The Lexicographer's Rules

;I’m very wary of statistics on how many people speak English as a second language. In my experience, those who claim fluency are far from fulfilling my (perhaps lofty) definition of the word. Countless thousands of businesspeople have a passable command of it, enough to get them through a meeting or type up an e-mail, but they are not fluent, nor is the language being batted around conference halls anything better than a sorry dilution of the English language. It’s a nasty “lite” version called International English where everyone is on a first-name basis, and nobody’s quite sure what all those apostrophes replace. It has no style, no poetry, no nuance, and no purpose other than to do business. It is indeed the new Lingua Franca, and will ensure only that you’ll get your martini dry, a room for the night and increase your third quarter earnings. It will not equip you to enjoy James Joyce, or even Dr. Seuss. It is nothing to rejoice about. (Source Link)

;Away from home, I was in a small hostel, Ningbo. The moment I stepped into my room, I saw a cockroach creeping on the bed. “Oh, dirty!” I couldn’t help shouting these words out. The owner of that hostel, a thirty-something woman, was standing beside me, but she seemed totally indifferent to what she saw, and tried to kill the cockroach with the pillow I was gonna use. She failed—the cockroach disappeared quickly, finding a nice place to hide below the bed. The owner shrugged her shoulders as if to say that there was nothing else she could do about it. (Source Link)

;Come to Montenegro—Your Car is Already There! used to be a tongue-in-cheek tourist slogan aimed at Westerners.

;We are all living longer; there are fewer children. You can’t strike against demographic developments like that. (Source Link)

;The imbalance in links is far greater than relative numbers would suggest. Once again, if you assumed that links were completely independent of language, you would expect about 54% of all Icelandic links to point to English sites, and 0.9% of English links to point to Icelandic ones. Predictably enough, both languages have fewer links to each other because of the language barrier, but to a very different degree. Icelandic blogs underlink to English ones by a factor of about 4.5 (54% predicted,12% actual). But English blogs underlink Icelandic ones by a factor of 80. Just the fact that they’re writing in Icelandic makes these 3,000 bloggers eighty times less visible to us than an equivalent group of English-language bloggers would be. I propose we call this ‘underlinking’ coefficient the “Bennett Factor”, in honor of the great thinker who said “Our common language is English. And our common task is to ensure that our non-English-speaking children learn this common language.” Our Bennett Factors to other languages remain astronomical. We continue to keep ourselves isolated from world opinion, which is particularly troubling at a time when our country’s politics are becoming more exceptionalist and unilateral. (Source Link)