“Harold Keables taught me how to write. He was my English high-school teacher in the early seventies (1970s, not 1870s). I wasn’t that great a student, so he’s probably having a good laugh in heaven watching me write books and blogs.”

“A few days ago, I wondered in passing about the origins of typographical bleeping, in which asterisks or hyphens or underscores are substituted for certain letters in order to avoid violating lexical taboos. Greg Hanneman emailed an example from 1869, and this caused me to do a small search that pushed it back to 1688 1680. No doubt some readers will be able to push it back further.” (Thanks kottke.org!)

“Get It Write offers services for people who realize that the written word makes a powerful and lasting impression.”

WebVerbix is a free on-line verb conjugator that conjugates verbs in 85 different languages.

“Cursing, they say, is a human universal. Every language, dialect or patois ever studied, living or dead, spoken by millions or by a small tribe, turns out to have its share of forbidden speech, some variant on comedian George Carlin’s famous list of the seven dirty words that are not supposed to be uttered on radio or television.”

Here’s a discussion from the Visit the world Flickr group containing a lot of submitted translations for “May I take your picture,” which can come in handy when traveling.

“In 1953, while working a hotel switchboard, a college graduate named Shea Zellweger began a journey of wonder and obsession that would eventually lead to the invention of a radically new notation for logic. From a basement in Ohio, guided literally by his dreams and his innate love of pattern, Zellweger developed an extraordinary visual system — called the ‘Logic Alphabet’ — in which a group of specially designed letter-shapes can be manipulated like puzzles to reveal the geometrical patterns underpinning logic.” (Thanks Design Observer!)

“A blog about keyboarding in diverse scripts, literacy and digital literacy, and random quotes selected from the history of writing system theory.”

“Freud noted that adults do not remember childhood events occurring before they were as old as six. This period of childhood amnesia is now generally believed to end at about age three or four. Though current psychologists don’t put much stock in Freud’s explanation of the phenomenon (he believed the memories were repressed because they are too traumatic), there is still little agreement on what causes it. Gabrielle Simcock and Harlene Hayne of the University of Otago noticed that the period of amnesia tends to end at about the time of the onset of language, so they devised an experiment to test whether language ability might be at the root of the problem “

“Can’t find the right word? You might want to start moving your hands. New research at the University of Alberta suggests that gesturing while you talk may improve your access to language.”

“I’ve been a linguophile for a long time, and I’m always studying a little bit of some language or another. However, it’s only recently that I’ve finally figured out the way that works best for me, with the help of modern technology. Perhaps this might help those of you who have been planning on learning a language some day.”

“Steganography is the science of hiding one message inside another message ó hiding in plain sight, so to speak. Think of steganography as the soft-spoken yet elegant sister of cryptography. Where cryptography scrambles a message to prevent unauthorized people from reading it, steganography opts instead to hide the message in such a way that it is not obvious that there is anything there to see. Read on for a description of steganography, with example.”

“Over five years in the making, poet, ípataphysican, performer and artist Christian Bˆkís much-anticipated second book Eunoia is about to change your perception of your own language forever.The word ëeunoiaí, which literally means ëbeautiful thinkingí, is the shortest word in English that contains all five vowels. Directly inspired by the Oulipo (l’Ouvroir du LittÈrature Potentielle), a French writersí group interested in experimenting with different forms of literary constraint, Eunoia is a five-chapter book in which each chapter is a univocal lipogram (the first chapter has A as its only vowel, the second chapter only E, etc.). Each vowel takes 0n a distinct personality ñ the I is egotistical and romantic, the O jocular and obscene, the E elegaic and epic (Bˆk actually retells the entire Iliad in Chapter E; you have to read it to believe it). Stunning in its implications and masterful in its execution, Eunoia is poised to be one of the most unusual and important books of the year.”

“1+1=2. Mathematics doesn’t get any more basic than this, but even 1+1 would stump the brightest minds among the Piraha tribe of the Amazon. A study appearing today in the journal Science reports that the hunter-gatherers seem to be the only group of humans known to have no concept of numbering and counting.”

“This is a list of some of the most commonly found Latin abbreviations and phrases. It may not be completely accurate and is provided as a guide only.”