The word of the today, Friday April 13, is:

Paraskavedekatriaphobia

Dr. Language at YourDictionary.com defines Paraskavedekatriaphobia as “The Fear of Friday the Thirteenth, a form of triskaidekaphobia, the fear of the number thirteen.”

Usage: The fear of Friday the 13th originated in two fears: the fear of Friday and the fear of the number “13.” Why? Well, no one knows so we won’t repeat any of the urban myths that have arisen to explain either. The fear of 13 is clearly much greater than the fear of Friday, since the 13th floor is regularly omitted from high-rise buildings, 13th Street and 13th Avenue are often omitted in street numbering, and no one would dare invite 13 guests to sit around the table for dinner–at least one would surely die within a year.

Suggested Usage: Most people fear this word more than breaking a mirror while walking under a ladder to avoid a black cat on Friday 13th. It is long but pronounceable with a little practice: “Paraskavedekatriaphobia is among the leading causes of loss of productivity since many sufferers avoid coming to work on that day.” For the adjective, just replace the final [a] with a [c], “Freemont is an old paraskavedekatriaphobic who never leaves the house on Friday the 13th.”

Etymology: Today’s word is a humorous concoction that no Greek would ever utter. It seems to be based on the Greek word for Friday “paraskeue” + dekatria “thirteen” (deka “ten” + tria “three;” not “thirteenth,” which is “dekatreis”) + fobos “fear” + ia, a noun suffix. “Friday the Thirteenth” in Modern Greek is “Paraskeue kai dekatreis.” If you are worried today, we thought you might like to know that your worry has a name.

From: Dr. Language, YourDictionary.com

If you ever use Wikipedia as a resource for linguistics, you may be interested in a challenge currently going on over at the LINGUIST List.

Inspired by a letter sent by Barbara Partee regarding the coordinated efforts of a group of Russian linguists to improve linguistics coverage in the Russian-language Wikipedia, the LINGUIST has started a mini-funding drive to support a half-time LINGUIST staffer to coordinate similar efforts in the English-language Wikipedia.

The LINGUIST List would act as a hub and facilitator by calling for volunteers, coordinating efforts, identifying Wikipedia pages that need to be created or updated, and ensuring accuracy and consistency across the entries. As Wikipedia is a massively popular source of information, this would benefit Linguistics as a whole.

To read more about this effort, visit:
http://www.linguistlist.org/donation/fund-drive2007/wikipedia/

According to an online survey by dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster, the word that best summed up 2006 is: truthiness – “truth that comes from the gut, not books.

Truthiness made its debut on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report in October 2005.

This is not the first award for the word – it was also awarded the 16th annual Word of the Year (2005) by the American Dialect Society, who defined it as “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.”

Check out this interactive language map of Canada, produced by the CBC. Click on a province to display the top 5 languages spoken at home for each province and territory of Canada, according to the 2001 census. BC’s top five? English (3,521,730); Chinese languages (208,080); Punjabi (125,920); French (53,615); and Tagalog, or Filipino (37,830).

Nunavut’s numbers give an interesting snapshot of the area:
– Inuktitut speakers outnumber English speakers, and,
– Chinese language speakers and Tagalog (Filipino) speakers are tied for 4th place with 20 speakers each.

If you’re looking for more detailed information on the languages of Canada, you can try Stats Canada Census 2001 Topic Based Tabulations and look for #6 in the list, Language Composition of Canada. Tables include:

These tables provide a comprehensive breakdown of languages by a wide range of variables such as age, gender, education, and income. If you use the 20/20 software that StatsCan provides, you can pull out the data for just the variables you are interested in (rather than looking at all the provinces or all languages, for example).

Statistical data can be challenging, so if you’re having trouble pulling out the numbers you need, please come down to the Koerner Library reference desk (2nd floor) and chat with a librarian. (Or contact me directly; details at the top left.)

Does the sound of a word (phonology) tell you anything about how it is used (its lexical category)? Or is the relationship arbitrary? The standard view since Saussure has been NO, there is no correlation between word sound and word meaning. However, a recent paper by Cornell University researchers argues that adults do use the relationship between how nouns and verbs sound and how they are used to guide their sentence comprehension.

The paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) to which UBC Library subscribes. Read it here, or, read the news brief from Newswise for a quick summary.