upon "expound"
  thrice.dost_thou do
    speaketh("Hark!")
  verily
  ponder(1..3)
verily

Christopher Hitchens on the KJB. "An unbeliever argues that our language and culture are incomplete without a 400-year-old book—the King James translation of the Bible. Spurned by the Establishment, it really represents a triumph for rebellion and dissent. Accept no substitutes!" A very good (and pretty quotable) read.

“And he was like, you know, ‘Helloooo, what are you looking at?’ and stuff, and I’m like, you know, ‘Can I, like, pick you up?,’ and he goes, like, ‘Brrrp brrrp brrrp,’ and I’m like, you know, ‘Whoa, that is so wow!’ ”

'In northern California, something that's cool is "koo" in tweets, while in southern California, it's "coo." In many cities, something is "sumthin," but tweets in New York City favor "suttin." While many of us might complain in tweets of being "very" tired, people in northern California tend to be "hella" tired, New Yorkers "deadass" tired and Angelenos are simply tired "af."'

joemoransblog: Another great piece by Simon Kuper, this time about the French: http://tinyurl.com/32u5jg8

To the question, “what is the next big trend in programming”, Guy Steele said, “Maybe it’s sloppy programming.”

Simon Winchester, quoted in the article: "Until six months ago I was clinging to the idea that printed books would likely last for ever. Since the arrival of the iPad I am now wholly convinced otherwise. The printed book is about to vanish at extraordinary speed. I have two complete OEDs, but never consult them – I use the online OED five or six times daily. The same with many of my reference books – and soon with most. Books are about to vanish; reading is about to expand as a pastime; these are inescapable realities."

I was reminded of this today on Twitter, but I don't seem to have a bookmark, so: on mathematics, with an interesting bit about how the differences in how languages render numbers affecting the speed on which we learn numeracy.

"In the fight against English, France is famously out in front. Now Germany is joining in. Guido Westerwelle, its foreign minister, has begun a campaign to promote German as the “language of ideas.”" "When Germany’s Lena Meyer-Landrut takes to the Eurovision stage on May 29th to sing “Satellite” in English, purists will cringe. Walter Krämer of the Verein Deutsche Sprache (German Language Association) blames Hollywood."

"Any kind of personality would be an improvement on @lowflyingrock’s robotic language" Maybe, maybe not. I went back to @abovelondon from @twisst because I got fed up with their self-promotion and backchat. @asteroidwatch also looks overly chatty. Me, I want my bots to be, well, robotic.

"86% of British people live in the suburbs, but almost nobody admits it. The term has become pejorative. Rather than a euphemism treadmill-style replacement of the term, though, people pass in silence over generic descriptions of where they live" On Thinking Allowed on the suburbs

"you won't be able get traction with [a language implementation] unless it does direct threading, is register based, has generational GC, does peephole optimizations, does trace-folding, does type-inferenced inline caching, etc"

Interesting commentary on the AppleScript history PDF.

A PDF on the history of AppleScript, including tantalising descriptions of the never-released Professional Dialect, amongst other things. (I referred to this back in September 2006, but keep needing to find it.)

"it would probably have taken me a couple days to figure out how to interact with [Unicode in MZScheme], and I don't want to spend even one day dealing with character sets" That's OK, I can't be bothered spending a minute on your language then.

More Flickr API changes. I'm not sure if I really have much of a use for places, but then maybe I would if I thought about it more.

Continuing my obsession with the Alphabet vs the Goddess, this time commenting on Ang Lee's musings on pictorial language and montage.

For some reason I think I put British English first anyway, but this is still a good tip.

A templating engine for Java, as used by the Guardian (amongst others). Don't like the look of the syntax much, but it beats JSTLs.

Leon's presentation on the new stable Perl, due this year

Not "Colour"? Tut. Yesterday's comments about embedded sound and video go for this page too; watch out.

Thoughts on being able to criticise a language and what it means as a guide to how good a developer is

"I’ve met people who don’t know the difference between a million and a billion, and don’t care. We play a lottery with ‘six ways to win!,’ overlooking the twenty million ways to lose." Lots of interesting stuff in here.

Notes on a paper (which I sadly don't seem to be able to find) about the design of the AppleScript environment. Interesting to see the Professional dialect.

Deconstructing and refuting Stewart Lee's article on humour, language and Germany

"On not calling things by their right names"

"A writing game devised by Jeff Noon and Steve Beard" to explore at home

Lisa Jardine (who's been writing some good stuff for the BBC) on Europeans, the British, language and national identity