Teddy Roosevelt Changes the American Language

In America we spell certain words a bit different. Colour is color, favour is favor, parlour is parlor. Have you ever wondered why? Well, I was reading a good book called One-night Stands with American History and found out the answer: President Theodore Roosevelt.

On August 27, 1906 T.R. decided to change the American language. Some changes were small and were quickly adopted by American dictionaries. Many words had silent vowels removed, such as the words I listed. Also changed were words like rumor, which was rumour. Some of the other changes were not as elegant and were not kept. For example, the word kissed became kist and blushed became blusht. As soon as Congress came back from their recess there was a great debate. Shortly after, T.R.’s changes were knocked down and the Government Printing Office was ordered to “observe and adhere to the standard of orthography prescribed in generally accepted dictionaries of the English language.” Of course, since the dictionaries had already adopted some of the new spellings, they stuck with us. I bet T.R. “blusht” when he heard he had been beaten.

SOURCE: Mark Sullivan, Our Times (New York: Scribner’s, 1930-36), IV, 162-90.

Goodbye msnbot

User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /

Yes, I’ve blocked you msnbot. I’m tired of finding you in my stats coming from random searches that don’t even show my site in the search results, such as “keeping,” “album,” “comments,” or any of the other thousand or so one word searches you come to my site for. I don’t show up in your search results (at least not high enough for me to care) nor do I really want to show up in the top 100 pages in search results for the word “keeping.” So, you are no longer welcome here. I don’t want to see you on my property anymore. I don’t really care that this may drop me out of live.com’s search altogether. It’s a crappy search engine and anyone who uses it is an idiot and shouldn’t come to my site anyway. So, in conclusion, stop visiting my site msnbot. You’re not welcome here.

The Dark Knight

I have to say I am extremely excited about The Dark Knight coming out. The movie looks to be fantastic. The viral marketing is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Just check out Gotham Cable News, Gotham National Bank, and The Gotham Times for examples.

I thought Batman Begins was great and I knew they had to make another. Every preview for TDK I’ve seen has blown me away. This does not look like a comic book movie. This looks like a crime thriller, such as Heat. It’s being compared to The Godfather II, meaning it’s a sequel that is so good it blows the first film out of the water. There are even whispers going around that if Heath Ledger doesn’t win an Oscar for this it will be a travesty. Christopher Nolan is a talented director and Christian Bale is one of the top actors in the business.

I’m counting down the days until its release. I’ve seen every Batman movie in the theater. I’ve seen every one, since the first back in 1989, when I was 6, with my dad. I’m looking forward to going with him. It’s one of our traditions. 19 years of Batman movies. Thankfully, Christopher Nolan was able to revive the franchise after the horrible Batman and Robin and hopefully he’ll come back for a third in the series reboot. Until then, I’ll continue to drool over more news and previews of TDK and wait impatiently for the day my dad and I can see it together.

Cancer

Just a quick update.  My mom has been diagnosed with thyroid cancer.  Please keep her in your thoughts.  I will update with her progress as time goes on.  She’s a strong fighter and I know we can get through this.