@guardianstyle on Twitter points to an article by Mark Brown announcing what sounds like a wonderful exhibition the British Library is preparing: Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices (Nov 12, 2010 - Apr 3, 2011). There’s even a second piece, by Alison Flood.
British Library exhibits are reputed to be large, well-made and almost over-abundant (I’ve [...]
Sometimes automatic social media integration on news sites can be a little… callous. The fact that there may have been realtively well-known former US senator on the plane only underlines the macabre element.
In the Twitter client Tweetdeck, and on my Twitter page itself, I run a search for “i18n”: the frequently used abbreviated form of “internationalization” (or “internationalisation” in BrE). A while ago, I noticed that this search feed contained some odd posts that seemed to have nothing to do with the topic, but originated from accounts [...]
A few days ago, my friend Melinda Shore, who knows I’m interested in internationalization, sent me a screenshot from the search bar of her Safari browser. It is a drop-down list of search suggestions provided by Google just after typing the letter h:
The top suggestion is a mess:
What does it mean?
Why is it a legitimate [...]
Over on Facebook, a friend posted a link to the article “Lotto lout Michael Carroll going back to being a binman after blowing £9.7m win”, in which the Daily Mail, a paper known for its even-handed quality reporting, is nearly falling over itself in breathless excitement over the story of a man who spent a £9.7 [...]
The polling stations for the UK General Election 2010 have closed, the exit poll predicts a hung (some call it “balanced”) parliament, a loss of seats of the Liberal Democrats, and a Conservative party only a few seats away from a majority. The first MP has been announced — Sunderland South, a safe Labour seat, [...]
From the article “Prehistoric snake gobbled-up dinosaur babies” by Jeremy Hance, which was published on mongabay.com on March 2, 2010:
A fossilized snake has been discovered inside a titanosaur nest in India, leading researchers to conclude that the snake fed on newly-hatched dinosaur babies, rather than their eggs like modern snakes.
The thought process is quite clear, [...]
In the Daily Telegraph, an article illustrated with this captioned image:
Frankly, I’d have mistaken him for a wild boar too.
Via a recent Failblog post, our attention is drawn to a very bizarre sign in Czech:
What is most puzzling about this sign is that it is not an example of what we’ve seen in the past, a translation error: Zákaz tlumočení does indeed mean “translating [interpreting] prohibited”. Apparently, and without explanation, the sign’s injunction doesn’t [...]
I finally edited and uploaded to Flickr pictures from a trip I took to Prague a year ago (August 2008).
A few of them looked like they’d be nice as screen backgrounds, so I experimented with making backgrounds in the correct monitor sizes. I have this one right now on my Mac - external screen [...]