m. c. de marco

Via the Double-Tongued Dictionary: Lexicographer Grant Barrett contemplates children’s nursery rhymes. Here, for example, is the truth about the Three Little Pigs:

I do recall most of ‘The Three Little Pigs’. There are three pigs, and a wolf who is trying to get inside their houses, and in response to his demands, the pigs say the memorable phrase, “Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin.”

Language Log has a funny grammar police video up.

I was checking for updates to WordNet, a thesaurus program that I use, when I found a similar tool on-line: Wordage. There’s no explicit information there about the dictionaries behind the Wordage interface, but I suspect WordNet was involved. Wordage looks very handy, especially compared to the current state of WordNet usability.

WordNet is now at version 3.0 and has a rudimentary web interface. Matters are not so promising if you want to download the dictionary for offline use.

Via Daring Fireball: Ironic Sans presents a beta of Thsrs, the thesaurus of synonyms shorter than your original word.

From Language Log: two posts on non-constituent titles, one that explains the term and one with further examples from the wild, which answer the unasked question “What constitutes a title?”

The short answer is, a brief, perhaps poetical, constituent phrase.

Ben Zimmer of Language Log documents a couple of fun “incorrections”: the one alluded to in the title of this post, and one I spotted on Universal Hub and emailed to him:

As noted on the Random Squeegee blog, a[ Boston Metro] article about the observation of Martin Luther King Day explained that “King’s birthday is Jan. 15, but the federal holiday bearing his name is observed on the third yesterday in January.”

On LanguageLog, John McWhorter spots the Celtic Hypothesis in the wild and explains why it’s not just another crackpot linguistic theory:

The more extreme advocates even claim that English is Celtic grammar with Germanic words. As you might expect, this idea has never penetrated mainstream work on English in any serious way (although none other than J.R.R. Tolkien was a fellow traveller). As such, I was fascinated to run across a casual espousal of the Celtic Hypothesis by a nonspecialist. […]

Take the way English uses DO in negative sentences like HE DOESN’T KNOW, or interrogative ones like DO YOU LIKE CHEESE? It seems so ordinary to an Anglophone, but what language have you ever learned that used DO like that?