"Irritating nouns-as-verbs"

Henry Hitchings has a piece in the NYT this morning called "Those Irritating Nouns-as-Verbs", here. It's about stuff of the type "do you have a solve for this problem" and "let's all focus on the build" (his examples). I was all set for a rant about peevology and how nouning is just as fun as verbing, but it's much less peevologically driven than I first assumed.

Still, the real value in the piece, I'd say, is Grant Snider's graphic, starting with the title.

Calling multilinguals ...

Noted linguist and novelist Rosina Lippi has an intriguing request out ... here. 

She's got this scenario:

one character tells another character that there’s a list of about ten phrases he can say in fifty different languages or dialects of languages. She doesn’t believe him, and challenges him. The sentence she chooses (of the ones on his list) is “Why did you kill your wife?”

She needs the last sentence translated into lots of dialects and languages by native speakers. Help her out. 

Rosina concludes "Eventually you’ll find out what I’m doing with this." I'm dying -- figuratively, not literally -- to know she's up to here. 

MOOCs

Things have been too quiet around here lately, but that has its place too, I guess. One of the linguistics blogs we don't call attention to often enough is Faculty of Language. They have a really good new post on MOOCs. Well, 'good' in the sense of informative and likely right. Very 'bad' in the sense of 'wow, that's depressing'. Worth a read.

In the meantime, an announcement is due soon here at Wisconsin about a new chancellor.