Uh-oh, people. It's almost 2010 and we still seemingly haven't decided, as a global whole, what to call this current decade. It was the "eighties," then the "nineties," then the...what? Oh-ohs? Zeros? Aughties? Naughties?

This page discusses the main possibilities. But we will probably have to wait several years for a definitive answer, just by seeing which usage shakes out as the prevailing one.

...MS Word's spell-check "errors" include the following:

texted/texting
oooh
hottie
snog
laddie
ick
yay
ringtone
Spidey
raincheck
crackhead
indie
wifi
kissyface
hickie
ew
ain't
fanboy
eyeshadow
jangly
sucky
bleh
yuckiness
offed (oneself)
Googled
aww
nutjob
microwaved/microwaving
snarky
creeped (out)
wowsers
chitchatty
sexeh
YouTube
stalkerish
winky (emoticon)
righto
grody
iPod
earbuds
spaz
skank
Chapstick
hiya
freakin'
sluttiness
sniffly
hyperdrama
cluelessness
buttload
tard
blissed (out)
slimeball
woohoo
neato

LJ doesn't like most of those either, incidentally. But it allows some of them to pass without the red underlining, so it's apparently a step hipper than MS Word.

How much do you remember about learning how to read?

My mom asked me that recently, and for me the answer is "Nothing, really." I was quite young; two or three, maybe. Now my son appears to be following in my footsteps.

At age two and a half, he's already stopping to point to letters and numbers on signs or cars or anywhere they appear, and reading them aloud. So far it's mostly just the individual characters ("F! O! R! D!"), but in at least two cases he's remembered what the whole word is. (Those two cases, in typical negative two-year-old fashion: "No" and "Stop". Well, they're both on signs on lot.) We iz proud parentz!

In not exactly related news...

Analyzing my webpage hit statistics shows clearly that the old parodies are really what people still come to read, both the Lord of the Rings film ones and the two Harry Potter book ones. This indicates to me that the smart thing to do, self-advertising-wise, is parody the first five HP books too. So, eventually I'll get started on that. Anyone have an extra copy of Sorcerer's Stone they want to send me? I borrowed the first three books when I read them.

Maybe I'll even get the first one done before the next film comes out. Which, at this rate, gives me plenty of time.

1) Finished watching Doctor Who, season 3. ( spoilers )

2) I would be remiss as a linguist if I didn't link to this story: students in Baltimore (and elsewhere) are using "yo" as a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun. Examples include "Yo threw a thumbtack at me" and "Yo looks like a freak." In short, these kids have managed to do what no well-meaning politically correct language fashioners have been able to do in centuries. Not sure it will catch on everywhere, but it shows there is hope for that cumbersome he/she/one/they business in the third person singular. I think it's great. Oh, come on, it's fun! No, the language is not collapsing. Languages never collapse. Stop being so stuffy.

3) Farewell, Heath Ledger. I am saddened, as I was only just beginning to appreciate you. Also, I have a two-year-old child myself and it breaks my heart to think of your girl growing up without her daddy. So this better not have been intentional or I'll be really angry with you.

4) I'm off to get braces. I'd be apprehensive about the pain, except that the spacers they put between my molars have already inflicted pain upon all four quadrants my jaw for the past week, rendering the eating of crunchy things impossible. So I feel prepared. And you may call me Titani-M* for the next nine or ten months, or however long it takes my little crossbite to straighten out.

*The brackets and wires are a titanium blend nowadays. Stronger, smoother, smaller, faster, sexier, etc.

If you've not seen it yet, FreeRice is a cool site where you can quiz yourself on vocab, and for every word you get right, the UN donates 10 grains of rice to Hungry People somewhere or other. It also automatically adjusts its difficulty level based on the words you get right, so it should get more challenging as you go.

This may be the first time my lexical abilities have ever directly put food in anyone's mouth--and is likely to be the only time. Fun to play, though.

(Included below are sort of general spoilers for the whole Buffy series, just so you know.)

The linguist in me wants to dwell for a moment on why Angel lost his Irish accent over time, while Spike never lost his English one.

First, let's get the obvious answer out of the way: David Boreanaz's Irish accent is reeeally shaky, whereas James Marsters' accent kicks ass. But let's pretend that's not the actual reason...

