“Bank” does not have a long A sound as in “plane”? Are you kidding me? I pronounce it “baynk”. And yet, look at the dictionary and there’s no line over the a. It’s a short a as in “cat”. Either I’m mispronouncing the word or English is unreasonable. If English were a programming language, it would be JavaScript.
Category: language
Icelandic names
If we were in Iceland, my sons would have a last name something like Nathanson and my daughter something like Nathansdóttir. Björk’s last name is Guðmundsdóttir. It’s the Icelandic name.
practice another language
I’ve been trying out Duolingo to practice Spanish. It’s a website where you practice English, Spanish, French, etc. in a game format and earn “points”. Anyway, I think it’s helping if I could remember where those accents go.
French for "grape"
Raisin is French for “grape”.
Imma leverage my leverage
Stop using “leverage” instead of “use”. Stop it, stop it, stop it!
English double words
Sometimes, I come across a case where I want to use the same word twice in a row. It seems a bit awkward, but rephrasing the sentence to get around it would be even more awkward. For example, this question: “Do you think they’ll get their bid in in time for the deadline?”
Goodbyes are easier than Hellos
Sean (5-year-old son) just called me to tell me about his new Lego construction. He seems to have learned the wrong lesson from me…delivering his message and then, almost in mid-sentence, saying, “so bye.” Guess we need to level up our smalltalk skills…and I ain’t talkin’ about the programming language.
English language wackness
A few things about the English language
What’s up with the -let suffix? It’s rarely used, but computer people might be latching on to it. For example, in applet, servlet, and the aforementioned cmdlet. Seems to be borrowed from the French -ette.
And then there’s the issue of not speaking the way things are spelled. (Or is it the same thing?) What happened to the British R? Apparently, that can’t be answered without lots of nightmarish linguistic terms.
So why is English such an insane language? If you try to spell things logically (the way they sound), you’re a bad speller. I mean, we wouldn’t want anything to be logically spelled. Currently, good spelling only comes through lots of experience. There’s apparently a small movement to fix the language. Unfortunately, it sounds like the problems in sorting this out are huge. English is a mishmash of Latin, Greek, French, Germanic, and other terms. If you pick one of those styles, you have to run the whole language through the grinder to make it consistent with that style.
A professor in our midst
Looks like Vanessa has a new feature on her blog: Professor Sean Presents: The Word of the Day
Notate
Notate is a word. “I notated it per your request. Per that’s how I roll.”