German schoolteachers have started a campaign to abolish the teaching of joined-up handwriting, according to a report in the Guardian.
“Die Schreibschrift” is the German name for the handwriting style pupils have to learn before they leave primary school, at around 10 years old. It is based on Latin script, and the current form used is called “Vereinfachte Ausgangsschrift” (easier model script). The teachers’ union argues that it is an outdated way of writing and a waste of time for pupils, who first have to learn printed letters, then how to join them up.
There is opposition to the idea, however, with the regional head of the Society for German Language in Hamburg, Dr Hans Kaufman, arguing:
“Writing is a cultural technique used to quickly put down thoughts. Joined-up handwriting trains fine motor skills, develops [a sense for] aesthetics. An apparently easier script also simplifies thoughts. I would mourn the loss of a piece of our writing culture.”
Apart from the argument about loss of culture, others argue that letting children print script will slow down writing speed (think about the time it takes to write individual letters rather than a joined-up word) and decrease legibility.
What do you think? Would you prefer not to have learned joined-up handwriting in school?
The weather’s been miserable this week, there’s no hint of summer, and we all need a little something to cheer us up. So how about a quiz on commonly confused words?
The quiz is on words from Hollywood Comedies, and you can view it here. Answers are near the bottom of the page (no cheating!). There are also links to other quizzes if Wimbledon isn’t holding your attention this afternoon.
Do you have any examples of words that you confuse? Perhaps in songs?
The latest edition of Collins Official Scrabble Words has been released. Nearly 3,000 new words have been added – which will you use to perplex your opponent?
A small selection:
BREDREN: brother
GOBI: cauliflower
INBOX: email folder for incoming mail
INNIT: isn’t it
NANG: cool
QIN: a Chinese zither
TWIGLET: wheat snack
VLOG: video blogging
WAGYU: a breed of cattle
(Source: The Guardian)
What words would you like added to the book to help you win a game?
Everyone knows the famous “you’re fired” catchphrase from popular TV show The Apprentice. Popularised by The Donald in America, it’s used in the UK by Lord Alan Sugar.
The show is also known for the cringeworthy things that contestants say. Who can forget Stuart Baggs from the last series, with the classic “I’m not a one-trick pony, I’m not a 10-trick pony – I’ve got a field of ponies waiting to literally run towards this job.” Love it.
This BBC article has complied some other classics, here’s a few of my favourites:
“The spoken word is my tool,” said silky-tongued Raef Bjayon in series four.
“Don’t tell me the sky is the limit when there’s footsteps on the moon.” Yes, we’ve sneaked in a line from one of this year’s candidates.
“I think outside the box, if I was an apple pie the apples inside me would be oranges” (said by Alex in series six).
Do you have any more to add?
An interesting piece in the Guardian looks at urban dictionaries (well, mainly at the Urban Dictionary). Whilst well-known print dictionaries like the OED can take years to update, urban dictionaries are on the web and can be updated as and when new words and phrases appear.
But, as the article suggests, there are issues with this:
“..slang expert Green’s problem with Urban Dictionary isn’t that it contains offensive words. “It’s amateur hour. They set themselves up as an authority and I don’t believe they are. There aren’t 2,000 new slang words a day – they don’t exist. It undermines the whole point of a dictionary. If you want to have something called The Book Of Amusing Words That Young People Come Up With, then fine, let’s have that. I’ll stick with [Viz comic's] Roger’s Profanisaurus.”
Over 3,500 volunteers edit submissions to Urban Dictionary – but there are masses of them. According to the article, “in the past 30 days 67,000 people wrote 76,000 new definitions”. As Jonathon Green points out, there can’t be that many new words created constantly.
One thing urban dictionaries do better than traditional dictionaries though, is to publish slang words and definitions, and keep them up to date. When the new OED is published (around 2037), many of the slang words we use today will likely have fallen out of favour. In the meantime, we can use Google or the Urban Dictionary to satisfy our curiosity.
.Another day, another amusing language-related story from NewsBiscuit. This one is about the government removing the letters ‘m’ and ‘n’ from the alphabet due to cuts.
The real cleverness is in the writing of the article though – it contains no ‘m’s or ‘n’s:
David Caero ade the shock aouceet i the house of coos today that the alphabet would shrik to just twety four letters with iediate effect, sayig that “Labour left us owig billios ad billios of pouds ad tough decisios have to be ade”.
Ed Illibad was the first of the Labour P’s to code the ove as cyical ad uecesary, sayig that agai the goveret had got it wrog cuttig too quickly ad to deeply affectig the poorest ad ost vulerable i society. Ick Clegg supported the coalitio lie o this issue sayig, “I kow i proised ot to reduce the uber of letters before the electio but I had y figers crossed” leadig to shouts of Resig! Resig! from the labour beches.