When adults lose their native accents and acquire another, it's often a semi-conscious effort, based in the desire to blend into a new group and leave behind their old one. Angel, upon regaining his soul, clearly wants to escape his past as Angelus, in which he still used his native Irish brogue. He moved to America decades before the show's beginning (if I understand correctly), so blending in as an American would have been the obvious choice. In contrast, Spike seems to have roamed the world more freely before showing up in Sunnydale, and anyway doesn't care about blending in; in fact, to judge from his fashion sense, he wants to stand out. He proudly uses Brit slang even among the American kids who aren't as likely to understand it.

I think the explanation lies mostly in their personality differences rather than amount of time spent in America. Namely, Angel is drastically different from Angelus, while souled Spike (or chipped Spike) is really not that different from evil Spike.

And that's something I wished Buffy (the character) had acknowledged a little more. I mean, jeez, Angelus has pretty much zilch going for him in the "good" column, but Spike all along, despite the tough talk and exterior, is the true softie, the "fool for love." Even in his first episode, he's partially defined by his tenderness toward Dru ("You two reek of humanity," a Big Baddie tells them disparagingly later on), and is troubled and seemingly conflicted by his discovery that Buffy is "a Slayer with friends and family." Angelus's reaction to Buffy's friends and family? More like, "Whee! More people to psychologically torture and kill!" Buffy would have done well to remember that it was Spike, still unchipped, who helped her save the world against Angelus.

So, really, it's no wonder Angel wants to distance himself from his other persona: that guy is a scary dude. But the distance between bad Spike and good Spike is short enough that ol' William can stretch across it and still be, more or less, himself. In all his cheekiness. Thus, while Spike turns more and more to the good side, he doesn't start sounding any less English.

But note: when Angel reverts to Angelus in the present day, he doesn't revert to Irish. Why not? Guess we're back to "Angel spent a lot of time in America" and "Boreanaz really didn't want to do the accent."

Enough about linguistics. The real question is: why, in God's name, did Angel's hair have to be so bad in the 1800s? William the Bloody gets a cute floppy wavy 'do, and Angelus gets Frankenstein Hair? Could nothing have been done about that, I ask you?

If I ever get a novel published, and it gets turned into a movie, I hope Sofia Coppola is on the short list of directors. I just watched Marie Antoinette and loved it. I gather it really didn't work for some people, putting '80s music to the glitz of the Versailles court, but to me it was something new, thank God, and anyway I loved the music, so I couldn't complain. The Cure's "Plainsong," finally in a film! And how can I not love a director who intentionally had a rakish character costumed to look like Adam Ant? (He did, too. Yum yum.) Also, refreshingly, no beheadings. It's enough to know they're on the horizon, really. No need to splash blood all over the gorgeous costumes. I say "refreshingly" because I also lately watched and enjoyed Elizabeth I, which again I was destined to love because of my softness for both Jeremy Irons and Hugh Dancy. But jeez, beheadings and drawn-and-quarterings much?

Anyway, well done, young Coppola. She seems to have taken the writing advice "Write the book you want to read," translated here to "the movie you want to see."

Speaking of writing--I'm going to veer off and rant a little about character naming conventions. My feminist streak may emerge. You may want to look away.

I read some writing advice somewhere (I wish I remembered where) that suggested giving your characters names that were easy to say, with no more than two or three total syllables for the men and four or five for the women. Neato, we get more syllables! Uh...why? Wait a sec, are multiple syllables "girly"? "Dirk Pitt" is an awfully manly and curt name, after all, while "Scarlett O'Hara" takes its pretty time to roll off the tongue. Hmmm.

Also, have you noticed that in certain types of novels--usually adventure novels, like Dan Brown's or Michael Crichton's among others--the men are always referred to by their last names, and the women by their first names? Why in the world is this the established style? When we have Dr. Jad Forke (you know, the ex-Navy SEAL who now teaches antiquities) and Dr. Tiffani Engelbright (you know, the 23-year-old nuclear physicist), why do we get usage like "Forke tossed the AK-47 to Tiffani"? (You know, I'm never gonna write adventure novels unless as farce or parody.)

Darn...I wish I had thought of these issues for my Linguistics thesis. Oh well. Someone else can take it and run with it.

Check out the bottom half of this picture. I'm pretty sure, almost certain in fact, that that's not a California leaf-nosed bat.

That's from a free children's publication that shows up in our mail for some reason. Hope the kids reading it are smart enough to catch that little error.

