Now read this: Eyjafjallajoekull
We all heard by now about the volcanic ash clouds threatening air traffic in Northern Europe. Geoffrey Pullum from Language Log provides us with a funny outlook on the matter:
Eyjafjallajoekull: the name says it all, doesn't it? No, of course it doesn't. It looks like a kitten walked across your keyboard. It's the name of the glacier covering the volcano in Iceland that just woke up and remembered that its job description says "Spew hot lava ash across northwestern Europe".
Also, closely related to the department of linguistics, I'd like to point you to an essay written by Evan Schnittman on the various reading behaviors in today's digital world.
So today there are two successful areas of digital reading – extractive and immersive. Yet there are still frontiers to be opened – most notably in the arena that print textbooks now occupy. I call this type of reading, pedagogic reading.
Pedagogic reading is different than extractive and immersive reading even though it contains both extractive and immersive qualities. Pedagogic reading is reading that is done to explicitly train the brain using building blocks of information that can be recalled and applied to do higher levels of thinking and learning.
