WordLo

New exhibition features Victorian poems written like text messages, the rise of RP, and battles over the letter H

Mark Brown Arts correspondent

guardian.co.uk

A typical text message on a mobile phone. The British Library has unearthed examples of 19th century language using text msg abbreviation. GR8!
If u really r annoyed by the vocabulary of the text generation, then a new exhibition at the British Library should calm you down. It turns out they were doing it in the 19th century – only then they called it emblematic poetry, and it was considered terribly clever.
Details were announced today of the library's new exhibition devoted to the English language, exploring its 1,500-year history from Anglo-Saxon runes and early dictionaries to not dropping your Hs and rap.
The exhibition will open this winter after three years of planning.
One of the stars of the show will be the oldest surviving copy of Beowulf, the longest epic poem in Old English, which was written down at least 1000 years a…

published on: Johnson

I'VE quickly become slack about maintaining my blacklist of tired phrases used by lazy journalists. (Seems this journalist is too lazy even to look for tired phrases.) But hooray! Someone has now starting doing it for me. A new web tool called Listiki lets people create lists of things and manage them collaboratively, and one Alison Gow ("Journalist, skier, biker. Usually in Liverpool, always over-caffenated") has created a list of journalistic clichés, to which 16 people have already contributed. Among them:

http://listiki.com/journalism-cliches-i-most-dislike

Outpouring (of grief/support/etc)

Grisly murders. Or brutal ones.

"Plummeted" meaning "was down a bit"

In scenes of reminiscent of (insert film/TV show here)

Only time will tell (I haven't a clue)

Yes, indeed. Will Listiki take off, and will this list turn into a comprehensive encyclopaedia of journalistic mediocrity? Only time will tell.

published on: BBC

A poem by so-called 'Mini Meee' written in txt talk

Dear peers of mine wat r we thinkin?
Our health and lives r slowly driftin.
Can't u c ure hurtin each otha?
Can't u c ure hurtin ya mothas?
All this violence, sex and drugs,
Ain't nuthin fun bout bustin slugs.
My dear poor friends of Generation X,
Can't u c u havin too much sex?
Some girls in my school r pregnant and hopeless,
Jus go to school be calm and stay focused.
I had friends killed by drugs and drug relations,
Please say no, let's fight against 'em.
Do somethin' positive unlike dealin or doin,
Jus' have fun by dancin or hoopin.
So much in this world can kill in one second,
Like guns 'n' knives, they're dangerous weapons.
All these song bout shootin and chokin,
U think thas cool? U must b jokin!
Guns kill us quick, drugs kill us slow,
Sex makes us kill a life before it even grows.
Sex, drugs and violence,
Jus be safe and practice abstinence.
Please my Generation X friends,
Don't…

By BEN ZIMMER

When Jake Tapper of ABC’s “This Week” asked Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey last month for his opinion of the MTV reality series “Jersey Shore,” the contempt in the governor’s voice was obvious. “What it does is it takes a bunch of New Yorkers — most of the people on ‘Jersey Shore’ are New Yorkers — drops them at the Jersey Shore and tries to make America feel like this is New Jersey,” Christie said. In other words, in the parlance of the Jersey Shore, the show is about a bunch of bennies — disagreeable tourists from the metropolitan New York region who crowd the beaches every summer.
When it comes to the seasonal exodus of sun worshipers to the Jersey Shore and other beach spots around the country, language can get fiercely local. It starts with the fundamentals: how do you describe your prospective trip to the beach? In Oregon, you might say you’re going “to the coast.” In New Jersey, you invariably go “down the shore.” Baltimore natives, meanwhile, say they’re going “…

Have you ever been at a party with a bunch of "software industry" people and overheard a conversation that included something like this:
"I was sitting in the cube farm checking out the dead tree edition of the Times when some idea hamster comes in to ask for my help on a project. I told him I didn't have enough bandwidth to support him--that he should go find some gray matter to help him out."
Sound like a different language? It is. An entire lexicon of "geek speak" has emerged from the world of hardware and software. But the next time you feel left out at a party full of mouse potatoes, you can show your savvy by speaking the lingo. If you do it well enough, you might even be mistaken for the alpha geek.

Alpha geek: The most knowledgeable, technically proficient person in an office or work group. "Ask Larry, he's the alpha geek around here."

Bandwidth: The ability to juggle or handle an excessive amount of stuff. "I'm really busy …

published on: advice.cio.com

With Forrester Research's help, I attempt to demystify the Cloud flavors known as SaaS, PaaS and IaaS for enterprise software.
What hasn't the high-tech industry done to the poor "Cloud Computing" moniker? For the past couple years or so, "The Cloud" has been hyped up like a LeBron James appearance, contorted like a Yoga-practicing Swami, poked and prodded again and again, and then hijacked by just about every apps vendor in the known universe.
Sucked up in the marketing vortex of cloud computing's hurricane were software-delivery models SaaS (software-as-a-service) and "Web-based" or "on-demand" computing. Along for the ride now—and further flummoxing market watchers and IT customers—are more aaS's: PaaS (platform-as-a-service) and IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service). (And don't forget about "private" and "public" clouds!)
Perhaps our favorite was the Governance-as-a-Service soluti…

tratto da:punto informatico

Il verbo da Facebook "unfriend" arriva nei dizionari di lingua inglese e diventa parola dell'anno. D'altronde la lingua è una questione sociale, e questi sono social network: appunto Roma - Negli ultimi anni il linguaggio della Rete ha ricevuto sempre più la consacrazione dei vocabolari, e della lingua ufficiale che cambia e si piega alle esigenze e ai tempi dei nuovi mezzi: così già erano entrati nel linguaggio comune Twitter, Facebook e blog (anche come verbi twittare, facebookare e bloggare). E, anche quest'anno, il social network in blu è protagonista dell'evoluzione degli idiomi.
È ancora Facebook l'origine della parola che meglio rappresenta il 2009: Unfriend (verbo), che secondo l'Oxford Dictionary significa "rimuovere qualcuno come amico da un social network come Facebook".
Oltre a questo neologismo nato dal web 2.0, nel 2010 saranno riconosciuti altri termini sorti dall'ICT. Solo per fare alcuni esempi, …

Will a new pride of economic lions take their place beside the Chinese dragon and the Indian tiger?


The term "tiger economies" to refer to the fab four of Asia dates back to the 1960s. (They are also known as the "little dragons" owing to China's influence.) Ireland adopted the "Celtic tiger" in the 1990s, despite there being no such beast—presumably it was worried that calling itself the "hare economy" would make it sound flaky. Scotland made a bid for "Celtic Lion" in 1997, on the reasonable basis that there is at least a lion on the Scottish Royal Standard. It never took off, though; neither did Scotland.Curiously, Russia's periodically hyperactive economy doesn't seem to have a common animal name. The "bear economy" is an obvious no-no, but people rarely use "tiger", even though there are tigers in Russia. Perhaps that's because they're Siberian tigers, which are in danger of going extinct. Sa…