- Yeet! It’s the first newsletter of the year, which means it’s time for Word(s) of the Year! First, WOTY winners and short lists: American Dialect Society (and nominees), Merriam-Webster’s, Dictionary.com, Collins, Oxford, Cambridge Dictionaries, Australian National Dictionary Centre, LinguiBishes and Geoff Nunberg. ※ Plus, WOTYs in German, Dutch and Japanese. ※ Finally, some grist for the mill on such lists: Language nerds worked really hard on that ‘Words of the Year’ list and Language Jones on the problematic nature of such lists.
- Let the Fountain Pens Flow! is a solid story about the ongoing renaissance of fountain pen use, including some of my favorite pen world personalities.
- The fascinating story of David Maurer, the dean of criminal language.
- The story of Wilson Bentley’s Crystal castles: the first snowflake photos — in pictures is a visually arresting story with a sadly ironic end. Via MR TH.INK which I encourage you to subscribe to. ※ While I’m at it, I discovered the captivating, and occasionally terrifying, profile The Whalers’ Odyssey in that wonderful newsletter too.
- The Mind is a Collection is a “born-digital museum of early-modern cognitive models.” ※ The Mind is a Metaphor is a “collection of eighteenth-century metaphors of mind.”
- RIP Bob Einstein. Many know him best as ► Super Dave and he appeared on all kinds of media since those days, where he inevitably stole the show. Others will remember him as Curb Your Enthusiasm regular Marty Funkhouser, where he provided one of my ► favorite (and most profane, definitely NSFW) tv comedy moments of all time.
- A look at children texting with (often solely) emoji and digital-age language learning. ※ See also: Teenage Girls Have Led Language Innovation for Centuries.
- “Copyrights, patents and trademarks are all important, but the term ‘intellectual property’ is nonsensical and pernicious.” I couldn’t agree more (convince me I’m wrong)!
- I’m “152: Emotions & senses” — Which Dewey Decimal Number Are You?
- Today in 1987, astronomers report witnessing the birth of a galaxy for the first time. The New York Times described the event as “detecting evidence that perhaps a billion suns ignited within a huge gas cloud 71 billion trillion miles from Earth.” Given the evocative name Radio Galaxy 3C 326, this area would later yield photos of one galaxy, 3C 326 North, “stealing” gases from its smaller neighbor, 3C 326 South. Incidentally, a “billion trillion” is also known as a sextillion (1 followed by 21 zeros) and, according to the Light Speed Calculator, light from that galaxy would take more than 170 million years to reach Earth. And in 2010, astronomers asserted that ‘Trillions Of Earths’ Could Be Orbiting 300 Sextillion Stars in our universe, three times as many as previously estimated.