Complaint received by a French typewriter shop, reprinted in a local newspaper on the Île de Ré:

Monsixur ( Read more... )

Michael Chabon's 'The Mysteries of Pittsburgh' (1988) is a good book. Universal, in places. But also particularly American, in a quiet variety of ways.

By way of example...

This scene, between two boys about to kiss for the first time, is English in its reticence.

"Arthur, can I ( Read more... )

"We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language ( Read more... )

To fundamentalist Australian Christians, sex outside marriage is the root of all evil.

Is it worse, wondering whether someone did a troubling thing on purpose, or out of unchecked naivety?

Why yes, I am newly reminded that laundrettes really ought not to be advertised with death-threats to the immediate family...

In among all the panicky and preposterous news stories online*, tis nice splendiferous to find the BBC musing on vocabulary sizeProfessor David Crystal reckons most people vastly underestimate their total, and suggests gauging your own average by ( Read more... )

Goodyear Tyres' Innovation & Development division saddened by head office memo urging all employees to 'cease trying to reinvent the wheel'.

Wang grew by 2225 percent between 1996 and 2008, reports Reuters. Cock shrank to 785 last year from 3,211 in 1881.

Forget communication with family and fellow hunters. Maybe that sort of reportage - of surnames! not genitals at all! aha! - is why we evolved language. One massive leap for mankind... away from cave-painting a three-line cock.

I ♥ the internet. Have just learnt of Muphry's Law, the "editorial application of the better-known Murphy's Law".

Muphry's Law dictates that ( Read more... )

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