When Writers Go Weird: That time George Bernard Shaw left money in his will for a new English alphabet

Someone's really irked at the English alphabet.

Are writers ever normal? No, otherwise they'd be productive members of society. 'When Writers Go Weird' is when we remember writers acting strange, odd, off, or--yeah--just plain weird. Also known as Tuesday to them.

Today:  George Bernard Shaw really didn't like the English alphabet and wanted a new one.

You are used to the English alphabet and language. Whether you're an expert user or dabbling in it as a secondary means of communication, you're used to it. You've read this far in a blog post after all.

Which leads to the curious case of George Bernard Shaw's distaste for the alphabet he relied on so heavily. The winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925--and numerous other literary awards--Shaw's native tongue was English. He was an Irishman under British rule for the majority of his life, surrounded by the English alphabet. His plays--from Pygmalion to Man and Superman--were all written with that same standard English alphabet using Latin letters.

But he hated it. It made no sense to him how we spelled words and relied so little on phonetics. Case in point, the word "ghoti" is attributed to him, where "ghoti" is pronounced the same as you would say "fish." (Using the "gh" from words like "enough," etc.)

In actuality, Shaw never said anything about "ghoti" (it comes from a letter written in the 19th century from Charles Ollier, who credited his son William with its creation), but Shaw's hatred for the English alphabet was so pronounced, everyone presumes he created the ghoti/fish comparison.

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The organization gained so much traction, President Theodore Roosevelt became a firm believer.
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He wasn't alone. The early 20th century was a quirky time with individuals promoting curious ways to overcome difficulties in language. In 1906, for example, the Simplified Spelling Board was created in the United States (and funded in part by steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie) in hopes of simplifying spelling mistakes and ease the ability to learn English. The organization gained so much traction, President Theodore Roosevelt became a firm believer of the Board's suggestion of 300 new spellings and demanded the Government Printing Office adopt them in their literature. The reason we don't see those new spellings today? Congress quickly rebuked Roosevelt within months.

L.L. Zamenhof

Even earlier, in 1905, an ophthalmologist named L.L. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto (designed to be an auxiliary worldwide language easy enough for all to learn), released his Fundamento de Esperanto as a definitive guide to the new language. He gained so much traction that there was the Worldwide Esperanto Congress established that same year--a congress which is still held annually to this day. Mark your calendars and invite the kids.

(Yes, an ophthalmologist deals with eyes, but L.L. Zamenhof apparently only had eyes for languages.)

By 1908, the Simplified Spelling Society was created in Great Britain in the same vein as its American cousin (although completely lacking in tycoon affiliations), and attracted authors from throughout the country, including George Bernard Shaw, to no one's surprise.

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He habitually refused to abide by rules traditionally held with English spelling.
_______________________________________

This is all to say it was a heady time for lovers of making languages accessible and for straightforward alphabets. For Shaw, though, this was a lifelong passion. He habitually refused to abide by rules traditionally held with English spelling and punctuation, such as dropping the "u" in words like "favour" and refusing to use an apostrophe in contractions. He also spent 13 years on the BBC's Advisory Committee on Spoken English pushing a phonetic component. How much the BBC actually listened to Shaw's advice is another matter.

He felt so intensely about establishing a new English alphabet that, upon his death in 1950, Shaw bequeathed a significant portion of his assets in his will to reforming spelling. Naturally, people contested Shaw's last will and testament. Create a new alphabet for English? Was he crazy when he made the will?? But after some legal wrangling, the trust announced £8,300 was set aside from the estate and that a contest would commence for people to design a new alphabet.

There were three rules Shaw required for his new alphabet. One, it had to have a minimum of 40 letters. Why at least 40? God only knows. Two, the new alphabet should be based as much as possible on phonetic qualities. And, lastly, it should not look anything like the Latin letters the English alphabet already uses.

By 1958, the contest began. Out of 467 submissions, four winners were chosen to receive a £500 prize, with Ronald Kingsley Read largely receiving most of the credit. The Shaw Alphabet--also known as the Shavian Alphabet--was born. Made of 48 letters compared to the English alphabet's 26, it replaces lowercase and uppercase letters with "tall," "deep," and "short" status. A dot is placed over a letter if it's a proper name.

