Hello, my fellow AD addicts. Just caught one episode on PBS of a series regarding the English language, my native and beloved tongue. Except we speak Coloradan American around here, where Buena Vista is pronounced Be-you'-knee, and Cache Le Poudre is butchered into Catch Yer Poodle. I've studied French and am now learning conversational Spanish, so I'm not a language bigot. However, it seems I am attracted to the Latin-based branches. Having a touch of dual-personality, I also sometimes use the Anglo-Saxon expressions banned from most civil discourse.

Okay, so here are some questions for discussion:

What are your favorite Web sites on the English language? Please provide links.

Do you have an approach to the English language in your writing and/or speaking that is unique, off-beat, fun, avant-garde, or in some way remarkable?

What do you think about the English language becoming the world-wide tongue of business, government and technology?

How do you feel about the English language? Rant away, I'm looking forward to it. Better keep it clean though, and please don't attack other members.

Here's a link to what looks like a promising site I just found while poking around for free access to the Oxford dictionary: Ask Oxford dot Com

This one I use regularly to figure out technical terms: Whatis

I'm very boring when it comes to inventing language. That's why the second question is there, I'm looking for ideas.

I'm okay with English becoming a world-wide tongue for business, government and technology. But then, I'm kinda lazy.

The English language is a bastard child with several fathers and mothers. I hate it. I love it. I can't get over it. Drunkards and coke addicts wrote the rules. The spelling makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Is it ketchup or catsup? I toss and turn many sleepless nights haunted by gerunds, completely confused on verb tense, and cursing the gods who invented semicolons. What a half-baked punctuation mark. If you're going to colonize, do it with a full colon!

Then there are bouts of reading the dictionary and Roget thesaurus, the old style that has concept headings in front. Some words are ugly, some nice, others more beautiful than a sunset. Words can be stupid, boring, crass, ignorant, base. They can be clear, striking, brilliant, astonishing. Words can be splattered across a page like paint on canvas, or carefully and selectively placed just so, a ship in a bottle, a universe in haiku.

English borrows freely without a blush of shame. It is a thieving language, drawing the life blood from others like a sucking parasite. English lives and breathes, sometimes like a troupe of modern dancers, sometimes like the rattlings of a dying poet. It's a survivalist language. Through centuries of conquest and subjugation, it has kept coming on and on, crawling at times as if on the final train to doom, but no. Here it is, arrogant and brazen, preparing to enwrap the world in its gut and digest both the wondrous and banal into the corporeal body.

English. Wish I could get over you, dulcinea.

I have a few favorite sites.
http://www.Engrish.com is fun
http://www.etymonline.com/ is interesting
http://www.symbols.com/ is just another method to how the English language is used
http://www.urbandictionary.com/ is yet another method of using English

When speaking I have some words I pronounce American and some British my husband makes fun of me..you want what? WAWLnuts? a TAWco?



I think as English becomes more and more used we will see it become more and more complex as words will take on different meanings and uses in accordance to the culture they are being used in. It is also becoming more and more common place in and amongst other languages. A popular saying in German speaking Switzerland (the Swiss often conduct all business in English and have adopted it as their fifth official language)
Take it easy Schneckli Huusli It means relax you got everything you need in life with you.

Well I like English. Altho. having kids who are currently learning to read or have just recently learned to read it is a awfully confusing language.

Here is another fun site on that subject...

Observations of the English language

I have this special link that is really handy.

http://members.aol.com/tommydamac/ebonics.htm

I know Dutch, French, English, German, Latin and Ancient Greek, I am now learning the wonderfull language of Ebonics.