Archive of Linguistically Captivating

It was only a matter of time for a bilingual blog like mine to pick up a myth shrouded in legend like the one we’re looking at today. Here’s the thing: According to stories that a lot of German teachers tell their students, German lost out to English in a vote on the official language of the United States in the 1776. Time for the myth-busting Philipp to check whether German really nearly made it as the official US language.

Is it true that we could have had the term VSA (V for vereinigt) instead of USA (U for united) on today’s maps?

In the unlikely event you feel the sudden urge to relieve your bladder’s pressure, make sure nobody catches you and most importantly can track you down to exact spot you committed the crime. For your information (FYI) only. The background story for the attached picture, after the jump.

Paris, je t’aime! · photo by arique on flickr.com

It’s time to face the truth… Are you abusing lol? You are most likely to be one of the internet generation LOL Abusers according to a statistic by the National Acronym Monitoring Board of Linguistic Anomalies. Research could reveal a devastating misusage of lol since people actually don’t laugh out loud whenever they add lol in a chat message, text message on their cellphone or even worse in everyday conversations in real life. Caution: “False Lolling” [...] is a class G felony punishable by permanent IP banning and in rare cases death by pawnage.”, it says on nomorelol.com

Remedy LOI: Laughing on the inside.

False usage of the abbreviation lol (laughing out loud) is committed by so called lol addicts whose remedy should be found in loi, as in laughing on the inside. LMAO (laughing my ass off) and ROFL (rolling of the floor laughing) are most likely to be replaced with an alternative as well. Since how often do you roll over your floor.

Nomorelol.com - Check it out and make sure you don’t misuse internet acronyms. I guess someone might have confounded figuratively and the more commonly used literally.

In the last couple of days I did some research on Australian and - as a consequence -  New Zealand Kiwi accents (Susi’s comback from Australia) and I came across with this video that I felt obliged to share with you guys. It’s fun to see the New Zealand accent explained after dark years of Unwissen (not-knowing).

By the way. Today’s webtip is leading us to the author of this video. Miss Verständnis. Watch the video after the jump. + AN UPDATE.

I know that I have neglected my German entries a lot lately, but I just don’t feel like posting anything German. It’s not that I am having a writer’s block or I’m missing German word wit. No, it’s not that. So, as an apology, I’m now concentrating on German idioms and proverbs. There you go. I came across with these in the last two weeks. A collection, quasi.

Rot Rot Rot ist alles was ich sehe, Rot Rot Rot ist das wofür ich lebe!

Having a weakness for another language makes you do weird things. Sometimes I encounter a phrase or joke in German that I have a hard time translating, where the internet bears a hand*. Most of the times this gets me the solution, I feel satisfied and can move on with life. Here is an example of hard-to-translate-phrase. German to English gave me a spinning head*…

Literally

Ever since the Internet got accessible easily, an Avant Garde descended from Linguistic Heaven to educate us, the stupid common people, literally point at our linguistically weak Achilles’ heel. Ouch, doesn’t the usage of “literally” sound wrong to you? Well, if you are a representative of today’s online patrol on misusage of the English language, you probably answer the previous question with a loud, stark Y-E-S. If your answer is no, please, don’t stop reading now. You already made it this far.

There are moments in life where you feel this sudden surge of hormones (mostly adrenaline) that tell you the meaning of your existence. The chore that you are supposed to be able to tick of at the end of your life, the obligation that you fulfill with - hopefully - good grace. It seemed to me that yesterday this special moment occurred to me when I was talking to an old friend (he happens to be from Vorarlberg, servas). I was using the omnipotent, omni-pretty-much-anything phrase “Duh” and all I got was a sad, cheerless “What does it mean, man?” This post is supposed to clear up some things.