The unknown letter.
The letter everyone can read… and less than a third of people can identify in its correct form.
Because grammar.
It’s official: by popular demand, “because” can now be used as a preposition.
Prisencolinensinainciusol.
I find the whole “what English sounds like to people who don’t speak English” thing fascinating.
Also: catchy song!
Accents around the world.
Fascinating archive of (English) accent samples. Basically a bunch of people, with a variety of different native languages, reading out the same English paragraph.
#c0ffee
Hex colors made from words in English, including such highlights as #FAECE5, #F0E71D, #1D1075, and #71D1E5.
Useless facts about English.
Did you know that the longest word in the English language has 189,819 letters? Did you read that and think, “Yeah, but I bet it’s a chemical name so that hardly counts?”
You smartass you. Have 52 more useless facts to nitpick.
You keep using that word…
I have a confession to make. By all rights, it should get me fired.
For the last 25 years, in my writing, I have been using the adjectives “epistemological” and “ontological” interchangeably and without actually knowing what either means. Sure, I have looked them up, but their definitions are so gauzy and academic that they are meaningless to me, and forgettable. So I forget them. I don’t even go back to check anymore.
But here is the amazing thing: Not once in 25 years has anyone called me out on this. There has been not one phone call or online comment or letter to the editor pointing out that, philosophically, I have my head up my arse, which I obviously do. There is only one conclusion I can reach: No one else has any idea what these words mean, either.
Gene Weingarten on consensus ignorance.
I’ve seen this article posted around a few places and people basically have two reactions to it. The first is to laugh and say something along the lines of, “IKR? WTF are those words good for other than sounding pretentious? Ain’t English funny!” And the second is to make some ponderous announcement along the lines of, “It helps if you use them in a sentence”, then proceed to sprout off a bunch of example sentences that in no way whatsoever clarify the words’ meanings and, thus, end up proving exactly the point Weingarten was trying to make in the first place.
Like, let’s be clear, Weingarten literally won a Pulitzer for a piece in which he used the word “epistemological” in a context without knowing if that context was correct or not. Like, a Pulitzer, man!
So, yanno. Next time you get mocked on the internet for using a word without really knowing what it means? Remember you’re in good company.
The hardest words.
Some of the most commonly misused English words.
I can never get “affect” and “effect” right, and my beta readers will tell you I also constantly mess up “bought” and “brought” even though they’re not even slightly the same word. (In my defence, I pronounce them almost identically in speech.)
I will also confess I’m one of those people who doesn’t care much about the difference between “less” and “fewer”, given how interchangeable they are in modern spoken English. And, yes. I also use “literally” figuratively. Fight me.
Ye Olde English.
What the English of Shakespeare, Beowulf, and King Arthur sounded like.
Chaucer’s English is the weirdest for me to listen to, since it sounds a lot like a half-half transition between English and Old Norse, even moreso than Old English does (which I can “understand” more from knowing a bit of ON than I can from speaking modern English).
Basically, modern English is super, super modern. Which makes the stereotype we have of people in Ye Olde Medieval Fantasy England speaking in RP… interesting.