This is cool: the Unicode Consortium wants to make the Universal Declaration of Human Rights available in all the languages, and all the writing systems, of the world. It's already available in 300 languages.

The whole point is to demonstrate what Unicode is capable of. (If you've read my NY Times piece about Michael Everson, "alphabetician to the world," you'll already know what Unicode is capable of.)

Four months ago, it was a URL that someone else owned and an idea in my head. A month ago, it was a mock-up.

Now, it's live. Umthebook.com has arrived.

Backtracking a little: two months ago, this was an idea in my head and the head of Eric Ogburn, an amazing designer I met at SXSW Interactive. Before Katrina, he used his knowledge in the restaurant biz (he'd been a chef) to design websites to build online communities for New Orleans restaurants; after the hurricane, he made online homes for dispersed communities. I liked how he saw that a book is a lot like a restaurant: a physical place/object that becomes a staging ground for conversations and social experiences.

I hope lots of people go to the site to learn about the book (and buy it) but also share their experiences with language, particularly the blunders, and pass them on to friends.

When I taught English in Taiwan, I lived in Chia-yi, a bustling mid-size city in the middle of the island, where I first went because I knew people and then stayed in because I liked it. Some views of that city are scratched into my soul. From rooftops, roaring down wet dark streets on a motorcycle, drunk at dawn, the orange groves, the temples. I've not been back since I left in 1992. The other day an American expat writer, Dan Bloom, wrote to me -- he'd seen a description of Um... somewhere, saw the Taiwan connection, wanted to write about it.

Here's the piece.

Bloom lives in Chia-yi, too, so if I ever go back, we're going to have crab legs and beer, asparagus and bamboo shoots, in the street markets.

His piece does say that Um... will be translated into Chinese, which is news to me. Anyone have an idea how to translate spoonerisms, or how to represent exchanges of sound segments in Chinese characters?

John Cowan has collected 901 essentialist explanations of languages here. Some examples:

English is essentially the inevitable result of repressing the gender of nouns.

Australian English is essentially an Irishman bitten by a Tasmanian Devil while chasing a kangaroo.

Yiddish is essentially the Ebonics of German.

You get the idea -- very funny language geek humor.

Just found out that Marcel Wingate, a speech pathologist I'd corresponded with via email in the course of doing research on various stuttering stories, died last November at the age of 86. He's best known for his definition of stuttering, which was considered definitive from 1964 onward: repetition of a sound, syllable, or one-syllable word; silent or audible prolongation; or both.

I always liked his notes -- he was so vehement in his criticisms of Wendell Johnson, I half expected him to show up at my doorstep to make me write how much Johnson had damaged the field of speech pathology, and how clinicians still operated with latent diagnosogenicism. He was dedicated to rooting it out. I hope it worked. I wish he'd been able to see Um...

I had no idea that Prince Phillip was known for his faux pas, but here's a Google map that shows how global he's been. For instance, he apparently told a group of British students in China, "Stay here much longer, you'll be all slitty eyed." Or the time he asked a student who had been trekking in Papua New Guinea, "So you managed not to get eaten then?"

Here at Um... headquarters, we treat this sort of thing like a fishing tale. On one hand, we appreciate the telling, and we like slapping our foreheads, particularly at the Queen of England's consort. On the other hand, we can't help but note that taken out of context, quite a lot of statements can sound doltish, crude, and so...common. But given that Phillip has the job of being chummy with lots of descendants of colonial subjects whom he's never met before and will never see again, the opportunity to find a statement that makes an ugly contrast has to be quite high.

The real test of gaffeness would be whether or not the people he was talking to thought it was a faux pas. Let's give this test a name: the Prince Phillip test. Until we hear from an Australian aborigine who's found umbrage, we'll treat such stories as too good to be verifiable and too unverifiable for measuring the man.

My Texas Observer piece on the Southern Baptists is up. It was an interesting, challenging story to write and report, but I'm grateful to TO editors for giving me the space. I've promised myself to do more actual reporting, not just phone conversations, and this is a good example of what that can be.

The bartender may well be the loneliest person in this hotel on San Antonio’s Riverwalk. Just feet away from the darkened bar, people mill around the lobby with plastic glasses of lemonade in hand. “Oh, they’re all Baptists,” says Ben Cole, a 31-year-old pastor from Arlington, Texas. Or as he pronounces it, Babdists. Cole points out the dean of a Baptist seminary, then a man in a dark suit who Cole says is the armed bodyguard of a prominent seminary president. We’ve crowded into chairs with another pastor, Wade Burleson from Oklahoma, his wife Rachelle, and a pastor from Alabama, C.B. Scott, who knows hired muscle when he sees it. That used to be Scott’s line of work. It’s Sunday afternoon, June 10, and talk turns to what to watch on television tonight: the first game of the NBA finals or the last episode of “The Sopranos.”

