This is pretty cool, Kansas University students perform Shakespeare in original pronunciation:

KU Theatre professor Paul Meier, in collaboration with Linguist David Crystal, are staging the first-ever American rendition of a Shakespeare play in its original pronunciation. Here, KU Theatre students rehearse a scene in original pronunciation from the play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Surprisingly and easily understandable. (via kottke)

Too damn funny: The Alot is Better Than You at Everything. I would buy a plush Alot.

Merriam-Webster has a great video on how unreliable the “i before e” rule is. Stupid English!

Christopher Hitchens on the word “like.” Geoffrey Nunberg beat him to the bunch by like nine years.

Quang Phuc Dong on the special grammatical weirdness reserved for “fuck.” Even if you don’t want to read the whole thing, at least hang down there until the Lyndon Johnson examples.

Neil Gaimen takes note of a couple reviews for his new one, The Graveyard Book:

The New York Times made it an Editor’s Choice, but not The Boston Globe, in the first example of Thumper’s “if you can’t say something nice about someone don’t say anything” motto book-reviewing I can remember. The entire review is:

“I found the book ghastly, literally and metaphorically, and since Gaiman is a writer whose inventive genius I respect, I’ll pass on without further comment.”

…which just left me wondering how something can be metaphorically ghastly. (“It was ghastly — and I mean that metaphorically!”) and concluding that Liz Rosenberg is probably trying to use metaphorically as the opposite of literally, whereas what she actually meant was that it was ghastly in several senses of the word (ie. filled with dead things and ghosts and she didn’t like it one little bit). Ah well. I hope she likes the next thing, whatever that is.

What if the expression is really “time heals awl wounds”? The common interpretation outscores it on Google 132,000 to one (really, just one?), but I think my version has the significant advantage of not being blatantly wrong. So the next time somebody tries to console you with the cliché, gently remind them that you are suffering from more than a mere puncture wound.

I happened to remember the expression, “I’m your huckleberry” out of the blue today. Val Kilmer put the expression back on the map doing his Doc Holliday in Tombstone years ago. It didn’t occur to me then to wonder what it meant, but thanks to Google now I know:

“Huckleberry” was commonly used in the 1800’s in conjunction with “persimmon” as a small unit of measure. “I’m a huckleberry over your persimmon” meant “I’m just a bit better than you.” As a result, “huckleberry” came to denote idiomatically two things. First, it denoted a small unit of measure, a “tad,” as it were, and a person who was a huckleberry could be a small, unimportant person—usually expressed ironically in mock self-depreciation. The second and more common usage came to mean, in the words of the “Dictionary of American Slang: Second Supplemented Edition” (Crowell, 1975):

“A man; specif., the exact kind of man needed for a particular purpose.

What a great expression.

I thought all the best game shows came out of Japan. The Netherlands enter the fray.

(That is Dutch, right? what language is this? thinks so.)

(Apologies in advance for the meta-profanity.)

The most recent appearance of the D-word on my radar, from Merlin Mann’s new post at 43 Folders, Photography, and the Tolerance for Courageous Sucking, in which his internal monologue tries to undercut his new hobby:

“Oh, Jesus. Really?“ some voice whined. “Now you’re That Guy? Can’t you just walk out there like a grownup, retrace your steps, and be back here in 5 goddamned minutes? You really need to drag your giant, douchey camera out for a four-block walk? Who’re you now, freakin’ Diane Arbus? Jeez, get a life.”

“Douchey?” When I was in high school, if you used that word as your expletive of choice that was a pretty good indicator that you were somebody I wanted nothing to do with, but now it looks like that simple litmus test is a thing of the past. Not only does Merlin Mann (who I like) use it, but Jon Stewart (who I like) uses it as a comedic crutch (if recent episode of The Daily Show are any indication).

So are they words on the rise, or has my brain decided (totally against my will) to pick them out of the air? A little research…

Google Trends has “douche” marginally on the rise as a search term:

… but I’m wondering about word frequency in text, not in people’s searches. I assume search frequency is more driven by legitimate need and preteens looking up naughty words rather than any linguistic prevalence. Although what’s up with that big spike in late 2004? Anyway, the “news reference volume” is a more what I’m looking for, so off to Google News which gives me a timeline of the actual word usage (as opposed to search usage):

Looks like a spike to me, especially if you contrast with “fuck“, which is the model of a fully saturated cuss word:

Fuck can stay, but I’m already tired of douche. I’m hoping it’s a fad.

Google Blogoscoped embeds Amy Walker's "21 Accents" Video, and conducts an e-mail interview. Regional accents. Fantastic.

Great language-geek post at defective yeti today, in which he mounts a wonderful defense of the word "like":

Really, "like" is more than just a word — it is practically a auxiliary verb that puts the entire statement into a new tense. Call it the "Past Approximate." If someone tells you they once ate fourteen eggs in one sitting, you recognize that is a boast; if someone says they ate, like, fourteen eggs, you know instinctively that the number was probably closer to five.

UPDATE: after discussing off-list, a buddy recommended Geoffrey Nunberg's books, and his NPR commentary of a few years ago, "Like, Wow!"