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Wordage

Stop what you’re doing and watch this utterly charming and beguiling video entitled Wordmaking: What it take to succeed in hacking English and invent a new word. It’s a presentation by Erin McKean as part of the TechTalks series at Google.

How is it that I had never come across the term snowclone before?* I asked Jessica this rhetorical question and the next thing you know, I’m learning all about eggcorns. Clearly I need to improve my linguistic knowledge.

On a tangentially related note, I’ve discovered kindred spirits out there in blogland, to whit:

• The “blog” of “unnecessary” quotation marks and
• Lowercase L:

Ever notice hand-written signs with letters in all-caps, except for the letter L? It looks like an uppercase i … WHY DO PEOPlE WRITE lIKE THIS?

*Update: Edward O’Connor points me to his wife’s blog, The Snowclone Database.

Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 12:43am

Tagged with language linguistics writing words

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© 1998 - 2009 Jeremy Keith.

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