Oxford Word of the Year: Unfriend.
Oxford University Press has chosen unfriend as its word of the year for 2009.To unfriend is "To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook."Christine Lindberg explains that unfriend assumes a verb sense of “friend” that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!) Altho a search for the verb forms, friended and friending bring up a couple million hits on a major web search engine.* And the intact phrase "tried to friend" (with quotes around it) brings up almost 40 million hits.I'd say the verb friend

Maddow chooses to inexplicably apologize
The metaphor of language as music is fruitful.When I used to perform music publicly, my teacher (Roger Jackson) gave me a bit of advice that I should follow more often. "If you make a mistake," he said, "make it proudly." His thinking was that more often than not, I knew more about that piece of music than anyone in the audience. He repeatedly assured me that the masses have no idea what note's coming next and they can't remember what note was just played. If you mess up a note (or seven) in Fernando Sor's Introduction and Variations on a Theme by Mozart from The Magic Flute, the only way the audience will know it, is if you grimace or react with shame.My ha

The English language in America is not threatened.
My addiction to C-SPAN has me thinking that Steve King (representing the poor people of Iowa's 5th district) is just talking in the hopes of stumbling across a good idea. Much of his ignorance revolves around ideas about language and the threat of multilingualism.As Sally Thomason points out in a recent Language Log post, this is an ignorance worth countering.Below I post in full the relevant Resolution adopted in 1987 by the Linguistic Society of America (mentioned by Thomason in her post).Resolution: English OnlyDr

Windmill cookies, they'll give you gonorrhea
Just make sure to read more carefully than you listen.(h/t Elizabeth)

DSM-BS
Maybe Tom and L. Ron are right about this psychiatry racket.My favorite proposed diagnosis:God ComplexAntecedents: Creating the known universe.Symptoms: Thinking you own the place. Snooping on people's private conversations even when not addressed through prayer. Fickle support for Steinbrenner's Evil Empire during playoffs. Sufferers will sometimes exist just to spite Christopher Hitchens.Notes: Those with lon