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Bartelby.com has the full text of Mencken’s The American Language online. I found the chapter on English as a world language especially interesting for its mix of prescience mixed with some strange 19th century thinking (courtesy of Otto Jespersen) on English’s supposed vitality due to its relative “masculinity” (meaning: laconic, gnomic utterances with clearly defined [...]

As economic (and other forms of) power shifts from the US and western Europe to China, will English retain its status as a global language of commerce and politics? According to a recent New Yorker article, there are hundreds of millions of potential new English speakers and learners. This creates not only new potentialities of [...]

I was reading around page 477 in Crystal about the large amount of spelling variation that exists even in Received Pronunciation. I was struck by the fact that all but a couple of the presented examples of spelling variation were irrelevant to American English speakers (alright/all right, judgment/judgement, maybe amok/amuck). All the rest of them (aery/airy, [...]

As I was reading Crystal 18, part of his discussion on 19th-century grammar caught my eye. While not as grammatically far removed as Shakespeare, 19th-century English still occasionally sounds odd to us. “Whenever we sense that the phrasing of a passage is somewhat ‘awkward’ or ‘old-fashioned’,” Crystal writes, “or a conversation is in [...]

(click the picture to follow the link)
Above is a link to a site where users can post mistranslations found in foreign languages that actually try to use English in conveying a message.
Most are from Japan, where the funniest mistranslations occur.
“Engrish” because the “r” sound is replaced with the “l” sound in spoken Japanese.
Example: “Surprise!” would [...]

Take up any of these points, or start your own thread on a different issue! Thanks for playing, sorry to be out of commission.
Ch. 1: Taking the measure of it all – the “need” for a dictionary based on historical principles that is not also a kind of encyclopedia or almanac (as some of the [...]

While reading Samuel Johnson’s introduction to his dictionary, the following two sentences caught my eye:
The language most likely to continue long without alteration would be that of a nation raised a little, and but a little, above barbarity, secluded from strangers, and totally employed in procuring the conveniences of life; either without books, or, like [...]

Looking at the pages that are linked from this blog, I noticed that this page was absent, which is a shame because this is such a fun site.  A few years ago PBS produced a documentary called “Do You Speak American?” focusing on the various dialects of English spoken in the United States.  Since both [...]

One of the more interesting observations I realized from the Chasing the Sun excerpts was that Green heavily emphasized the idea that lexicographers see themselves as bringers of the true meaning of words, like Moses who brought down from Mount Sinai the Ten Commandments. ” Green cites Ephraim Chamber’s belief that lexicography has its origins [...]