Anyway, we are back from a week in California (didn't see any bats nor bears, though we did see a coyote, a raccoon, several deer, lots of birds, and many farm animals), and our misgivings about taking little Z on the plane were unfounded. He was a prince. He was pretty much a prince the entire trip, actually. Flirted and babbled and waved at people, let his grandparents walk him around, played very nicely with another couple babies his age. Whew. I'd love to take credit, but personality may just be inborn. ;)

His name, by the way, if you ask him, is "Doo-dah." Linguistically speaking, I think he may actually be trying to say "Zach." The Z sound, being a fricative, is trickier for young tongues than the D sound (a stop; stops like M, B, D, G come early and easier). So in trying to pronounce a Z he may kind of stutter a D instead--same place of articulation for both; the alveolar ridge behind the front teeth--and then proceed with the "a". Getting to the "K" sound at the end would be too complicated for now; he'll add that when he can handle more sounds in one syllable.

So, Dooda it is. This is how nicknames get started...

I tend to think myself immune to the need for spell-check, but I do occasionally run it anyway. Tonight I found that in my most recent novel-in-progress, I misspelled the following words:

serotonin
idiosyncrasies
exhilaration

My one consolation is that Microsoft Word didn't know how to spell them either--that is, it had no suggestions on correcting them; it just "knew" they were wrong. I had to Google them to find the right spellings.

In an interesting twist on the usual ubiquitous acronym, my father-in-law found this one:

MOL is a Japanese shipping corporation and their letters stand for "Mitsui O.S.K. Lines," the "OSK" standing in turn for "Osaka Shosen Kaisha." So what we have is an acronym within an acronym. I find this intriguing.

Can you think of any others?

May have to cross-post to grammargasm.

Today I got a rejection with the bit of feedback: "Sexual relations in a YA [young adult] novel? Seems too mature for 13-year-old readers."

The characters are 18 or 19, and college freshmen. I once showed the story to a romance editor, and she liked the story but thought they were so awfully *young* that it would have to be marketed as YA. Now it's too mature for YA? What genre should I claim it is, anyway?

Or did I just happen to get a reviewer who has an unrealistic sense of what teenagers think about? :)

Probably wasn't a good match anyway--they claimed I'd made "grammatical errors" for instances such as:

"Was that your flight?" she sniffled.

...on the grounds that "You can't sniffle dialogue." Sheesh; no creative leeway allowed?

Complain, complain. Have a nice weekend, everyone!

(x-posted to novelwriters)

Edit: The "sniffle" bit is wobbly, I admit. But okay, here's another "error" they claim I made: they circled the word "grey" and wrote "avoid variant spelling." Yeah, I know we spell it "gray" in the U.S., but the narrator is British! He would write "grey"! I also wrote "colour," "centre," and "realise"; are you going to circle all those too? "Error," my great-aunt's tea cozy. I screwed with that spelling quite deliberately, thank you.

Which is to say, "Enough with the furkin' acronyms"!

I know we're all pressed for time, and that if you're writing a long report in which you plan to reference "self-contained underwater breathing apparatus" or "international standard book number" many times, it's much easier to call them SCUBA and ISBN. I admit to using "ASAP" and "FYI" myself, because everyone understands them; along with "TMI" and "WTF?" because they're amusing. But I didn't become a stay-at-home mom solely to gain the shiny new acronym of SAHM, which makes it look like a disease; and IMHO (in my humble opinion) and AFAIK (as far as I know) have always bugged me a bit.

Back in chat room days, we pegged annoying dorks instantly by their use of "A/S/L?" ("Age/sex/location?," or "Where are you, are you hot, and are you old enough to cybersex me?"). The other day I saw a post ending with "KWIM???" Took me a second, but I got there--"Know what I mean?" Now, was it so hard for me to type those four words? Why, no. No, it wasn't.

What are your acronym pet peeves? Or pet loves?

Item the First: Sayeth my teabag wrapper, "Surprisingly enough, with a name like Tazo Honeybush, this tea contains none of the buzz of caffeine." Funny; I would have said, "Surprisingly enough, with a name like Tazo Honeybush, this is a tea and not a porn star."

Item the Second: This PBS page claims that we in the Pacific Northwest are shifting our vowels so that words like "beg" and "bag" come out almost the same, with the vowel sounding like the one in "bake." Also, "good" sounds like "gid" and "look" sounds like "lick." Having tested my own speech, I have to admit they're pretty much right. I already knew that, in true Wild West form, I said "frr" (almost like "fur") instead of "for", and "git" instead of "get," and I drop most of my g's, so to speak, for words endin' in -ing. And "cool" comes out as two syllables for me, just about. But I hadn't noticed the "What kind of beg, paper or plastic?" thing yet. Coo-wul.

