"Brasfrwrw" has got to be witch-rain, right? This is great.

"‫قلب‬ is a simple, Scheme-like programming language that you code entirely in Arabic. It is an exploration of the impact of human culture on computer science, the role of tradition in software engineering, and the connection between natural and computer languages." Somebody asked me at Four Thought about non-English programming languages, and I had to explain there really weren't many/any. This is a nice counterpoint, though it's as much a statement as a practical tool, I guess. Still: it's a statement about the thing I explained to the audience member.

"Sentiment analysis tool for node.js based on the AFINN-111 wordlist." Interesting; feel slike it could be ported to other platforms, too.

"Infamous will in fact now serve as the reigning shibboleth (or "test word", or giveaway). Anyone who uses it loosely, as I did, is making the following announcement: I write without much care and without much feeling. I just write like other people write" This is good, and sweet at the same time; nice to see a man's cares expressed so well by his son, who's not being an ass for once.

"...Compares the magnitude of stuff. Like one guided missile destroyer costs as much as three million fluffy kittens."

"Words in other languages are like icebergs: The basic meaning is visible above the surface, but we can only guess at the shape of the vast chambers of meaning below. And every language has particularly hard-to-translate terms, such as the Portuguese saudade, or "the feeling of missing someone or something that is gone," or the Japanese ichigo-ichie, meaning "the practice of treasuring each moment and trying to make it perfect."" Lovely little article on the untranslatable.

"In this adaptation of Raymond Queneau’s 100,000,000,000,000 Poems, the rules of 10 sports (football, polo, water polo, lacrosse, ice hockey, table tennis, basketball, rugby, the Kirkwall ba' and beach volleyball) are divided into their constituant elements (duration, playing area, objective, players per team, attire, ball and method of play/restrictions) in such a way that they can be reassembled without contradicting each other."

Depicted as a grid by artist Susan Wolf; to circumvent the large number of languages spoken in Joburg, taxi drivers have official hand signals to take you from A to B. This PDF shows all of them. (via Bobulate)

""Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." is a grammatically correct sentence used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated constructs." And: what a URL.

"Every family, it seems, has its own set of words for describing particular Lego pieces. No one uses the official names. “Dad, please could you pass me that Brick 2x2?” No. In our house, it’ll always be: “Dad, please could you pass me that four-er?”" So true. I'm trying to recall our own nomenclature.

"This is a selected list of gairaigo, Japanese words originating or based on foreign language (generally Western) terms, including wasei-eigo (Japanese pseudo-Anglicisms)." One of my new favourite Wikipedia pages; there is some fascinating stuff in here.

"It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate." And so on.

Andrew Plotkin on some of the design of Inform 7, and rule-based programming as it applies to IF. Long story short: everything is exceptional, and designing systems to support the kind of stories IF authors want to tell is hard.

"In business, words are like fashion. You try a word on because important people around you are saying it and getting results, but you may not actually know what it means." Rands helps you discover what the words actually mean. As usual, he is right.

"‘sdfsdf ‘means, I would argue, ‘I am testing’, or even more specifically, ‘I am now testing what can be seen’. It’s another performative expression because there is no semantic distance between typing this string and doing what it says, in the same way that there is no semantic distance between saying ‘I do’ in your marriage vows and actually performing your marriage vows. Saying is doing."

"I gave a presentation on Treetop last night at lrug - seemed to go down well. There aren’t many examples of treetop grammars I’ve seen, so it might be useful if you find the main site’s documentation a bit impeneterable." Roland drops some Treetop science, and it looks very useful. Good stuff!

"The genre of the palindrome, playful and ludic as it is, nonetheless has a strong implication of violence. In the work of its foremost practitioners, Velemir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as some of their postmodern successors, the palindrome is closely linked to death, cannibalism, beheading, and murder."

"Verbing weirds language"

"...after careful consideration [the editors in charge of style guidelines at the NYT] decided to alter our style. As of now, the spelling whisky will be used not only for Scotch but for Canadian liquor as well. The spelling whiskey will be used for all appropriate liquors from other sources." As it should be.

"Picking out political buzzwords from 2008 is like shooting moose in a pigpen. The fundamentals were so dizzyingly strong, it could be tough to keep them all straight." Good selection, though, both political and non.

"Program recipes should not only generate valid output, but be easy to prepare and delicious." Chef is a programming language where the programs are also valid (if strange) recipes. The syntax description is proper crazy; gives Homespring a run for its money, easily, in the realm of metaphorical programming languages that embrace their metaphor.

The Wire has started airing on German TV, in a dubbed version; fascinating interview on how to translate it whilst keep the flavour of the original show.

Well, as long as they ban every other imported phrase. Stupid as this is, I think the comment that it's "the linguistic equivalent of ethnic cleansing" is a bit of an absurd, and somewhat insensitive, overstatement.

"The No Game is a party game with only one real rule."

"...the empty language of the corporate world, forever leveraging its resources to effect a paradigm shift in the compelling value-proposition of our once-noble language."

"I am stumped by how to excerpt the language on message boards and blogs... My problem with message-board language brings up a prior problem in journalism: the difficulty of translating spoken language into written language."

"Dolores Labs paid MechaTurks to apply labels to 10,000 color swatches." Then they built network graphs out of them. Very nice.

"Osmo Wiio is a Finnish researcher of human communication. His laws of communication are the human communications equivalent of Murphy’s Laws"

Some great points here, especially 1, 2, and 3, which apply equally to many forms of design.

"We showed thousands of random colors like this to people on Mechanical Turk and asked what they would call them. Here’s what they said [...]"

"When we call something a scripting language, we're primarily making a linguistic and cultural judgment, not a technical judgment. I see scripting as one of the humanities. It's our linguistic roots showing through." Larry Wall ++

"Chinaderas is the nomenclature assigned [in Mexican Spanish] to imported goods from China, usually those that are knock-offs or replicas of other branded commodities…" Delightful etymology behind it, too.

"The Language Switcher WordPress plugin allows you to create a bilingual or multi-lingual blog, using WordPress." Feels a little fudgy to me, but it definitely works.

"In this context, the insertion of a Latin word in a couple of paragraphs may be a tiny step: but it is at least one in the right direction." Nature changes its mission statement.

A nicely-written guide to the way engineers classify problems - and a reminder to us of how other people hear the words we use.

Actually knew a few of these already, but there are some great ones in there.

What it says on the tin.

This story is copyright 1974 by Ursula K. Le Guin. It is transcribed from Le Guin's collection The Compass Rose because I'd like my friends to read it.

Rails helper method of the day: to_sentence. Nicely executed!

Going beyond just pluralize. Cute.

Cal told me about this. I think I could be good at it.

Clay Shirky's wiki for discussion pattern languages of moderation.

Pointers tripped me up when I was 13 and trying to learn C. Flummoxed, I tell you - and put off programming for a while. Now, though, I appreciate Joel's point (even if I'm a lousy coder and not worthy of the title "programmer"). I think it's the fact I k

David Foster Wallace on "Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage"

learn is a perl script that outputs english. what better proof of concept than to dump output to a blog?