Surprisingly it’s still fairly easy to read these paragraphs. It reminds me of the internet meme saying a researcher at Cambridge University had found that you can still read words where the letters are jumbled up, as long as the first and last letters are correct. More on the science (and truth) behind that here
In my RSS reader I came across an article from Wired.co.uk intriguingly titled ‘Jargon Watch – April 2011’. It took me a moment to realise (slow morning) but it’s still only March, isn’t it*?
So here’s the new jargon you can start using (from next month):
Peep-holing
pp. Driving a snow-covered vehicle with only a small hole cleared on the windscreen. Also called peephole driving. Many people don’t have time or are just too lazy to clear the whole screen, so they scrape a space on the driver’s side and then aim in the general direction of work.
Entomological terrorism
n. The use of insects as a weapon. According to the US Army Medical Department Journal, the practice can be organised into three categories: attacking people directly (killer bees), destroying crops (locusts), and spreading sickness (disease vectors).
Gutenbourgeois
n. The people who maintain a smug belief in the primacy of print, particularly books, over digital works as a cultural driver, and the supremacy of professional writers, editors and publishers over amateurs. Coined by Paul Ford, writer and contributing editor at Harper’s.
Aflockalypse
n. The sudden death of a large number of birds. This year there has been a spate of mass bird deaths: 5,000 blackbirds in Arkansas; 300 turtle doves in Italy; up to 100 jackdaws in Sweden. Experts are unflapped: in North America, 50 million birds die every year.
*OK, there’s a simple explanation – the article’s from the April 2011 print issue of Wired, but that’s no fun, is it?
We all use this one simple word many times every day, in many different contexts, without even thinking about it.
“Is that OK?”
“OK! That sounds great!”
“Oh, OK.”
But why do we use OK and not something else? According to Allan Metcalf, author of a new book on the history of OK, one reason is that it provides neutrality, “a way to affirm or to express agreement without having to offer an opinion”.
The use of OK used to be restricted to business contexts (o.k. meant that a document was “all correct”) and was associated by some people with illiteracy. Now however, it’s used by everyone in except in formal settings – speeches and reports for example. If you’re interested, it’s well worth reading the rest of the article by Metcalf over at BBC News.
A new study of word frequencies has found that certain words can shake the political blogosphere in a similar way to an earthquake.
The study, completed by researchers at the Medical University of Vienna, looked at 168 political blogs in the US and tracked spikes in the frequency of individual words. They noticed that some events trigger ‘reverberations’ and can cause social change.
The types of blogosphere responses took two forms, the researchers say. Some words suddenly spiked in popularity in response to a real-world event. Sarah Palin’s nomination as the Republican vice presidential candidate was the most dramatic example.
“Indeed, aftershocks of this event are still trembling and quivering through our society,” Klimek and colleagues wrote. Because these events are triggered from outside the blogosphere, the researchers called them “exogenous.”
Other words gradually grew in frequency and then died down, like the use of the word “inauguration” in the days before and after Barack Obama took office. Such events are called “endogenous” because they seem to arise within the blogosphere itself. (Source: Wired.com)
So what does this have to do with earthquakes? Well, apparently the ‘aftershocks’ of the increase in word frequency fit the equation of Omori’s law for the frequency of earthquake aftershocks.
It’s a pretty interesting concept, but as Duncan Watts says in the article, “it sort of can’t be true” as the analogy is between two unrelated phenomena.
Newspapers are a part of a lot of people’s daily lives – they’re how we know what’s going on in the world, whether you read them in print or online.
But have you ever thought about the name of the newspaper you’re reading? British national newspapers include The Mirror, The Sun, the Guardian and The Telegraph. Of these, perhaps only the Guardian (implying protection for the public against misinformation) and The Telegraph (a telegraph was a way to convey signals) make sense.
Someone at BBC News had their interest in newspaper names piqued by the launch of The Daily, the iPad-only new paper from NewsCorp. The list of strange newspaper names the public have submitted makes for interesting reading – here are some of my favourites:
2. My favourite is from a small town near the Missouri state capital, Linn. Their paper is the Unterrified Democrat.
Janet Breid, Columbia, Missouri, US
8. My favourite newspaper title is in Broken Hill, Australia – the Barrier Daily Truth. Could there be a better title for what a newspaper is supposed to do – tell the truth?
Roger Stonebanks, Victoria, Canada
23. The strangest newspaper name in Oxfordshire has to be the Banbury Cake. It’s bizarrely inappropriate, but wonderfully memorable. I can’t decide whether it’s the work of a complete lunatic or a marketing genius.
Anonymous, Oxfordshire, UK
