blog posts

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  [Your Name Here] University: Naming Rights for Sale

  Apr 29, 2013 11:15 pm1145 views

  The University of Illinois has sold the naming rights to its 50-year old sports and entertainment arena to State Farm Insurance. Effective immediately and for the next 30 years, the building that has always been called Assembly Hall will be known as the State Farm® Center. State Farm will pay $60 million for its product placement coup, though the premium could go up if the company fails to maintain a B+ average.

  The State Farm Center is just a start. What about the Amazon.com Library? The Pearson® English Building? The Dali Professor of Horology? The Laval Center for Surrender Studies? Considering that the former Illinois governor tried to sell a Senate seat, maybe the University of Illinois could even sell a donor on the idea of putting their name on the entire school. Imagine the [Your Name Here] University of Illinois. To quote the former governor, "It's @#*!% golden!"

  With auctioning off naming rights all the rage, the Web of Language™ wants you to send in your suggestions for the most appropriately ironic names for university buildings, programs, and endowed professorships.

• "Young chicken without sex": China bans Chinglish for Olympics

  Apr 12, 2007 6:45 pm5286 views

  Wanting to show off its cosmopolitan modernity while maintaining tight control over what the Chinese are allowed to say in public, China has banned Chinglish, the oddly-phrased, unintelligible, and often unintentionally funny English translations of Chinese signs that have been proliferating in the capital in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. 

  For example, there’s the bus sign that announces pregnantly in English lettering under the Chinese, “Offer the Seats to the Old, Weak, Sick, Cripple, and Gravid,” or the awkward but apt warning on the gasoline tanker, “Dangerous Goo Keep Clear.”

• You lie: Dictionaries find truth in a post-truth world

  Jan 25, 2017 1:45 am1832 views

  It’s a fact: politicians lie, and the news media exposes their lies. It may seem surprising, but lately dictionaries, not the media, have become the guardians of facts and the exposers of lies.

• You can save this endangered language for only pennies a day; or you could let it die.

  Feb 25, 2007 2:45 pm1154 views

  According to some alarming estimates, half of the worlds 7,000 languages will die by the end of this century. English, French, and Arabic probably wont be among them. Some people try to save the endangered languages by writing grammars and dictionaries and encouraging their use among schoolchildren, or by videotaping the few remaining speakers on the off chance that future generations will want to revive the lost tongue.

• You are the person of the year. One of you? Two of you? All of you?

  Dec 24, 2006 12:15 am1301 views

  Time magazine has just announced that you are its person of the year for 2006.  One blogger faulted the magazine for not making clear whether you is singular or plural.  Since the magazine’s cover has a mirror – actually a bit of silvered paper impersonating a mirror – it seemed clear to me that you was singular. Calling you the person of the year, not the people of the year, suggested this as well.  Nonetheless, some ambiguity remains: many of the articles in the “Person of the Year” issue address a mass audience, users of the World Wide Web, you plural.   

  Whatever Time meant, it’s clear that when it comes to numbers, the English second person pronoun isn’t clear at all.  You can mean one, or two, or more than two.  That hasn’t always been the case.  Old English had separate second person pronouns for the singular, the dual (referring to two people), and the plural (for more than two).  The dual died out – after the Norman conquest the English decided that two was the loneliest number – but singular thee, thou and thy held on till well into the 17th century, with ye, you and your reserved in most cases for the plural. 

• Yo! A new gender-neutral pronoun from, of all places, Baltimore

  Jan 8, 2008 11:30 pm6079 views

  Yo, a new gender-neutral pronoun, has been popping up in an unlikely spot, the hallways of a few Baltimore schools. Or maybe Maryland middle schools arent such unlikely incubators of new words after all, since theyre full of teen-agers whose linguistic inventiveness hasnt yet been beaten out of them by grammar lessons and standardized tests, teenagers who love to play with language and coin ever-newer words just to prove to adults that were never going to get it, never in a million years will be as cool as they are now. (What they dont know is that we invented cool, or our parents did, but hey, whatever.)

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  "Yes, we want" -- Who owns global English?

  Apr 21, 2010 3:00 pm13638 views

  A 1.8 million euro advertising campaign for Madrid's new Spanish-English public schools is being ridiculed for its slogan "Yes, we want," which critics are calling bad English. English is what the chanters of "Yes, we want," want to learn, because English is the new global language. The ads, which evoke Barack Obama's "Yes, we can," have appeared on Spanish television, radio, billboards, and buses, prompting complaints that the Education Ministry should be promoting its bilingual public elementary and high schools in correct English if it wants pupils to pick them.

