SIX MONTHS OF LANGUAGEHAT.

It feels a little silly celebrating a semianniversary, but everybody knows blog years are like dog years. (However, a book cannot be blog-eared. But I digress.) I worked hard on my first post (wanting to avoid the “Testing… testing… hey, this thing works!” syndrome), and I’ve tried to keep up an interesting mix of material somehow related to language (or, on occasion, hats). I’d like to take this occasion to thank everyone who’s sent e-mails or left comments—and may I remind you all that my comment boxes, unlike some others, do not require an e-mail address, so even the shyest of you can freely indulge in commentary, silliness (hi quonsar!), or a combination of the two (I’m thinking of the mysterious aa‘s contributions to my Bad Etymology thread)—and I’ll direct specific thanks to Songdog for helping me get started and saving me repeatedly from template disaster, to Renee and Pat for early encouragement, to Avva for collegiality and postcards, to the Mermaid for kind words and many stolen links (how do you find all those great links?), to Moira for inspiring me to add poetry to the mix, and to all those who cannot be mentioned because the revelation of their names would upset the balance of the space-time continuum: you know who you are.

When I began, my readership could be counted on the fingers of both hands—and the fact that the second hand was needed was due entirely to Pat’s and Merm’s brilliant mutual-backscratching invention, Linguablogs. It rose steadily to an average of several dozen a day, then shot upward this month because of a combination of the excellent Pepys’ Diary site, to which I quickly became addicted, and the Jan. 28 MSNBC recommendation (“One of the most exciting blogspotting finds I’ve made while judging Bloggies is the large and active community of linguabloggers…”). I hope to keep everyone entertained for at least another half-year, if only with the spectacle of language names more bizarre (hi aa!) than you ever thought existed (Guugu Yimidhirr, anyone?). Y’all come back now, y’hear?

Comments

  1. Long may it wave!

  2. Veels geluk!

  3. Congratulations, languagehat! It’s been a great six months, and I look forward to your posts yet to come.

  4. Aww, congrats on your six months! I love your blog and the way you write and hope you keep it up for a long time.

    moi

  5. hwrê!

    as the Welsh are wont to say

    here, have a multilingual smiley:

    \(^_^)/

    more hat stuff!

  6. Excellent job – keep it up!

  7. Yours is one of the few blogs I try to read outside my RSS news aggregator.

    Keep up the good work, but please move the site to Movable Type, or use something like RSSify to provide an RSS feed.

  8. Many happy returns! Maybe now it’s time to disclose the correct Russian word for the Hat: is it shapka? or is it shlyapa? or, g-d preserve us, kolpak? 🙂

    Renee

  9. I’ll let you pick the Russian version, with your native-speaker Sprachgefühl; I have shapki and shlyapy, but no kolpak!

  10. Congrats! Every time I come to your blog, I learn something new …

  11. Hi Language Hat,

    Happy semi-anniversary! Did you see you’ve been mentioned in Russian too?
    And now the great secret revealed: I find my links by subscribing to some 25 translation discussion groups, hanging out at Proz and by launching Google immediately, barely after the first stroke of an idea forms in my silly head.

    Cheers and keep up with the great linguablogging!
    ME

  12. Congratulations! 🙂 And keep at it…. 😉

  13. Congratulations on your 32nd semi-anniversity. It’s worked well for us readers (and I guess for you also).

  14. For me, dog is in THOUGHT, anomalously, whereas blog is in LOT just like weblog.

  15. and I guess for you also

    Indeed. I literally can’t imagine what my life would have been like without it. Who knows if I would have been able to switch from corporate hell to freelance life successfully if I hadn’t had the entrée provided by people being familiar with Languagehat? Who knows if I would ever have gotten a Kindle, or started my program of reading through Russian lit? I met my wife online, and through her her son Songdog, who introduced me to the (then-new) world of blogs and helped me start this one. Everything I have I owe to the internet!

  16. David Marjanović says

    Thank Gore for the Internet.

  17. @David Marjanović: I realize it has been almost eighteen years, but jokes like that have seemed a lot less funny since the 2000 election.

  18. Well, I chuckled.

  19. David Marjanović says

    Of course Gore didn’t “invent the Internet” and never claimed he had. He did, however, get Congress to fund an important step in its development, AFAIU – so the alleged claim isn’t that far off!

  20. But who connected the tubes?

  21. @David Marjanović: The point is that Gore said something that was entirely true, and it was twisted by the media into something that sounded like an absurd lie. And the Internet thing was only the most prominent example of his truthful words being perverted in that fashion.

  22. David Marjanović says

    I know. We can quite seriously thank Gore for the Internet. It’s kind of a meta-joke.

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