Collecting casual and informal collective-nouns by scraping twitter. The "What Is This" page is very well done, explaining just what the scraper "sees" in a clear fashion. Fun.

""Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." is a grammatically correct sentence used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated constructs." And: what a URL.

"It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate." And so on.

"The analysis presented here explores word usage in the 2008 US Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates. The purpose is to explore the structure of speech, as characterized by the use of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and noun phrases. The speech patterns of opposing candidates are compared in an effort to identify characteristic value and personality traits."

"the eminent linguist tried to spoof the idea of converting Chinese character text into a phonetic (e.g. Latin alphabetic) system... Since every word is pronounced alike (except the tone), the entire essay becomes utterly unreadable in Mandarin."

"Chinaderas is the nomenclature assigned [in Mexican Spanish] to imported goods from China, usually those that are knock-offs or replicas of other branded commodities…" Delightful etymology behind it, too.

What it says on the tin.

Been looking for this for a while - as a classicist, it fills me with a silly delight if nothing else.

Going beyond just pluralize. Cute.

David Foster Wallace on "Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage"

learn is a perl script that outputs english. what better proof of concept than to dump output to a blog?