NLPhilia Blog

I got some great news from Doug O’Brien: he’s started a blog, and will be making regular posts on the subject of Ericksonian language patterns. Doug is an amazing trainer, and he’s sharing his expertise with the world for free!

Go to the Web site or subscribe to the feed!

We all got good news(letter) from Barb Stepp today: her company, Excellence Quest, has acquired the right to produce and distribute the famous Zebu Cards!

Get your Zebu Cards from Excellence Quest!

As I read Randy Cassingham’s fantastic e-mail newsletter, This Is True, I was pleased to find that his “Bonzer Site of the Week” for this week is One Sentence: True stories, told in one sentence.

The Copyblogger blog recently held a contest:

Just to review, the idea behind the Twitter Writing Contest was simple… compose a story in exactly 140 characters and post it on Twitter. I want to thank everyone who participated, because there are a ton of talented writers out there even at 140 characters.

Ernest Hemingway, in response to a similar challenge, once wrote a story in six words: “For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.” I think that is the ultimate short story, but the winners of the Twitter Writing Contest did really well too. 🙂

A recent article in discovery News indicates that there are neurological differences between the experience of dyslexia in native readers of Chinese and native readers of English:

Dyslexia affects different parts of children’s brains depending on whether they are raised reading English or Chinese. That finding, reported in Monday’s online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, means that therapists may need to seek different methods of assisting dyslexic children from different cultures.

Read the rest at Discovery News from the Discovery Channel.

(Hat tip to BoingBoing!)

Additional note: I read an interesting book by a former dyslexic. It is called “The Gift of Dyslexia”. Check the author’s Web site for more information.

I dost.

For some time, the idea of learning to read Old English has been on my “someday maybe” list. To be able to enjoy Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the original language, the way it was spoken a thousand years ago, would be amazing.

I recently borrowed from the public library a course of lectures titled “History of the English Language” by Michael D.C. Drout, the Prentice Associate Professor of English at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. (Do you know why we use “apostrophe+s” to indicate possession? I do!) I was so impressed by his ability to make a potentially dry subject a lot of fun that I went to his home page. There I found gold:

• Anglo-Saxon Aloud: A daily reading of the entire Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, which includes all poems written in Old English (Free, a podcast)
• Beowulf Aloud: A Reading of Beowulf in Old English ($20, on CD)
• King Alfred’s Grammar: A tutorial on Old English (Free, HTML)
• Wormtalk and Slugspeak: Professor Drout’s blog

If you’re an English wonk like I am, I’m sure you’ll enjoy these.

[edit 2008-04-26: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was in a particular dialect of Middle English, not in Old English. Sorry about that.]

I found out that stifle is practically the only word which is an anagram of itself.

I’m enjoying the Calligraphic Button Catalog. 🙂

Remember the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis? Bandler and Grinder wrote about it in The Structure of Magic. I don’t recall if they mentioned it by name, though. The basic idea is that our language shapes our perceptions. I’ve been told that it’s been Soundly Disproven By Science.

And then along comes this article, titled “Babies See Pure Color, but Adults Peer Through Prism of Language“, in Wired Science:

When infant eyes absorb a world of virgin visions, colors are processed purely, in a pre-linguistic parts of the brain. As adults, colors are processed in the brain’s language centers, refracted by the concepts we have for them.

Thanks for the pointer, Boingboing.

If people aren’t taking you seriously, maybe it’s because of the way you’re communicating with them. Liz Strauss over at Successful Blog writes about the disconnect between a recent client’s goals and some of their marketing materials:

What do you do when you have big goals and you realize that your customer base sees you as a small-time operation? It’s time to realign your value proposition and how you offer your services to them.

Go read Does Your Value Proposition Say that You’re Small Time?

(I love the way she creates headlines. )

On the Lifehacker blog recently is an article on how to encode numbers into words so you can remember them more easily. (Read the comments, though, as most of the good information is in those.)

The jist of it is that each digit is given one or more consonant sounds, and vowels are free. So 491,744,962 ends up being “rabid carrier pigeon”, for example.

If you’re looking for a challenge, here’s pi to one million decimal places and phi to 20,000 places.

Read more at Lifehacker: Memorize Long Numbers Using the “Red Table”