Government by blogging. Hundreds of people have commented with stories and complaints about TSA experiences. Expect thousands, maybe millions more.

From the NYTBR review of David Rieff's memoir about his mother's death:

In a car returning from receiving the terrible diagnosis, he writes, she looks out the window, and "'Wow' she said, 'Wow.'" It tells us something important, surely, that one of the most articulate women of the last century should say, in the face of her cancer, "Wow."

Not sure? Here, fill out the questionnaire. (Or to win a prize for your beat answers, take this quiz.)

Then there's the whole phenomena of getting yourself tattooed in a language you don't speak, a script you don't read, which often goes bad. From the BBC:

When teenager Joanne Raine had her boyfriend's nickname "Roo" tattooed on her stomach it was supposed to be a sign of her undying love.

The 19-year-old from Darlington paid £80 for the Chinese artwork in 2004 and was delighted with the results.

That was until she showed it off in a Chinese takeaway and found out it actually spelled "supermarket."

The helpful blog Hanzi Smatter disputes that the characters mean "supermarket." Commenters have fun trying to figure out what it does mean, until someone writes in to say it's the name of a Chinese supermarket chain (without corroboration).

Update: changed the typo on the hanzi blog, got the joke. Thanks to the king of closed captions.

On this blog I feel as if I'm mostly moving information around, which isn't that satisfying to write, and it's no fun to read, I admit. So I'm going to work harder to add some value to what I put here. But for right now, I wanted to pass on several Our Fathers written in some pidgin Englishes, which are collected here.

Here's the Gullah version:

We Papa een heaben,
leh ebrybody hona you nyame
cause you da holy.
We pray dat soon you gwine
rule oba all ob we.
Wasoneba ting you da want,
leh um be een dis wol,
same like e be dey een heaben.
Gee we de food wa we need dis day yah an ebry day.
Fagibe we fa de bad ting we da do.
Cause we da fagibe dem people wa do bad ta we.
Leh we don't habe haad test wen Satan try we.
Keep we from e ebil.
Amen.

Then there's this one, from Middle English. Familiar, isn't it?

Oure fadir that art in heuenes, halewid be thi name; thi kyngdoom come to; be thi wille don, in erthe as in heuene. Yyue to vs this dai oure breed ouer othir substaunce, and foryyue to vs oure dettis, as we foryyuen to oure dettouris; and lede vs not in to temptacioun, but delyuere vs fro yuel. Amen.

Just found out that an upper division cognitive psych class at Allegheny College is using Um... as a textbook. Watch undergrads blog about Um... here! If you're a high school teacher or college professor and want to use Um... as a textbook, get in touch with me; Random House will provide desk review copies, and I'm happy to talk to your class in person or online.

Discovered the new motto for Um... in Donna Haraway's new book, When Species Meet:

Making mistakes is inevitable and not particularly illuminating; making mistakes interesting is what makes the world new.

Pinyin News mentioned the College Board's Mandarin AP test results from 2007: 81.1 % of those taking the test got a 5, and 88.9% test takers said they "regularly speak or hear the foreign language of the examination at home."

The real story here is that the weekend Chinese school system must be doing something right. When I was talking to Gaston Caperton in 2005 for my Mandarin article, the College Board fully expected the first couple years of the test to be dominated by native speakers. Chinese parents had been pushing for an AP test in the language for a while, so their kids could get academic credit for all the work they'd put in (and so the parents could vindicate themselves in their kids' eyes, no doubt). In the early years of the AP curriculum, there just wasn't going to be enough support early enough in the public schools to give non-heritage speakers the background they'd need to do well on the exam.

The challenge will be for schools that have touted their new Mandarin AP classes to duplicate these test scores.