U.S. Surname Distribution. (Link from James Grimmelmann.)

Most of the names I tried show an anomaly in some part of the Deep South (Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana); for example, Sherwood is rarest in Alabama. Exceptions include Wheeler, about equally common in every State, and Manlove, almost unknown outside Delaware.

numerous translations of “Why can’t they just speak [my language]?”.

Sometimes I complain that no one ever gave me a nickname; now a couple of spammers have seemingly remedied the omission:

To: “Malik Riley” <bpotter@pobox.com>
Cc: “Bradly Fisher” <broker@pobox.com>, “Jaymie Tucker” <bronto@pobox.com>, “Kathlene Gardner” <bruce.metelerkamp@pobox.com>, “Sarai Little” <bugs@pobox.com>

To: “Meritriona a’Hettinel” <bronto@pobox.com>, “Cylin aup’Gaveryou” <eric.loew@pobox.com>, “Jaiwenna aup’Qunnewur” <m-wild@pobox.com>

How do you suppose these handles were generated? (And by the way how do you efficiently write a hanging indent in HTML?)

Planned Obsolescence: Dictionaraoke. (Blogging this mainly to save the link. I may comment on it later.)

The other day I brought home from a Thai restaurant a wrapped piece of hard candy, looking forward with pleasure to the prospect of opening a swell book that Dad gave me a few years ago, to see whether AMIRA (in small type) is a fair transliteration of what appears to be the name of the candy or its maker.

My reference treats Thai and Lao scripts together, and to my initial surprise two of the letters (corresponding to ‘m’ and ‘r’) look more like Lao. The small print is like the Thai type in the book. I’m guessing that there is an informal mode of Thai script that retains more of the look of the common ancestor than is in the formal style.

The trouble with books of this sort, of course, is that they usually show only a formal style. Imagine that you are literate in Arabic and getting your first exposure to the Latin alphabet. You have a reference table showing the letters in Times Roman, and from it you have to decipher handwriting. How sure can you be what features are essential and which are decorative?

I do have one book that overcomes the problem somewhat by illustrating each of the major living scripts with a page of a newspaper, showing body type, headlines and a few decorative titles.

More concise is the excellent Omniglot: Lao; Thai.

Who can tell me what kuvia means in Finnish?

Public service announcement: I keep reading that “the Norwegian Blue prefers keeping on its back,” which makes a tortured sort of sense; but the word in the script is kipping which means sleeping. Hope this helps.