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One Hour Translation Blog
Translation related Android applications — II
We review three more translation related Android apps viz. ConveyThis Translator, Trippo Monde Voice Translator, and Google Goggle in this blog. They would be found useful by frequent travelers in foreign countries. For quality translation of your own Android App you have to contact professional translation services. ConveyThis Translator ConveyThis is a...
Translation related Android applications
Android is the Operating System for mobile devices developed by Google as a competitor to Windows Mobile, Nokia’s Symbian, Blackberry OS and others. Version 1.0 of Android was released in February 2009 and since then it has undergone several upgrades with the latest version 2.2 released in May 2010. Google...
Translation related iPhone apps – II
Continuing the discussion on translation related iPhone apps, we review some more popular apps like World Nomads, Lonely Planet Phrasebooks, and Coolgorilla Talking Phrasebooks here below. As mentioned previously these apps can only serve as a guide particularly for people on the move and can not substitute professional translation service...
Everything you Need to Know about the free CAT-Tools
The job of a translator is not half as easy as it sounds. There are a lot of things that are to be kept in mind as there is a huge sense of accountability attached with the task. Nowadays, the business world is growing at a breakneck speed and in...
Details on the Most Spoken Languages in the World
Language is the most basic function that every human being has to know in order to communicate with others. This explains the need for professional translation services. As many as six thousand languages are currently being spoken in different corners of the globe today. Every region has a distinct and...
Importance of Spanish translation for US companies – II
Continuing the discussion on the importance of Spanish translation for U.S. companies, here are some startling statistics on the growing domination of Hispanics, the Spanish speaking population in the U.S.: The no. of Hispanics in 2004 exceeded 43.5 millions accounting for nearly 15% ...
Learn Thai Podcast
John has made great progress after just 4 months of learning with our course.
Below is a little video from John who has been learning with our podcast for 4 months. We have to say congratulations! His pronunciation is already in 90% of the cases spot on. See for yourself....
Instant Thai Phrase Lesson: Massage PDFs (txt)
Download the Instant Thai Phrase Lesson: massage PDF...
Instant Thai Phrase Lesson: Massage (mp3)
Instant Thai Phrase Lesson: Massage...
Instant Thai Phrase Lesson: Massage (mp4) (SDw)
Instant Thai Phrase Lesson: Massage...
Instant Thai Phrase Lesson: Massage (mp4) (SD)
Instant Thai Phrase Lesson: Massage...
Instant Thai Phrase Lesson: Massage (mp4) (HD)
Instant Thai Phrase Lesson: Massage...
Global Watchtower™
Language Vendors Announce End-to-End Partnership
This week, three language technology suppliers and a language service provider (LSP) launched a partnership to pull several advanced technologies together into a unified translation and localization solution. The four companies — Acrolinx , Asia Online, Clay Tablet, and Milengo — announced that they would work together to “create an...
BP Fails to Cap the Language Leak
After nearly three months and millions of gallons of oil, it looks like the leak in the Gulf of Mexico may finally stop gushing. While BP’s blunders have caused untold damage to the environment, its failure to provide language services continues to put human life at risk....
iPhone 4 and ZVRS Make Mobile Video Interpreting a Reality
Just as Steve Jobs begins to recover from “Antennagate,” Apple fans in the language services industry have yet another reason to lust after the company’s latest must-have gadget. ZVRS, a company that specializes in video relay services (VRS) for the deaf and hard of hearing, announced that it will soon...
SDL announced today that it was buying machine translation (MT) supplier Language Weaver for US$42.5 million. The MT supplier will become SDL Language Weaver as the entire management and technical team joins SDL as a business unit reporting directly to CEO Mark Lancaster....
Obama Expands Executive Council to Increase U.S. Exports
On March 11, 2010, President Barack Obama announced the National Export Initiative (NEI) to “double our exports over the next five years, an increase that will support two million jobs in America.” This week, the White House announced that Obama would name 18 American executives to the Export Council, an...
