How would you define a "humanitarian disaster"?

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I really enjoy it when I say something and my interlocutor comments that while they know the word or expression from their reading, they've never heard anyone use it in conversation.

As many of you know, I love eggcorns, those wacky re-shapings of familiar words or phrases, often undetectable by spell-checkers. A post tonight on Language Log includes a beautiful (albeit deliberate) one: feint-hearted. For me, the best thing about eggcorns is finding a way in which they actually make sense. Give it a try! Look up three ( Read more... )

I recently read The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman ( Read more... )

"reek havoc"

As always, I find myself thinking of ways this could be used intentionally. Something like "The arrival of a skunk reeked havoc on our picnic."

Courtesy of languagelog, David Pesetsky's "translation" of the performance instructions in Mahler's 1st Symphony.

I confess that my German is so rudimentary that I didn't really get it until "viola solo".

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, an eggcorn is a non-standard reshaping of a familiar word or phrase. The word comes from someone's attempt to spell "acorn ( Read more... )

Poll Figures of Speech

Please comment and tell me what you think each of these means, whether you've heard it before, or not.

Friedrich Froebel, the man who invented kindergarten originally called his school a Kleinkinderbeschäftigungsanstalt, which the article I'm reading translates as "small-child-keep-busy-institute".

As most of you know, I record textbooks for Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic. This week I was assigned to a textbook I've read parts of in earlier sessions that deals with language deficits and impairments. I was reading the chapter about school-age children and was impressed with how it outlined the specific and complex language tasks that are ( Read more... )