Miscellanea

Little things are starting to pile up that don't or no longer warrant full posts …

• Petraeus = Betray us is suddenly a very famous aptronym. It's been popping up of late, but now has exploded: see here, or catch how MoveOn was condemned in Congress today for using it.
• Over at Greenbelt, the Ridger has picked up something here from the news feed (on the right) that I just couldn't figure out what to do with: Some Army billboards in the Chicago area aiming to recruit Arabic speakers. A guy is offended because he can't read them. Part of what gave me pause was the one line in English: "If you can read this, call Mohamed." The 'if you can read this' thing is kind of cute (and gets a ton of g-hits, like "If you can read this ... consider yourself in the minority"), but even though it's a very common given name, in this context 'call Mohamed' sounds like some odd euphemism somehow. Thanks, Ridger, I owe you.
  
• And Mark Liberman just beat me to a piece in a Straight Dope column from last week's Onion, about the shrinking-American-vocabulary hoax.
• Omniglot — the blog is something I hadn't read until just recently and he picks up on the degrammaticalization here, with some interesting comments. Separated by a Common Language also had a nice post on the topic, with some pieces of the puzzle that were new to me.