While the alphabet exists and Shaw's wishes were granted, the Shavian Alphabet never gained much traction. The trust--which had been originally responsible for holding the competition--had very little money left over. In the end, they only published Shaw's play Androcles and the Lion in the Shavian style.

As for the general movement for an easier alphabet and language, its high point was probably Teddy Roosevelt backing them. The movement petered out into a whimper by the second half of the 20th century. The American Simplified Spelling Board ceased operations by 1920. The auxiliary language of Esperanto? Estimates suggest there are only 1,000 native speakers worldwide today.

Meanwhile, the British Simplified Spelling Society changed its name to the English Spelling Society, but stopped formally endorsing a new English spelling system by 1960. While still in existence today, it largely only makes headlines when protesting major spelling competitions, like the Scripps National Spelling Bee in the United States. Because nothing sways worldwide opinion like raising a stink around nervous 13-year olds.

In the end, Shaw's curious desire for a new English alphabet came to fruition, if only after his death--even if the alphabet itself is largely dead now, too.

There's always Pygmalion in its original Latin letters, though.

Facebook researchers shut down artificial intelligence programs that talked to each other in code.

HAL doesn't mean any harm. Really.

You know how Hollywood always creates some movie regarding artificial intelligence, where a robot or software starts becoming a little too smart for its own good? Usually chaos ensues, humanity is on the brink, and a great time was had by all.

That's all fiction. But we're off and running with it in reality now, too.

Mark Zuckerberg is obsessed with artificial intelligence and investing in its development. As a result, Facebook researchers created sophisticated software designed to have two programs speak to each other in English.

While the two AI programs used English words, their respective sentences were nonsense. An example of their conversation:


Bob: “I can can I I everything else.”

Alice: “Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to.”


The kicker? The computers understood was the other was saying. Researchers? They have no idea what the programs meant and don't know the sort of linguistic code being used by each. As a result, the software was shut down quickly.

Don't look so casual, pal! Why so cryptic??

A Georgia Tech researcher at Facebook's AI Research (FAIR), Dhruv Batra, told Fast Co. Design "[t]here was no reward to sticking to English language," and that "[a]gents will drift off understandable language and invent codewords for themselves. Like if I say 'the' five times, you interpret that to mean I want five copies of this item. This isn’t so different from the way communities of humans create shorthands."

Computers using codewords between themselves that we can't understand--sounds safe to me!

Wha--what are you saying, computer?

"Our interest was having bots who could talk to people," FAIR scientist Mike Lewis told Fast Co. Design. The end result was that Facebook researchers required typical human English be used by the software in the future.

While scientists seemingly paused with trepidation at having computers speak in code to one another, others don't have issues with humanity being left in the dark. Mark Wilson, senior writer at Fast Co. Design, wants the software to have free reign. "[A]t the same time, it feels shortsighted, doesn’t it? If we can build software that can speak to other software more efficiently, shouldn’t we use that? Couldn’t there be some benefit?"

Wilson admits that humans won't know how AI thinks, their thought processes, and how their intelligence might evolve, but if we allow AI to speak in ways humans might never decipher "[I]t offers us the possibility of a more interoperable world, a more perfect place where iPhones talk to refrigerators that talk to your car without a second thought."

Thanks, Mark, but I can survive without my phone talking to my fridge. I really don't need an update that I'm out of mustard before both AIs decide to overthrow humanity.

The fridge was reallllly irked I didn't buy the mustard.

La Casa Blanca es un desastre!

Not quite la casa blanca I'm looking for.

The official website of the White House, henceforth known as la Casa Blanca on this humble page, has long allowed a translation from the English language into Spanish. This might be because over 41 million Americans are native Spanish speakers, with an additional 11.6 million native English speakers also fluent in the romance language.

The 52.6 million fluent speakers of Spanish in the United States is more than the number of people who live in Spain. Only Mexico has more.

