Counting Up to the Millionth Word

According to the Global Language Monitor, a new word is created in English on average every 98 minutes. This means that we should reach one million words on about June 10th of this year. What do new words look like? How about Bushism, interpandemic, microblogging, and defriend? These are a few of the words that have appeared recently. How do we know when a word becomes a word? As you might imagine, there are different opinions on this topic. Does it have to appear in the dictionary, or just be understood in conversation? This BBC video addresses that question. There's an absolutely delightful kids book on that topic also, Andrew Clements' Frindle, which I recommend to anyone.

Live Long and Prosper

Here's a great Slate article on the origins of the Klingon language, in honor of the opening of the new Star Trek movie this week. What's interesting is how the language evolved. The first few words came from overdubbing some English lines and having to match the movement of the actors' lips with the created Klingon words. From there, the language was mostly created by a single linguist so that it worked like a real language, but with the militaristic and guttural quality of the Klingons as depicted in the Star Trek world. You can even display Google's home page in Klingon if you wish. (Google>Preferences>Interface Language). But here's a trivia question for you: what other prime time television show featured a speech in Klingon to play a joke on one of the characters? Give up? Here's the answer.