Doobly? Fipper? What Do You Call the Remote?

'It's on like Donkey Kong' has become liability

(NEWSER) - Nintendo’s trying to trademark “It’s on like Donkey Kong”—so we need a new video-game based catchphrase. Contenders from Unplggd :

• I Got Mario Karted: Someone’s beaten you at the last minute, which often happens in Mario Kart. Example: “I almost got with this girl/guy, but then my friend Mario Karted me by buying her/him a drink!”

Yes, it's an annoying verbal tic—but it can also be useful

(NEWSER) - “Like” is, like, the biggest filler word since, um, “you know,” and it, basically, gets on Christopher Hitchens’ nerves. But though “it’s true that in some cases the term has become simultaneously a crutch and a tic, driving out the rest of the vocabulary as candy expels vegetables,” it wasn’t always so—and, believe it or not, in a modified form it can actually be useful, he writes in Vanity Fair . More»

Cell phone, computer make way into written and spoken Mandarin

(NEWSER) - New technology has kids in China generating their own modern lingo, I.D. Magazine reports. The millennia-old Mandarin language lacks terms for things like cell phones (which go as shou ji, or "hand machine") and USB (which goes as yo pan, a word created partly phonetically), forcing users to resort to slang. The new words are spread through television and other pop culture. More»

Yep, really. A jury of German language experts picked it

(NEWSER) - Germans are better off because of America's pottymouth, at least according to a group of language experts who have named the biggest English contribution to the German language in 2011: "shitstorm." Yep, the "Anglicism of the Year" is a word that the experts say "fills a gap in the German vocabulary that has become apparent through changes in the culture of public debate." After all, Germans would previously have had to turn to more toothless terms like kritik (criticism) to express their emotions. More»

Seems to be the natural order for human 'proto' language: scientists

(NEWSER) - Human beings' very first "proto" language may have sounded more like Yoda-speak than the English we use today. Researchers believe all language derived from one spoken some 50,000 years ago in east Africa. Now scientists are making a case that the first language followed a "subject-object-verb" order, as in "I you like," favored by the little Jedi warrior. The researchers—co-directors of the Santa Fe Program for the Evolution of the Human Language—reached their conclusion after creating and studying a family tree linking all languages, reports MSNBC . Clear patterns of word orders became apparent, and all were traced back to the subject-object-verb, or SOV, order, rather than the subject-verb-object of English and several other languages. More»