Alas, in the last week, the official Casa Blanca website has stopped allowing a Spanish translation for no apparent reason other than it's not English. President Donald Trump even once said during a primary debate his preference. "This is a country where we speak English," Trump said. Except, you know, for where the country speaks Spanish. (Don't let anyone know highway signs in Vermont sometimes show kilometers! Quebec's influence has run amok!)

When initially asked about it, Casa Blanca spokesperson Sean Spicer said the website was in flux. "We are continuing to build out the website," Spicer said. "We've got the IT folks working overtime on that now." Naturally, a complete removal of Spanish makes sense. Those verbs are so complex!

A few days later, la  Casa Blanca claimed they were going to bring back a translation eventually. "We're just building up," said Helen Aguirre Ferre, director of media affairs, while still emphasizing the need to build an established website over two decades old. "It's just day two on the job," she said earlier in the week.

Now, as of day nine on the job, nothing still has changed.

Spanish is still banished at la Casa Blanca.

NFL wide receiver has a punctuation first.

An umlaut!

You know what an umlaut is probably, and it's not that little fleshy thing hanging at the back of your throat. That's a uvula. Common mistake.

An umlaut is the punctuation mark of two dots above a letter found in many European languages, like German. It's sort of like if a letter had its own uvula, you might say.

Which brings us to German footballer Moritz Böhringer, who was just drafted by the NFL's Minnesota Vikings. The young rookie assumed he would have to spell his last name as Boehringer because the league's strict uniform policy forbids non-English punctuation. Even his Twitter handle can't manage an umlaut.

Except, for reasons unknown, the NFL changed their position.

Böhringer, not Boehringer.@MoBoehringer received approval from the @NFL to add the umlaut on his jersey. pic.twitter.com/w5oefFZZtT

— Minnesota Vikings (@Vikings) May 11, 2016

First Poland, now football jerseys. Germany never quits invading.

Who owns a language? Better yet, who owns the Klingon language?

"Waaait, people don't think we sound sexy?"

To speak Klingon, the language of Star Trek's most notable villain alien species, you need a deep supply of mucus in the throat and a total lack of shame for speaking it in public.

You might also need to go to court to fight over the copyright.

Currently being battled out in federal court is the matter of who exactly owns a language for a fictional alien species, an esoteric mind bender of a geek debate if there ever was one. Does the corporation (Paramount) that owns the artistic rights to the fictional alien species' likeness also own the language, too? Do the fans own it, since they expanded a previously 2,000 word vocabulary into an expansive language numbering in the tens of thousands of words? Or can anything or anyone really own any language in the first place--especially one for a species that doesn't exist?

"This argument is absurd since a language is only useful if it can be used to communicate with people, and there are no Klingons with whom to communicate," stated a brief authored by David Grossman, a lawyer for Paramount, who's adding even more opaque layers to the debate. The old question "If a tree falls in the forest..." has met its match. If no Klingon exists to speak it, does that mean it's not useful? How would the ancient Greeks feel knowing they no longer exist, but people still know and use their language? Who judges worth of use?

Microsoft Bing even has an English-to-Klingon translation tool. Over 250,000 Klingon dictionaries have been sold. There's even a Klingon Language Institute. In the end, can Paramount own the words they sort of never created? Can anyone?

No court in American history has ever ruled the copyrightedness of a language--any language--before. Song lyrics? Poems? Words on a page? They've been touched on by courts. By comparison, the copyright over language as a whole, and the Klingon language specifically, is, well, the final frontier.

Not only do the 2016's candidates for president act like sixth graders, they sound like sixth graders, too, study shows.

No one politician comes unscathed from the recent study on the speech and grammatical patterns of various politicians from the 2016 election--except for Abraham Lincoln, who isn't around to run. But we'll get to him in a second.

"A Readability Analysis of Campaign Speeches From the 2016 US Presidential Campaign," published this week by Carnegie Mellon University, looked to analyze the reading level of speeches given by the prospective 2016 presidential candidates and found that the group of them largely falls into the 6th-to-8th grade range.

