Polysyllabic

I am something of a creature of habit, and therefore will stick to the same blogs for a long time. Lately though, I've been trying to expand my reading, and so I've been following links from the sites I frequent to language-oriented sites that I haven't visited before. In the process, I have discovered 1) Language Log really needs to update their links. At least half the sites on their sidebar are defunct.

Creative Commons has just released version 3.0 of their license, and I have relicensed everything on this site (apart from the out-of-copyright stuff, which remains public domain) with this latest license. Unless you're planning to reuse my material, that will be of no interest to you, but it does give me a chance to praise the good folks at Creative Commons for their invaluable work promoting the ideals of free culture.

This discussion of Grammar Taliban reminds me of a mondegreen that I heard a young cousin of my wife utter last summer when we were visiting Malaysia. Said cousin had heard us singing Harry Belafonte's Banana Boat Song to our son by way of a lullaby, and so whenever he would start fussing, she would pipe up with "Come, Mr. Taliban, tally me bananas"

This is a word that deserves more attention. Two different senses show up in different on-line dictionaries. The Urban Dictionary defines it as a small piece of excrement floating alone in a toilet bowl. That's a fairly prosaic instance of derivation, just the dimminutive -let tacked on to crap.

A colleague passed on a three-way e-mail exchange discussing the difference between hang and hung. By itself, that isn't all that interesting. The usage guides all give more or less the same instructions. This explanation from The American Heritage Dictionary is typical:

For Christmas, Sherina (uxorum optima!) gave me a book that has been on my wish list for a while now: Error and the Academic Self by Seth Lerer (who was my undergraduate advisor years ago at Princeton). Of course I immediately sat down and read the first two chapters, and probably would have finished the book if I hadn't had to cook Christmas dinner. Lerer writes about the connection between error and errancy among scholars, and although I have left academia, I certainly have been errant (in the sense of intellectually wandering). I've been spending my free time working on some behind-the-scenes architecture for this site. I hope to roll out the results in a week or two, once I've managed to debug everything.