Item the Third: You know you've been reading The Silmarillion too long when you giggle at the brand name "Melnor" on your lawn sprinkler, and start making up a heritage for it. Melnor, also called Cunithielanien, son of Maginor. When I turned the water up a little too high, and got sprinkled, I even went so far as to tell Steve, "Beware, the arm of Melnor is long. And cold, and wet."

Item the Fourth: I forgot to fangirl about a book I recently read, so now is the time. I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith. So utterly charming and funny and poignant. Somehow the very charismatic narrator reminded me of kalquessa, even though kalquessa is neither British nor a denizen of the early 1900s. (But it's still a compliment, Marie, really!) And thank you to modmerseygirl for recommending that one in the first place.

Item the Fifth: We have taught Zachary the Jedi mind trick. Useful, don't you think?

Whilst feeding The Baby, I usually read. I've managed to go through several books that way in the past two months. (He eats a lot.)

Mark Helprin's Freddy and Fredericka is worth looking into, as a totally insane and eloquent parody of the English royalty--and American politics too. Goes on longer than it needs to, but was fun.

Marrying Mozart was a rather sweet little historical piece, but it was amusing to me that they were being coy, till the end, about which of the Weber sisters ended up marrying Mozart. Anyone who has heard "Rock Me Amadeus" knows it was Constanze. ;)

Mary Renault's Fire From Heaven was a remarkable achievement of historical fiction, and impressed me even though I was flippantly calling it "Brokeback Mount Olympos." (The book used the spelling "Olympos," rather than "Olympus," so I shall too.) Alexander and Hephaistion were really good friends. Not that this was unusual in ancient Greece. It also illuminated for me where the slash-artists The Theban Band (NOTE: NOT a work-safe link) got their name--evidently Thebes had an elite army entirely made up of Very Close male companions. *smacks forehead* Hello, history idiot. (I had heard of such armies, but didn't know their names.) Anyway, the original Theban Band (Sacred Band of Thebes) kicked ass; book claims they never had lost a battle, until Alexander caught up with 'em. However, I have no interest in using this space to debate gays in the military (since I'm sure I somehow just offended both the pro and the con side), so moving on...

Less impressive was a bit of fluff I read because it was supposed to be a ghost story. And it was a ghost story, a fairly fun and decent one, but it was basically a grocery-store romance novel. The funniest thing about it was that it was set in England in 1876, but it was like the (American) writer didn't even bother to get it Britpicked, or edited to match the era properly. The characters kept using colloquial phrases like "The thing is," and "I guess" (to mean "I suppose so."). I couldn't be entirely sure, but I was almost certain people weren't saying "I guess" in England in 1876. So, just now, I did a cursory search through a few famous English authors' texts from roughly that era on Gutenberg.org--Dickens, Thackeray, Wilde, Stoker, Wodehouse, R.L. Stevenson--and indeed, only the Americans say "I guess." Example: The Texan, Quincy P. Morris, in Dracula:

"Miss Lucy, I know I ain't good enough to regulate the fixin's of
your little shoes, but I guess if you wait till you find a man that
is you will go join them seven young women with the lamps when you
quit. Won't you just hitch up alongside of me and let us go down
the long road together, driving in double harness?" [boldface mine]

Alas, the romance novel was nowhere near as amusing as that. However, it WAS amusing to be able to say to Steve, "Ah. We have reached the part where 'Desire slammed into his loins like a fist,'" and to watch him cringe when I threatened to read more of it aloud. Sounds painful in any case, doesn't it? Something slamming into your loins like a fist?

But to name something I found linguistically delightful, and indeed excellent in all ways, we saw Everything Is Illuminated last night. Poignant, beautifully filmed, and at times quite funny thanks to "Alex" with his English malapropisms and his goofy hip-hop outfits. Oh, and the mentally deranged dog, of course. (And Elijah Wood kissing the dog was deeply cute.)

Whoo. Thank the heavens for LJ's "saved draft" recovery. Safari just crashed on me. Eeep. Goodnight!

For a few seconds I thought I had lost my ability to comprehend English properly. But no. It was the message that was screwy.

A voice-mail at work informed me that I should have received some insurance, covering the company from the dates "four thousand oh-five to four thousand oh-six." Uh...when?

