Monthly Archives: February 2016

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/fashion/i-now-pronounce-you-husband-and-husband.html?_r=0

The Los Angeles County Library is celebrating the Oxford English Dictionary during the month of March. Explore this rich and exciting website: LFLA.ORG/OED

A lot of vocabulary has been eliminated from the current version of the SAT tests. An amusing article in The Economist incorporates the lost vocabulary into a story: http://www.theworldin.com/article/10654/elegy-lost-verbiage What do you think about the elimination of this vocabulary?

The modal auxiliaries carry a lot of weight, as became evident in the Paris conference on climate change: http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2015/12/15/shall-should-and-the-fate-of-the-earth/

Attempts to reform French spelling by removing the circumflex or eliminating some hyphens (changes approved, by the way, by the august Académie Française) have met strenuous disapproval by traditionalists: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/06/world/europe/french-spelling-changes-26-years-in-the-making-cause-a-fracas.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share

Akira Okrent and illustrator Sean O’Neill have produced another great whiteboard video on the history of English spelling: http://mentalfloss.com/article/62995/why-english-spelling-so-weird