This came in an e-mail from a friend, another English teacher. It’s a great example of an occupational hazard — we just can’t help noticing lapses in other people’s writing!

Is proofreading an important life skill? You be the judge.

I had a colonoscopy last Friday and the receptionist told me I needed to read the anesthesia disclaimer before signing it - that the nurse would require my signature on a form stating that I had read and understood it. Right in the MIDDLE of the list of awful stuff that can happen to the patient was this statement:

“…may aggravate preEXITING conditions.” Given the nature of the procedure, I was amused. In a more serious situation, I would have found the misspelling ominous. The nurse was NOT amused. … I am definitely in the wrong business!

Sometimes a sense of humor is just not optional.

The Roman Empire may have collapsed, but Latin didn’t die. It morphed into Italian and had a profound influence on French, Spanish, and Portuguese. It also contributed heavily to the vocabulary of English.

Latin isn’t completely dead. But Kitsai, a Native American tongue, is. And National Geographic reports that we lose another language about every two weeks as the last surviving speaker dies. Many of these languages don’t contribute substantially to others, as Latin did. They just disappear, and with them, a way of seeing the world and expressing that vision.

Five “language hotspots” have emerged, places where languages are dying at the greatest rate. This map depicts them:

Source: http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/langhotspots/

National Geographic’s Enduring Voices program attempts to preserve languages that are threatened with extinction. Linguists seek out the surviving speakers of a language to record their speech and memories. In Australia they discovered the last speaker of a language previously thought to be extinct. Communities are also establishing programs to pass to a new generation the languages no longer spoken at home.

Linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf once observed, “Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.” If this is true, then the death of a language is as significant as the loss of a species in an ecosystem.

Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words offers scholarship and observations on current English usage. His weekly newsletter recently included a reader’s question about why the letters a and e were joined together in the Old English digraph æ, called “ash.”

His answer explains the background and process in the clear style that makes his newsletter my favorite bit of Saturday-morning reading. Here is an excerpt (used with permission):

The first writing in English, in the fifth century AD, was brought over by the Jutes, Angles and Saxons from the continent of Europe. When they wrote, which they didn’t much, these Germanic peoples did so in runes, the letters being shaped so that they could be cut into hard materials like wood, bone or stone. The runic script was called futhorc, from its first six letters (th, called thorn, was one letter). …

The problem for the early English scribes was that English included sounds that didn’t fit the letters of the Latin alphabet. So they added three new ones, to which they gave the names ash, thorn and wynn, taken from the names of the letters that represented the same sounds in the runic alphabet. They also added eth (a crossed d) and (later) yogh. The one you’re referring to is ash, æ, which was created by combining a and e, technically a ligature or a digraph. The runic name meant the ash tree as well as the letter. The sound was that of the a in cat or apple, if you say them with a standard British English accent, though it varied in length. …

But ash is almost completely obsolete (the name itself is used only by linguists studying Old English; its modern official title is Latin ligature ae). It has been replaced in British English in all but the most scholarly or old-fashioned writing by ae (hence aegis, aeon and leukaemia, where older works had ægis, æon and leukæmia). Americans sidestepped the problem by extending the change to e to most such words, creating spellings such as archeology, eon and leukemia. Brits are increasingly doing the same, so — as a notable example — medieval is now standard, with mediaeval hardly seen, let alone the even older mediæval. …

The complete article, including samples of the runes

Spelling gives us enough trouble as it is. What would happen if we adopted those 5 letters back into the alphabet?

September 15 - October 15 is Hispanic Heritage Month, a time to celebrate the achievements and contributions of Hispanic Americans.

In a scene from The West Wing, President Bartlett challenges his staff to list all 13 punctuation marks in English. They begin bravely but founder, and he has to finish the list for them.

Too bad they missed National Punctuation Day. Oh, wait! That’s TODAY!

National Punctuation Day was established 4 years ago as a way to remind people that those little marks carry meaning and need attention. Most of us have probably seen these classic examples of meaning changed by punctuation:

Give me a man who reads!
Give me a man! Who reads?

Woman without her man is nothing.
Woman — without her, man is nothing.

Mother said, “Tommy, the turtle has escaped.”
Mother said, “Tommy the turtle has escaped.”
“Mother,” said Tommy, “the turtle has escaped.”
“Mother,” said Tommy the turtle, “has escaped!”

As teachers we see reminders every day that punctuation needs to be taught, retaught, and even overtaught to prevent unfortunate lapses like these.

OK, here’s the quiz: which punctuation mark is missing? (No fair looking at your keyboard. The answer is below.)

Be sure to visit The Web of Language and The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks for more thoughts on the skillful use of punctuation.

Scroll down for the missing mark
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The missing mark is the apostrophe.

(I missed Talk like a Pirate Day — shiver me timbers! Special thanks to Alex for the heads-up today!)

At a convention of oilmen, the speaker from Texas called the neighboring state of Oklahoma an “outlying province of Texas.”

The next speaker, an Oklahoman, started off his talk with, “First of all, there ain’t no state that can out-lie Texas.”

Today is the birthday of an icon. Literally.

is 25 years old today, according to Professor Scott E. Fahlman of Carnegie Mellon University. He proposed using a colon, hypen, and right parenthesis to suggest a smile in 1982. His post proved to be the first of a series of keystroke sets now known as emoticons or “smilies.” In 1982, of course, everything online was text-based, and people had to learn to attach an agreed-upon meaning to the unorthodox punctuation.

Smiley has not grown up as an only child. In the same post Fahlman also created :-(, the frownie. Others followed:

• — the very big grin
• — winking
• :-p — sticking tongue out
• B-) — the person is wearing glasses
• :-X — “My lips are sealed.”

(Today’s browsers render the most common text smilies in graphic form.)

Because tone is often difficult to determine in text, smilies serve a useful purpose in conveying meaning in chat rooms and e-mail. Teachers would like to think that we teach our students to write so that their words convey their tone, and in formal writing, it must. In informal writing, however, smilies are part of code switching, identifying newbies and outsiders. (Don’t we all remember the moment someone said, “Turn your head to the left”? We were strangers no more.) As text in a busy chat room flies up the screen, we don’t have time to analyze a statement thoughtfully. A well placed smiley prevents misunderstandings and subsequent flames. Smilies might be called the diplomats of the Web.

Happy birthday, Ambassador Smiley!

September 15 - October 15 has been designated Hispanic Heritage Month since 1988. It’s a time to celebrate the achievements and contributions of Hispanic Americans. The Library of Congress Community Center Exhibit this month features resources for teaching about Hispanic contributions to American life. Follow links to primary sources and a wealth of related resources. Scroll down for lesson plans on cultural rituals and oral history.

The Department of Labor offers links with additional information, and lists of famous Hispanic-Americans such as singer Christina Aguilera, baseball star Jose Canseco, and astronaut Ellen Ochoa, are also available at other sites online.

According to the U. S. Census Bureau:

• Hispanic-Americans are the fastest-growing ethnic group in the United States, projected to equal 24% of the American population by the year 2025.
• On average the U. S. Hispanic population is about 10 years younger than the U. S. population as a whole.
• The number of Hispanic-owned businesses grew 3 times faster than the national average between 1997 and 2002.
• More than 1.1 million Hispanic-American men and women have served their country in the armed forces.
• Approximately 11% of all college students are Hispanic.

During this month it seems especially appropriate to recognize Hispanic/Latino American authors whose works have entered the curriculum on a variety of grade levels.