That's shameful and embarrassing and pathetic. And it's also very close to the same reading level of where this blog resides. That said, I'm not running to be a fairly awkward individual with the power to rule hundreds of millions of people. I'm just running to be your number one blog for random stuff, like Herman Hesse hiking mountains in the nude. I also know how to write like a research wonk, super-heavy on a polysyllabic craziness and jazzy punctuation, but you'll be bored, doze off, and--oh, hey, is that Ray Bradbury shirtless, too?

(That crap I just wrote above, that one paragraph you just read right there ↑↑↑↑? That gets a 9.1 grade level through various testings, like the Flesch-Kincaid Scale, on this site. If my drivel can enter the high school realm, imagine what Trump is pushing.)

This is all to say that politicians dumb down and pander to Americans because it works, although some are worse than others. Bernie Sanders wants you to have a high school education, so he speaks at a tenth grade level, says Carnegie Mellon. Donald Trump? More like a grade 5.7. Which one looks to have a better shot at winning the election?

This all brings us back to Abraham Lincoln--specifically, to the Gettysburg Address. Potentially the greatest speech in American history, it still maxes out just over a 10th grade level grammatically, and 9th grade for vocabulary. Yet, despite such modest levels, Lincoln would surpass all of today's politicians.

Does this mean I sound like Abraham Lincoln when I talk?

God, no.

But does it mean I sound smarter than a billionaire Sunkist orange with pigs-in-a-blanket for fingers?

Yessss.

Fashionable Words: Ragamuffin

"I'm a--a--what?"

[Sometimes words die out of fashion. But sometimes those words are good words, words with a certain appeal that can't be denied forever. Those words should be brought back into fashion, used frequently and used often. These are those words.]


Word:

Ragamuffin



Definition:  noun

A ragged, disreputable person; often a child in dirty clothes and an unkempt state.



Origin:

Nothing pleases the British like making poverty sound quaint. Charles Dickens made a career off this model after all. And like most British words, ragamuffin is a child born of many parents.

There's no be-all origin story for ragamuffin. The first known use of it was in the Middle English epic poem Piers Plowman, not to be confused with modern English media personality Piers Morgan. Written in the 1300s about a character named Will who keeps falling asleep and having dreamvisions of spiritual meetings with religious figures, it's as exciting and titillating as you might imagine 14th century sleep to be. Ragamuffin makes its first known appearance in history as Ragamoffyn, a demon's name in the poem.

Morgan, not Plowman.

Wait--does this mean we actually have been calling Tiny Tim and Oliver Twist demons all this time? Yes. Yes, that's what I'm saying. We're all terrible people, you especially. I never claimed to like Dickens.

Most sources don't know what ragamuffin evolves from. The word probably comes from some variety of surname of the time, with "rag" being what you imagine--that thing you refuse to pick up to clean your bathroom. Even the famed English word master Samuel Johnson was uncommitted to the word's birth, actually stating in his famed dictionary, "From rag and I know not what else." In other words, he's got nothing. Thanks, Sam!

I got nothing for you.

"Muffin" probably just comes from a cute English wordplay, which is as cute as the Brits get, but some claim the word evolved from Middle Dutch's muffe, which means mitten, thus the clothing angle reinforced. Muffe would sound confusing these days after all, as we'd picture a fifty-something WASPy woman in jewels who is clearly no ragamuffin.

Shakespeare ends up using the word in 1597 in his play Henry IV (I'll save you the convoluted line), but it doesn't really gain traction in popularity until the 1800s. Writers like Louisa May Alcott, Anna Sewell, and Mark Twain all use it in their novels, and Charles Dickens pretty much creates the titular ideal of a ragamuffin in Oliver Twist. Google Books' Ngram Viewer even shows the spike in usage as the 19th century rolled on:

What does this all mean?

I don't know. Just that Oliver and Tiny Tim are demons.



Most obscure UrbanDictionary.com definition of ragamuffin:

12.  A person who does not like turnips or rutabagas.



Used in a sentence:

Part of me wondered if Oliver was angelic, but something suggested he was demonic, especially considering his filthy appearance as a ragamuffin from the streets.



Why you should use ragamuffin in your everyday life:

It subtly suggests delicious breakfast treats while reminding you you're too dirty, poor, and disheveled to afford delicious breakfast treats.



