I don’t swear! I find that if I use up the swear words in day-to-day situations, I will have nothing to use in the critical moments when I actually need to let the steam out. Interestingly, when I do get those moments, I still do not really swear. But I need to know that such release vent exists.
So, I was relieved (if a bit surprised) to find that a competition was held on swearing words and expressions in Esperanto with prizes for top three places and that there were enough candidates offered to need the judges.
When I speak to other people about Esperanto, they often ask whether there are any practical uses to knowing the language beyond the language itself.
I used to talk about Pasporta Servo, ability to listen to other countries’ radio and global community. Now I just go straight for the big guns.
I ask them whether they ever tried learning another language. Usually the answer is yes and usually the language was never learned well.
Most of the comments to this blog are - unfortunately - spam. WordPress’s Akismet filters them out and I periodically review and delete them all. I don’t know why I bother, but once I had a real comment black-listed, so I keep making the effort. It is also semi-interesting to see how the spam attacks changed over time from automatic to semi-manual looking efforts.
Today’s collection had a comment that gave me a double take.
There is a fight brewing between David Rothman of TeleRead and Bill Janssen of Plucker fame. The point of contention (as I understand the issue) is what would be good format to produce e-books in.
Bill’s position is that any format that is not already accepted (specifically not html) is a lock-in and a disadvantage, whether that format is an open standard (like OpenReader) or a proprietary one (like Sony’s BBeB).
Many people say that they become vegetarians because they can not keep thinking that the meat they were eating came from a real animal - cow or sheep.
The rest of us can handle this problem by not thinking about the connection in too many details. Fortunately English, Russian and probably other languages help us by disassociating the name of the animal with the name of the meat that comes from it.