Passive voice from an activist IRS.

“Mistakes were made, but they were in no way due to any political or partisan motivation,” he wrote. “We are — and will continue to be — dedicated to reviewing all applications for tax-exempt status in an impartial manner.”

When Iran-Contra blew up, Reagan used this formulation, and I laughed then. As the father of two sons, there were times when we’d hear a crash in the kitchen and find something had been dropped. We’d ask what happened.

“It fell,” was the answer.

Yep, one minute the sugar bowl was on the table, the next minute it decided to fall off.

Here’s a cool interactive guide to southern accents as voiced by actors in memorable parts: they’re quite varied.

You have to listen closely to the choice of words liberals use. They’re often loaded.

Example #1. This week an NPR report on the effects of the sequester focused on a woman who will not get her free housing because of the cutbacks. They said (paraphrasing) “In 2008 she lost her job, her apartment and found herself homeless and pregnant.”

Wait: she “found” herself pregnant? Was this immaculate conception or did she mate carelessly? There are old and infirm people who truly need this program. She’s not one of them.

Example #2. President Obama called to congratulate NBA player Jason Collins for his bravery in coming out as gay. Obama referred to Collins as a “young man.” Collins is 34, which used to be regarded as nearly middle aged. Is 34 the new 20?

Example #3. Kathleen Parker noted…”repeatedly in the past several days, we’ve heard the argument that any interference with the over-the-counter sale of Plan B to any female of any age is blocking a woman’s right to self-determination. Fifteen-year-olds, where the Obama administration wants to set the limit, are girls, not women. And female parts do not a woman make any more than a correspondingly developed male makes the proud possessor a man.

So, in Obamaland, a 15-year old girl is a woman, but a 34 year old NBA player is a young man.

The 15-year old age limit for the Plan B ill is odd because it is below the age of consent. If a 15-year old is pregnant, someone committed statutory rape.

Aren’t liberals against rape?

Lately the chattering class has been changing how they pronounce words. For example, they like to say Nevaaaahda.

Which annoys residents of Nevada, who know the first “a” is pronounced like the “a” in bad.

Copenhagen gets mispronounced to sound like Haagen Dazs, which is a made up word. It should have a long “a” the way Americans have said it for years.

On the other hand, Bangladesh has a soft “a” to sound more like smoking weed that using a hammer.

Remember when bums were called bums?

Mark Steyn:

He who controls the language shapes the debate: In the same week the Associated Press announced that it would no longer describe illegal immigrants as “illegal immigrants,” the star columnist of the New York Times fretted that the Supreme Court seemed to have misplaced the style book on another fashionable minority. “I am worried,” wrote Maureen Dowd, “about how the justices can properly debate same-sex marriage when some don’t even seem to realize that most Americans use the word ‘gay’ now instead of ‘homosexual.’” She quoted her friend Max Mutchnick, creator of Will & Grace:

“Scalia uses the word ‘homosexual’ the way George Wallace used the word ‘Negro.’ There’s a tone to it. It’s humiliating and hurtful. I don’t think I’m being overly sensitive, merely vigilant.”

For younger readers, George Wallace was a powerful segregationist Democrat. Whoa, don’t be overly sensitive. There’s no “tone” to my use of the word “Democrat”; I don’t mean to be humiliating and hurtful: It’s just what, in pre-sensitive times, we used to call a “fact.” Likewise, I didn’t detect any “tone” in the way Justice Scalia used the word “homosexual.” He may have thought this was an appropriately neutral term, judiciously poised midway between “gay” and “Godless sodomite.” Who knows? He’s supposed to be a judge, and a certain inscrutability used to be part of what we regarded as a judicial temperament. By comparison, back in 1986, the year Scalia joined the Supreme Court, the chief justice, Warren Burger, declared “there is no such thing as a fundamental right to commit homosexual sodomy.” I don’t want to be overly sensitive, but I think even I, if I rewound the cassette often enough, might be able to detect a certain tone to that.