Word Awesomeness Scale (1-to-5):

Four.

It loses a point for being the name of a random cat breed and obscure Christian movie.

Fairytales are old. And it turns out they're a lot older than originally thought.

A study released by the Royal Society Open Studies journal reveals that fairytales began earlier than once thought. A lot earlier.

Looking at common links between 275 Indo-European stories, Durham University anthropologist Dr. Jamie Tehrani and folklorist Sara Graça da Silva from the New University of Lisbon concluded fairytales pre-date commonly believed origins by thousands of years.

As The Guardian, which spoke to Tehrani and da Silva, writes:


"Analysis showed Jack and the Beanstalk was rooted in a group of stories classified as The Boy Who Stole Ogre’s Treasure, and could be traced back to when eastern and western Indo-European languages split – more than 5,000 years ago. Beauty and the Beast and Rumpelstiltskin to be about 4,000 years old. A folk tale called The Smith and the Devil was estimated to date back 6,000 years to the bronze age."

The Smith and the Devil never gained the popularity of other stories, although it takes on similar themes of a trickster (the Devil, shockingly) being tricked (noo!).

By comparison, Aesop looks like a new kid to the storyteller game by being only 2,500 years old or so. And Mother Goose? Let's not speak of her amateur hour shenanigans again.

Him? Her? They? The Washington Post has little care for your pronoun usage.

The English language is filled with a variety of silly rules--rules you should never, never, never abide by because you're a savagely good looking and charismatic individual who wears expensive Italian suits and/or shoes and flaunts society's conventions.

This is to say I'm not against flattery, and I'm also here to twist your arm. (God, you smell great! New cologne/perfume?) Rules in the English language are largely misguided, antiquated, or outright false, rules like Never end a sentence with a preposition! or Don't split an infinitive! or Don't use an adverb with a feeling verb! (Have you done something new with your hair? It looks so full and shiny!)

Another English language 'rule' is that you should always use her/him whenever writing and a singular pronoun is called for--never, ever the plural they. Specificity is key, proponents claim, and they is gender-neutral. (Goodness, it looks like you've lost weight!)

But there are some people--usually people who are writers, who encounter pronouns by the hour ((waves!!)), writers prone to flattery--that gravitate toward the gender-vague they as a singular term. We all use it in conversation every day, so why can't it be written? (Your eyebrows smolder like George Clooney's, just sayin'.)

Writers are split on the matter. Sides are taken. Flattery gets thrown about to woo the undecided. (Your teeth are so white and perfectly straight!)

This explains why the Washington Post Style Guide is now accepting they as a singular term.The Post's copy editor, Bill Walsh, explains it's all really simple, mainly because it's "the only sensible solution to English’s lack of a gender-neutral third-person singular personal pronoun." And, I swear, half of what Walsh just said makes sense. Promise.

Once one style guide joins the fray, it's only a matter of time (or flattery) before other style guides follow suit. But you don't want to be a follower. You're a leader. A quick witted, gorgeous individual with sun-kissed skin that's just simply radiant!

To speak it or not to speak it, that is the question.

One of the greatest complaints modern readers have regarding Shakespeare's work is that it's not approachable, that his word choice and phrasing is too dense to unravel in order to understand. It's as if everyone reading Hamlet or Macbeth collectively gets a migraine trying to figure it out. Pass the Advil.

This sort of collective groan from confused people is what has led various Shakespearean theatrical companies to reconfigure the bard's work into modern vernacular. Gone are the "thee"s and "thou"s and sentences that sound like Yoda on a bender. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival--an 80-year old annual event--is the latest to jump on the modernization bandwagon. As James Shapiro notes in an opinion piece this week in the New York Times:

"However well intended, this experiment is likely to be a waste of money and talent, for it misdiagnoses the reason that Shakespeare’s plays can be hard for playgoers to follow. The problem is not the often knotty language; it’s that even the best directors and actors — British as well as American — too frequently offer up Shakespeare’s plays without themselves having a firm enough grasp of what his words mean."

