A couple of weeks ago, I did an “English language time machine” piece for The Week. This week, it’s up as a podcast, for those who prefer to listen:
What the English of Shakespeare, Beowulf, and King Arthur actually sounded like
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- Motivated Grammar Prescriptivism Must Die!
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- The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows A wistful, mournful, fanciful lexicon.
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- word nerd The blog of language columnist Howard Richler.
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- wordcount.org A ranking by frequency of 86,800 words of British English.
- Wordorigins.org A good site about the origins of words and phrases
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- Wordsmoker because words are highly addictive too
- World Wide Words An excellent place to look for reliable information on the origins and uses of words and phrases.
- You Don't Say Veteran drudge John E. McIntyre writes about language, usage, journalism & arbitrarily chosen subjects.
- You Don't Say John McIntyre, whom James Wolcott calls “the Dave Brubeck of the art and craft of copy editing,” writes on language, editing, journalism, and other manifestations of human frailty.
Meta
The intrinsic humor in this sentence of today’s blog:
> Many fad words from 35 years ago have gone out of style,
> totally rad though they may have been at the time,
was totally lost on me. I left the States in 1970 at age 33 and had never seen or heard the word “rad”. My first thought was: It’s a typo. My second thought was: Google it. I did and found this in the Urban Dictionary:
>> An abbreviation of ‘radical’–a term made popular by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Still primarily used by people on the West Coast who find words like ‘cool’, ‘awesome’, and ‘tight’ to be tired and overused; ‘rad’ is generally considered to be a much higher praise than the aforementioned superlatives. Also used as a general expression of awe. <<