• Is it a piece of IKEA furniture or a type of cheese? An amusing quiz from Mental Floss.

• Thou wayward rump-fed malt-worm! Have some fun with the Shakespearean insult generator.

• Which reminds me of the pirate Guybrush Threepwood in the old video game, Curse of Monkey Island, where swordfights included trading insults. Sample: “I’ve spoken with apes more polite than you!” “I’m glad to hear you attended your family reunion.”

• See the entertaining History of English in Ten Minutes. (Actually, it’s 11:29 minutes on the origins of words.)

Enjoy your weekend, however long it is! And please share if you find any great places for word fun.

Image: Tina Phillips and FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

Correct the malapropisms, where one word is used mistakenly for another, like “I was prostate with grief” vs. “I was prostrate with grief.”

Make a word as fast as possible with the tiles given in Scrabble Sprint. (Apologies for the addictive nature of this!)

Find all the food-related words in the puzzles with Eat Your Words.

How strong is your vocabulary? Can you tell the difference between a bunker or the rough on a golf course, or recognize a board game as Kendo or Go? Show your stuff in Name That Thing.

Enjoy!

Image credit: digitalart and FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

NPD founder Jeff Rubin has announced the select few among the 220 entrants who attempted to meet the challenge of creating one paragraph containing 13 specific punctuation marks in no more than three sentences. You’ll find the list on the National Punctuation Day website, but this one from Demorah Hayes of Montgomery, Alabama is my fave:

“If punctuation marks wore clothes, the comma would dress in brown—not rich, chocolate, winter-boots brown but faded, school-uniform khaki—and the ellipsis (remember those from Editing 101?) would wear a purple dress with oversized shades and sit alone sipping a martini,” said the founder of National Punctuation Day as she announced the day’s events to celebrate the “lowly comma . . . and the ever-mysterious ellipsis.” She was vague about the clothing choices of the question mark, suggesting that “the question mark is like the lady who changes [her dress] as the minutes tick by, with her husband yelling ‘late!’ as he slams the door.” She was more certain about the colon’s dress: monochromatic; balanced on top and bottom; and modest in size, color, and fit, as if to say, “look not at me but at what comes after me.”

Rubin says he also received a few late entries for the 2010 contest, which asked for a haiku about punctuation and drew more than 3,000 entries. He provided a link to a PDF of the winners on his site, which included this one I particularly like from Michelle Green:

Supermarket trip. / I erase apostrophes / from apple’s and grape’s.

maybe because my own submission was similar:

What makes me crazy / are apostrophes in signs. / Know the one’s I  mean?

 Image: jscreationzs and FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

Play Hangman with Oxford English Dictionary. No surprise, expect tricky words.

Play Oxford Fortune Cookie on Twitter by tweeting “I want to play OxfordFortuneCookie with @OUPAcademic” and a number between 1 and 400. The reply will be a quote/your fortune.

Build or test your vocabulary with FreeRice; addictive, and you donate 10 grains of rice each time.

Enter your name and see how it gets scrambled. Mine came out as “Hoarser Nuns.”

Try out the YouTube insult generator, which pulls insults from comments people have left on YouTube (pointed to by Guy Kawasaki). For example, entering “school” came back with “You GOT NO RECSS hahahaha no.” and “You ride the short bus.”

Create a Wordle picture with a favourite section of literature, speech, article, words of praise or whatever words you like.

Enjoy. And do share if you find other fun sites involving word fun!

Photo: photostock and FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

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Just think if spammers took all the time they spend creating new forms of spam and used it for good. They would solve world hunger, for sure.

Have you had any funny, unusual and/or creative spam lately? Do share!

Image credit: Patchareeya99 and FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

The 2011 contest winner — Terri Daniel of Seattle, WA — recently received the crown for this “Fantasy” category submission:

Within the smoking ruins of Keister Castle, Princess Gwendolyn stared in horror at the limp form of the loyal Centaur who died defending her very honor. “You may force me to wed,” she cried at the leering and victorious Goblin King, “but you’ll never be half the man he was.”

As you can see, writers get points for puns and over-the-top writing, the more, the better. A lot of people also try to cram as much detail as possible into one sentence, although organizers advise trying to keep it under 50 words. (Note that for comprehension, experts advise keeping your average sentence length to about 14 words.)