Or, taking it one step further, we have become so beholden to the rhythm and patterns of 21st century speech, that simply making an effort to interpret a different cadence, a different pulse to the phrasing Shakespeare uses has become too much for readers and playgoers to bother with. It isn't simply a dumbing down. It's apathy. It's mental inertia. It's intellectual lethargy that wants things handed over easily.

Put in more simplistic terms: It's wanting a 12-course French meal, but only willing to pay for a Big Mac.

Fashionable Words: Doozy

[Sometimes words die out of fashion. But sometimes those words are good words, words with a certain appeal that can't be denied forever. Those words should be brought back into fashion, used frequently and used often. These are those words.]


Word:
Doozy


Definition:   noun (and adjective)
Something outstanding, remarkable, amazing, unique.


Origin:
Most likely a 20th-century creation, there's actually no concrete history as to where doozy comes from, although the OED suggests an old slang variant of the word daisy is the origin.

You're probably thinking flowers right now. Don't. Or maybe you're thinking of the female name, like Daisy Buchanan. Nah. While daisies are lovely flowers and Ms. Buchanan was a charming person when not mowing down innocent people in the road, the slang daisy didn't have to do with either flowers or female names. (Although Daisy Buchanan plowing over Myrtle in a speeding car was a bit of a doozy.)

The hydrangeaist!

Instead, daisy (as the classy doozy) meant something was first rate, top-notch, fantastic, etc., and first appeared in text in 1757. Its first appearance in something noteworthy came in 1886 when it popped up in the old children's novel Little Lord Fauntleroy, in the sentence "She's the daisiest gal I ever saw!" Admittedly, "She's the hydrangeaist girl I ever saw!" doesn't roll off the tongue quite as well.

Doozy finally appeared in its own right in 1903, when it popped up in a book called Slang Fables from Afar by Al Kleberg. Kleberg, who is otherwise unnoteworthy, also holds the distinction of first citing batty (as in crazy) in a text.

Al Kleberg, the unknown Shakespeare of his time.



Most obscure UrbanDictionary.com definitions of doozy:
(verbatim)

4.  Something that is better than everything else. Also, a famous Runescape player who is one of the best in that game.

5.  A delicious drink in a can or bottle

The doozy card.

10.  someone that mean anything, a word that can be used anywhere at anytime, like how in uno you have a wild card that can be any color well DOOZY is a wild word it can mean anything.

11.  A night filled with excessive drinking to the point that events of the said night are hazy and cannot be completely recalled. There are varying degrees of "doozy", the most common being a night filled with drunken hilarity that for the most part is only recalled by those who did not get too drunk, or partake in the "doozy". A person who has a doozy usually wakes up the next morning wondering where he/she is, often times confused about the events of the night before.







Used in a sentence:

Better watch out--this snowstorm is going to be a doozy!


Why you should use doozy in your everyday life:

Makes you sound like an innocent seven-year old who just inherited an English estate.


Word Awesomeness Scale (1-to-5):

Three.

Could be mistaken as the name of Snow White's long lost dwarf.

Learning to speak English on a French commuter train.

Dubbed English on Track by French rail officials, the program teaches intimate, small groupings of students how to speak English in conversational style, all while commuting to Paris on high speed trains.

This program, notes NPR, comes after a recent report that France ranks 35th on a worldwide study of English proficiency, behind varied nations like Russia, Sri Lanka, India, Malaysia, Spain, South Korea, Italy--and even right behind China. This places France in the "Low Proficiency" category.

Says passenger-student Giles Hallais to NPR, "Before the course, we were sleeping in the train in the morning. [...] So I prefer practicing English."

Admittedly, the French have never been known for their coffee.

Fashionable Words: Tomfoolery

[Sometimes words die out of fashion. But sometimes those words are good words, words with a certain appeal that can't be denied forever. Those words should be brought back into fashion, used frequently and used often. These are those words.]


Word:
Tomfoolery


Definition:  noun
Foolish or silly behavior; the action or behavior of a tom-fool.

Waka-waka-waka!

