Li'l Jawa 'n' Tuscan

Via Boing Boing.

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Buble's Finest Hour

Smells Like Sesame Spirit

Sesame Street/Old Spice parody.

(I know you've seen it, but just for future reference.)

Bad news for your dissertation

Prognostications which might make the subject matter irrelevant:

28) It will become harder to view your life as “a story”

The way we define our sense of self will continue to morph via new ways of socializing. The notion of your life needing to be a story will seem slightly corny and dated. Your life becomes however many friends you have online.

...

30) Some existing medical conditions will be seen as sequencing malfunctions

...

Dysfunctional mental states stem from malfunctions in the brain's sequencing capacity. One commonly known short-term sequencing dysfunction is dyslexia. People unable to sequence over a slightly longer term might be “not good with directions.” The ultimate sequencing dysfunction is the inability to look at one's life as a meaningful sequence or story.

- Douglas Coupland, A Radical Pessimist's Guide to the Next 10 Years

Via Boing Boing.

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An Honor to Be of Assistance

Apparently when the first letter "H" in a word is mute you use the article "an" before it. I guess it's about the sound of the word rather than the actual spelling.

So says this.

Presumably this rule applies to the phrase "An Hundred" as a holdover from back in the day when everyone in the world spoke with a cockney accent.

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Spoonful of Nutella

Contrastive reduplication

The phrase may not sound familiar from your English classes, but you'd know it when you heard it. Apparently it's now a categorized thing that someone wrote a paper on:

This paper presents a phenomenon of colloquial English that we call Contrastive Reduplication (CR), involving the copying of words and sometimes phrases as in It''s tuna salad, not SALAD-salad, or Do you LIKE-HIM-like him?

Via Boing Boing, via Mark Rabnett's Posterous.

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