LinkedIn at last

After signing up years ago, but never actually doing anything with my account, I’ve finally set up my LinkedIn page. Connect to me and validate my existence. (And, you know, help me find a job when the time comes.)

From A.Word.A.Day e-mail list

lexiphanes (lex-SIF-uh-neez) noun

One who uses words pretentiously.

[From Greek lexiphanes (phrase monger), from lexis (word or phrase) + -phaneia
(to show).]

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D.C. has second-ugliest people in the nation

This is no surprise to anyone who watched Wag the Dog with an eye toward the (totally accurate, in my experience) casting, hair and costuming: Washington, D.C. has the second-ugliest people in the nation, according to Travel & Leisure.

1 4.53 Miami
2 4.50 San Diego
3 4.43 Charleston
4 4.40 Austin
5 4.34 Honolulu
6 4.31 Los Angeles
7 4.28 San Francisco
8 4.26 Minneapolis/St. Paul
9 4.25 New York
10 4.23 Denver
11 4.18 Chicago
12 4.14 Seattle
13 4.13 Phoenix/Scottsdale
14 4.10 Las Vegas
15 4.09 Nashville
16 4.09 Boston
17 4.08 Santa Fe
18 4.07 Portland, Oregon
19 4.04 Atlanta
20 4.00 New Orleans
21 3.99 Orlando
22 3.99 San Antonio
23 3.98 Dallas/Fort Worth
24 3.95 Washington, D.C.
25 3.75 Philadelphia

The nation’s capital ranks #4 in intelligence, though, and #1 in “nice personality.”

I don’t know about Miami, but whenever I go there, San Diego is always laughably full of beautiful people, of all ages, as though some casting agent had just populated the street moments before outsiders arrived.

Predicting the future of English

NPR had a pretty cool story yesterday about what the English language of the future will look like.

Two new studies published Wednesday in the journal Nature explore how languages evolve.

Tecumseh Fitch, a professor of psychology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, studies the evolution of language and wrote the introduction for the Nature studies.

A blog I can “get behind”

This is what the Internet is for: Making fun of unnecessary quotation marks.

From the AP:

Isn’t it “funny” how something can “really annoy” you for ages and then you discover via “the Internet” that the same thing “really annoys” thousands of “other people,” too?

Yes, AP writer, it is “funny!”

The blight that Bethany Keeley exposes on her “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks (http://quotation-marks.blogspot.com ) is of a benign sort, of course, nothing like global warming or endangered wildlife.

But it bothers people mightily just the same, as this 24-year-old grad student and language-lover has discovered from the hundreds, occasionally thousands of visitors she gets daily. And nary a day goes by when she doesn’t receive a bunch of e-mails with photographic evidence of quote abuse, misuse or overuse.

As in:

-The sign in Fletcher, Okla., which advertised a tractor club’s ANNUAL SHOW — “Labor Day Weekend.”

-The restaurant billboard in Madison, Wis., which felt the need to put quotes around “Lunch” and “Dinners.”

-The bathroom sign that asked visitors to Leave the Light “On” during business hours. (“On” was also underlined. Twice.)

-The currently featured “Good Luck Amy” cake, which not only wastes frosting on those quote marks, but also adds parentheses around the whole message.

There’s also a regular stop sign with a handwritten “Stop” beneath it, for good measure apparently. Then there’s the security guard at a rest area in Mississippi, a “SECURITY GUARD” sign beneath him that unwittingly casts doubt on the whole enterprise.