Origin:

The modern tomfoolery has only been bandied about since 1812, when--according to the OED--writers (and brothers) Horatio and James Smith included the word in their book of humor, Rejected Addresses, specifically the line, "Round let us bound for this is Punch's holiday, Glory to Tomfoolery, huzza! huzza!"

Zing! That 19th century comedy is as fresh as ever!





Tomfoolery is just the offspring of a much older--and very similar--word, tom-fool (or, all dressed up like a proper noun, Tom-Fool), which the OED tells us was born around 1356. Joseph Thomas Fowler, in 1901, edited a manuscript from those quaint days of the 14th century called Extracts from the Account Rolls of the Abbey of Durham (your bible if you're an insomniac) which included the following sentence from 500+ years earlier, "Pro funeracione Thome Fole."

Note: Google Translate doesn't translate much.

[Side note: Google Translate detects that jambled sentence as Spanish. Or Latin. Or God knows what.

When translators quit on you, that's when you know you're diving deep.]






So why Tom and why fool?

For centuries Tom was considered a generic male's name, the same we might use the name John today. (Think: John Doe.) Tom Thumb, Tom, Dick, and Harry, tomcat, and Tom and Jerry are all examples of good ol' generic Tom. If you're named Tom, odds are your parents lacked imagination. This is how they met each other. They were dull. It happens.

As for fool, it appears as long as there has been language there have been fools. This results in a gasbag of an etymology, from Middle English to Old French to Italian to Latin, where we end up with follem or follish, which, when popularized in Latin, meant an empty-headed person.


Most Obscure UrbanDictionary.com definitions of tomfoolery:
(verbatim)

Trying to figure out what he needs to shine.

2.  Wreaking Havoc/causing general chaos/shennanigans, taking the piss, etc...

10.  Cockney rhyming slang for 'jewelry'. Often shortened to just 'tom'.

11.  monkey shines

12.  sticking a half-smoked joint into the carb of a pipe and covering the bowl with your thumb.




Used in a sentence:
1.  The administrators of the college won't stand for the hijinks and tomfoolery of the frats during pledge week.


Why you should use tomfoolery in your everyday life:
Because noahfoolery or jacobfoolery don't have quite the same ring.


Word Awesomeness Scale (1-to-5):
Two.

Shenanigans is better, but tomfoolery is reliable.

Germans are heavily borrowing English words, and this has some German linguistics experts worried.

Germany has borrowed or adopted 10,000 English words into their own language since 1990. At least that's what NPR authoritatively says, as they apparently stood listening at the Berlin Wall as it fell and haven't stopped counting since.

Holger Klatte, the spokesman for the German Language Society, explains his concern to NPR.

"Languages do tend to affect one another, but the influence of English in Germany is so strong that Germans are having a hard time advancing their own vocabulary," he says.

Klatte says that can be a problem for Germans who may not know any English.

"The second world war and Nazi times have led Germans to downplay the importance of their language," he says. "Unlike the French, Finns and Poles — they promote their languages a lot more than we do."


If I'm Finnish, I'm suing whoever's promoting my language and demanding a refund. Even the Muppets chose the Swedish Chef over anything Finnish.

Anatol Stefanowitsch, an English linguistics professor at the Free University of Berlin, tells NPR that Germans are just overemphasizing the matter. As Stefanowitsch notes, roughly 25% of the German language comes from borrowed words. English, by comparison, borrows 40-80% of its words from other languages--and it's a healthy, robust language doing just fine.

"No language has ever disappeared because it borrowed words," Stefanowitsch says.

Quite true. It might become a hot mess like English, but it never disappeared.

The dialects of American English, mapped in wavy, neon colors.

The Washington Post reposted Robert Delaney's map from back in the day to show how we Americans speak.

There are quirks. Boston, New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and the coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia all have tongues with linguistic uniqueness.

As does the Ozarks. On this map it's like the beauty mark of America. And just like a beauty mark, it's something you want to keep an eye on just in case it metastasizes.

4 minutes detailing the various dialects of American English.

The Atlantic surveyed various Americans and asked them to pronounce a variety of words and phrases largely based off North Carolina State's Joshua Katz's dialect maps of the United States, which he, in turn, developed off Harvard's 2003 Dialect Survey.