Translation Blog
Freelance translators and quoting
Quoting is one of the very first steps of a translation project. With a new prospect, it could mean the beginning of a long-term collaboration and as such, it is a crucial step. Sending a clear quote is essential. A document giving detailed information about a project means that all parties...
“Would you like this last bit of summer pudding, Céline?” asked my mother-in-law. “No, thank you,” said I. “However, I think I will bagsy it for tomorrow.” Rarely had my in-laws’ dining-room witnessed such outrageous behaviour, which was swiftly condemned by all present. You can’t bagsy pudding for the day after! Was...
I came across the expression "be-all and end-all" in a document, which I chose to translate in French as panacée. I knew it took its origins in a Shakespeare play, but couldn't remember which one, so I went in search of an answer. It was Macbeth: Macbeth says: If it were...
I spent last week in Brighton interpreting during a training course on waste management. When you're interpreting, you need to make very quick choices to make sure the message is communicated efficiently between all the different participants, so when the debate turned to nimbyism (from NIMBY, Not In My Backyard,...
The webinar I gave with James on websites for translators went really well yesterday, but at the end, I completely misunderstood a question and ended up giving Really Bad Advice. I was able to correct myself once I realised my mistake. The question was: “If you’re not able to write perfectly...
So Gordon Brown is at the centre of a controversy for calling a retired resident of Rochdale a “bigot” after she questioned his immigration policy. The leader of the Labour party chose a very interesting word: 1590s, from Fr. bigot (12c.), in O.Fr. "sanctimonious;" supposedly a derogatory name for Normans, the...
Learning the Language
English-Learners Set to Benefit From i3 Grants
More than half the grants from the federal Investing in Education, or i3, fund will serve English-language learners and students with disabilities, according to a federal official....
Enrollment in Adult ESL Classes Rises in Southern States
The enrollment of adults in English-as-a-second-language classes rose modestly in the South from 2005 to 2008, the Southern Regional Education Board says in a report released today....
A Week Away: Web Chat on Improving Schools for Native Americans
How state and federal policy can support the teaching of Native American culture and language is bound to be one of the themes in next week's live web chat on improving education for Native American students....
Horne to Tucson Schools: Funds at Risk Over Ethnic Studies
Tom Horne, Arizona's Superintendent of Public Instruction, has told the superintendent of Arizona's Tucson Unified School District that he will announce a withholding of 10 percent of the district's funds as soon as a new law goes into effect that bans classes designed for a particular ethnic group....
The Justice and Ed. Departments and ELLs' Civil Rights
An article published by edweek.org tells how it happened that some English-language learners in four urban school districts didn't get the services to learn English they are entitled to under federal law....
Lumina Foundation Aims to Steer More Latinos to College
Supporting programs that increase the preparedness of Latinos for college and help them to enroll is a grantmaking focus of the Lumina Foundation for Education based in Indianapolis, Ind....
Sinosplice » Life
ChinaJoy: a Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity
By “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” I mean now that I have had the opportunity to go, I will never again go in this lifetime. Once is definitely enough. Still, I’m surprised that very few foreigners have ever heard of ChinaJoy, because it’s so huge here in Shanghai. Not until...
Randy and the Half-Life of Irregular Verbs
Last night I met up with Randy Alexander of Sinoglot, Yuwen, and Echoes of Manchu for dinner and imported beers. We had a great chat, with topics ranging from English and Chinese linguistics, to sci-fi and (evil genius) Joel Martinsen, to the Sinoglot crew and how they tricked Randy...
I understand very little Cantonese, but it doesn’t matter. I’ve done enough dubbing work to know it isn’t easy, and this woman is just amazing. Keep watching… it only gets better and better. (Via Kaixin Wang.)...
China Blog Death and Relevance
I enjoyed Kaiser Kuo’s recent Sinica podcast on Popup Chinese featuring Jeremy Goldkorn of Danwei.org and Will Moss of Imagethief. They started off with the provocative statement that “the English language China blog is dead,” and went into some analysis of how things are different now than they were....
Tooltip Plugin Color Feedback, Please
So the pinyin tooltip WordPress plugin I mentioned before is slowly but surely coming along. We’re alpha testing now, and discovering weird discrepancies between versions of WordPress. Hopefully those won’t be too hard to fix. One of the options supported by the plugin is choice of tooltip background. ...
