WordLo

Read more: An Anthropological Linguistic Study of the Perry So-so

What jobs are out there for people with language skills? ‘Teacher’ or ‘translator’ are usually top of this list when you ask people that question, and there is a common misconception that these are the only jobs you can do. Wrong!


Here follows just some of the interesting jobs where languages are specifically required:
Video games tester – playing video games to test that they say the right words in the correct language.
Private jet sales executive – selling private jets, or fractional ownership of them, to high net worth individuals across Europe.

Football analyst – watching and analysing the latest European football matches and producing reports on the failures and successes of the team in different languages.These are passed onto traders to aid investors in betting more successfully.
International assignment manager – working for a large international company to help colleagues re-locate from country to country.

Luxury yacht sales manager – Selling yearly memberships tothe rich and famo…

A word coined or used for a special occasion.

A nonce word is one coined 'for the nonce'--made up for one occasion and not likely to be encountered again. When Lewis Carroll coined it, frabjous was a nonce word. Neologisms are much the same thing, brand-new words or brand-new meanings for existing words, coined for a specific purpose. Analogy, especially with familiar words or parts of speech, often guides the coiner, and occasionally these words will enter the standard vocabulary."(Kenneth G. Wilson, The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. Columbia Univ. Press, 1993)

source:GrammarAbout

Defined by Tom McArthur in The Oxford Companion to the English Language (1992) as an informal, late-20th-century term for "a word created and used to produce a special effect or attract attention, as if it were part of the performance of a stunt man or a conjuror."

Example:

"Rudyard Kipling coined the word curtiosity, which means the asking of ever so many questions. It may perish with the book in which it appeared, or it may reach a venerable age like fudge--who knows?"
(Leon Mead, Word-Coinage, 1902)

source:GrammarAbout

The idea that your mother tongue shapes your experience of the world may be true after all.


When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.


More on: NYTimes

Economist debate:The language we speak shapes how we think

Brave New Words: Word Nerds ‘R’ Us:

This is a list of the “50 Coolest Online Tools for Word Nerds” .

Perché il calcio viene chiamato in modo diverso da inglesi (football) e americani (soccer)?

I due termini, football e soccer, si usano per indicare lo stesso sport sebbene football sia presente in un maggior numero di lingue con un più alto numero di occorrenze.

Footballrisale a un decreto del 1424 in cui re Giacomo I di Scozia bandiva il gioco con la frase: "That na man play at the Fute-ball".

Nel 1863 viene fondata a Londra la Football Association (FA), la prima federazione calcistica nazionale che unificò definitivamente il regolamento. Queste regole furono adottate da tutti eccetto che dalla Scuola di Rugby, che preferiva un gioco più fisico in cui si potesse toccare il pallone anche con le mani. Si venne a creare cosi il termine soccer, entrato a far parte dello slang universitario comeabbreviazione colloquiale di Assoc., da  Association football+ la formazione agentiva "-er" per distinguerlo dal Rugby Football.

Fonti:


Terminologia etcEnglishfor.it

Thanks to the economy, technology and fashion, there are so many new words being created you'd have to be a "didiot" not to notice them. As a didiot myself, I assumed didiot means someone who's an idiot with digital technology (that would be moi), but no: It is a hybrid of "damn" and "idiot." A "yoot" sounds like either a Dr. Seuss character or the way your cousin Vinny would pronounce "youth," but instead it is a person young enough not to remember life before youtube.
Men were already suffering in the "mancession" -- meaning disproportionately more men are unemployed due to the languishing of traditionally male trades like construction. Now they have to cope with the "Tiger effect," too. That's newly alert wives checking up on them through cellphone, GPS, and e-mail records. And by the way, a GPS is not just a gizmo but also a driver that gives too many directions. I have just bought a GPS myself and lo…

Ten years ago, no one had heard of “H1N1″, “Web 2.0″, “n00b”, or talked about “de-friending” someone on “Twitter” or “Facebook”.

Now these are part of people’s everyday vocabulary.The world is changing. Inevitably, so are our words.The English language is going through an explosion of word creation. New words are coined – some, like “n00b”, may not even look like words; old words take on new meanings – “twitter” today bears little relation to the Middle English twiteren. According to the Global Language Monitor (GLM), in 2009 the English language tipped the scales with a vocabulary of one million words. Not good news for the 250 million people acquiring English in China.

GLM, the San Diego-based language watcher, publishes annual lists of top words and phrases by tracking words in the global print and electronic media, the Internet, blogs, and social media such as Twitter and YouTube.

Each year’s list reflects major concerns and changes taking place that year. For instance, from the 2…

published on: Guardian

More than a lingua franca, the rapid adoption of 'decaffeinated English', according to the man who coined the term 'Globish', makes it the world's most widely spoken language.
The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee has just published a report Global Security: UK-US Relations whose headline conclusion (The "Special Relationship" is Dead) interests me. This, it seems to me, is potentially another milestone in the evolution of the phenomenon I've occasionally referred to on this blog as "Globish". Full disclosure: for the past four years, I've been working on a book, Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language, which argues that a seismic shift in the foundations of our lingua franca has transformed it from an expression of Anglo-American cultural sovereignty into a supra-national phenomenon, with its own powerful inner dynamic. Penguin Books will shortly publish this in the UK, and I'm…

Teenagers on social networking sittes are creating a secret language to stop adults knowing what they are up to, researchers say.

published on: Telegraph

The teens are using it to stop parents and employers judging them by their social activities such as partying and drinking.Instead of writing they are drunk, teens post 'Getting MWI' - or Mad With It.
Being in a relationship is known as 'taken' or 'Ownageeee', and 'Ridneck', a corruption of redneck, means to feel embarassed.
Meanwhile, girls posting 'Legal' are indicating that they are above 16 and legally allowed to have sex.
Lisa Whittaker, a postgraduate student at the University of Stirling, who studied teens aged 16-18 on Bebo in Scotland, said the slang had been created to keep their activities private, and cited the example of one young girl who was sacked after bosses found pictures of her drinking on the website.
"Young people often distort the languages they use by making the pag…

Fears about the demise of Arabic are misplaced

published on: Economist

THE Arabic language is dying. Its disloyal children are ditching their mother tongue for English and French. It is stagnating in classrooms, mosques and the dusty corridors of government. Even such leaders as the Lebanese prime minister, Saad Hariri, and Jordan’s foreign-educated King Abdullah struggle with its complicated grammar. Worse still, no one cares. Arabic no longer has any cachet. Among supposedly sophisticated Arabs, being bad at Arabic has become fashionable.
That, at least, is an opinion prominently aired in the National, an English-language newspaper in Abu Dhabi. It reflects a perennial worry in the Arab world about the state of the language. Classical Arabic, the language of the Koran, and its modern version, Modern Standard Arabic, known in academia as MSA, are a world apart from the dialects that people use every day. Spoken and written in the media and on stuffy occasions, this kind of Arabic is no …