dispatches from the new world of work

Most Beautiful Words

If you don't subscribe to "A word a day" from wordsmith.org, you don't know what you're missing! Every day provides an interesting word, organized into weekly themes.

The monthly newsletter adds some extra features. The latest issue told of a survey of 42,000 non-native speakers of English in which they voted for what they thought were the most beautiful words in English, with the top 10 being mother, passion, smile, love, eternity, fantastic, destiny, freedom, liberty, and tranquility. Peekaboo and pumpkin weren't far behind. Another article described an issue that is really just the tip of the iceberg—the linguistic consequences of global warming. The article shows how Arctic peoples don't have the words for the new species they are seeing as polar ice thaws and wildlife can live farther north.

Yesterday's word: Profluent, an adjective meaning "flowing smoothly."

Steve Yastrow posted this on 11/28/04.

Comments

Before reading too much into the "linguistic consequences of global warming", read the debunking by Geoffrey Pullum at http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001665.html

Pullum was the linguist who, years ago, debunked the "Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow" myth.

Posted by James Tauber at November 28, 2004 2:54 AM

Same service in French :

http://jclat.typepad.com/think/

Enjoy - rÃ©galez-vous.

Jean-Christophe Latournerie

Posted by JC Latournerie at November 28, 2004 7:34 AM

Fantastic - fabulous - radical!!! Neurolinguistics!!!

Posted by Freeman at November 28, 2004 10:29 AM

James -

Thanks for the Pullum link ... I loved it! More debate on language and linguistics is always fun.

How many words do Eskimos have for snow? I heard 23.

Posted by Steve Yastrow at November 28, 2004 7:00 PM

The Inuit don't have very many words for snow. See Pullum's wonderful book The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0226685349/).

His frustration with the false meme about the number of words for snow goes a long way to explaining his irritation at the myth that the Inuit don't have a word for robin.

Posted by Lance Knobel at November 29, 2004 12:33 PM