Nonetheless, Max Mutchnick’s “vigilance” is a revealing glimpse of where we’re headed. Canada, being far more enlightened than the hotbed of homophobes to its south, has had gay marriage coast to coast for a decade. Statistically speaking, one-third of 1 percent of all Canadian nuptials are same-sex, and, of that nought-point-three-three, many this last decade have been American gays heading north for a marriage license they’re denied in their own country. So gay marriage will provide an important legal recognition for an extremely small number of persons who do not currently enjoy it. But, putting aside arguments over the nature of marital union, the legalization of gay marriage will empower a lot more “vigilance” from all the right-thinking people over everybody else.

Mr. Mutchnick’s comparison of the word “homosexual” with “Negro” gives the game away: Just as everything any conservative says about anything is racist, so now it will also be homophobic. It will not be enough to be clinically neutral (“homosexual”) on the subject — or tolerant, bored, mildly amused, utterly indifferent. The other day, Jeremy Irons found himself musing to a reporter on whether (if the issue is unequal legal treatment) a father should be allowed to marry his son for the purpose of avoiding inheritance taxes. The vigilance…

Or is he just a clumsy clod when he opens his yap?

Yesterday, speaking at a campaign event in Florida, Vice President Joe Biden said, “I ask every day, what’s the exact number of the fallen angels – not generally, not an estimate, the exact number — because for every one of those women or men, it has transformed a family, a family we owe. And thus far, as of today, there are 6,437 fallen heroes, 49,871 visibly wounded, and tens of thousands of invisible wounds — post-traumatic stress, traumatic brain injury — thousands, thousands, critically wounded, who will need extensive care the rest of their lives.”

The French are going off the deep end. But what about all those feminine and masculine words?

France is set to ban the words “mother” and “father” from all official documents under controversial plans to legalise gay marriage.

The move, which has outraged Catholics, means only the word “parents” would be used in identical marriage ceremonies for all heterosexual and same-sex couples.

The law would also give equal adoption rights to homosexual and heterosexual couples.

The draft law states that “marriage is a union of two people, of different or the same gender”.

It says all references to “mothers and fathers” in the civil code – which enshrines French law – will be swapped for simply “parents”.

Maybe they should all switch to English which has no gender. Sacrebleu!

Words that started out dirty.

Orchid? Yep.

Read here.

Reggie Love, the man by President Barack Obama’s side for two years in the White House

“He’s a competitor, and I think when you compete … you can’t spend all your time sort of being overly emotional or reactional to what’s going on,” Love said.

Or teaching grammar, it seems.

Mark Helprin:

Every day it seems, reason and the English language are ravished by contemporary American politics.

For example, as there is no God-given tax rate, when the rate increases it is an increase, not the expiration of a decrease. Were it the latter, one could say that the Bush tax cuts were not tax cuts but the expiration of the Clinton increases, the Clinton increases the expiration of the Reagan cuts, the Reagan cuts the expiration of previous increases, and so on. Such is the thinking of non-effervescent minds that see as a cut a lesser increase in spending than they advocate, or urge passage of a stupendous, juggernaut, congressional bill so that they can find out what’s in it.

The nation appears more and more able to eat whatever words are shoved down its throat. It is told, and does not protest, that Islam is a religion of peace. Islam is indeed a religion of peace, but it is also, quite demonstratively and throughout the world in proof after proof day after day, a religion of war.

As the president travels about, yelling at America and dividing the population into good people and bad people (the bad ones being, purely by coincidence, those who don’t vote for him), he has adopted an extraordinary war cry that might make both Huey Long and Spiro Agnew smile in their graves: Millionaires and billionaires. Income or net worth, he doesn’t say, the idea being to grab a billionaire, turn him upside down, and shake money out of him. But in the president’s logic, this includes, for example, a couple earning $125,000 apiece. The trick is that you can indeed get a lot of money out of such people if you call them billionaires and turn enough of them upside down.

Perhaps the most brazen language diktat has been the mischievous switch of political colors. Stalin would hardly believe it, but blue now supposedly signifies the left and red the right…

David Ogilvy was a giant in advertising in the ’50s and ’60s.

When I began writing advertising copy I bought his book, which was short and sweet.

In a memo to his staff, he offered ten writing tips, among them:

2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.

3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.

4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.

This is context for a silly article based upon a silly study (they’re a plague) about the level of speech in Congress.

Discourse in the House and Senate has dropped a full grade level — to the equivalent of high school sophomore, according to a new study.

