Not the sort of thing you'll find in every phrase book

This is a sample phrase from from the Eastern ǃXóõ dialect, provided by the linguist Anthony Traill:

"Give them their stinking genitals with the fat!"

Makes "My hovercraft is full of eels" seem tame in comparison...

Lupper and déjouper

This great post from the "French word a day" blog introduced me to the word déjouper, a meal that stretches from lunch time to dinner time and cover lunch and dinner. (Kind of the same as the made-up English word lupper that we used to use when I was growing up).

Usually lupper was what you had when you forgot to eat lunch at the usual time, got really hungry in the afternoon, and had an early dinner. Déjouper on the other hand seems to be more of an informal dinner party with friends and family that starts around 1:30pm and stretches on into the early evening. It sounds very civilized, and like something I need to do more often!

Spell-check your code

I find it amusing when I stumble on mis-spelled API functions and structures. The irony is that a gaffe by one programmer becomes a documented interface, and it's often impossible to correct the mistake.

Take for example the PrintProvidor entries in Win32:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa506097.aspx

Luckily the person writing the surrounding text was able to use the phrase "print provider".

Juggernaut

The word "juggernaut" came up in a meeting at work recently, and some non-native English speakers hadn't heard it before.

There was some joking reference to the comic-book character (and some people thought this was the origin of the word). Someone explained that a juggernaut is an unstoppable force or object, to which I replied "I don't know about that. I think Wolverine could stop him..."

The real origin of the word is quite interesting: it comes from the Sanskrit word Jaganatha, as this Wikipedia page explains. (This list of English words of Sanskrit origin is also pretty interesting - e.g. candy, cash, ginger, jackal, jungle, lilac, loot, sugar)

"You drank my milkshake"

It's always fun to see a new saying enter the English language, and it seems "drinking someone's milkshake" is well on the way. (For example, I've now seen it used in email subject lines at work)

Everlasting fame goes to the first commenter to identify where this saying comes from...

Wrongly correcting people's English

I had an interesting experience yesterday flying back from a quick visit to San Francisco... A Chinese woman was seating in the aisle seat, next to another woman, and I was in the window seat, so I could easily hear the conversation beetween the two women.

The Chinese woman struck up a conversation and quickly moved on to a question: "Is it incorrect to say 'speak wrongly' in English, for example: 'People in America don't correct you when you speak wrongly' ?"

It turns out the Chinese woman was in San Francisco for an English class and had chatted to someone earlier that evening while waiting for the plane. She had lamented the fact that people generally don't correct non-native English speakers when they make mistakes. People are too polite or forgiving and let things slide, assuming they understand the gist of what the non-native speaker is saying. The other person, thus encouraged to be critical of her mistakes, had told her "You can't say 'speak wrongly', that's not correct English. You should say 'speak wrong'..."

So, fast-forward to the conversation next to me in the plane, and the Chinese woman has just posed the question to the American woman next to me. "Yes, that's correct. Wrongly isn't a word", she said. I could tell the Chinese woman was puzzled and trying to make sense of this - she had been using wrongly for several years. (I should add that in general her English was good, with a fairly heavy Mandarin accent though).

The Chinese woman seemed to have a superior grasp of English grammar and asked the other woman "But isn't wrong an adjective? Can you use it as an adverb too? 'Speak wrong' means that wrong is an adverb, right?" The American woman seemed a bit confused at this and admitted that English was never her strongest subject in school, so the academic discussion ended there.

It should be obvious that I was squirming in my seat and wanting to butt in, but I wasn't sure how to enter the conversation and not make the woman in the middle of us feel bad, plus I would then be talking over her to the Chinese woman, possibly for much of the rest of the flight... So I stayed quiet.

Needless to say, wrongly is a word and can be replaced by "incorrectly" in the Chinese woman's original usage: "Speakign English incorrectly". I hope she does a check in her dictionary when she gets home, or asks her English teacher. Then she can confidently correct people when they tell her she's "speaking wrong" in future! :)

Poetic booze advice from around the world

There are a few verses in different languages that all purport to give advice about what to drink when (i.e. which order to drink things in). The sad thing is that they can't quite agree amongst themselves:

• English: Beer after wine and you'll feel fine; wine after beer and you'll feel queer
• German: Bier auf Wein das lass sein; Wein auf Bier das rat' ich Dir. (Roughly: Don't touch beer after wine; but wine after beer is fine)

The French notably ignore beer and instead focus on red versus white wine:

• Blanc sur rouge, rien ne bouge; rouge sur blanc, tout fout le camp. (Roughly: White on red won't go to your head; red on white and you're out for the night.)

This page on the Gaurdian website goes into more detail on these and other sayings.

Monkey's Wedding

One of the interesting bits of South African English is the term "monkey's wedding" for a sunshower (rain falling when the sun is shining). It turns out there is a common theme in the folkloric names for a sunshower - many cultures talk about weddings between animals. (See this Wikipedia page).

Whenever I see a sunshower I still automatically think of "monkey's wedding" - it's amazing how phrases like this from your childhood get cemented in your head. Anyway, now some of my American friends will have a clue what I mean when I say this...

Strange word of the day: Bowser

Today I was talking to some colleagues from the UK that have been effected by the recent flooding. They mentioned getting water from something called a bowser. Hmm... That's an odd word - the only thing I could think of was Bowzer from Sha Na Na.

It turns out it's a large water tank (e.g. 250 gallons), usually towed behind a truck and able to be left and re-filled if needed. (See Wikipedia too). It seems to originate from Australia and New Zealand, and originally applied to gasoline tanks.

So there you have it.

French Word-a-Day

Yum Lass found a nice blog titled French Word-a-Day.
It's a bit like a travel blog from your French teacher...

While the postings are not quite daily (more like 2-3 times a week), the entries are really nice, covering an interesting French word with examples of usage, audio recordings to help with pronunciation, and anectdotes about French life (in English). You can read how the blog started here.

Strange word of the day: Copasetic

I ran into the word copasetic for the first time this week. (It's also spelled copacetic)

Wikipedia has an interesting article on this word. Interesting snippets:

• It is an unusual English language word in that it is one of the few words of seemingly unknown origin that is not considered slang in contemporary usage.
• Its use is found almost exclusively in North America, and has been said to have been first widely publicized in communications between the astronauts and Mission Control of the Apollo Program in the 1960s
• It's in the OED, so you know it's a real word... :)
• David Mamet has written an article about its origins, although perhaps in jest.