It's not all high tea and crumpets

Posted on December 28, 2009 by Leona

riot-police What’s going on with the UK?

Like a billion little pin-pricks, the myriad stories of the UK turning into a giant big-brother, police state are circulating, just under the surface of the regular media. I hadn’t been paying it no mind; I don’t necessarily remember the UK being that way, and it’s always a bit jarring to hear people describe it that way.

But. I DO remember the “twitchiness” in the air in the run-up to the time I left. A sort of perpetual calm-before-the-storm. It’s easy to forget about other parts of the country: I remember on some brief trips up north to places like Bradford and Manchester and having a very distinct feeling that there was something in the air; that it would only take a spark to light shit up once and for all… Continue reading →

Fitness amongst human languages

Posted on January 9, 2009 by Leona

Human languages are duking it out, apparently.

Here’s a rather interesting google answers page pitching English and Spanish as the main contenders. It mentions something about spanish fragmenting and diluting less over time than English, the little bastard language that could (or, as Orson Scott Card renamed it in some of his fictions, ‘Stark’).

Possible runners-up for world domination are the usual suspects: Chinese, Hindi, French, Russian, Arabic and Portuguese (take that, Africans. And Central Asians. And native and indigenous peoples everywhere). Continue reading →