For those of you new to Notes from the Copy Editor, the sidebar has a little blog-within-a-blog of language stuff I've del.icio.us-ed. Every month or so, I highlight my very favorite links. The good stuff.

So here's my favorite language-related stuff for April:

The Onion - Commas, Turning Up, Everywhere
More punctuation humor from the people who brought you "Copy Editor's Revenge Takes Form Of Unhyphenated Word."

Motivated Grammar - Preposterous Apostrophes VII: Why Won't Willn't Work?
Because we've all been wondering: here's why we abbreviate will not as won't.

H&FJ - Pilcrow & Capitulum
Typographer Jonathan Hoefler explains the origin of the paragraph mark and the choices you can make while designing it. He followed up this post with a similar introduction to the ampersand. via wordworker.

Wikipedia - Mopery
I thought this was just a synonym of the gerund moping, but Wikipedia introduced me to two interesting alternative definitions: "walking down the street with no clear destination or purpose" and "exposing oneself to a statue or blind person."

Language Log - Angry linguistic mobs with torches
Mark Liberman makes excellent use of Language Log's new "Prescriptivist Poppycock" tag.

Wisconsin Englishes Podcast
A defunct podcast covering the various Wisconsin dialects. If you've ever been to Wisconsin, then you'll find the first three or four episodes especially interesting. The first episode ("Yah Hey!") has a great song about the Fox River Valley at the 11:40 mark. I just discovered this, but Mr. Verb was blogging about it years ago.

Stereotypist - The Signifier vs. The Signified
A one-off custom comic for philosophy of language geeks, drawn by the creator of Pictures for Sad Children.

Labels: links