Language and words in the news – 25th May 2012

This post contains a selection of links related to language and words in the news. These can be items from the latest news, blog posts or interesting websites related to global English, language change, education in general, and language learning and teaching in particular.

Feel free to contact us if you would like to submit a link for us to include, or just add a comment to the post, with the link(s) you’d like to share.

Language change and slang

A golden age of proverbs
What comes to mind when you hear the word proverb? Probably a bit of hoary old advice like “Waste not, want not,” or “A stitch in time saves nine.”

Crickets and Stool-Ball
I spent yesterday lounging around at Lord’s watching a game of stool-ball. This is a sport in which a chap throws a ball at a stool and another chap attempts to bat it away.

Did Stocks Have a ‘Turnaround Tuesday?’
There’s no standard definition of a Turnaround Tuesday … But as has been shown before, Tuesdays have, for some reason, the greatest odds of being the day that a short-term sell-off is reversed.

Improve your English

Words in the news: Stone
The stone (abbreviation st) is a unit of weight measurement that was used in many North European countries until the advent of metrication.

Language teaching and resources

“Historic” Versus “Historical”
A listener wants to know if she should say, “We sell historic replicas” or “We sell historical replicas.”

Books, words, languages and dictionaries

It’s official: hail will no longer be the size of golf balls
“Drought is a really blunt word,” says Trevor Bishop, head of water resources. On hearing this, I guess the Government’s vast Department of Euphemisms cancelled all staff leave.

The interstellar etymology of ‘mazel tov’.
Although I have little interest in horoscopes, I like how mazel tov preserves a reminder of celestial bodies’ significance in traditional conceptions of human fate and fortune. English retains a similar link in written in the stars, thank your lucky stars, and star-crossed (‘ill-fated’).

Signing Savvy: John Miller’s Online American Sign Language Dictionary
When John Miller became a teacher for deaf and hard of hearing children he saw a void. Often times, their communication would stop outside of the classroom because nobody shared their language. So, Miller decided to bring the classroom to the children’s home using the internet.

Video

This Is YOUR Video If YOU’RE into Gotye and Language
Here’s the you’re vs. your rap based on that Gotye song. The language on this is a little, shall we say, R-rated at times so you probably don’t want to blast this out of your computer’s speakers at work or school.

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