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  Yellow Fever: Is it a racist slur or just a place to eat?

  Apr 28, 2018 11:15 pm2562 views

  Is calling a restaurant Yellow Fever yet another example of mainstream racism? Is it a bold reappropriation of a negative stereotype? Or just a bad marketing decision?

  It’s all of the above when Whole Foods hosts a pan-Asian resto called “Yellow Fever” in one of its California markets.

• WTF? Swearing at work is good for business

  Oct 22, 2007 11:15 pm1756 views

  Bans on swearing in college sports have been making headlines in the last year or two as part of a concerted effort to enforce good sportsmanship among players and fans alike, both toward the opposing team and toward the refs, but a new study coming out of the University of East Anglia’s Norwich Business School reports that, while swearing may cost you the game, on the plus side it does build team spirit.  Their research further suggests that turning the air blue on a regular basis may actually be good for business.
  
  The legendary American lawyer Clarence Darrow reportedly told one interviewer, “I don’t swear just for the hell of it” (at least the Darrow character in Inherit the Wind says this).  Now two business scholars, Yehuda Baruch and Stuart Jenkins, report in a recent issue of the Leadership and Organization Development Journal (vol. 28 [2007], pp. 492-507), that regular swearing at work creates a sense of community and reinforces social relationships. 

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  WTF is the 2010 Word of the Year

  Dec 25, 2010 6:15 pm5581 views

  WTF is the 2010 Word of the Year. Each December the Web of Language chooses one word or phrase which best exemplifies the spirit of the year gone by. It may be a new word, like "refudiate," chosen as word of the year this year by the Oxford American Dictionary, or an old one, like "austerity," Merriam-Webster's choice. It could be a word that lasts: "blog" and "information superhighway" were words of the year. But it could be an obscure word as well: "locavore," for example, which few people had a taste for, or worse yet, "plutoed," a word with the visibility of a very dim comet (neither word was Web of Language approved). Then there was "roadside bomb." That morbid phrase appeared in so many daily headlines about the War in Iraq in 2005 and 2006 that it was the Web of Language word of the year two years running.

• Written Language Disorder: Medical researchers fear there's no cure for bad writing

  May 13, 2009 11:30 pm5896 views

  A group of Mayo Clinic researchers has found that almost 15 percent of otherwise normal school-aged children in Rochester, Minnesota, are suffering from Written Language Disorder. According to Dr. Slavica K. Katusic, while Written Language Disorder, or WLD, does not pose as great a threat as the H1N1 virus, it’s actually just as common in school children as reading problems, with boys twice as likely as girls to be symptomatic.

  Teachers and editors have long suspected that some people write better than others, and critics typically treat writing they don’t like as diseased. But bad writing wasn’t recognized by the medical profession as pathological until 1994, when the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition, defined the syndrome, and psychiatrists suddenly began seeing it in many of their patients.

• Words don't lie: semantic mapping of presidential debate shows what's really on candidates' minds

  Sep 28, 2008 12:51 am1231 views

  With the global economy imploding and the United States mired in two wars of attrition, the presidential candidates met for their first debate Sept. 26 at the University of Mississippi. By counting their words we can create a semantic map for each candidate, a map which shows just how skillfully Sens. McCain and Obama skirted these pressing issues.

• Words don't lie, part IV: Candidates debate role of plumbers in the White House

  Oct 16, 2008 1:00 pm3210 views

  Although the candidates did occasionally discuss substantive issues like school vouchers, abortion, and the principles they might use in selecting Supreme Court justices, the most riveting part of last night's third and final presidential debate, held at Long Island's Hofstra University, came when John McCain looked straight into the camera and asked the American people, "Why can't you ever get a plumber when you need one?"

• Words don't lie, part II: Perception Analyzer reveals no Jack Kennedys at vice presidential debate

  Oct 2, 2008 11:15 pm985 views

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• Words don't lie, part III: Campaign rhetoric gives way to campaign linguistics

  Oct 8, 2008 10:27 pm882 views

  Language has taken on a special prominence in the 2008 presidential election. It's customary for each side to malign the opposition for using words that are vague or deceptive, and even for lying outright nothing new there. But this time around it's Language with a big "L" that's also coming under scrutiny, the use of language as a whole, not just individual words unfairly spun or improperly deployed.