While at the pharmacy the other day with my friend Chris, we came upon what seemed like a typical example of Engrish: Funny, we thought… “the count” instead of “the counter.” Only as we were leaving did we notice the guy behind the counter: The Sesame Street character “the Count” is known for...
GoodWord from alphaDictionary.com
Hogmanay is not a pig resort but a Scottish festivity celebrated on the last day of the year. Children traditionally stroll about the neighborhood on this day asking for presents. Today's Good Word also refers to the gifts given or received on Hogmanay. More recently it has become a raucous...
1. Slicked down, greasy, said especially of hair with too much tonic or oil on it. 2. Unctuous, oily, obsequious, ingratiatingly polite, perhaps with an overlay of feigned intelligence or sophistication....
1. Magic, sleight of hand. 2. Trickery, deceitful cleverness....
1. A crude, uncultured, heartless person, a boor; someone who lives and treats others savagely. 2. A wild or primitive person, a savage....
1. To fish by pulling a line through the water. 2 To try to lure or incite someone by passing or passing something where they can see it. 3. (Obsolete) To sing in the manner of a round or simply merrily....
Excessive, more than is necessary, extra and unnecessary....
What's New? The Learn English Blog
Aug 5, That's very kind of you Diana! :)
I was impressed when I looked up at your website, especially in a giving instructions part. You crossed the words which weren't suitable and you corrected...
Still can't speak English! TOTAL SCAM!!! Thoughts from Diana: I just saw this comment this afternoon and I'd really like to know more about this person's...
Jun 28, Discover Blayne Taylor: A talented and down to earth Calgary based photographer
Blayne Taylor, a talented Calgary based photographer, doesn't just take photos; she captures memories....
Jun 28, The Importance of Willpower
You might have realized that I haven't come back written for quite a long time. This is because You have to know that's very it is difficult to continue...
Jun 28, Speaking like native speaker
I want to speak like actors in movies, I want English to be like my mother language for me. I've good knowledge of grammar, but not that much in speaking...
In my whole life all I wish for when I grow up is that I can find a great job for my family. My father wants a car and my mother wants a house amd I want...
Global by Design
Amazon’s Kindle goes multilingual
The Kindle 3 was announced last evening. The big news about the device is the price — starting at $139. You could argue that this is the first mass-market e-reader. Of course, going truly mass market means going multilingual. Last year, I asked where was Kindle’s support for non-Latin characters....
Embedded text is untranslated text, courtesy of Google
Google Translate is a great tool for translating content on the fly — and on the cheap. And as Google noted in its blog, Poland’s Ministry of Economy is taking advantage of this translation engine to provide web users with real-time translated content. The Google Translate engine is built right...
Another country code bites the dust. Say goodbye to .AN
.NA is the ccTLD for the Netherlands Antilles which is about to fade into the sunset. Its days as a country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands will end in a few short months. Says this article: On the same date, 10-10-10, Curaçao and the Dutch half of St Maarten...
Now I can get back to my regularly scheduled life....
Translation memory goes open source: An interview with Smith Yewell of Welocalize
Translation memory helps companies re-use previously translated text, improving consistency and potentially saving money. But translation memory requires using translation memory software, which has for years largely meant using SDL Trados software. When a company hires a translation agency and requires that they use translation memory — not only must...
Apple iPhone 4 improves international support
The iPhone is a global success story. And one of the reasons for this success can be attributed to the device’s support for more than 30 languages. But with the iPhone 4 update, Apple continues to push ahead on the global front. Multilingual Mac has documented these improvements, which include fonts...
Games with Words
A number of people have been blogging about a recent, still unpublished study suggesting that "a significant proportion of native English speakers are unable to understand some basic sentences." Language Log has a detailed explanation of the methods, but in essence participants were asked to match sentences to pictures. A...