I found the insurance, and in fact it covers them from April 1, 2005 (04/01/05) to April 1, 2006 (04/01/06). But it really took me those few seconds to remind myself that, indeed, while you might say "four-oh-one-oh-five", you simply never say "four thousand oh-one." Anyway, even if you ignored the slash mark, 0401 would be four hundred and one, wouldn't it?

*baffle*
I won't even attempt a linguistic theory on how that happened.

*pours more coffee for whoever left that message*

[Edit: turns out this was a joke, as I sorta suspected it MUST be, given the creed mentioned below. But it's still funny.]

Ordinarily linguists have a creed of being mild and non-judgmental about speakers of any languages and all languages, and that's a lovely thing. Which makes it all the more remarkable (and, let's face it, hilarious) when one snaps and goes after, say, the French language. (He points out it's only fair, since French speakers have been sneering at the English language since the dawn of time.)

Excerpt:

Boy may long for girl to hold him in her warm embrace, but he won't be able to tell her that in French, because they don't have a word for "warm". They have tiède, which means "tepid", but boy doesn't long for girl to hold him in her tepid embrace. So what they use is chaud, which is the word on the hot water tap, the one that isn't froid. A language of love that was minimally functional would be able to distinguish between a warm friendship (enthusiastic discussion of topics of common interest; amicable farewell handshakes with promises to do lunch real soon) and a hot friendship (passion, heavy breathing, sudden uncontrolled couplings in shadowy doorways and on moving trains, returning home having lost underwear, midnight calls to say I have to have you right now). If boy cannot distinguish lexically between these, boy is going to be in real trouble with his relationship with girl.
---
Hee.

Language geeks observing Talk Like A Pirate Day will appreciate today's Language Log entry. It involves a pirate keyboard photo, an amusing misunderstanding of the phrase "Arrr," and the linguistic question, "Where does this idea that pirates say 'Arr' come from, anyway?"

After all, if we consult Johnny Depp, pirates talk like drunken rock stars. Which doesn't seem entirely unlikely.

Two linguistic constructions to look at today, which have been out there a while, but which I only started noticing lately:

1) "The thing is, is..."
Usage examples from Google:
a. "The thing is is that I do not want good looking girls to be around him..."
b. "The thing is, is that I might be moving in two years."
c. "The thing is, is that EVERY drug has some sort of side affect [sic]..."
d. "The thing is, is that they are back in school and there is an increase of children around the schools and on the streets."

Most editors would, wisely enough, point out that none of these sentences need the extra "is." "The thing is, I might be moving in two years." Perfectly good sentence. So why do so many various English speakers do this? As usual, LanguageLog has beat me to an examination. Their suggestion, which strikes me as pretty good, is that people are, in part, modeling such sentences after similar ones in which a wh- word is used. (Note: in the world of Ling, wh- words are who, what, when, where, how and their semantic equivalents, even if they don't actually start with "wh".) For, with wh- words, we get grammatical constructions like:

a. "What the question is, is what is that purpose?"
b. "What the question is, is not mentioned."
c. "What the issue is, is not Al-Qaeda but local war lords."

Wh- constructions are complicated and gave me headaches when it came time to draw trees for them in syntax class (do a Google search on wh- syntax if you doubt me), but the basic thing to notice is that when the subject of your sentence is a wh- clause, as in those above, you do still need a verb for the main sentence, and usually it is a form of "be." When you take the wh- word away, the sentence gets less complicated and you no longer have that subject clause, and thus you no longer need the extra verb. See?

The reinforcing reason why people might say "The thing is, is" is that humans tend to repeat words in speech, when stalling and thinking. Actual transcripts read something like, "I--the--the--issue is--is--is when can we get--when can we find--find help, for all those who--who--who are waiting?" (I made that up, but you can hear it any day, usually with a lot of "uh" thrown in.) "Is" in particular, being such a common, short, and seemingly colorless word, gets a lot of repetition. So, in sum, people hear "is" repeated in speech, and their minds connect it to wh- type constructions, and they begin forming deliberately constructed sentences with the phrase, "The thing is, is...," which in their minds have thus become grammatical. Interesting, no?

2) "I was reading where..."
Usage from Google:
a. "I had just sat down and was reading where Cary Middlecoff won the US Open..."
b. "I was reading where Alexander Yakovlev's father Dmitri was also involved in the 'mess'..."
c. "I was reading where he had sold about $337 million of Qwest stock..."

