to publish an article about a book that contains a swearword in the title, but its stylistic rules forbid the actual printing of the word in question.

The solution: the title is cited as “On Bull - - - - “, and the article body mentions [bull] or bull sixteen times. This leads to (unintentional? it’s hardly credible) contortions like these:

“I used the title I did,” [Prof. Harry G. Frankfurt] added, “because I wanted to talk about [bull] without any [bull], so I didn’t use ‘humbug’ or ‘bunkum.’ ”

Bull, it appears, wasn’t originally a fig-leaf word, created to sanitise the offending bullshit. It may derive (there are other theories) from Old French boul and has been around since the middle ages, denoting trivial or false statements (whereas bullshit only dates back to the early 20th century.

Via Crooked Timber.

Or maybe, water vermin again? After my own attempts at gay ant rap (sorry, anagram poetry) on my name and serendipity.lascribe.net/… hreflang=”en”>those of some friends, Michel “Zegun” from Corsica has published an anagram interview with Matt, the WordPress lead developer

Excerpt:

Michel: A little off-topic, how would you explain Georges W. Bush’s popularity in Texas?
Matt Mullenweg: W? mullet magnet!

Michel: Any message to HauntedUnix, about the #wordpress regulars who haven’t sent their mug shots to yet?
Matt Mullenweg: Tell ‘em “Want mug!”

I will not tell a long, sorted tale, little lone tell a bear-faced lie, now will I? Dear eggcornologists worldwide, I am happy to announce the launch of The Eggcorn Database, for which, I am sure, you have waited with baited breath.

This is a work in progress, so don’t take anything for granite. But if you take it with a grain assault, you just might enjoy it.

May eggcorns rain supreme!

P.S.: Paula likes it, Suw wants to run and hide. Take your pick.

Sorry to be blunt, but someone must have been asleep. The astonishing new phishing exploit that has generated a lot of commotion since the weekend relies on something so obvious that you don’t have to be a coder or know anything about what makes web browsers tick to understand the principle. Being a moderately […]

My brain and mind, as I have mentioned before, feel these days like something that stayed too long in a hot frying pan. So I have quite a number of planned or partially written posts on language topics, and just can’t seem to be able to finish them. The question is: should I first […]

Over at Language Log, Mark Liberman refers to Nicola/maeveenroute, a linguistic blogger from Canada, to tell us that “in French, an allophone is a kind of person, whereas in English, it’s a kind of sound”. What “kind of person”? Precisely the kind who we’ve just heard turns children into dangerous potential criminals: those whose native […]

I can’t procrastinate any longer. Claude has passed on a music meme to me, and it’s even a chain-letter type meme. But the task looks harmless enough, and I feel guilty anyway because I owe her an email and have been a bad correspondent (in addition to being a bad all-kinds-of-things).#[1] (I promise, I will […]

… blogs are talking about society. And language, too, further down. Firstly, via Laurent at the beautifully redesigned Embruns, we learn from this post by Adrien/Bix that the french “pro-life” activists (they are called les anti-avortement here, by those who don’t agree with them) have found a rather insidious new way to send young women on a […]

The W3C markup validator has a “tip of the day” feature. Earlier, I was working on a bit of site design, and thus used the eminently helpful validation service to debug a bit of xhtml. What gave me a start, though, was the tip that jumped off the screen right into my field of vision: Use […]

… from reading an article on computer security: The choice of a gurning picture may indicate that the worm’s writer is British. Gurning is an ancient Cumbrian practice of pulling a funny face and is famously practised in the village of Egremont at its annual crab apple fair. I had never heard of gurning before, […]