Honestly, Research Blogging, Get over yourself
A few years ago, science blog posts started decorating themselves with a simple green logo. This logo was meant to credential the blog post as being one about peer-reviewed research, and is supplied by Research Blogging. As ResearchBlogging.org explains: ResearchBlogging.org is a system for identifying the best, most thoughtful blog posts...
Data collection keeps plugging along at GamesWithWords.org. Unfortunately, as usual, it's not the experiments for which I most need data that get the most traffic. Puntastic had around 200 participants in the last month. I'd like to get more than that, and I'd like to get more than that in all...
What's with movies in which fMRI can be done remotely. In an early scene, the CIA do a remote brain scan of someone sitting in a room. And it's fully analyzed, too, with ROIs shown. I want that technology -- it would make my work so much easier! UPDATE I'm not the...
What are the best cognitive science blogs?
If you look to your right, you'll see I've been doing some long-needed maintenance to my blog roll. As before, I'm limiting it to blogs that I actually read (though not all the blogs I read), and I have it organized by subject matter. As I did this, I noticed that...
Translation Party Idea: type in sentence in English. The site then queries Google Translator, translating into Japanese and then back again until it reaches "equilibrium," where the sentence you get out is the sentence you put in. Some sentences just never converge. Ten points to whoever finds the most interesting non-convergence.Read...
Blogging Translator
It’s still only July and like many of you, by this stage of the year the extent of my forward planning goes about as far as fantasising about my much-needed summer holiday next week. Life post-holiday is quite low down on my priority list right now, but there have been...
Marketing speak that makes you cringe – in any language.
Earlier this week I enjoyed reading a post called ‘The Most Overused Buzzwords and Marketing Speak in Press Releases’ over at Adam Sherk’s blog (discovered courtesy of @Betti_Moser). Reading the post, it really struck me that high ‘bleurgh’ factor buzzwords like synergy, and dynamic tend to rear their ugly heads...
Tips from the ITI Scottish Network and Food & Drink Networks ‘Food for Thought’ event
Last Friday I set off for weekend far, far away from home up in Inverness with other foodie translators. This was my first event since becoming Food & Drink Network Coordinator, and I was really looking forward to meeting other members of the network, and to catching up with Scotnet...
The UK election seen through social media
Back in November 2008 (was it really that long ago?) I wrote a post on how astute use of the internet and social media had a helping hand in getting Barack Obama to the White House. While the crucial role of the internet as a medium in the US election...
When I logged in to Twitter this morning I was excited to see the news (courtesy of @NTceline) that after 7 years of relative silence, Alex Eames has resurrected his ‘tranfree’ ezine. Yesterday’s post, on his blog, ‘How to kill your translation business‘ is particularly worth a read – excellent...
Blogging translator in ‘Real World’ magazine
Last year I agreed to write another case study - this time for a graduate magazine called ‘Real World‘, which aims to provide advice and guidance for new graduates entering the labour market. The case study appeared in the magazine’s January/February 2010 issue, and in it I briefly describe what...
babelhut.com
French Pronouns: Subjective Case
Today we’re going to look at French pronouns. Specifically, the subjective case, the French equivalent of saying the following words: I You He She It We They In English, these are all the pronouns with which you start a simple sentence. Sentences like “You are speaking” and “He is listening.” We’ll...
My name is David and I’m a new contributing author here at babelhut.com. Like Peter and Thomas both, I’ve realized my desire to learn another language later in life, though looking back at my life, it’s been a rather obvious result. The first thing in my life I can remember involving...
I am starting to learn Japanese, not for fluency, but for travel.
Within the last few months, I decided that I am finally going to get some international travel under my belt. I’m going to save my money, and I’m going to Japan. The actual trip probably won’t happen until next year, but it’s going to happen, and I’ve already made good...
Welcome to the first post of a new series at Babelhut.com, Spanish Verb Highlight. This series will highlight a different Spanish verb in every post, and provide several example sentences showing how the verb is used in different tenses. The first verb highlighted is oír, which means to hear, or to...
Language Learning Tip #3: Learn To Cook
Here’s a language learning tip that has worked really well for me: learn to cook. And when you do, use recipes in your target language. Great way to learn language. Here’s why: Recipes are short – most recipes fit on one piece of paper, and that’s including a big picture of...
