thoughtful post from leonard about findings

"early history of tarot indicates that the cards were used to compose poems before they were used for divination"

An auto-antonym (sometimes spelled autantonym), or contranym (originally spelled contronym), is a word with a homograph (a word of the same spelling) that is also an antonym (a word with the opposite meaning).

via: http://mlkshk.com/p/3OPH

ScriptSource is a dynamic, collaborative reference to the writing systems of the world, with detailed information on scripts, characters, languages - and the remaining needs for supporting them in the computing realm. It currently contains only a skeleton of information, and so depends on your participation in order to grow and assist others. Learn more about ScriptSource

Lojban is a carefully constructed spoken language designed in the hope of removing a large portion of the ambiguity from human communication. It was made well-known by a Scientific American article and references in science fictionLojban has been built over five decades by dozens of workers and hundreds of supporters.

Lojban has a number of features which make it unique:

Lojban is designed to be used by people in communication with each other, and possibly in the future with computers.
Lojban is designed to be culturally neutral.
Lojban has an unambiguous grammar, which is based on the principles of logic.
Lojban has phonetic spelling, and unambiguous resolution of sounds into words.
Lojban is simple compared to natural languages; it is easy to learn.
Lojban's 1300 root words can be easily combined to form a vocabulary of millions of words.
Lojban is regular; the rules of the language are without exception.
Lojban attempts to remove restrictions on creative and clear thought and communication.
Lojban has a variety of uses, ranging from the creative to the scientific, from the theoretical to the practical.

A snowclone is a type of cliché and phrasal template originally defined as "a multi-use, customizable, instantly recognizable, time-worn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different variants".

MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn.

Stumbled upon this kind-of-great glossary totally randomly in a google search for the definition of 'production values':

"Computer-mediated communications, being a field based on modern computer technology, is one laden with obscure technical terms and arcane jargon. This glossary is provided in an attempt to define some of the more commonly used terms and concepts. Please note that most words are described in very general terms for brevity, and special cases and exceptions are largely omitted. Acronyms are pronounced as individual letters unless otherwise indicated. Some of these terms are also trademarks (proprietary intellectual property) of large us computer firms, though the words may be in common usage.

For much more complete, and thus much more precise, definitions of these and other computer-related concepts I refer you to The Jargon File. (Raymond, 1996.) In addition to technical accuracy this comprehensive dictionary of computer-related slang also provides a wealth of entertaining historical background to - and fascinating insight into - the mysterious world of computer nerd culture."

blog about the unusual stories behind some well-known — and some rather more outlandish — marks of punctuation

#ngrams: plague, medicine