Portland based copywriter Ted McCagg has determined diphthong to be the best word ever… it’s a new one on me, and means:

In phonetics, a gliding vowel in the articulation of which there is a continuous transition from one position to another. Diphthongs are to be contrasted in this respect with so-called pure vowels-i.e., unchanging, or steady state, vowels. Though they are single speech sounds, diphthongs are usually represented, in a phonetic transcription of speech, by means of a pair of characters indicating the initial and final configurations of the vocal tract. Many of the vowel sounds in most dialects of English are diphthongs: e.g., the vowels of “out” and “ice,” represented as [au] and [ai], respectively.

Winning, by the way, was no amble down the aisle, diphthong had to see off a number of worthy contenders in order to reach the top spot.

Reddit members have been listing their favourite, and most profound of, mind-blowing sentences in recent weeks… here are a few stand outs:

• No one is going to remember your memories.
• Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
• Photons simultaneously experience their beginning, middle, and end.
• As you look farther away, you are looking farther into the past.
• When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.
• The Pyramids were as old to the Romans as the Romans are old to us.
• The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.
• You have just begun reading the sentence you just finished reading.

The way someone speaks can say a lot about a them, but you may be able to glean a few more insights into what makes a person tick by tuning into the “crutch” words they use, expressions such as “basically”, “like”, “honestly”, and of course “at the end of the day”:

If you use the English language’s worst phrase, you are the forward thinker of crutch-word users. You know each day has an end, and some day we will reach it, and therefore this phrase will be relevant, except really it’s not. See also ultimately. If you need an ultimately or an at the end of the day to give your point punch, you should probably just phrase your point a bit differently, or simply place verbal emphasis on the words that hold the most meaning. “At the end of the day, we all learned something” can just as easily be said as “We all learned something.” At the end of the day gives you a sense of backstory with no real backstory, so it’s dissatisfying at best, the end of an experience without the context or even sometimes the beginning. Hold your ultimately.

Maybe this is why I had the feeling I was re-visiting a place I’d lived in many years earlier (even though I’d never been there before) while I was in Turkey… it is highly possible the English language originated in Turkey some nine thousand – give or take – years ago.

Commenting on the paper, Prof Mark Pagel, a Fellow of the Royal Society from the University of Reading who was involved in earlier published phylogenetic studies, said: “This is a superb application of methods taken from evolutionary biology to understand a problem in cultural evolution – the origin and expansion of the Indo-European languages. “This paper conclusively shows that the Indo-European languages are at least 8-9,500 years old, and arose, as has long been speculated, in the Anatolian region of what is modern-day Turkey and spread outwards from there.”

A couple weeks ago I linked to a list of words that originated in India, or on the Indian subcontinent, that have become so much a part of the English language they almost seem endemic to it (if that is really possible of course… scroll down to “English” heading).

Not only has India played a part in augmenting English though, it is also one of the only places where certain English words, such as wheatish, stepney, and prepone, are ever used.

I need to prepone some meetings to arrange for the trip so I need to rush due to the same, but not to worry, I will keep you initimated of my progress. Will give you a missed call when I deplane upon returning back.

(Thanks Jessica)

While some grammarians will tell you semicolons are an example of a punctuation mark that has been deprecated (meaning you’ll find them around here), others will tell you they are still useful, provided they are used correctly.

I think the semicolon is more easily understood if it is defined in relation to the colon rather than to the comma. Under “Semicolon,” the book says, “Its main role is to indicate a separation between two parts of a sentence that is stronger than a comma but less strong than dividing the sentence in two with a full stop…. She looked at me; I was lost for words.” So the semicolon is exactly what it looks like: a subtle hybrid of colon and comma. Actually, in ancient Greek, the same symbol was used to indicate a question.

Shampoo, pyjamas, and veranda, are but a mere few words that have been absorbed into the English language, that are of Indian, or sub-continent, origin.

With another language dying out every fortnight, The Enduring Voices project – a National Geographic initiative – that strives to preserve endangered languages, certainly has its work cut out, though hopefully the Talking Dictionaries it is compiling will prevent some from disappearing completely.

Every 14 days a language dies. By 2100, more than half of the more than 7,000 languages spoken on Earth – many of them not yet recorded – may disappear, taking with them a wealth of knowledge about history, culture, the natural environment, and the human brain. National Geographic’s Enduring Voices Project (conducted in collaboration with the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages) strives to preserve endangered languages by identifying language hotspots – the places on our planet with the most unique, poorly understood, or threatened indigenous languages – and documenting the languages and cultures within them.

Lorem ipsum is a tool long used by web and graphic designers, and allows them to populate in-development layouts with text (there’s load of it in use on the development version of disassociated) without the need for completed copy, which may be yet to be drafted anyway, and also permits the tweaking of font sizes, colours, and what have you.

But what do all these commonly used passages of Latin actually translate to and mean? As US software developer Jeff Atwood discovered, translating Lorem ipsum is one thing, but making meaning of the result is something else.

Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit, qui in ea voluptate velit esse, quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum, qui dolorem eum fugiat, quo voluptas nulla pariatur?

The above text returns the following English translation when run through Google Translate:

To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault, who are in the wish to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or else he endures pains to avoid certain things, which produces no resultant pleasure?

Quite… lyrical I must admit. If Lorem ipsum were an author I’d probably read his/her books.

British ATMs, or cash machines, that offer customers the option to carry out transactions using menus and commands made up of cockney rhyming slang, have proved surprisingly popular:

The first machines offering cockney prompts were introduced for a three-month trial run in 2009. There are now 30 machines and with the Olympic Games on the horizon, Mr Delnevo has plans to introduce more. “We will have one in the pub on the corner of the road leading to the Olympic Stadium,” Mr Delnevo explains, while others are being scheduled for the area in east London which will attract hundreds of thousands of visitors during the games. It might have started as a novelty but many people choose the cockney option.