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Casa Blanca was a boring movie without a lot of action, but Star Wars, man did that have some great light saber fights. I’m speaking here, of course, as a kid: to see how children understand language, you need look no further than your own memory, specifically, your memory of movies and video games from [...]

René-Louis Baire His “Baire space” and “Baire Category Theorem” help us understand topological spaces whose complements are very bare. George Cantor Taught us how to count infinite sets. Carl Friedrich Gauss Made a pretty good guess at how many primes there are below x. Also, some stuff about statistics. Kurt Gödel Played God by applying [...]

Other languages ain’t got nothing on the English double negative. Improper as it’s come to be seen by stuck-up language pedants and grammar police, there’s actually an interesting explanation behind it. Imagine a band of pirates who helped capture a pile of gold. The pirates are grumbling about how little their shares of gold are… [...]

As a high school student, I was a big fan of British progressive rock legend Pink Floyd. Like, to the point of memorizing whole albums worth of lyrics. Here are some of my favorite lyrics from the band: Echoes Overhead the albatross Hangs motionless upon the air; And deep beneath the rolling waves, In labyrinths [...]

As you know, I’m a big fan of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, especially his epic poems Kubla Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I was introduced to these poems through, and both play a critical role in, Douglas Adams’ under-appreciated masterpiece, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. That book is the type of [...]

This is a very long-delayed continuation of the Goldmine of Engrish I published previously. I wasn’t planning on posting an Engrish sequel, but the original was so popular, people are practically demanding an encore, so here we go These are some of the most horrifically badly translated subtitles ever put forth by any translation agency. [...]

One of my favorite poems is the Kubla Khan of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (the same poet who penned The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, previously featured on this site). In fact I like this passage so much that, back when I was in high school, I memorized the whole thing. So instead of copying it [...]

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). It’s a very long poem, so it’s split into seven parts. The spelling of its name varies; sometimes “Rime” is spelt “Rhyme”, and sometimes “Ancient Mariner” is spelt “Ancyent Marinere”. There is a lot of archaic English throughout the poem, but [...]

There’s been some debate in the United States about whether English should be the official language. It should not. Making English the official language would send an unequivocal message of unwelcome to the non-English parts of the world, completely counter to the melting pot ideal which makes the U.S. so great. THEN WHAT SHOULD THE [...]

As English speakers, we already know quite a few Japanese Vocabulary Words, without even realizing we know them. Japanese is a language where words get put together to form new words. We know a lot of compound words, and you can break those compound words down into their smaller pieces to get a whole ton [...]