Funny list!  How many time has  Bakku-shan happened to you?

1. Zhaghzhagh (Persian)
The chattering of teeth from the cold or from rage.
2. Yuputka (Ulwa)
A word made for walking in the woods at night, it’s the phantom sensation of something crawling on your skin.
3. Lampadato (Italian)
Addicted to the infra-red glow of tanning salons? This word describes you.
4. Luftmensch (Yiddish)
The Yiddish have scores of words to describe social misfits. This one is for an impractical dreamer with no business sense. Literally, air person.
5. Iktsuarpok (Inuit)
You know that feeling of anticipation when you’re waiting for someone to show up at your house and you keep going outside to see if they’re there yet? This is the word for it.
6. Cotisuelto (Caribbean Spanish)  
A word that would aptly describe the prevailing fashion trend among American men under 40, it means one who wears the shirt tail outside of his trousers.
7. Pana Po’o (Hawaiian)  
“Hmm, now where did I leave those keys?” he said, pana po’oing. It means to scratch your head in order to help you remember something you’ve forgotten.
8. Gumusservi (Turkish)  
Meteorologists can be poets in Turkey with words like this at their disposal. It means moonlight shining on water.
9. Vybafnout (Czech)  
A word tailor-made for annoying older brothers—it means to jump out and say boo.
10. Mencolek (Indonesian)  
You know that old trick where you tap someone lightly on the opposite shoulder from behind to fool them? The Indonesians have a word for it.
11. Faamiti (Samoan)  
To make a squeaking sound by sucking air past the lips in order to gain the attention of a dog or child.
12. Glas wen (Welsh)  
A smile that is insincere or mocking. Literally, a blue smile.
13. Bakku-shan (Japanese)
The experience of seeing a woman who appears pretty from behind but not from the front.
14. Boketto (Japanese)
It’s nice to know that the Japanese think enough of the act of gazing vacantly into the distance without thinking to give it a name.
15. Kummerspeck (German)
Excess weight gained from emotional overeating. Literally, grief bacon.

From this isn’t happiness, ultimately from  Adam Jacot de Boinod’s book ‘The Meaning of Tingo  and Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World.’

The NSA’s guide to proper grammar has finally been released due to the Freedom of Information Act!

Now you know to not use the word “amidst” when describing the bomb being amidst between the two buildings!

Plus you can finally use proper grammar while interrogating your subject as nothing confuses an interrogee more than improper grammar, right?

The guide can be found here.

The article states that health activists want to sack the world’s best-known clown!  You can read the article here. I was just happy to see coulrophobia used in an article!  Yeah!

Hallow as we learned in an earlier video comes All Hallows Even.. or Halloween!  Oo Ha ha ha (<– evil laugh sound)… so you’d better learn your word origins OR ELSE!

Thank you Thomas J. Churchill for making this happen!

Go like their Facebook page for more deets. :-) Did I just say deets?!!

Image: Rachael Voorhees/Flickr

Scientists have created a system whereby a computer can finally identify double entendre… especially of the “That’s what she said” (TWSS) variety!

You know the joke:

Aaron referring to his late-evening basketball practice – “I was trying all night, but I just could not get it in!”

Betty – “That’s what she said”

Their system is called Double Entendre via Nouns Transfer or DEviaNT. You remember we learned about Double Entendre in an earlier lesson.

After much programming, the system was able to even identify this phrase as having TWSS potential… and they specifically used this example:

“Don’t you think these buns are a little too big for this meat?”

These results along with the Double Entendre examples will be presented  at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in June.

You can read more about DEviaNT here.

Below is Alfred Hitchcock uttering a very early version of the “That’s what she said” joke from 1929:

The first study by Dr. Quentin Atkinson used phonemes to show where language originated. Phonemes are the smallest sounds which differentiate meaning, for example, the “th” in thin; replace it with an “f” sound or “s” sound and the result is a different word.  It’s been known that the less widely spoken a language is, the fewer phonemes it has. Thus, the farther a group ventured from the source of language, the fewer phonemes that group would have in their language. Dr. Atkinson charted these phonemes and showed that language truly did originate in central/southern Africa.

The next study looks at Noam Chomsky’s theory that the human brain comes hard-wired with a universal grammar – a language instinct.  I WISH my brain was hard-wired for grammar.. perhaps those tests would have been easier for me!  Dr. Dunn looked at the four large language families:  Indo-European, Bantu, Austronesian (from South-East Asia and the Pacific) and Uto-Aztecan (the native vernaculars of the Americas) that account for >1/3 of    the 7000 languages spoken in the world today and found NO correlations between them, thus disproving Chomsky’s theory of instinctual grammar.

Perhaps these talking babies hold the clue to the origin of language?

More can be read over at the Economist.

1/3 of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.
42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college.
80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.

(Source: Jenkins Group) more stats here.

I find these statistics horrible.

“But high-school and college ruined the enjoyment of reading books for me!” is a phrase I’ve often heard.

Perhaps there is some truth to this as a lot of my friends do view reading as a chore, and they end up buying books that they think they *should* read… self help books, relationship books, career advancement books, etc. The end result is a pile of half-read books that they never finish, further supporting their view that “reading is a chore.”

Actually, reading is one of the most enjoyable past-times there is. After I’ve read a book, I oftentimes think that I have seen the movie due to the vivid imagination that I have. But those vivid images only come about if the book I just read was truly engrossing.

What makes a truly enjoyable and engrossing book for me? A mystery? A love story? Science fiction? A spy novel? All of them do! Any book that allows me to escape from my world and immerse myself into a another world, very different from my own, is an enjoyable book for me! Sometimes a book is so good, I end up reading it in every spare minute I have over 2 or 3 days. Then, when the book is done, I am bummed that it’s over! When’s the last time you read a book like that?

Other times I’ll pick up a book and immediately I have trouble getting through the first chapter. Do you know what I do then? I put the book away in my bookshelf and find myself another book that is more fun to read. I may go through 3 or 4 books at a time to find that enjoyable book, but it’s worth it. Because reading is so much fun for me, I will not allow it to become a chore… and if a book starts feeling like a chore for me to get through… it’s “bye-bye” to that book.

You should do the same. Get rid of all of those half read books and go curl up with a fun book! Let’s reverse these horrible statistics at the beginning of this post and let’s reverse this horrible feeling that reading is a chore. Some of the greatest discoveries in history happened due to an active imagination, and I feel that an active imagination is developed through reading, so do your part to further advance mankind – READ A (FUN) BOOK!

When’s the last time you’ve read a whole book just for fun and enjoyed it? What was it about?

Oh, one other thing. For those of you who think reading is not sexy, here are some fun pics I found of a familiar face who also loved to read :-)

Have you ever noticed that European book spines have the titles going one way and American book spines have the titles going the other?  It’s kind of annoying as it makes my bookshelf not look consistent!

Also.. when you think about it, the American way makes more sense than the European way, because when you lay the book down on a table facing up, you can read the title on the American book spine, but the title is upside down on the European book.  Hmmm…

I wonder why they are different?  Any ideas?  Let me know in the comments below.

Above, LaneVid does a review of my new iPhone app!  Thanks LaneVid! Be sure to subscribe to him to stay up on all cool new iPhone apps and other fun stuff! Oh,  and don’t forget to check out the doobly-doo!

Hey guys!  Check out my new iPhone app!  It allows you to keep up with the lessons while on the go, as well as keep up with any news, tweets, posts, etc.  And it’s free!  :-) Just pop over to the App Store, grab it and you’ll always have me in your pocket!  :-)