“Actually, I’ve learned a lot about how to be a Southern Baptist from ‘The Sopranos,’” Cole says. “Hold your friends close but your enemies closer. The person who sets up the meeting between you and your enemy is working for your enemy. You know, the whole ‘Godfather’ thing.”

To read the rest of this, go here.

In this part of Moby Dick, Ahab talks to a severed sperm whale head hanging off the Pequod, which Melville describes as "black and hooded" and Sphynx-like "hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm":

Speak, thou vast and venerable head, which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them.

Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed--while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would
have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!

From a BBC report:

Speed reader and Potter fan Anne Jones was one of the first to finish the book, reading more than 4,000 words a minute.

"It's a real page-turner, great fun. The kids are going to love it but there are some sad moments in it," said the 55-year-old.

That's about the level of reading comprehension you can expect to get, reading 4,000 words a minute.

Why not? Because they know how the sausage gets made.

The LA Times reporter, William Lobdell, begged his editors to let him cover religion after he was born again. But the heart-warming stories of church life gave way to stories about the Roman Catholic sex abuse scandal. Then he talked to ostracized Mormons. Then he covered the money-making machine that is the Trinity Broadcasting Network. Then he covered the trial of a Catholic priest who successfully avoided paying child support for his 13-year-old illegitimate son.

As I walked into the long twilight of a Portland summer evening, I felt used up and numb.

My soul, for lack of a better term, had lost faith long ago — probably around the time I stopped going to church. My brain, which had been in denial, had finally caught up.

Clearly, I saw now that belief in God, no matter how grounded, requires at some point a leap of faith. Either you have the gift of faith or you don't. It's not a choice. It can't be willed into existence. And there's no faking it if you're honest about the state of your soul.

Sitting in a park across the street from the courthouse, I called my wife on a cellphone. I told her I was putting in for a new beat at the paper.

This is a passage from The Complaints of Khakheperre-Sonb, an ancient Egyptian text from the early 19th century B.C.E.

O that I had unknown phrases, sayings that are strange, novel, untried words, free of repetition; not transmitted sayings, spoken by the ancestors! I wring out my body of what it holds in releasing all my words; for what was said is repetition, when what was said is said. Ancestor's words are nothing to boast of, they are found by those who come after. Not one speaks who spoke, there speaks one who will speak, may another find what he will speak! Not a teller of tales after they happen, this has been done before; nor a teller of what might be said, this is vain endeavor, it is lies, and none will recall his name to others. I say this in accord with what I have seen: from the first generation to those who come after, they imitate what is past. Would that I knew what others ignore, such as has not been repeated, to say it and have my heart answer me, to inform it of my distress, shift to it the load on my back, the matters that afflict me, relate to it of what I suffer, and sigh 'Ah' with relief!

Take a moment to let sink in that an Egyptian 4000 years ago was praying for something new to say.

What do manga, Pac-Man, psychedelic rock, a booze podcast, and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" DVD have to do with my book, Um...?

They're all listed as "wired" in the playlist section of Wired Magazine, which you can see to believe here.

A Q&A with me also appears in the August Texas Monthly -- part of it in the mag, all of it online here.

The book's also been written up in O Magazine, Real Simple, Men's Health, and Details -- I'll be scanning these pages and putting them up soon, hopefully.

Rosecrans Baldwin, one of the co-founders of The Morning News, moved to Paris a couple of months ago, and has a hilarious but horror-filled essay about new life, new city, new language:

It’s especially worse when I can’t see the person I’m talking to—if they’re wearing sunglasses, or it’s over the phone. I avoid the phone at all costs. Setting up voicemail for the first time on my cell phone, I had little idea what the French computer voice was saying. Press numero un for boeuf Bourgogne. Numero deux for Jacques Pepin. At least that’s what it sounded like. I managed to leave a message on my phone, but then, feeling cocky, I pushed a button to a question I didn’t understand, just to see what happened. It took several more calls before I realized I’d turned on voice-activation for my phone’s commands. I had locked myself out. To get my phone to do what I wanted, I now had to give it instructions in proper French.

And then there's the story he thinks he hears about a cheese being thrown out a window, which is actually a story about a cow breaking someone's leg. Read it and feel some sympathy for people who have learned English recently.

Language science. Language policy. Language technology. Language arts.

And now, language on trains:

Should Welsh or English be used first in train announcements?

Sometimes, what comes out of my fingers seems like gold -- and then sometimes it seems like fool's gold. I am rather fascinated by that volatility...it isn't connected to the quality of ideas -- writing isn't a command and control process, in which the concepts come first and tell the language, or one's share of it, how to get to work. The concepts are vaguely there, a sort of drape fluttering and room hum, and one's share of the language is sprawled on the floor, grinding up crayons and picking their noses. And then some cognitive clearing occurs, and the language either jumps up and starts spontaneously doing the dance of the bumble bee back from the pollen laden flowers -- which is good -- or it bucks and whinnies like a dying mule -- which is bad.

Roger Gathman