eating cucumbers without permission...

Now traced back to before he was even born.

How bad translation software and an ambiguous ideogram blazoned the f-word all over China.

"...the home for language courses developed by the Foreign Service Institute. These courses were developed by the United States government and are in the public domain."

A feeling for language or a sensitivity for what is correct language. ... If you have Sprachgefuhl, you have an ear for idiomatically appropriate language.

Fascinating.

On those occasions when she showed up at a con to meet Elise, she saw lots of fans in groups talking. To her they seemed angry and rude. To Elise they seemed nothing of the sort. [...]

She did suggest that many of the common features of fanspeak seem to be related to thinking in "written English".

The root of this problem lies in the fact that these textbooks try to teach you Japanese with English. They want to teach you on the first page how to say, "Hi, my name is Smith," but they don't tell you about all the arbitrary decisions that were made behind your back. [...] In fact, the most common way to say something like "My name is Smith" in Japanese is to say "am Smith". [...] But does the textbook explain the way things work in Japanese fundamentally? No, because they're too busy trying to push you out the door with "useful" phrases right off the bat.

It might be the shortest novel ever, and it might be the only novel without a word. But Hu Wenliang, the author the novel entitled 《。》, claimed that he spent one year to write a novel with five sections as follows:

：？

：！

“‘……’”

（、）·《，》

；——

Hu is offering to reward those who can understand the hidden story.

In conjunction with a major forthcoming BBC2 series, the OED invites you to hunt for words and help rewrite 'the greatest book in the English language'.

Rotor is an experimental script created to realize the concept of letters that literally move on the “page”. It consists of seventeen minimal pairs of graphemes in which the members of each pair are identical except for the way they move ...

Hideous, but an interesting idea. I'd like to see one using the simplest possible glyphs, like a motion-based Morse code.

Compare these numbers: China only has about 500 surnames. Korea only has 249. Japan has about 120,000. [...]

Yes, in the Heian period and after, it was common to use "Kuso" in names, which means just what you think it means. The famous poet "Kinotsurayuki," who wrote the Tosa Diaries, is a notable example. His birth name was "Ako Kuso," which means "my child...shit."

Interesting comments at languagehat.

Laughing My Ass Off With My Hands Squeezing Your Throat, And As The Final Breath Exits Your Body I Stand Over Your Filthy Corpse And Begin To Beat It With A Sledgehammer.

RikaiXUL is a plugin version of the Japanese Reading function of rikai.com. In runs in (and requires) the Firefox browser.

That is, mouseover kanji to get English and hiragana translations, plus radicals. It's too cool.

Mouseover a character and get a tooltip with magnification and English translation. It's fantastic as a learning tool -- I wish there were sites like it in the language(s) I'm studying in my spare time.