Call this the dumbing down of Congress in a partisan age. Or a shift to plain-spoken populism ignited by the new class of tea party Republicans.

But what has become clear in the new research is that the soaring oratory that once filled the floors of the House and Senate with million-dollar diction and sophisticated syntax is making way for a more modest approach.

“Congress is changing as an institution, and what you see is more and more members gearing their speeches as sound bites or YouTube clips,” said Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation, which compiled the study released Monday.

Brace yourself.

In an analysis of floor debates over the last several years, the study found that newer lawmakers tended to speak at a lower grade level than the veterans of congressional speechifying.

And political moderates among both Republicans and Democrats tended to carry on at a higher grade level than those more partisan liberals or conservatives.

With that framework in mind, it should come as no surprise that the lawmakers at the bottom of the list, speaking at the lowest grade level, are among the most ardent tea party Republicans in the freshman class. Rep. Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina, Rep. Robert Woodall of Georgia and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky were the bottom three — speaking at about an eighth-grade level, the study found.

I bet you saw that coming. Tea Partiers are so dumb they talk simple.

“We look at it as a badge of honor,” said Mulvaney, a graduate of Georgetown University and the University of North Carolina Law School, who notes that he often speaks on the floor “extemporaneously.”

“It’s a conscious decision on my part. We are trying to be clear and trying to be concise,” he added. He said he and his wife had been known to diagram sentences at the dinner table, a byproduct of having schoolteacher parents.

“I can explain the difference between ‘fewer’ and ‘less,’” Mulvaney said, but he acknowledged that he still stumbled over the difference between “farther” and “further.”

“I don’t think people see the polysyllabic words — or the number of words — in a sentence as a sign of your intelligence,” he said.

Intelligent people don’t.

…because imagine what it must be like to learn. This is an old email that’s made several round trips, but it’s still good.

_______________________________________________

You think English is easy??

I think a retired English teacher was bored.

THIS IS GREAT!

Read all the way to the end……………..

This took a lot of work to put together!

1) The bandage was wound around the wound.

2) The farm was used to produce produce.

3) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.

4) We must polish the Polish furniture..

5) He could lead if he would get the lead out.

6) The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert..

7) Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.

A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.

9) When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.

10) I did not object to the object.

11) The insurance was invalid for the invalid.

12) There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.

13) They were too close to the door to close it.

14) The buck does funny things when the does are present.

15) A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.

16) To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.

17) The wind was too strong to wind the sail.

18) Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear..

19) I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.

20) How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?

Let’s face it – English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren’t invented in England or French fries in France . Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren’t sweet, are meat. We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig..

And why is it that writers write but fingers don’t fing, grocers don’t groce and hammers don’t ham? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn’t the plural of booth, beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices? Doesn’t it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?

If teachers taught, why didn’t preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? Sometimes I think all the English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell?

How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites? You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which, an alarm goes off by going on.

English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race, which, of course, is not a race at all. That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible.

PS. – Why doesn’t ‘Buick’ rhyme with ‘quick’ ?

You lovers of the English language might enjoy this ..

There is a two-letter word that perhaps has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that is’UP.’

It’s easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP ?

At a meeting, why does a topic come UP?

Why do we speak UP and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report?

We call UP our friends.

And we use it to brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver; we warm UP the leftovers and cleanUP the kitchen.

We lock UP the house and some guys fix UP the old car.

At other times the little word has real special meaning.

People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses.

To be dressed is one thing, but to be dressed UP is special.

A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP.

We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night.

We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP!

To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP, look the word UP in the dictionary.

In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4th of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions.

If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used.

It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don’t give UP, you may wind UP with a hundred or more

When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP.

When the sun comes out we say it is clearingUP.

When it rains, it wets the earth and often messes things UP.

When it doesn’t rain for awhile, things dry UP.

One could go on and on, but I’ll wrap it UP,

for now my time is UP,

so…….it is time to shut UP!

Now it’s UP to you what you do with this email.

Via Ann Althouse

Two little language tidbits before the video:

• boondocks comes from the tagalog (Filipino) word for mountain
• the Japanese slang for a comb over is barcode

Fun with words.

