Swedish, adding to all the awesomeness, has proven especially adept at coining new words for the new circumstances occasioned by new technologies. Below, some of the best Swedologisms I could find, via the Swedish news site The Local. We should, obviously, incorporate them into English as soon as possible.

PHP is not merely awkward to use, or ill-suited for what I want, or suboptimal, or against my religion. I can tell you all manner of good things about languages I avoid, and all manner of bad things about languages I enjoy. Go on, ask! It makes for interesting conversation. PHP is the lone exception. Virtually every feature in PHP is broken somehow. The language, the framework, the ecosystem, are all just bad. And I can’t even point out any single damning thing, because the damage is so systemic. Every time I try to compile a list of PHP gripes, I get stuck in this depth-first search discovering more and more appalling trivia. (Hence, fractal.) PHP is an embarrassment, a blight upon my craft. It’s so broken, but so lauded by every empowered amateur who’s yet to learn anything else, as to be maddening. It has paltry few redeeming qualities and I would prefer to forget it exists at all. But I’ve got to get this out of my system. So here goes, one last try.

Gizoogle was originally created by John Beatty, who started the site in 2005 as a joke after inspiration from a friend's constant use of the slang on America Online's Instant Messenger service and also by Snoop's "Doggy Fizzle Televizzle" program on MTV.

...

This website is only intended for mature audiences farmiliar with the slanguage used by Snoop Dogg, and anybody under the age of 13 should not visit this website without adult supervision.

This scam itself is a few years old now, but I had not personally received one of the calls until yesterday—the very day that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced a major crackdown on such "boiler room" call center operations. The very day that six civil lawsuits were filed against the top practitioners. The very day on which I had just finished speaking with Ars IT reporter Jon Brodkin, who spent the morning on an FTC conference call about this exact issue. And here were the scammers on the other end of the line, in what could only be a cosmic coincidence.

A new study has shown that Apple’s lawsuit against Samsung has actually helped spike sales for the South Korean firm.

...

The report argues that the press coverage not only helped Samsung become a recognisable name but the constant comparisons between the iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy S III suggested that the devices were rather similar thus making them a decent option for consumers to consider. A key point to be remembered is that after the verdict in early September, the Galaxy S III outsold the iPhone 4S for the first time ever in the US.

According to reports in the Associated Press, the setting up of China's Confucius Peace Prize was intended to protest the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize award to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.

This year will witness the third Confucius Peace Prize since its setup. However, the previous two award ceremonies of this prize didn't go very well. The laureates selected never showed up nor even cared about receiving such a prize.

Some observers saw the affair as a complete farce. The award was given to a terrified small child, supposed to represent Kuomintang Honorary Chairman Lien Chan at the first ceremony and two Russian hotties, supposed to represent Russian President Vladimir Putin, at the second, which just added to the entertainment value.

The MPAA & RIAA claim that the internet is stealing billions of dollars worth of their property by sharing copies of files. They're willing to destroy the internet with things like SOPA & PIPA in an attempt to collect that money.

...

Let's just pay them the money! They've made it very clear that they consider digital copies to be just as valuable as the original. That makes it a lot easier to pay them back in two ways: a. We can email them scanned images of dollar bills instead of bulky paper and b. We don't have to worry about the hassle of shipping huge quantities of cash.

If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world.

A very funny story about a man who has seen a problem and is prescribing a "solution" that is 100% wrong and the complete opposite of what needs to be done:

Thierry Breton, Atos’s 56-year-old chief executive officer who is a former French finance minister [...] pointed to a recent study by the business watchdog ORSE, which reads: ‘Reading useless messages is terrible for concentration, as it takes 64 seconds to get back on the ball after doing so. Poorly controlled, the e-mail can become a devastating tool.’

Mr Breton suggested that a real time messaging interface as available on sites like Facebook would be far preferable to email, with staff also encouraged to talk to each other in person.

So an email, that you can reply to at your leisure, wastes time, but an instant message, that calls for immediate attention, does not? Oookay then. As for Facebook, he must have added that for comic effect. Right? Right?

Over the past several years, you've probably seen some of our fun linguistics designs on CafePress or at various conferences. We've now selected some of the funniest, cleverest, and most attractive linguistics items other designers have for sale on CafePress, and brought them together for you in this gallery. Click on the picture to see details or to place an order through CafePress.

1–10 (96)   Next >   Last >|