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Tag overview for: 'language'

Entries on this site with 'language'

• rialtoscuro
  Rialtoscuro n. disorientation when you step outside a movie theater into unexpected darkness, a twinge of jet lag from two hours of escapist fun which only diverts you fro
• word is murder
  Word is murder of a thing, not only in the elementary sense of implying its absence - by naming a thing, we treat it as absent, as dead, although it is still present - but
• a dissimulation of birds
  Collective nouns (not to be confused with mass nouns like water, sand or coffee) describe groups of countable things, people or animals. For animals, English has a large a
• bokeh
  Word of the day: ' bokeh ', Japanese for fuzzy/blurry, and borrowed in English for the aesthetic quality of out-of-focus areas in photographs and film, most notable when s
• a pataphor for what?
  Some more on Oulipo (see previous post ), many of whose members were also 'pataphysicians. A pseudo-philosophy devised by French playwright and surrealist avant la lettre
• quarks
  As a postscript to the previous post , did you know the word quark (the elementary particle) came from James Joyce 's ' Finnegans Wake '? American phycisist Murray Gell-Ma
• kluning
  As the first serious frost in years starts to get Holland into iceskating mode, one of the strangest Dutch words is coming back into use: 'klunen', 'to walk on iceskates o
• fernweh
  Word of the day, from German: Fernweh. Coined as the opposite of Heimweh (homesickness), it literally means 'farsickness', an ache for the distance, a longing to be far aw
• off to morocco
  
• deer park
  Just four lines long, the ancient Chinese poem 'Deer Park', by Buddhist poet Wang Wei , has inspired poets and translators through the ages. Eliot Weinberger 's '19 Ways o
• ambient music
  By now a sprawling genre of electronic music - characterized by a very fine and wavery line between boring and soaring - the idea of ambient music has an intriguing histor
• stairway wit
  'Stairway wit', or 'stairwit', isn't really English, just the direct translation of the French ' l'esprit d'escalier ' (originally coined by Diderot ) and its German equiv
• mathom
  Moving houses is always a confrontation with all the stuff that you've allowed to accumulate over the years. P.K. Dick called this ' kipple ' (and considered it a lost bat
• calling shotgun
  Hilarious Wikipedia article on ' calling shotgun ', the very American car-cultural game of claiming passenger seat rights. With some of the more elaborate rules, it must t
• tela totius terrae
  The "tela totius terrae" (ttt) is the world wide web (www) in Latin. If this sounds like Asterix & Obelix , it turns out there's a whole ' Dictionary of Modern Latin ' (pu
• off to china...
  
• kipple
  'Cause i can never find the original definition for this great concept, here's the complete quote: Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use
• denkraam
  Sorry, the death of graphic artist / writer Marten Toonder , creator of 177 Tom Poes & Olivier B. Bommel comics and coiner of God knows how many Dutch language innovations
• jihad?
  To Westerners [the word jihad ] conjures scenes of screaming fanatics being egged into war by promises that they will be instantly transported to heaven if they are slain.
• habseligkeiten
  This word was voted most beautiful German word in the competition organized by the Goethe Institute and the German Language Council. 'Belongings' doesn't even come close a

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