Still muscular after all these years

Quick repost of a thing I found about 4 years ago, documenting some of those crazy slang words the kidz all chat nowadays. Check out the power of "Blench":

Kiss ma guns, you muthas.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, LOLcat

Welcome, comrades, to my new favourite site, uniting 3 of the things I like the most: LOLcats, all things Russian, and wilfully incorrect translations. I give you - Rolcats!

Anybody got any sites that poke fun at the Chinese?

In case you are bored

I have made a cryptic crossword for you:

Entries should be printed, completed, wrapped around a biscuit and posted to me. The winner gets a shining nugget of bugger all.

With apologies to the Times.

"Feathery bumpit"

How about this for a totally charming linguistic remnant, courtesy of Jake Thackray, my favourite late, Yorkshire-based chansonnier:

Yan, Chan, Tether, Mether, Pip, 

Azar, Sazar, Akka, Cotta, Dik,

Yanadik, Channadik, Thetheradik, Metheradik, Bumfit, 

Yanabum, Chanabum, Thetherabum, Metherabum, Jiggit.

A bit of research reveals that this is a base 5 counting system used by shepherds in Swaledale, Yorkshire. Beautiful the way this arose from tools readily available to the shepherd: his hand and some stones... somehow it appears to be based on Celtic. Or maybe Cumbric.  

I wonder how badly our increasingly standardised "here and now" of a world will cheat us out of all this beautiful, useless idiosyncracy. The linguistic tendency to invent will always be there, but the more our references become similar and shallow, the less likely it is that our idiomatic range will be so large. 

What a shame for most people, whose self-expression will be limited and dull. What a great opportunity for those of us whose interest in history and/or language guarantees a mind richly fertilised with this kind of nourishing mulch. 

The best we can hope for from kids nowadays is something based on LOLspeak.

"Is this urgent?"

Simulataneous translation LOL:

"I usually do the Japanese stuff"...

Shoulda gone to DotSub.

via Leeds Russian Alumni blog.

Prating pimhole

Stephen Fry - a family favourite at Blench Towers since his "A Bit of Fry and Laurie" days, turns out to be a bit handy with gadgets and the internet and stuff. He's even got a blog! 

And in his latest post, he talks language in his own inimitable style, covering plenty of the stuff I like to bang on about when I'm feeling excitable. 

I don't have much to add to that, except to wonder aloud if Mr Fry has thought about the linguistic effects of our new, networked world. Cultural imperialism at its worst? Or "Forward into a productive future full of divergent Englishes"..?

Anyway, in his post he refers to a sketch which you can see right here. Click around the rest for more joy. Why he finds the name "Marjorie" so funny, I'll never know.

His hair hasn't improved much.

Why study modern languages?

It's funny what you find languishing in hidden corners of your hard drive. The below began life in 2006, in response to a request from a former lecturer of mine at Leeds University. We were strolling round the Vondelpark and she was bemoaning the ever-falling number of students applying to the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies.

Seems "the youth" nowadays don't understand the point of studying foreign languages unless you plan to go abroad and speak them. I held forth a bit about how much I've got out of my foreign language skills and she said, "Brilliant! Write that down and send it to me." So I did... that is to say, I started, then forgot about it, only discovering it two years later:

"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."

- Mark Twain

When I chose to study languages to degree level, I had no idea of what practical use they might be to me in the real world, beyond being able to go abroad and speak the local language. I just studied languages because I was good at them, and I enjoyed the mixture of detective work / creative craft that went into each translation or essay.

With the benefit of several years hindsight, I now realise that learning foreign languages clued me into the basics of communication - concision, precision, tone, rhythm, and knowing when to stop being careful and blurt out whatever's on your mind.

I don't use the languages I can speak very much in my day to day work - I'm a copywriter and creative director for internet stuff - but the background I have in manipulating language is behind pretty much everything I do, every day: boiling down wordy briefs into concise and informative documents, distinguishing sense from nonsense, picking the right word, tweaking sentences to make a paragraph flow properly etc.

Modern communications like the internet are making the world seem smaller every day. Clarity of self-expression, the ability to understand other cultures and different ways of doing things are more important than ever. A modern language is one of the best skills you could have.

So there you have it. Learn Russian - or French... or any foreign language - and become better at communicating in your own. And if you're lucky, you get to enjoy weird stuff like this all by yourself:


Here, Hitler and Stalin are preparing to do battle, starting with a bit of bragging about just how damn tough they are, ending with Hitler doing a bad guy / maniacal laugh. This must have been before the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, then...

Newspeak

Well look at that, it's my talk about language and the internet that I gave at Reboot 9 in Copenhagen, 2006!