¡Muchas gracias, Time Warner Cable! How did you know I am studying Spanish?
Today I received yet another envelope from Time Warner Cable addressed to “Peter Carroll or Current Resident,” which was seconds from being thrown in the trash can when I decided to open it. This is what was inside: Click to enlarge Click to enlarge I was surprised to receive the advertisement in Spanish....
Paleoglot
Let's talk some more about some wandering instrument terms in the Mediterranean. That of the kithara (ie. the classical lyre) is an interesting case.In January, I explained my refined etymology for the mythic creature known to the Greeks as the Chimaira. I've been suggesting since then that it originally came...
Edward Sapir and the Philistine headdress
Browsing the web as usual I came across something that captured by attention. It turns out that Edward Sapir in his 1937 article Hebrew "Helmet," A loanword, and its bearing on Indo-European phonology had reconstructed a Philistine word *kaubaɣ- 'helmet' based on the Christian story of Goliath (1 Samuel 17:5)....
A Mediterranean flute wanderword
Here's a quick note about a wanderword that I noticed. It starts with a quote from Festus, 403 which equates Latin tibicen 'flute player' with an alleged Etruscan word subulō 'flute player'. What first has to be realized is that this is surely a Latinized form of the original word...
Etruscan tular and a Venetic look-alike
Lately, being more focused on the obscure, ancient Northern Italian languages previously mentioned, I've noticed a Venetic verb variously spelled toler, tolar or tuler, and translated as a 3ps form of 'to bring'. I notice it has the appearance of Etruscan tular which is likewise a verb shown by the...
The above picture should give a clear picture of how I would wager the Etrusco-Rhaetic languages entered Italy by the beginning of the 1st millennium BCE. I can't help but conclude one thing: the Etruscan and Rhaetic languages eminated from the eastern coast of the Po Valley and spread out...
I think I finally got it. This etymology has eluded me for a while but with so much to look up I left it on the backburner, simmering like a spicy gumbo. Nonetheless, it frustrated me at every turn. In almost every book, there's always the same answer: "unknown origin"....
ScienceDaily: Language Acquisition News
Humans imitate aspects of speech we see
New research shows that unintentional speech imitation can make us sound like people whose voices we never hear....
Psychologists develop two potent new predictors of suicide risk
Two powerful new tests developed by psychologists show great promise in predicting patients' risk of attempting suicide. The work may help clinicians overcome their reliance on self-reporting by at-risk individuals, information that often proves misleading when suicidal patients wish to hide their intentions....
Good and bad in the hands of politicians
Politicians' gestures can reveal their thoughts, according to a new study. In laboratory tests, right- and left-handers associate positive ideas like honesty and intelligence with their dominant side of space and negative ideas with their non-dominant side. To find out whether people link 'good' with 'dominant' beyond the laboratory, researchers...
Remembering to forget: The amnesic effect of daydreaming
When your mind drifts, it's hard to remember what was going on before you stopped paying attention. Now a new study has found that the effect is stronger when your mind drifts farther -- to memories of an overseas vacation instead of a domestic trip, for example, or a memory...
Why does everything look gray when you feel blue?
Regardless of culture, language, era, or individual artist, the arts consistently depict depression using darkness. Scientific findings now lend empirical support to this representation of depression that everything looks gray when you feel blue. Researchers had previously shown that people with depression have difficulty detecting black-and-white contrast differences....
Foreign accents make speakers seem less truthful to listeners, study finds
A foreign accent undermines a person's credibility in ways that the speaker and the listener don't consciously realize, new research shows. Because an accent makes a person harder to understand, listeners are less likely to find what the person says as truthful, researchers found. The problem of credibility increases with...
LexiBlog - The Official Blog of Leximo, a World Social Dictionary
For the past month or so the entire world has been fixated on the World Cup. It's slowly coming to an end this week but it's been fun while it lasted. Imagine if the world was this united all the time? :-)I received a lot of my passion for learning...
