Digital Commons Network^™

Poems - Part I, Jon Bannon

Word Ways

A collection of poems.

Dartboard Words, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

The standard dartboard should be familiar to most readers, although most would be hard pressed to reel off the exact arrangement of the numbers 1 to 20.

Anagram Quiz 15, . Anil

Word Ways

A quiz.

Instructions To Authors

Word Ways

Instructions to authors and back cover.

Functional Tautonyms, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Numerical Tautonyms such as GULP (G+U=28 AND L+P also =28) have appeared in previous issues of Word Ways. Letters (in the case 2) from each half of the word are added (+) according to their alphabetical values. However, there are other ways of achieving numerical tautonyms.

Wolves In Sheep's Clothing, . Anil

Word Ways

Don't believe your eyes! There's a bunch of animals out there disguised as other animals, braving their niches. This map of 100 disguises or "hides" hides 50 hiders.

Beheading And Joining, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Two words which begin with the same letter, or group of letters, are beheaded i.e. the common letter/letter group is removed. The two remaining sets of letters are joined to form a word. I set a minimum of 5 letters for this word.

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

Answers and solutions to the puzzles and quizzes contained in this issue.

Calling On The Homophone, Richard Lederer

Word Ways

Too-Fore-sics-ate! Homophones we appreciate!

Homophones are pairs (pears, pares), triads, or more capacious clusters of words that sound the same but are spelled differently and communicate different meanings.

The Year In Bloopers, Don Hauptman

Word Ways

Once again, it was a banner year for blunders and boners, flubs and fluffs, gaffes and goofs, slips and solecisms. Most such lapses are simply depressing, because they confirm America's diminishing literacy levels. But some at least possess the redeeming value of amusement.

A Pangrammatic Variant Of Sudoku, Christopher Mcmanus

Word Ways

A sudoku grid contains 81 squares. Any three subgrids contain 27 squares. To my knowledge, no one has exploited how close this number is to 26, the size of the English alphabet. In this article, I propose a simple way to link the full alphabet to the standard sudoku grid.

Linguistics Grad Students Have Role Teaching Assistants In Opie, Ohio University College Of Arts & Sciences

All Forum Articles

No abstract provided.

Foreign Language News, Georgia Southern University

World Languages & Cultures: News & Publications (2013-2023)

• Dr. David Seaman exhibited in intertextual art show in Paris
• Dr. Mike McGrath lectures at the Royal Academy of History and Art in San Quirce
• Dr. Marcela Ruiz-Funes published in Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching
• Dr. Olga Amarie published in the Cincinnati Romance Review
• Dr. Catherine Johnson recognized for efforts to incorporate STEM instruction into German language learnin

Writing & Linguistics News, Georgia Southern University

Writing & Linguistics News (2012-2022)

• Writing & Linguistics brings Nicholas Kristof to campus

Writing & Linguistics News, Georgia Southern University

Writing & Linguistics News (2012-2022)

• Join our faculty!

"Le Créole Est Chez Moi": Le Créole Haïtien Et Dany Laferrière, Jessica Gerdisch

French: Student Scholarship & Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Culturally And Linguistically Diverse Students' Standardized English Literacy Achievement And Language Redesignation Status: A Multiple Regression Analysis, Matthew R. Weyer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The initial No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation stated that by 2014 all students would reach proficiency in all subjects. However, this has not been the case as NCLB has had mixed effects for culturally and linguistically diverse students (CLDs) (Hopkins, Thompson, Linquanti, Hakuta, & August, 2013). Language redesignation policies, often termed reclassification, can be considered a significant contributor as the variation in policies and practices alone has led to significantly different achievement for CLDs across the country (Hill, Weston, & Hayes, 2014; Mahoney & MacSwan, 2005) and has created an expansive achievement gap with their non-CLD White counterparts (Reardon, …

Yo, Get A Mate, Goy!, Richard Canty

Word Ways

The following is a chess fantasy which describes the progress of a game using palindromes. Here and there, narration explains the various episodes. The subtitles throughout the piece are themselves palindromes and prefigure the coming developments.

Pros And Cons - 1, Steve Kahan

Word Ways

Some situations in life have distinct advantages, while others present clear disadvantages. The same can be said about the twenty words for which clues have been supplied in Column A below. Each word sought there can be prefaced with either PRO or CON to create a new one whose definition appears somewhere in Column B.

Ebola, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

As distressing as the disease and its spread is to all of us, ebola
is interesting to the wordplay-loving logologist from several viewpoints, Firstly, it has a number of transposals.

