Tag Archives: language

Paramount is suing the makers of a crowd-funded Star Trek fan film on multiple copyright grounds. But what’s got the Trekkie world buzzing is Paramount’s claim on the Klingon language, which the defendants say cannot be copyrighted because no language can be. From the response filed by Paramount: “This argument is absurd since a language is only useful if it …

Comedy Central’s Larry Wilmore followed President Obama to close last night’s White House Press Correspondents Dinner with a series off jabs against the gathered media bigwigs. While Wilmore’s routine was generally met with tepid laughter or stony silence, especially from his targets at CNN, it was his final message to President Obama that caused gasps across Teabagistan and not a …

Via Mediaite: Tuesday’s primaries in five Northeastern states was nicknamed “the Acela primary” by pundits, a reference to Amtrak’s Acela Express train that spans from D.C. to Boston. But local news anchors struggled to pronounce the high-speed rail service’s name. Bloomberg Politics created a humorous mash-up of all the anchors who tripped over the word (which is supposed to be …

From the BBC: A Paris tribunal has ruled that calling a male hairdresser a “faggot” is not homophobic – “because hair salons regularly employ gay people”. The case relates to an employee at a salon who was fired after failing to turn up for work while sick. His boss accidentally sent him a text using the slur, so the hairdresser …

Andres Duque writes at Blabbeando: Earlier today a Mexican political party which bills itself as the 4th largest in the country launched a television spot demanding respect from U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump… by calling him a faggot. In the ad a member of the Nueva Alianza party expresses frustration at how Mexicans are currently being portrayed worldwide and takes …

The website Abado examined millions of tweets for “slurs and other prejudiced language against black people, Hispanic/Latino people, women, gays and lesbians, transgender people, people with disabilities, and the overweight.” Topping their list for anti-gay tweets was Buffalo. Here’s their overall breakdown by state: Altogether, Louisiana places first with 1,155 slur-containing tweets out of every 100,000, indicating that approximately 1 …

This is considered a win for trans folks who reject traditional pronouns. From the Washington Post: Singular “they,” the gender-neutral pronoun, has been named the Word of the Year by a crowd of over 200 linguists at the American Dialect Society’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. on Friday evening. In a landslide vote, the language experts chose singular they over …

Here’s a fascinating look at Donald Trump’s speech patterns and his “huckster’s knack” for selling himself. Over 300,000 views in just two days. Watch below.

CNN reports: Donald Trump took to Twitter Tuesday to defend using the word “schlonged” to describe Hillary Clinton’s primary loss in 2008, saying the word is “not vulgar.” “Once again, #MSM is dishonest. ‘Schlonged’ is not vulgar. When I said Hillary got ‘schlonged’ that meant beaten badly,” he said in one tweet. He then attacked the mainstream media, MSM for …

An amusing story from the Austin Statesman: Y’all already all know that Texas is known for its slang. The state is home to a slew of Southern colloquialisms as well as totally unique sayings you won’t hear anywhere else. But did you know that the word “Texas” is in itself a slang word? According to Texas Monthly, Norwegians have long …

Via USA Today: Fans of Carly Fiorina venting their views on Facebook are far more likely to do so with proper grammar than fans of Donald Trump. A new study by the folks at the grammar-checking app Grammarly concluded that commenters on Fiorina’s Facebook page made an average of 6.3 grammatical and spelling errors per hundred words compared with 12.6 …

According to the US State Department. More difficult languages are here.

I’ve long been fascinated with Polari, which I first learned about when I asked British friends about the title of Morrissey’s 1990 album, Bona Drag, which means “nice outfit.” From the clip recap: Polari was a form of slang used by gay men in Britain prior to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967, used primarily as a coded way for …

CNN reports: Scrabble dictionary has added lotsa new words for its players, and some are so ridic, they’ll make you lolz. The venerable board game has an additional 6,500 words, including a few once limited to social media and technology. The words are straight from the mouths of the cool kids. There’s lotsa, twerking, lolz, emoji and ridic — short …

Via the Guardian: The official dictionary of the Swedish language will introduce a gender-neutral pronoun in April, editors at the Swedish Academy have announced. “Hen” will be added to “han” (he) and “hon” (she) as one of 13,000 new words in the latest edition of the Swedish Academy’s SAOL. The pronoun is used to refer to a person without revealing …

600K views in four days.

An interesting analysis from Vocativ: President Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address was written for a tenth-grader, which makes it the most high-minded of all his SOTU speeches, a data analysis by Vocativ reveals. Generally, in order for Obama to make himself understood to the broadest possible swath of the population, he tailors his speeches to the intellect of …

Via the Associated Press: A nation, a workplace, an ethnicity, a passion, an outsized personality. The people who comprise these things, who fawn or rail against them, are behind Merriam-Webster’s 2014 word of the year: culture. The word joins Oxford Dictionaries’ “vape,” a darling of the e-cigarette movement, and “exposure,” declared the year’s winner at Dictionary.com during a time of …

Via the Wall Street Journal: No puns, please. This is China. That’s the message from the country’s media regulators, who on Thursday derided the use of wordplay in advertisements and broadcasts, saying they were “contradictory in spirit to the promotion and continuance of excellent, traditional Chinese culture.” Examples cited by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, …

Via CBS News: Of the many, many words that editors at Oxford Dictionaries review which have newly come into the language lexicon, only one has had enough of an influence in society to make it as 2014’s International Word of the Year. This year it’s “vape.” The Oxford Dictionary defines it as follows: v. Inhale and exhale the vapour produced …