Assorted links for your consideration:
- The MLA has a neat interactive language map and accompanying data tables, broken down by zip code and county, based on answers to the 2000 U.S. census question “Does this person speak a language other than English at home?” According to the data, Tagalog (the Philippine dialect dominant on my mother’s side of the family) ranks fifth among foreign languages, and slightly more than half of Tagalog speakers live in California. The more commonly spoken foreign languages in the U.S. are Spanish, Chinese, French, and German. (Link via The Map Room.)
- Briticisms (or is that “Britishisms”?) are creeping into American English. I guess this has been pretty obvious, but an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education points out the more stealthy ones, as used in the press, most of which I take for granted, not striking me as having a British provenance, like “to go missing,” “sell-by date” (in a metaphorical sense, referring to something past its prime), and “run-up” or “lead-up” (to an election, say) (“American Idioms Have Gone Missing,” 18 June).
- Couture goes from runway to fairway? “[G]olf has become more athletic, and the players’ clothes are beginning to reflect the new, cooler muscularity that is being flexed on the PGA Tour. The young cubs chasing Tiger—Charles Howell III, Justin Rose, Hank Kuehne, Luke Donald, Aaron Baddeley, and Adam Scott—are known as much for their attention-grabbing threads as for their new-generation swings” (“Dressing to the 9-Irons” in the Times, 13 June). Cute.
- In Mongolia family names were taken away in the 1920s by Communists, and Mongolians are just now, within the last decade, bringing back old names and finding new ones (Globe and Mail, 12 June).