On 23 March 1839, OK was introduced to the world on the second page of the Boston Morning Post, in the midst of a long paragraph, as "o.k. (all correct)".

Read How 'OK' took over the world at BBC.

Via DF and Coudal.

Situation: Shanghai Is Trying to Untangle the Mangled English of Chinglish.

“Cash recycling,” “fried enema,” “Flagrant and Hot Marxism,” and “Urine District” — you'll get an idea watching A Sampling of Chinglish slideshow.

The problem with the phrase "off the record" is that many people, reporters and the general public alike, misunderstand its precise meaning. These days many interviewees think "off the record" is largely synonymous with "on background" or "not for attribution."

—NYU Journalism Handbook for Students.

On the record, on background, not for attribution and off the record defined.

The AP Stylebook changes “Web site” to “website”. Language evolving.

Via DF.

New Oxford American Dictionary:

stake ² |steɪk| |steɪk|
noun (usu. stakes)
a sum of money or something else of value gambled on the outcome of a risky game or venture : playing dice for high stakes | figurative the mayor raised the stakes in the battle for power.
• a share or interest in a business, situation, or system : GM acquired a 50 percent stake in Saab.

Needs minor revision: sold instead of acquired.

The chewy mouthful "-preneur" jobtitles — Webrepreneur, Ecopreneur, Philanthropreneur, Alterpreneur, Grantepreneur, Innerpreneur, Momtrepreneur, Pastorpreneur etc — are rising.

Meaning? Learn the Enterprising Language to find out.

Via @thatwhichmatter.

"With a grain of salt is a translation of Latin cum grano salis. According to The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, the Roman historian Pliny the Elder wrote that General Pompey had discovered an antidote for poison that was to be taken cum grano salis. This was apparently to make it effective. That doesn’t quite explain the current meaning, though."

Quotes Uncovered: Who First Took Things With a Grain of Salt? .

Via @ThatWhichMatter.

Add Tolontan's meaty Ridzigate to the -gate list.

"'Fail' was becoming a new kind of noun: not simply a synonym for failure but, rather, a derisive label to slap on a miscue that is eminently mockable in its stupidity or wrongheadedness."

How Fail Went From Verb to Interjection at NYTimes.

"The definition of an idiom is a phrase whose meaning isn't clear from the words in it. What a bizarrely illogical way to communicate."

• To reheat cabbage: to rekindle an old flame (Italian).
• Cleaner than a frog's armpit: to be poor, broke (Spanish).
• To think one is the last suck of the mango: to be conceited (South American Spanish).
• Brew tea from dirt under another's fingernails: to learn a bitter lesson (Japanese).

The idiotic joys of idioms at The Guardian.

Via @thatwhichmatter.

A new weblog at The New York Times, Schott’s Vocab is “a miscellany of modern words and phrases” for those who enjoy watching the language evolve.

Along the same lines:

• Word Spy
• Urban Word of the Day
• Double-Tongued Dictionary
• Wordlustitude

In Romanian:

• Dictionar Urban [ro]
• 123Urban.ro [ro]

Enjoy.

Via DF.

At long last some chemistry that I can understand: The periodic table of awesoments.

Full disclosure: I epic-failed chemistry. Repeatedly.

"It’s funny to see the ampersand creeping into the Russian usage... Apparently, it is being associated with things ‘Western’, ‘capitalist’, &c. And it looks so chic in the Cyrillic context. Some ad agencies just love it. Incidentally, the Russian for ‘and’ is the i (yes, that ‘inverted N’, U+0418 and U+0438), and the meaning of the ampersand (& = et) is completely lost on the Russians. But who cares? It is so cute."

Maxim Zhukov at Typophile.

"When type was handset, a period or comma outside of quotation marks at the end of a sentence tended to get knocked out of position, so the printers tucked the little devils inside the quotation marks to keep them safe and out of trouble. But apparently only American printers were more attached to convenience than logic, since British printers continued to risk the misalignment of their periods and commas."

Quotation Marks: Where Do the Commas and Periods Go--and Why??

Yeah, interrobang — clueless, ha? Well, this platypus of a punctuation mark was redesigned.

The impossibility to disable iPhone auto-correction for text input in unsupported languages is a royal, royal pain. It's like trying to swear every other word while the Predictive Text Swearing team is hard at work.

Via DF.

Using diacritics shows respect for the language but it usually turns into a maddening ordeal. Diacritice.com is the only foreseeable easy way out: it painlessly adds diacritics to any given text, even though it prefers incorrect (Microsoft style) Turkish 'ş' and 'ţ' (s and t with cedilla) over correct Romanian 'ș' and 'ț' (s and t with comma below).

"The 24th letter of the modern Latin alphabet is more flexible than its lex-lack suggests." It is. Via DO.

Word of the day: Microsoftian. Used in contex: here.

"It clunks. It clangs. It has a strange barbaric grandeur"—Counting to ten.

The mystery of curse words and linguistic taboos. Witty! [Via DO.]