A standup comedian from Portland, Oregon defeated two professors, two computer programmers, a cartoonist and a book clerk to win the first World Palindrome Championship, hosted by Will Shortz, the New York Times’ crossword puzzle editor.

Six hundred word nerds filled the ballroom at the Marriott Hotel at the Brooklyn Bridge and watched seven prominent palindromists deliver new reversible verses written on the spot.  Audience members voted by deploying signs that said “WOW” on one side (for their favorite) and  ”HUH?” on the other. Portland comic Mark Saltveit squeaked past Minnesotan John Connett, a professor of Biostatistics, by an audience vote of 169-165.

Saltveit’s winning entry was an elliptical tale of kinky shenanigans:
“Devil Kay fixes trapeze part; sex if yak lived.”

Connett nearly won with a political tale about Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich:
” ‘Not Newt!’ Ron’s snort went on.”

Cartoonist Jon (“Go Hang a Salami, I’m a Lasagna Hog”) Agee placed third with another randy entry:
“‘Zoning’ is Mr. Al Axe’s sex alarm sign in Oz.”

MIT Professor Nick Montfort placed fourth with a long palindromic poem about Star Wars, titled “The Millennium Falcon Rescue.”

Saltveit said “I actually thought my second entry was better, but the crowd loved the yak.”  He was referring to his second palindrome: “I tan. I mull. In a way, Obama, I am a boy – a wan illuminati.”

If you watch many foreign films, you quickly realize how “OK or okay” has become nearly universal.

But where did OK come from? I used to believe the Martin Van Buren explanation — that it came from his campaign as “Old Kinderhook,” a nickname.

However, that dominant theory is okay came out of a fad for deliberate, comic misspellings, in some cases mocking the colloquial speech patterns of the uneducated.

The general fad may have existed in spoken or informal written U.S. English for a decade or more before its appearance in newspapers. OK’s original presentation as “all correct” was later varied with spellings such as “Oll Korrect” or even “Ole Kurreck.” Deliberate word play was associated with the acronym fad and was a yet broader contemporary American fad.

So OK was “all correct” with a goofy spelling.  Video here.

And A-ok? That came from NASA, where engineers used it because it was clearer on radio because  the sharper A sound better cut through the static. In which case A-OK means all all correct.

We use expressions (mostly correctly) in daily life that we have no clue to their origins.

Take “hands down” which means easily. I always thought it came from poker, where the winner took the pot without showing his cards.

Wrong.

Jockeys need to keep a tight rein in order to encourage their horse to run. Anyone who is so far ahead that he can afford to slacken off and still win he can drop his hands and loosen the reins – hence winning ‘hands down’. This is recorded from the mid 19th century; for example,‘Pips’ Lyrics & Lays, 1867:

“There were good horses in those days, as he can well recall, But Barker upon Elepoo, hands down, shot by them all.”

An LAT story about Google referred to their “gangbusters” advertising business. The dictionary defines this as “outstandingly excellent or successful.”

How did that come about?

Random House:

This word was popularized as Gang Busters, the title of an extremely popular CBS radio series that premiered on January 15, 1936, and was broadcast until 1957. This series began with a stretch of explosive sound effects, featuring machine guns, police sirens, and the like.

In reference to these violent sound effects, the expression like gangbusters appeared by 1940 in the sense ‘aggressively; forcefully; energetically’; and hence as a more general intensive ‘excitingly; well’.

The expression was especially popular among jazz musicians, often in the phrase come on like gangbusters. This remains the most common use of the term: “Perception is almost everything in these stocks–if people perceive that a company is back on track, all of a sudden a wallflower comes back like gangbusters” (Fortune, 1996).

So what began as a description of loud sound effects became something else.

We were wondering and so might you.

According to William Safire’s definitive “New Political Dictionary,” the term “straw poll” originates with author John Selden (1584-1654), who wrote “take a straw and throw it up into the air – you may see by that which way the wind is. More solid things do not show the complexion of the times so well. . . .”

Tittle, lunule, gynecomastia — just three words you must add to your vocabulary.

Read it here.

…must be rusty to let this get past them.

Reporting from Bangkok, Thailand—Thailand’s main opposition party won a fractious election Sunday, paving the way for the nation’s first female prime minister and the possible return from exile of her controversial brother, as disenfranchised voters laid down a new challenge to the nation’s political establishment.

