Wine and Wordplay

Thank you to 22 Words for bringing this video to my attention.

Wow, Do I Ever Love Language!

And I could not have produced a video that contains so many perfectly executed examples of the reasons why.

Thanks to Superlinguo for bringing this video to my attention.

An Animated Steven Pinker

After seeing the Steven Pinker lecture I posted a few weeks ago, a reader shared this RSA Animate version of Pinker's "Language as a Window into Human Nature".

RSA is the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce and they have been taking portions of lectures by well-known professionals in various fields and animating them with cartoon drawings to accompany the speakers.

Entertaining, informative, and well worth the watch.



Thank you Licia from Terminologia etc. for bringing this video and the series to my attention.

An Excellent Introduction to Steven Pinker

For those who may not have heard of Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist and linguist who currently teaches at Harvard, and for those who may not have seen this lecture based on his outstanding book The Stuff of Thought, here is the video from YouTube.

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It is well worth the watch.

Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia

An update on Monday's post...and some additional long words.

By the way, hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia is a fictional phobia that is defined as the fear of long words.

According to a Wikipedia article hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia is derived from: hippopoto- "big" due to its allusion to the Greek-derived word hippopotamus (though this is derived as hippo- "horse" compounded with potam-os "river", so originally meaning "river horse"; according to the Oxford English, "hippopotamine" has been construed as large since 1847, so this coinage is reasonable); -monstr- is from Latin words meaning "monstrous", -o- is a noun-compounding vowel; -sesquipedali- comes from "sesquipedalian" meaning a long word (literally "a foot and a half long" in Latin), -o- is a noun-compounding vowel, and -phobia means "fear".

A Humorous Look at Language Acquisition

I recently spotted this hilarious look at the babbling phase of language acquisition on Language Log and I still can't stop laughing. What a great way to relieve stress.

I've just been informed that the video has been removed so here is a link to the video on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1254261195230

Spotted this at http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2605

Reverse English Revisited

Back in December I posted an incredible video that featured a very talented individual known as OneManSho singing a song in reverse.

Here is the video -

And here is a link to the video on YouTube in case your browser does not allow you to view it here.

At any rate, the reason I bring up this post is...I have since learned that some people arrived on the post from an unusual search engine with which I was not familiar. Here is a screen shot of the search engine -

No, this is not an error.

Here are a few of the FAQ and answers from the search engine creator -

1.1 Why is this backwards?

It's a Google mirror. A common practice for busy websites is to create a mirror site, which is an exact replica of the original site but on a different server. This way if one server is really busy, you can go to the other server. elgooG is a play on this idea, except instead of an exact replica of the site, it's a mirror image of the site.

1.2. Why have you done this?

For fun. I thought it was a pretty funny idea and an interesting programming challenge, so I did it.

1.3. Well, yes - but what's the point? Other than humor.

It helps promotes reading backwards, which could be useful in such situations as reading the front of an ambulance or playing scrabble.

For more FAQ and answers click here - Google Mirror FAQ

Nuf, nuf, nuf. yalp evol I.

Gnos a Gnis

Thank you to Language Log for bringing this awesome video to my attention.

Victor Borge's Phonetic Punctuation

Victor Borge's Inflationary Language

Barry Manilow's "Copacabana" Explained

Created by Ari Hoptman, a former undergraduate linguistics major from Wayne State University.

Video Funny - Improve You English

Flatulent in Three Languages

Best word play commercial in ages.

Numbnuts in Spelling Bee Finals

Speaker's intent versus listener's interpretation results in a phonetic comedy.

Muppets - Mahna Mahna

For those of you who enjoyed the words in the Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper commercial, here is the Muppets version upon which it was based.