Doesn't look like any other linguists have cared enough about this construction to write about it yet (or not that I've found, anyway), and indeed it does strike me as mostly colloquial and not hugely widespread. Some of us, including me, will say informally, "I was reading how..." for any of the above style of sentences. "Was reading where" gets 2,610 hits on Google, which includes many that don't fit this pattern--e.g., "I was reading Where the Red Fern Grows." "Was reading how" gets 912 hits, and again with some misleading ones. For formal writing, we would probably all say, "was reading that..."--or rephrase the sentence altogether.

Still, I think there is a parallel construction for "where" that might lead people to use it in the above manner. If you were in the middle of A Christmas Carol, you might say, "I was reading where Marley's ghost visits Scrooge," and that would be somewhat different from the sentences above, since you would be abridging in a way: "I was reading the part where Marley's ghost visits Scrooge" is the full thought. In the above sentences you can't really insert a phrase like that, and make it work, but all of these sentences strike the ear in a similar fashion, which is often enough to spin off a new linguistic construction.

Linguist disclaimer: By pointing these out I'm not saying that people who use them are Stupid or Wrong. Don't feel you need to adjust your speech patterns or apologize for them. Given the way language keeps changing, these phrases could well become part of the "standard English" of the next generation. I am also not advocating the adoption of these phrases; to be honest, I would instinctively edit them out if I were correcting papers. My aim here is merely that of the linguist: to make note of relatively new constructions and try to figure out where they came from.

I just got this email from my little sister, who does admin work at a company that paints streets and curbs and things. It was too funny not to share with you:

---
I was trying to explain to many of you, individually, how the swearing
happens so casually and amusingly at my place of employment. Well. One guy
was talking about The Time His Fuel Pump Died Outside Of Prineville.
Normally, this wouldn't be an extraordinarily great story, but there was
*so much* swearing, I was cracking up- cuz it was so pointless! So I
jotted down my favorite sentence:

"So, I was driving back in the pitch-ass dark from f@#king dumbf@&k nowhere,
when all of a sudden there's this god-ass bitch bad smelling smoke coming
from the god@*&m f*%king engine!"
---

Naturally, as a linguist, I find this fascinating, for in lexical and syntactic choice it reflects both sociolinguistic and pragmatic...oh, who am I kidding? I just find it hilarious.

I was disposed to be in a good mood anyway, since this morning I signed a publishing contract, and that always feels good. It's for the electronic distribution rights to SUMMER TERM, one you've technically already heard about, and yes, that WAS seven months ago. Publishing, even electronic publishing, is a slow process. In fact, I think in the official list of slow things, it's placed thusly:

Evolution
Glaciers
The 3-toed sloth
Slugs and snails
Publishing
The Pony Express
A 14.4k modem
Paint drying

I hear you like my linguistics posts. So here's another.

This post on LanguageLog has a number of facetious "Linguistically Noteworthy Dates in May," written by late linguist Jim McCawley. Some of them are just odd and have very little to do with linguistics itself--e.g., "The University of Chicago trades Leonard Bloomfield to Yale University for two janitors and an undisclosed number of concrete gargoyles." (Bloomfield was a famous linguist, but that's about the only ling. content as far as I can tell.)

Others, despite my Master's degree, I don't get at all. But I do get the following and find them rather cute. (Raise your hand if you understand them. I'm willing to explain them to the best of my ability, but you know what they say about the funniness of a joke once you have to explain it.)

- May 5, 1403. The Great English Vowel Shift begins. Giles of Tottenham calls for ale at his favorite pub and is perplexed when the barmaid tells him that the fishmonger is next door.

- May 11, 1032. Holy Roman Emperor Conrad II orders isoglosses erected across northern Germany as defense against Viking intruders.

- May 19. Diphthong Day. (Public holiday in Australia)

- May 20, 473 B.C. Publisher returns to Panini a manuscript entitled Saptadhyayi with a note requesting the addition of a chapter on phonology. Panini begins struggling to meet the publisher's deadline.

- May 29, 1962. Angular brackets are discovered. Classes at M.I.T. are dismissed and much Latvian plum brandy is consumed.

- May 30, 1939. Charles F. Hockett finishes composing the music for the Linguistic Society of America's anthem, 'Can You Hear the Difference?'


...and even with those, I don't get every aspect of them. Why Latvian plum brandy? I don't know. But I do know why angular brackets. (Though actually, square brackets would make more linguistically-celebratory sense.)