Disenfranchised voters?

Disenfranchise: to deprive of a franchise, of a legal right, or of some privilege or immunity; especially : to deprive of the right to vote.

This exemplifies the sloppy use of this word to mean anyone or group that liberals think gets the short end of any/all sticks.

On my last trip to Atlanta I struck up a conversation with my cab driver. (Most of the Atlanta cabbies I met were from Africa.)

He was from Ethiopia and had immigrated over eight years before. His English was barely accented. He’d arrived speaking no English, but figured out that he needed English to advance.

Indulging non-English speaking immigrants is a) bad for them and b) bad for America. Our melting pot gets lumpy when we don’t speak a common language.

Furthermore, catering to Spanish speakers fuels ethnic resentment. Here’s why: if you run, say, a dental practice and 15% of your patients do not speak English, you will most likely hire a bi-lingual receptionist for practical reasons.

That means all the native, English speaking job applicants are out of luck. So the native born get pushed out of jobs because new comers are unwilling to fit in.

Here’s a video of a Texas state legislator who’d had enough.

New York Times

A researcher analyzing the sounds in languages spoken around the world has detected an ancient signal that points to southern Africa as the place where modern human language originated.

The finding fits well with the evidence from fossil skulls and DNA that modern humans originated in Africa. It also implies, though does not prove, that modern language originated only once, an issue of considerable controversy among linguists.

The detection of such an ancient signal in language is surprising. Because words change so rapidly, many linguists think that languages cannot be traced very far back in time. The oldest language tree so far reconstructed, that of the Indo-European family, which includes English, goes back 9,000 years at most.

Quentin D. Atkinson, a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, has shattered this time barrier, if his claim is correct, by looking not at words but at phonemes — the consonants, vowels and tones that are the simplest elements of language.  Dr. Atkinson, an expert at applying mathematical methods to linguistics, has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages spoken throughout the world: A language area uses fewer phonemes the farther that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it.

Some of the click-using languages of Africa have more than 100 phonemes, whereas Hawaiian, toward the far end of the human migration route out of Africa, has only 13. English has about 45 phonemes.

This pattern of decreasing diversity with distance, similar to the well-established decrease in genetic diversity with distance from Africa, implies that the origin of modern human language is in the region of southwestern Africa, Dr. Atkinson says in an article published on Thursday in the journal Science.

If you’ve ever wondered where the expression, “He’s not worth his salt” came from, now you know.

Receiving a salary may seem sweet, but the word originates with a different flavor.

In ancient times, because salt wasn’t always easy to come by (and because it was a leading way to improve flavor even back then), Roman soldiers were given a sum of money – a salarium – with which to purchase salt.

Over time, salarium (from the Latin salarius, ‘of salt’) came to refer simply to money paid the soldiers, and then to monies paid to any official of the Roman Empire, and eventually to wages in general

“Operation Odyssey Dawn?” Weak. Get me rewrite!

And this from Drudge:

MARCH 19, 2011
OBAMA: 'Today we are part of a broad coalition. We are answering the calls of a threatened people. And we are acting in the interests of the United States and the world'...

MARCH 19, 2003
BUSH: 'American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger'...

Clark Whelton in City Journal

What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness

The decline and fall of American English, and stuff

I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. “And he was like, you know, ‘Helloooo, what are you looking at?’ and stuff, and I’m like, you know, ‘Can I, like, pick you up?,’ and he goes, like, ‘Brrrp brrrp brrrp,’ and I’m like, you know, ‘Whoa, that is so wow!’ ” She rambled on, speaking in self-quotations, sound effects, and other vocabulary substitutes, punctuating her sentences with facial tics and lateral eye shifts. All the while, however, she never said anything specific about her encounter with the squirrel.

Uh-oh. It was a classic case of Vagueness, the linguistic virus that infected spoken language in the late twentieth century. Squirrel Woman sounded like a high school junior, but she appeared to be in her mid-forties, old enough to have been an early carrier of the contagion. She might even have been a college intern in the days when Vagueness emerged from the shadows of slang and mounted an all-out assault on American English.