New Arizona Ban on Ethnicity-focused Classes Proves Western Egocentrism
The SB 1070 law which reduces state financing for any schools which “offer classes designed primarily for students of particular ethnic groups and/or advocate ethnic solidarity” is hoping to prevent people within ethnic groups from...
Stereotyping as a Means to Understanding
As humans trying to understand the world around us we have a tendency to want to define everything. Definitions give the allusion of increasing understanding through breaking down subjects, objects, and concepts into self-explanatory factors that make up what it is as a whole. There are two problems...
This post is courtesy of a belated Mother's Day celebration with my mom. For a little over a year I have been aware of a documentary entitled Babies. The trailer, linked here, is a fantastic representation of the movie. This documentary follows four babies through their first...
The Graduation Speech That Never Was
Finally done with my Undergraduate Degree.Thought I'd share this with our followers.They said this speech was too controversial for a Commencement...so I decided to put it on YouTube instead.Here is the feedback I received:When you begin your speech with "Fear!", it can create a sense of uneasiness for...
Don't Fear Google, The Chinese Media Can Only Censor For So Long...
There are various hypotheses as to why China as the fastest developing country in the world continues to censor its media, the most common being that the Chinese Communist Party is afraid that freedom of the press will cause them to lose national political power, but there is...
Web Translations
Making the case for Multilingual SEO
SEO is just as important for your foreign language sites as for your English one. Simply translating content and putting it online unfortunately does not mean that any of your potential customers will find the pages you have created for their benefit. As Nataly Kelly of the Common Sense Advisory says: “It just doesn’t work to...
This post is an explanation of how our International Blast service works, as it’s something we are often asked about. International Blast was developed as a first step localisation for companies who wanted to begin trading internationally online, but preferred a cautious approach rather than investing a larger amount of money, time...
Web-Translations is proud to showcase its new portfolio of work
Have a look at some of the recent projects we’ve been working on: South African Airways, national airline of this year’s World Cup host nation - this project involves website localisation and managing multilingual updates. Aspinal of London, famous for their iconic leather goods - we set up a new ecommerce...
Web-Translations opens London office with an eCommerce expert
We’re pleased and proud to welcome Technical Sales Director, and eCommerce expert, Raj Jadeja to the team. Raj is heading up our London office, in the Clerkenwell area of the city, and has been appointed to meet the needs of our growing community of eCommerce clients, and also to provide a local...
Yorkshire businesses are well-positioned to sell into Scandinavia
Yorkshire companies are “well-positioned to sell into Scandinavia”, according to Danish business expert and former diplomat, Benny Sørensen. At a recent event to inform businesses in the region about opportunities in Scandinavia, the organisers (Import-Export consultants SØRENSEN, and Denmark’s inward investment organisation Copenhagen Capacity, teamed with the Leeds, York and North...
Harry Potter and the 64 Translations
With J. K. Rowling’s final instalment of the Harry Potter books coming out in cinemas soon, a blog post about how other countries have learnt about this brilliant saga is long overdue! The best selling series of books has been translated into at least 64 different languages, including Latin and...
Ryan's linguistics blog
Just north of my apartment there's a popular diner that has their own printed paper placemats. Printed on these are various slogans of the general form "Take time to X, it is the Y of Z", e.g., "Take time to THINK, it is the source of power." Leaving...
posting on Clarion Foundation blog
I'll be posting occasionally on the Clarion Foundation blog on the linguistics of created languages in sci-fi and fantasy, so today I'll just give a link to my first post over there, an expansion of something I did a while ago on this blog: http://clarionfoundation.wordpress.com.Feel free to leave comments here...
I've been thinking recently about the connection between language and place, not coincidentally because that was the theme of the SILS conference I attended last month. As an English-speaking American of German and Scotch-Irish ancestry, I haven't in the course of my life placed a lot of weight on...
(I'm using Lucida Sans Unicode for the phonetic transcriptions in this post; I think most people have this on their computer, but if something's not rendering properly, you probably don't.)As a phonologist, I'm always interested in tongue twisters. One of the classics in English is "She sells seashells by...
