quote:

the betrayal of a trust or confidence; breach of faith; treachery.

quote:

Originally posted by Geoff:
By the way, who knows what "Subaru" means?

quote:

Subaru is the Japanese name for the Pleiades star cluster, which in turn inspires the Subaru logo and alludes to the five companies that merged to create FHI.[2]

quote:

FHI was created by the merger of six companies, so you can see what a truly evocative name Subaru is.

quote:

The company is influenced by the star cluster Pleiades. In Japanese the cluster name is "Subaru", which roughly translated into English means, "to govern", "unite," or "gather together". The large star in the logo represents Fuji Heavy Industries, and the five smaller stars represent the current five companies that are united under the FHI group. In essense the logo represent the unification of 5 companies mentioned above to become one large entity called the Fuji Heavy Industry.

quote:

Fuji Heavy industries, the maker of SUBARU cars, was known as Nakajima Aircraft before WW II, which made many fighters and bombers. Even the famous Mitsubishi Zero fighter had a Nakajima 14 cylinder engine. After the war, the company was forced to spread into 15 companies to cut the strength of the huge weapon industry. But in the early 1950s, five of the companies gathered into one again to restart as a transportation company. That's FUJI and that's why there are five little stars and one big star.

quote:

Originally posted by tinman:

quote:

Originally posted by Geoff:
By the way, who knows what "Subaru" means?

Since no one, including me, seems to have known the answer, I looked it up.

quote:

Now that's what I call an apology!

quote:

Not into irony, I guess.

quote:

The Times Literary Supplement, the erudite British weekly, isn't the first place you would expect to find an outbreak of cool. But for a recent stretch of a few months, its letters page was home to a protracted debate over exactly how cool got cool.

quote:

About 8,500 new words enter the English language annually, which fueled a 70 percent growth of the lexicon between 1950 and 2000.

quote:

In one part of its analysis, the culturomics team estimates that about 8,500 new words annually entered the English language between 1950 and 2000. That process fueled a 70 percent growth in the number of English words, from 597,000 to 1,022,000.

quote:

I am convinced that when historians look back in 500 years on the downfall of American civilization, they will trace it to heated toilet seats in Vegas. Reality television and bacon martinis may also be on the list, along with competitive kindergarten.

quote:

“Swear words are unique,” says Timothy Jay, a psychologist at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams, who has studied the role of naughty words in linguistics. “They’re really the link between the language system and the emotional system.”

quote:

Originally posted by zmježd:
When people argue that some bit of grammar is not logical or what have you I assume they don't know their grammar from a hole in the ground.

quote:

Originally posted by zmježd:
There's nothing particularly logical about how a language might divide the world up, and having done so, how the bits fit together.

quote:

Infants raised bilingual from birth can distinguish not only between their two native tongues but between two languages they’ve never been exposed to, just by watching adults speak without hearing what they say, said psychologist Janet Werker of the University of British Columbia.

quote:

Desperate times call for desperate measures. The Illinois General Assembly has passed a bill that would allow citizens to collect the carcasses of fur-bearing mammals found along public roadways, reducing the shameful waste of perfectly good roadkill while saving precious taxpayer dollars.

quote:

If Gov. Pat Quinn signs the measure into law, Illinoisans will be free to retrieve dead beaver, mink, weasel, fox, raccoon, muskrat, badger and opossum — during the legal hunting or trapping season, with the required stamps and permits.

quote:

Some linguists say that languages are disappearing at the rate of two a month. Half of the world's remaining 7,000 or so languages may be gone by the end of this century, pushed into disuse by English, Spanish and other dominating languages.

quote:

Technology, long considered a threat to regional languages, now is being seen as a way to keep young people from forsaking their native tongues for dominant languages. YouTube and Facebook, as well as Internet radio and cell phone texting, are helping minority language groups stave off death.

Linguist Samuel Herrera said he was elated to find teenagers zapping each other with text messages in Huave, an endangered language spoken only by about 15,000 people in the Tehuantepec region of Mexico, along the Pacific.

"This really strengthens the use of the language," said Herrera, who runs the linguistics laboratory at the Institute of Anthropological Research in the Mexican capital.

Dr. Gregory D.S. Anderson, the director of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in Salem, Ore., agrees. Somewhere between the ages of 6 and 20 or 25, he said, "people make a definitive decision whether to break with the language."

"If the language isn't being used by their peer group, then they reject it categorically," he said.

Technology as simple as text messaging can draw them back.

quote:

At the University of Texas, for example, a group of linguists and social psychologists has been monitoring Twitter to track on-the-ground sentiment over the course of the Arab Spring, particularly in Egypt and Libya. After the death of Colonel Qaddafi, the linguist David Beaver and his assistants quickly summoned thousands of Arabic-language tweets before and after the event. They zeroed in on messages known to be from Libya by using Twitter’s system of geocoding. (Posts from cellphones, for instance, very often encode the user’s geographic coordinates.) The tweets were then automatically translated from Arabic to English and fed into a text-analysis computer program.

quote:

PLANE CRASH LANDS IN POLAND