My acquaintance with Vagueness began in the 1980s, that distant decade when Edward I. Koch was mayor of New York and I was writing his speeches. The mayor’s speechwriting staff was small, and I welcomed the chance to hire an intern. Applications arrived from NYU, Columbia, Pace, and the senior colleges of the City University of New York. I interviewed four or five candidates and was happily surprised. The students were articulate and well informed on civic affairs. Their writing samples were excellent. The young woman whom I selected was easy to train and a pleasure to work with. Everything went so well that I hired interns at every opportunity.

Then came 1985.

The first applicant was a young man from NYU. During the interview, he spiked his replies so heavily with “like” that I mentioned his frequent use of the word. He seemed confused by my comment and replied, “Well . . . like . . . yeah.” Now, nobody likes a grammar prig. All’s fair in love and language, and the American lingo is in constant motion. “You should,” for example, has been replaced by “you need to.” “No” has faded into “not really.” “I said” is now “I went.” As for “you’re welcome,” that’s long since become “no problem.” Even nasal passages are affected by fashion. Quack-talking, the rasping tones preferred by many young women today, used to be considered a misfortune.

In 1985, I thought of “like” as a trite survivor of the hippie sixties. By itself, a little slang would not have disqualified the junior from NYU. But I was surprised to hear antique argot from a communications major looking for work in a speechwriting office, where job applicants would normally showcase their language skills. I was even more surprised when the next three candidates also laced their conversation with “like.” Most troubling was a puzzling drop in the quality of their writing samples. It took six tries, but eventually I found a student every bit as good as his predecessors. Then came 1986…

Wow. Three mixed metaphors in the first 23 seconds.

Those layers of editors and proof readers must have been snoozing.

SOUTH BURLINGTON, Vt. — The last time they were together, it was in the wreckage of a roadside bombing in Afghanistan.

Sgt. Edward Matayka, a 33-year-old Vermont National Guard medic, had been mortally wounded. Specialist David Schwerer was among those who gave him first aid, applying tourniquets that saved his life but couldn’t save his legs.

On Saturday, Matayka got to say thank you, welcoming Schwerer home from a yearlong deployment in an emotional reunion at a ceremony for returning troops.

“This was one of the first things he requested coming out of unconsciousness, to greet the man who saved his life once he found out who it was,” said Laurie Ingalls, his mother-in-law. “He wanted to greet him so badly.”

New Yawk Times:

ANDREW RAMOS always believed it made him more charming, an endearing characteristic integral to his identity. But, finally, after too many people mocked him, he began seeing a therapist.

Patrick Mullin had the same problem. “People were complaining,” he said. He started weekly therapy sessions 11 years ago and still goes about once a month.

Lauren LoGiudice sought help for similar symptoms. “I would have sessions and I started to cry,” she said.

In all three cases, therapists reached the same discomfiting conclusion.

“I was diagnosed with a New York accent,” Mr. Ramos said.

The classic New York accent is not as distinct or as prevalent as it once was, but there are plenty of native “New Yawkers” who not only have it but consider it a curse.

“It humbled me,” Mr. Ramos, a television reporter at WPIX-TV, said of his diagnosis.

Those who seek professional help to conquer their accents make similar complaints, like, “ ‘People don’t understand what I’m saying,’ ” said Sam Chwat, who is considered the dean of speech therapists. “ ‘I’m stigmatized by the way I speak.’ ‘I’m tired of people imitating or ridiculing the way I speak, or saying I sound “cute.” ’ ‘My accent seems to imply negative characteristics.’ ”

This post recalls an old joke:

An American, Frenchman, Spaniard and German were debating the beauty of their native tongues. The American said, “Consider the word butterfly — it’s  conjures a lovely image.” The Frenchman said, “Papillion — it rolls off the tongue producing great pleasure.” The Spaniard replied, “Mariposa –it’s  a one word poem.”

There was silence as they looked at the German, who finally said, “And what is wrong with schmetterling?”

In case you’ve ever wondered how butterfly is said in other languages, check out this exhaustive list.

Some quirks: Tunisian Arabic says “fartattu” a word that put any elementary school class on the floor in stitches. Balinese “kupukupu” is very pretty.

Anyway, for those who enjoy languages, have at it.

HT: Tigerhawk.