I just found out today that Steven Menefee has passed away. I only just learned that he had cancer last weekend, though I gather he had been fighting it for a while. I first met Steven at the Workshop for American Indigenous Languages at UC Santa Barbara in...
I'm in Eugene, OR for the meetings of the Stabilizing Indigenous Languages Symposium, Athapaskan/Dene Languages Conference, International Conference on Salish and Neighboring Languages, and Hokan-Penutian Languages Conference. It's been a pretty good weekend, with some good presentations, and I've gotten to meet some fun and interesting people. I...
Learn French with daily podcasts
961 – Une simple piqûre (A simple shot)
Learning Guide | PDF Transcript Les docteurs seront bientôt capables de soigner les os et articulations endommagés n’importe où dans le corps… Learn French now ! Listen to today’s lesson :...
960 – Couple arrêté (Arrested couple)
Learning Guide | PDF Transcript La police française a arrêté un couple marié après la découverte des corps de huit nouveaux nés dans le nord… Learn French now ! Listen to today’s lesson :...
959 – Real Life French: le retour
Real life French Guide Welcome to your lesson of Real Life French. Each lesson we take a simple situation you may encounter in everyday life in France. Learn French now ! Listen to today’s lesson :...
958 – Boire de l’alcool (Drinking alcohol)
Learning Guide | PDF Transcript Y croyez-vous ou pas ? Oui, oui selon certains, boire de l’alcool pourrait réduire la gravité des symptômes… Learn French now ! Listen to today’s lesson :...
957 – Ancêtre commun (Common ancestor)
Learning Guide | PDF Transcript Selon une recherche en génétique, les koalas, kangourous et wombats d’Australie partagent un ancêtre… Learn French now ! Listen to today’s lesson :...
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Slang O' The Day
Origin: Computer/Internet Slang Definition: to search for references to yourself online Example: When Dan ego surfed he was pleased with the results that he found....
Origin: American Slang Definition: the routine; the method Example: He got the job done in no time because he knew the drill....
Origin: New Zealand Slang Definition: hard work Example: I’m tired from all of the hard yakka I did over the weekend....
Origin: American Slang Definition: slang used by teenagers Example: Mary’s mom didn’t know what her daughter was talking about because she was speaking in teenglish....
Origin: English Slang Definition: fight; argument Example: My neighbor and I had a ding-dong about his son playing music too loud....
Origin: Australian Slang Definition: cotton candy Example: I’m going to get pink and blue fair floss at the fair....
Fritinancy
If Your Skin Looks Like Shiitake
… Origins has the solution: From the website: “This patent-pending, clinically-proven serum features Dr. Weil’s famed mega-mushroom blend now fortified with Chaga and Pleurotus Mushrooms and Sea Buckthorn.” I had pleurotus once, but I made a full recovery. My thanks to Girls Sent Away, who posted the photo on Twitter......
They have so much fun, / Those employees at Spanx! It’s a pity misspelling / Is one of their pranks. (And not just any old word: Theodor Seuss Geisel’s nom de plume, for crying out loud.) I still like Spanx’s nomenclature, though. __ Photo of a freshly embellished wall in......
Quick, define “memorialize.” If you said “to preserve the memory of a deceased person,” you are correct—unless you’re speaking contemporary Corporatese. In my latest Visual Thesaurus column, “Weird Words from the Corporatese Lexicon,” I provide a translation service. Note, please, that my “weird words” are not the clichés everyone loves......
Glurge: Cloyingly sentimental stories, testimonials, and object lessons frequently sent as email or chain letters. (Source: WiseGeek.) Rhymes with “purge.” Glurge was invented in 1998 by Patricia Chapin, a member of the urban legends discussion mailing list run in conjunction with Snopes.com, the website that fact-checks urban legends. According to......
Ben Zimmer, executive producer of Visual Thesaurus, has noticed that Droid, the mobile device from Google and Verizon, changed its advertising. The slogan now: “A New Generation of Does.” “Those does grow up quickly,” Ben said nostalgically. Read more about “Droid Does” and weird Droidish. And check out Lawrence Yang’s......