The False Dichotomy Between Suggestive And Descriptive Trademarks, Jake Linford

Scholarly Publications

Classifying a trademark as descriptive rather than suggestive fundamentally alters the scope of trademark protection. A descriptive mark, derived from a feature of the product or service sold, only qualifies for protection after the mark has acquired source significance, i.e., consumers see it as a trademark. A suggestive trademark, which indirectly invokes qualities of the product or service, is protected without evidence of source significance. Courts often struggle to distinguish between suggestive and descriptive marks. The effort would nevertheless be reasonable if the differences between suggestive and descriptive marks justified their disparate legal treatment. But in light of cognitive and …

A Linguistic Justification For Protecting "Generic" Trademarks, Jake Linford

Scholarly Publications

A trademark is created when a new meaning is added to an existing word or when a new word is invented in order to identify the source of a product. This Article contends that trademark law fails in critical ways to reflect our knowledge of how words gain or lose meaning over time and how new meanings become part of the public lexicon, a phenomenon commonly referred to as semantic shift. Although trademark law traditionally turns on protecting consumers from confusing ambiguity, some of its doctrines ignore consumer perception in whole or in part. In particular, the doctrine of trademark …

Longest Anagrams, . Anil

Word Ways

Using "anagrams" in the narrow sense of meaningful or COGNATE TRANSPOSALS, what are the longest single-word examples?

Stance Taking In Japanese Newspaper Discourse: The Use And Non-Use Of Copulas Da And Dearu, Michiko Kaneyasu

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

The present study aims to demonstrate how writers display their stances in information-oriented written discourse. In particular, the paper analyzes nominal sentences in three newspaper subgenres, and explicates how the Japanese copulas da and dearu , which are normally considered stylistic variants in written language, are used by journalists as important grammatical resources for expressing their epistemic and evaluative stances toward certain types of information conveyed in nominal sentences. Da in newspaper discourse is used as a marker of the writer’s commitment to the relevance of the information in the given discourse context. Dearu, on the other hand, marks …

An Exception To The Rule? Lone French Nouns In Tunisian Arabic, Shana Poplack, Lotfi Sayahi, Nahed Mourad, Nathalie Dion

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

Reports on language mixing involving Arabic often qualify that language as resistant to constraints operating on other language pairs. But many fail to situate the purported violations with respect to recipient and donor languages, making it impossible to ascertain whether these are exceptional code-switches or (nonce) borrowings; isolated cases or robust patterns. We address these issues through variationist analysis of Tunisian Arabic/French bilingual discourse. Focusing on conflict sites that reveal which grammar is operative when the other language is accessed, we compare quantitatively the behavior of lone French-origin nouns in Arabic with their counterparts in both donor and recipient languages. …

Aspect And The Russian Verbal Base Form, Oscar E. Swan

Russian Language Journal

Roman Jakobson’s 1948 single-stem analysis of the Russian verb inspired many imitations and applications around the Slavic world, especially in American Russian pedagogy, where the names Alexander Lipson, Charles Townsend, and Maurice Levin come most readily to mind (see References). The first is a by-now dated two-part textbook series, grammatically innovative for its time, that is still available on the internet (although as far as I know it is not actually used anywhere), while the applied linguistic works by Townsend and Levin are still in print and are commonly used in graduate courses on the structure of Russian. It is …

Review: The Forms Of Russian, Grant H. Lundberg

Russian Language Journal

The Forms of Russian is a traditional approach to the fundamentals of Russian morphology based largely on the work of Jakobson, Levin, Lipson and Townsend. It is essentially the introductory course on Russian morphology that many, if not most, working North American Slavists took in graduate school. The work arises from such a course taught over many years by the author. The book is clearly intended for future teachers of Russian. The two main goals of the book are (1) to make working with and using Russian easier and (2) to explain how to establish a systematic description of Russian. …

Being Japanese In English: The Social And Functional Role Of English Loanwords In Japanese, Shalina Omar

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis investigates native speaker attitudes towards English loanwords in Japanese and the ways in which these loanwords are used. The imperialism and hegemony of English can often cause anger or worry for the preservation of the cultural identity of the borrowing language. However, the results from a 9-page sociolinguistic questionnaire suggest that English loanwords are overwhelmingly seen as useful and necessary and are generally associated with positive attitudes. Additionally, many native Japanese speakers feel that loanwords provide more options for expression, both functionally and as a possible pragmatic tool for performing Japaneseness. On the other hand, overuse of loanwords—especially …

A Public Duty: Medicine And Commerce In Nineteenth-Century American Literature And Culture, Heather E. Chacon

Theses and Dissertations--English

Using recent criticism on speculation and disability in addition to archival materials, “A Public Duty: Medicine and Commerce in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture” demonstrates that reform-minded nineteenth-century authors drew upon the representational power of public health to express excitement and anxiety about the United States’ emerging economic and political prominence. Breaking with a critical tradition holding that the professionalization of medicine and authorship served primarily to support and define an ascending middle class, I argue that the authors such as Robert Montgomery Bird, Fanny Fern, George Washington Cable, and Pauline Hopkins fuse the rhetoric of economic policy and public …

Shakespeare's Dictionary: One Playwright's Influence On The Modern English Lanugage, Jennifer Walton

Undergraduate Distinction Papers

William Shakespeare is considered to the be the father of Modern English, but what most people do not realize is that he influenced much more in English than just the language. The number of phrases and words he created is over-exaggerated, he borrowed from many other languages, and he was one of the first people to document modern medical disorders. Not to mention Shakespeare was writing during one of the most lexically innovative time periods, so he helped aid in the transition from using “thee” to using “you” when addressing another person. Moving away from language specifically, Shakespeare’s writing has …