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The OMG Shakespeare series replaces prose with text speak and emoticons. Furious academics have branded the new books 'absolutely disastrous.' Regarded as some of the finest works in English literature, now some of William Shakespeare's greatest plays--Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream--have been translated into emojis.

"American audiences will hear an accent and style surprisingly like their own in its informality and strong r-colored vowels... Meier said audiences will hear word play and rhymes that "haven't worked for several hundred years (love/prove, eyes/qualities, etc.)" Plus a sample video.

A Liverpool University study found reading poetry lights up both the left part of the brain concerned with language, as well as the right hemisphere, an area that relates to autobiographical memory and emotion. Reading triggers "reappraisal mechanisms" that cause people to reflect on their own experiences in light of what they read. The study might also suggest that word choice and sound are crucial elements in creating beneficial literary experiences: more "challenging" prose and poetry (striking wording/phrasing, complex syntax) sparks far more electrical activity in the brain than more pedestrian translations of those passages.

Video featuring British historical linguist and Early Modern English scholar, David Crystal, and his son, Ben Crystal, speaking about their work in re: speaking Shakespeare's words as they originally sounded.

"A few million virtual monkeys are close to re-creating the complete works of Shakespeare by randomly mashing keys on virtual typewriters."

Hey, Ryan! Glad to have you back with us. We miss you.

"All of the justices talk about "legalese" in disparaging terms, and many refer to great fiction writers as masters of language. ... That sentiment is echoed by Breyer, who points to Proust, Stendhal and Montesquieu as his inspirations. Justice Anthony Kennedy loves Hemingway, Shakespeare, Solzhenitsyn, Dickens and Trollope. ..."

To pun or not to pun, that is the question. Are puns the lowest form of wordplay, or an ancient art form embraced by the likes of Jesus and Shakespeare? Roman orators Cicero and Quintilian believed that "paronomasia", the Greek term for punning, was a sign of intellectual suppleness and rhetorical skill. Although often seen as annoying by detractors, puns may impart shades of meaning in an economical fashion, perhaps, or render lessons and concepts more vivid and memorable to listeners.

From Avatar to The Wizard of Oz, Aristotle to Shakespeare, there's one clear form that dramatic storytelling has followed since its inception.

"Everyone's entitled to their opinion regarding pronoun acceptability." The use of singular "they" has always been a bit disreputable - you might say it, but you wouldn't want to write it down. But now it's a pronoun whose hour has come. A few months ago, the Washington Post style guide accepted it. And it's been welcomed by people who identify as genderqueer and who feel that "he" and "she" don't necessarily exhaust all the gender possibilities. Universities allow students to select it as their personal pronoun. And so does Facebook, so that your friends will get notices like "Wish them a happy birthday." This use of "they" has been around for a long time. It shows up in Shakespeare, Dickens and George Bernard Shaw. Jane Austen was always saying things like "everybody has their failing." But the Victorian grammarians made it a matter of schoolroom dogma that one could only say "Everybody has his failing," with the understanding that "he" stood in for both sexes. That rule wasn't really discredited until the 1970s, when the second-wave feminists made the generic masculine the paradigm of sexism in language. Male critics ridiculed their complaints as a "libspeak tantrum" and accused them of suffering from "pronoun envy." But most writers now realize that the so-called gender-neutral "he" is anything but. Nobody would ever say, "Every candidate thanked his spouse, including Hillary." When you utter "he," you always bring a male to mind. But once the generic masculine fell out of favor, what were we going to replace it with? People weren't about to adopt a brand-new gender-neutral pronoun the way they were adopting gender-neutral job descriptions. "He or she" was impossibly clunky. It was time to restore singular "they" to respectability. And that's been happening, even in edited books and the media.

Apparently there are rules to the language used in doge memes, and it can be used in various contexts, up to and including translating passages from Shakespeare. Much amaze. So language. Wow.

This article talks about: -Eminem -his rhyme schemes -how his rhyme schemes compare to historical rhyme schemes (ie. Shakespeare) -his rapping speed -his word puns and wordplay

14 children with autism spectrum disorder participated in the "Hunter Heartbeat Method" which is a drama-based social skills intervention. The children play games that work on skills like facial emotion recognition, personal space, social improvisation, and pragmatics of dialogue exchange. The games are based on the plot of The Tempest and are taught in a relaxed and playful environment. At the end of the ten week program, children showed better language skills and were able to better recognize facial expressions.

Linguist Victor Mair references Caleb Madison's article in the "The Good Word" column of The Atlantic (1/24/22): "Why We're All Shooketh: The term is online slang of Biblical proportions". The phrase I'm shooketh was first uttered by the comedian Christine Sydelko in a YouTube video uploaded to her account in 2017 (she was expressing her shock at having been recognized by a fan at Boston Market). The adjective shooketh took off as a way to lend biblical proportions to awestruck confusion. But the linguistic journey to its creation spans the evolution of the English language, connecting Early Modern English, turn-of-the-century adventure novels, and Twitter slang. In the original article, Madison noted that when we want to transform verbs like shake into adjectives, we typically use something called a participle, either present or past. The present participle of shake is shaking, as in "I'm shaking." The past participle would be "I'm shaken." But in the 19th century, the simple past tense, shook, took hold. As for the "eth" part, Mair notes that this suffix was used in Early Modern English (think Shakespeare and the King James Bible) to put verbs in the third-person present tense, e.g. "she loveth." Soon, -eth simplified to just -s, but we still use the form when we need to give our verbs a little extra ancient oomph. It just wouldn't be as momentous to say "The Lord gives and the Lord takes away!" And it certainly wouldn't be as cool to say "I'm shooks." But our distance from the Elizabethan era allows -eth to reappear with no tense tension. Instead, it simply adds a wry dramatic flourish to the feeling of being shook. If using shook dials the shock of shaken up a notch, adding -eth pushes the intensity to 11, expressing a holy and almost sublime desire in the face of inexplicable events. Shooketh yokes together a punchy modern verbal innovation with a dramatic formal relic of early English to communicate a shaking of biblical propor