Here’s an apt description of William Shakespeare’s contribution to the English language. If you follow the link, there’s also an interesting story to go with it:

You know when you’re making a pot you put it on a wheel, you make it round, and then you put it in the fire and it gets hard? It was the same with English, and the fire was Shakespeare.

According to CNN, American regional accents are thriving quite nicely.

Some of these are brilliant. I’m glad I wasn’t sipping a Pepsi when I saw Keith Richards and….

Via MTV:

It deals extensively with souls — about keeping them whole and the evil required to split them in two. After one hero falls beyond the veil of life, his whispers are still heard. It starts with the premise that love can save you from death and ends with a proclamation that a sacrifice in the name of love can bring you back from it.

Harry Potter is followed by house-elves and goblins — not disciples — but for the sharp-eyed reader, the biblical parallels are striking. Author J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” books have always, in fact, dealt explicitly with religious themes and questions, but until “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” they had never quoted any specific religion.

It is wrong to claim that the Harry Potter series is “Christian” literature. It is equally wrong to fail to recognize the pervasive Christian imagery and themes J. K. Rowling weaves into her story. She may or may not be as devout or orthodox J. R. R. Tolkien or C. S. Lewis (two other Brits who wrote about fantastic worlds were magic is real), but she has clearly drunk from the same spiritual streams.

(H/T: Scot McKnight)

Mark Liberman of Language Log asks, “Is a bad writing system a Good Thing?” He wonders whether there is a correlation between the difficulty of a language’s writing system and cultural and economic advancement.

There are some simple factors that will guarantee such a correlation: national languages that were recently reduced to writing tend to have historically shallow and rationally-designed orthographies; and the countries for which this is true tend to be relatively poor and underdeveloped, simply because otherwise their literacy traditions would have started many centuries earlier. In some cases, like Turkish, special circumstances permitted a recent and radical orthographic reform. Spanish seems simply to have lucked out, by having a fairly shallow and transparent system to start with, and then undergoing relatively few orthographically-opaque sound changes. But around the world, countries who came late to the table of literacy tend to have relatively transparent and easy-to-learn orthographies; and the same countries tend, for roughly the same reasons, to remain relatively undeveloped economically, to have relatively little cultural influence outside their borders, and so on.

You could go beyond these trivial historical associations, and make an argument that an unnecessarily complex and hard-to-learn writing system is genuinely and causally a Good Thing from a political and economic point of view.  According to this story, a crappy orthography — in a society where literacy matters — creates a meritocracy based on verbal aptitude and the willingness to work hard at difficult and arbitrary socially-prescribed tasks. Mastering the orthographic system is a necessary (and sometimes even sufficient) condition for economic success, and this tends to offer a path out of poverty to the bright and ambitious children of the masses, and  to create a handicap for the most lazy and stupid children of the elite. You could point to the Mandarin system in Tang-dynasty China, or the English “grammar schools” back in the days when they taught Latin and then a standardized form of English.

But not so fast. Mark continues to say,

I’m skeptical that this argument remains valid, if it was ever valid to start with. For one thing, there are now many gatekeeper subjects that are more intrinsically useful, such as science, history, and math, (And of course we’ve levelled the global playing field by making it necessary for everyone to learn English, which has the third-worst orthography among modern languages, after Japanese and Chinese.)

….

Whatever its causes, the handicap is well documented. It’s true that we Americans (along with the British, the Japanese, and the Chinese) have collectively managed to overcome the handicap of our crappy writing system; but this is not evidence that the handicap has paradoxically done us good.

You’ll want to read the whole thing, especially if you’re not that terrific a speller.

They really should have thought of this years ago. Oh, wait. They did:

In what many are hailing as a breakthrough solution to Greece’s crippling debt crisis, Greece today offered to repay loans from the European Union nations by giving them a gigantic horse.

Finance ministers from sixteen EU nations awoke in Brussels this morning to find that a huge wooden horse had been wheeled into the city center overnight.

The horse, measuring several stories in height, drew mixed responses from the finance ministers, many of whom said they would have preferred a cash repayment of the EU’s bailout.

But German Chancellor Andrea Merkel said she “welcomed the beautiful wooden horse,” adding, “What harm could it possibly do?”

(H/T: rogueclassicism)

Barry Strauss lists his top six.

Ronald Helfrich has written an intriguing essay comparing and contrasting Biblical Studies with Buffy Studies: “Note to Self, Religion Freaky”: When Buffy Met Biblical Studies.

I’ll admit I know very little about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I am quite familiar with the kinds of “crystal ball textualism” Helfrich describes. Unfortunately, I cannot agree with him that the field of Biblical Studies is as immune to this tendency and he seems to think.

This is a fascinating essay about hermeneutics, among other things. I commend it to you.

Rogueclassicism has suggested a few. Here are my favorites: