Hoge and pakeratta are commonly used, with other common words and variants being piyo, fuga, hogera, and hogehoge.

Publications of McNeill Lab - Centre for Gesture and Speech Research

Human language may have evolved from manual gestures, which survive today as a "behavioral fossil" coupled to speech

“The notion that man’s first language was primarily gestural, carried on with hand and arm signals rather than vocal sounds, has been supported by a distinguished line of scholars: Condillar (1746), Tylor (1868, 1871), Morgan (1877:35n), Wallace (1881, 1895), Romanes (1988), Wundt (1912), Paget (1944, 1963), and Johannesson (1949, 1950). The gestural theory seems to be the most attractive of the many glottogonic hypotheses advanced so far, and receives support from recent studies of chimpanzees and other primates, such as Gardner and Gardner (1969, 1971), Premack (1970a,b, 1971), and Menzel (1971), as well as from other sources. The fact that this evidence was unavailable to earlier proponents of the gestural theory explains some of the weaknesses in its former formulations.” (Hewes GW (1973) Primate communication and the gestural origins of language. Current Anthropology 14: 5)

私のホバークラフトは鰻でいっぱいです
(Watashi no hobākurafuto wa unagi de ippai desu.)

The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of current British English, both spoken and written. [more]

Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Enquries into very many received tenets and commonly presumed truths, also known simply as Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Vulgar Errors, is a work by Thomas Browne refuting the common errors and superstitions of his age. It first appeared in 1646 and went through five subsequent editions, the last revision occurring in 1672. The work includes evidence of Browne's adherence to the Baconian method of empirical observation of nature, and was in the vanguard of work-in-progress scientific journalism in the 17th century scientific revolution, though he refers to his work as an encyclopaedia. Throughout its pages frequent examples of Browne's subtle humour can also be found.

Woh, whole new bits of google I didn't know about

French argot/backslang

a boom in telegraphic code books that reduced both common and complex phrases into single words. Dozens of different codes were published; many catered to specific occupations and all promised efficiency.

Languages by Average word length

I am reading this and listening to numbers stations. My brane hurts.

I am interested in the way that Anime conventions for showing the inner state of a character (which are probably derived from woodcut?) have moved over in to games, and also photography - wonder if an icon writing system helps that movement?

Bookmarked mostly for a lovely list of words. Turns out Apotheosis doesn't quite mean what I thought it did.

The program calculated the level of order present in each language.

I now realize that every adage should have an encyclopedia page explaining its actual genesis, history of antecedents, counter claims and context. Like any portriat, the story behind the quote is usually more interesting than the quote.