Other submissions I found amusing include this one, in the category of “Vile Puns,” by Joe Wyatt of Amarillo, TX:

“Detective Kodiak plucked a single hair from the bearskin rug and at once understood the grisly nature of the crime: it had been a ferocious act, a real honey, the sort of thing that could polarize a community, so he padded quietly out the back to avoid a cub reporter waiting in the den.”

And this, from Mike Pedersen of North Berwick, ME:

“As his small boat scudded before a brisk breeze under a sapphire sky dappled with cerulean clouds with indigo bases, through cobalt seas that deepened to navy nearer the boat and faded to azure at the horizon, Ian was at a loss as to why he felt blue.”

As I’ve mentioned before, the contest began in 1982, the brainchild (or Rosemary’s baby, as the site suggests) of Professor Scott Rice at San Jose State University. He accepts submissions all year, and is probably right now hoping that the release of the 2011 winners will spur yet more awful writing. Scroll down to “History of the BLFC” for how to submit your entry.

Trivia: Bulwer-Lytton is also responsible for coming up with “the pen is mightier than the sword” and “the great unwashed.”

Photo credit: Suvro Datta and FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

Last year, the creator of this widely celebrated national holiday (what? it isn’t?), Jeff Rubin, invited people to come up with haikus celebrating punctuation, and 3,000 of us did so. (Mine is here.)

This year, your task is to come up with one paragraph, maximum three sentences. It must use these 13 punctuation marks: apostrophe, brackets, colon, comma, dash, ellipsis, exclamation point, hyphen, parentheses, period, question mark, quotation mark and semicolon.

Are you up for the challenge? Submit your entry by Sept. 30 to Jeff@NationalPunctuationDay.com.

P.S. Check out the funny Grammar Vandal blog, where Kate McCulley posts signs and other items that get it wrong.

Image credit: “Idea Go” at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

I discovered this contest in 2008, and have looked forward to the results each year since then. It’s not always about the titles themselves, which actually seem to have grown less odd each year. More often I have enjoyed the way Horace Bent, The Bookseller’s diarist and custodian of the Diagram Prize, describes the contenders and the contest. See if you don’t agree:

“In the end, it wasn’t even close. Much like the tyrant himself, Managing a Dental Practice the Genghis Khan Way ruthlessly slaughtered the opposition, and scored twice as many votes as the runner-up, 8th International Friction Stir Welding Symposium Proceedings.”

Bent also notes that the winner:

“…joins an illustrious list of former winners including Living with Crazy Buttocks, Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, How to Avoid Huge Ships, and Highlights in the History of Concrete…I am delighted that in economically troublesome times publishers the world over have continued to publish incredibly niche titles with powerfully obscure titles.”

What I also find so appealing about this contest is that it apparently started as a way to avoid boredom at the Frankfurt Book Fair more than 30 years ago.

Another Word of the Year entry that I think is hilarious is Cookie Monster’s “nom,” the joyous sound he makes eating cookies. (And you know how I love Sesame Street!) Nom is also widely used in captions to LOLcats.

The Word of the Year vote is a “fairly light-hearted effort” that aims to find a word or expression that reflects ideas that have occupied the English-speaking world during the year, as in 2009′s “tweet,” 2008′s “subprime” and 2007′s “bailout.” Anyone can nominate a word and the society’s word people vote on them during the Linguistic Society of America’s annual conference in early January. Apparently both words were heavy favourites, with app just edging out nom.

When you think of it, that last sentence would have been completely incomprehensible just a couple of years ago, which underlines the society’s opinion that “language change is normal, ongoing, and entertaining.”

Somerville won over the judges with phrases such as the one describing an act of lovemaking as being “like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin.” The Guardian reported more of “the naughtiest bits” and shared amusing commentary, including about the suspected sex life of the judges.

The award is given each year by the British Literary Review and was established in 1993 by the late British author Auberon Waugh to “draw attention to the crude, tasteless, and often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in contemporary novels, and to discourage it.” No word on what prompted “Bron” to do this.

Graciously accepting his award, Somerville said, “There is nothing more English than bad sex. So on behalf of the entire nation, I thank you.”

(If you think awards like this are funny, have you heard about the Bulwer-Lytton awards?)