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Showing posts from April, 2011

Why are there so many languages?

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Leading linguist Noam Chomsky poses one of the central question in this short video here . The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics (Oxford Paperback Reference)

Is it bale? Or bail? And what about bailout?

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The word bailout has become closely associated with the idea of financial rescue -    to bail out the banks.  But it has many subtle usages - and two spellings! 1. The literal use of bail/bale is to abandon abruptly as in making an emergency exit from an aeroplane in a parachute.  2. The literal meaning of   to bail out  is to remove water from a leaky boat.  3. It is now more common to use bail   in a figurative/metaphorical sense: The minister has bailed on the government's housing policy ( announced his opposition) . The actor bailed on the script (stopped reading his lines with any show of conviction)  4. 'Bail out' is also used metaphorically but usually with a closer connection to the literal meaning: The pilot bailed out of his plane but not Bob has bailed out on us and gone home. 5. The noun is sometimes spelled as one word: bailout. 6. There is a dispute over the spelling of bail and bale - bail is probably used more frequently but both are allowed b