Sigh

I hope he writes code better than he writes English:

Now a Day's informing the Clients about the successful updation of data or sending other automated information form your Java Programs, either from your Servlets or from your Applications has become a requirement, more than a feature.

The decline and fall of the English sentence?

Here's an interesting article in the Washington Post on the fate of the sentence.

General American

Here in east central Illinois we're on the eastern edge of the General American accent region, which makes it easy to slide the accent south and east as needed. Unless you've spent time with northerners, it's more difficult to slide the accent north & get a good honking Chicago sound. My freshman year at the University of Illinois was spend around guys from the Chicago suburbs and I came out of it with an outrageous Chicago accent.

A sentence (at least) a day.

God bless these good men

They're doing the Lord's work.

Picture a pair of Kerouacs armed with Sharpies and erasers and righteous indignation - holding back a flood of mixed metaphors and spelling mistakes and extraneous punctuation so commonplace we rarely notice it anymore. But they are 28 and idealistic. Graduates of Dartmouth College, they are old friends with a schoolmarm's irritation at conspicuous errors, and despite their mild and somewhat nerdy exteriors, they have serious nerve. Deck lives outside Boston; Herson lives outside Washington. And together, they are TEAL - the Typo Eradication Advancement League - and they are between jobs.

Hat tip: Mrs vH.

"I have literally bent over backwards..."

That's my favorite abuse of "literally" - it's from Jimmy Swaggart, as quoted by Karl Keating in his book Catholicism and Fundamentalism. Now someone has literally created a blog for the subject. It goes very well with The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks and Apostrophe Abuse.

Sedaris on smoking

Really, David Sedaris is one of the best essayists in English. The incipit:

When I was in fourth grade, my class took a field trip to the American Tobacco plant in nearby Durham, North Carolina. There we witnessed the making of cigarettes and were given free packs to take home to our parents. I tell people this and they ask me how old I am, thinking, I guess, that I went to the world’s first elementary school, one where we wrote on cave walls and hunted our lunch with clubs. Then I mention the smoking lounge at my high school. It was outdoors, but, still, you’d never find anything like that now, not even if the school was in a prison.

Via TSO.

The founders' English

It's a delight to read Jefferson and the other founders, especially if you're giving them a close study. You can trust them to express complete well-turned thoughts in each sentence, making unnecessary the modern work of hunting through the clauses to put thoughts back together and extract some sense from them.

Let's orchestrate metacognitive systems!

Gitcher edumacation jargon here!

We'll envision process-based manipulatives in order to effectively exploit impactful scaffolding and morph interactive life-long learning into strategic infrastructures.

Now we need some grants to apply for.

The Irish roots of American slang

Here's a NYT article on Daniel Cassidy's work on American slang, much of which he traces to Gaelic words brought here by Irish immigrants. Also, here are a couple of articles on slang from Mr Cassidy in Counterpunch. He's the director of the Irish Studies program at the New College of California in San Francisco.

And here's a critique of Cassidy's work from lexicographer Grant Barrett.

UPDATE: Cassidy has taken a lot of heat in the lexicography blogosphere for his phonetic matching; here's a similar approach to video subtitling, courtesy of the matchless Buffalax.

How to speak Merlin

Or, a guide to the language spoken in Baltimore, Maryland.

UPDATE: here's the Lexicon of Bawlamarese or, How to co-moon-icate wiff the natives.