why is it that the african nation called the gambia is called "the gambia" instead of just "gambia"? i recognize that articles on country names are common in other languages. auf franzözisch, zum beispiel, man sagt "le canada", aber auf englisch man sagt nicht "the canada". i remember that we used to call ukraine "the ukraine", but that stopped ( Read more... )

• are pylons thus yclept because you can pile them on top of each other?
  
• if you were making a weedding-themed cheese plate, it's fairly obvious how you could do old, new, and blue. but how would you do "borrowed" cheese...?

often in the shower i wonder about the origin of the word "shampoo" - i mean, i'm glad i'm putting shampoo on my hair (as opposed to real poo), but it's gotta have a different derivation, right?
apparently it's from hindi! who knew?

googling on the phrase "You know what I blame this on the breakdown of? Society!" lead me to this page on linguistic humour in the simpsons. a truly cromulent discussion.

some random websurfing about double dactyls turned up one on the subject of Teddy Kennedy:

Rosenkrantz Guildenstern
Theodore Kennedy
Gave to Kopechne a
Ride in his car.

After the party, they
Automechanically
Went like Montgomery
One bridge too far.

Richard Ussery

the alarming thing about this is that i recall one (from, i believe, The Joy ( Read more... )

just found this site which translates the spoken and written chinese in Firefly into englisch. handy.

also this wiki on firefly.

so here's how it works - the contestants get a scene from a randomly selected (preferrably relatively obscure) shakespeare play. they then have an hour to write a modern english version of the same scene. versions are judged on faithfulness to the meaning(s) of the original text and quality of prose. translations of blank verse passages are not ( Read more... )

so if you're using the standard abbreviation for the phrase "a livejournal", do you write
"a lj"
or
"an lj"
?
if i say it out loud, i lean towards the second, but if i think about what it's abbreviating, i lean towards the first...

so i finally got around to properly playing with the random name stuff i talked about last month. thanks to kelc42 for the tip on ActivePerl. works like a charm. i'm curently playing with a dataset of French and Russian male names. some samples:
( Fruensschian names, cut for space reasons )

being a d&d geek, i've been playing with Chris Pound's random name generator for a while. (well, seeing as i' don't have Perl on my boxen yet, i've mostly been looking at his regularly updated random generations.) but he's missing some obvious language choices. i just found this site, which looks like a good place to compile data sets. now i have ( Read more... )