Cape Cod lights up for 85% of the answers. There's your linguistic melting pot of America--the part trying to get as far away from America as it can.

How English sounds to non-English speakers.

Making its way around the interwebs...

Surprisingly hypnotic, like looking at hand with six fingers or the Citgo sign over Fenway.

No need to be the Debbie Downer who tries to explain how biological audiological responses are the same for everyone, no matter if they are fluent in a language or not. The video is trying to suggest that English's prevalence in the world means non-English speakers understand every few words from a fluent speaker, before the rest just sounds like a mash of phonetic chaos.

Also, swap all this out for Spanish or French and this is how it sounds to me. "Oooh! I know that word! And that one, too! Maybe. Okay, no, I lied."

Beowulf has been misinterpreted for 200 years.

At least the very first word of Beowulf has been misinterpreted, according to new scholarly research at the University of Manchester.

For over 200-years, medieval scholars have always interpreted the first word of Beowulf--"hwæt"--to be a centuries-old equivalent of saying "Yo!" or "Hey!"

The Beowulf you find on the bookshelf at Barnes & Nobel or on Amazon reads its first line as the following Old English:

"Hwæt! We Gar-Dena in gear-dagum, þeod-cyninga,  þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon!"

When interpreted, modern scholars have largely agreed it means roughly the following:

"Listen! We have heard of the might of the kings."

Dr. George Walkden at the University of Manchester believes we've been misguided for centuries, for the very simple reason that the interjection form was rarely used in Old English. The blame, according to London's The Independent, belongs to Jakob Grimm, of Brothers Grimm fame, who translated the text in 1837 and claimed "hwæt" was "pure interjection." For centuries, scholars never changed course--until now.

The new interpretation of Beowulf's first line?

"How we have heard of the might of the kings."

Powerful stuff.

You know what's even more powerful?

An interjection.

Sufjan Stevens isn't a fan of improper verb usage, still a fan of Miley Cyrus.

Singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens is best known for introspective, quirky songs beloved by band camp attendees and craft beer alcoholics alike.

He's also a stickler for proper verb use, as shown by a recent open letter he wrote to Miley Cyrus asking her--politely--to use proper verb tense in her song Get It Right.

A snippet of the letter:

Dear Miley. I can’t stop listening to #GetItRight (great song, great message, great body), but maybe you need a quick grammar lesson. One particular line causes concern: “I been laying in this bed all night long.” Miley, technically speaking, you’ve been LYING, not LAYING, an irregular verb form that should only be used when there’s an object, i.e. “I been laying my tired booty on this bed all night long.” Whatever. I’m not the best lyricist, but you know what I mean.

While a great point by Sufjan, it seems the "I been" of this cluster doesn't perturb his grammatical senses. So be it. I'll take polite songwriter-on-songwriter verb tense smackdowns when I can get them.

He also finishes up the letter with this nugget:

Miley, I love you because you’re the Queen, grammatically and anatomically speaking. And you’re the hottest cake in the pan.

I wish someone would compare me to an overcooked baked good.





Aside: Miley actually didn't write #GetItRight. Shocking, I know, that someone who sounds like a drowning gerbil taking hits off a helium tank known best for foam finger enthusiasm and a lack of playing instruments doesn't always write her own songs.

#GetItRight was written by someone named Michael Williams II, professionally known as Mike Will Made It.

Does this make Miley an undercooked cake in the pan?

Is Khaleesi truly speaking a real language or just pulling our chain?

Whenever Khaleesi appears ready to kill someone in Game of Thrones, she usually whips out some Dothraki, admonishes them with a few clipped consonants, and finds a creative was to take out her enemy. (Why, hello there, fire-breathing dragons! How convenient!)

But is Dothraki--the language constructed by George R.R. Martin, and furthered by the creators of the television show--a real language? Is Klingon on Star Trek? Elvish in The Lord of the Rings?

TedEd (a branch of the famous TedTalk series) explains how Khaleesi isn't just taking us for a linguistic ride when she's irked: