Archive for the 'Language' Category
Posted: Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 @ 4:39 pm in Language | 2 Comments »
The worst sample of written English ever, courtesy of K-Lo at The Corner [emphasis mine]:
McCain may not rally a crowd, but there’s there there that could plausibly be commander-in-chief of a nation at war (really, we are, remember? It’s not just over there.).
Has anyone ever produced a worse sentence while attempting to write English?
Posted: Sunday, February 3rd, 2008 @ 7:03 pm in Language | No Comments »
Are you familiar with the expression the year dot, readers? I ran across it in a Nation column by Katha Pollitt:
[I]f you have to explain your decisions on your website, you’re already in trouble. Because that invites the rejected advertiser to critique your editorial content going back to the year dot…
Was that a typo, [...]
Posted: Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 @ 9:50 pm in Language, Political | 5 Comments »
Today the Costco Coulter has posted some “good and bad news” about the surge in popularity of Arabic as a foreign-language choice for American college students. She claims to have taken Arabic when she was in college (she doesn’t seem to have learned much, as we have noted in the past, but that’s another [...]
Posted: Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 @ 3:13 pm in Language, Political | No Comments »
The term “Nazi,” as a result of constant misuse, is starting to lose its meaning. It’s drifting semantically towards “something I consider oppressive and disagreeable.” See Glenn Greenwald’s post from yesterday and Dave Neiwert’s post from today on this topic.
Greenwald points out that it used to be considered a pretty bad thing to [...]
Posted: Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 @ 12:10 am in Language | 7 Comments »
Yes, it’s that simple, readers. A five-year-old could understand it:
The Arabic word allah means “God.” Just as the French word dieu means “God” and the Spanish word dios means “God.”
We’ve been over this before. Even wingnutty scaremonger Daniel Pipes has no problem admitting it.
Alas, there will always be Know-Nothings like Crazy Pammy, [...]
Posted: Thursday, August 9th, 2007 @ 12:16 pm in Language | 12 Comments »
Debbie Schlussel, the Costco Coulter, claims to “speak” four languages, including Arabic. She has unwittingly revealed that to be a lie, unfortunately for her, with a grotesque linguistic blunder that any Arabic 101 student would know better than to make. Look at this:
Of course, even that was a sanitized version of what happens [...]
Posted: Friday, May 4th, 2007 @ 3:09 am in Language, Political | 11 Comments »
Who are the two dumbest people on the intertrons, readers? I think they might be Crazy Pammy and Mark Steyn. Here’s what happened when the two of them hooked up for an interview: Mark Steyn displayed quite a deep grasp of sociolinguistics.
Yes, on the face of it yes Arabic is a language [...]
Posted: Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 @ 7:08 pm in Language | 2 Comments »
Timothy Noah, writing under Slate’s “Chatterbox” rubric, talked to the ghostwriter of O.J.’s controversial ex-book If I Did It. In his article, Noah wrote a sentence I can’t quite understand:
Goldman assumed a karate stance, according to Miller’s description. “Then,” Simpson/Fenjves writes discreetly, “something went horribly wrong, and I know what happened, but I can’t [...]
Posted: Saturday, June 10th, 2006 @ 9:22 pm in Language | 2 Comments »
Committing suicide by strangling yourself with a bedsheet is now known as “asymmetrical warfare” –
“They are smart. They are creative, they are committed. They have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us,” [...]
Posted: Sunday, May 21st, 2006 @ 3:34 pm in Language | 3 Comments »
The Liberal Avenger sent me a link to a a BBC story about a tuna fish, found in Mombasa, Kenya, which has what (supposedly) looks like a snippet of Koranic verse on it:
Supposedly, the markings on this tuna fish spell out a phrase from the Koran:
ﻮأﻨﺕ ﺨﻴﺭ اﻠﺭاﺰﻗﻴﻥ
wa-anta khayyiru r-raaziqiina
And you are the best of [...]