This Week's Factoids on Language, Consulting and Computers

• According to a friend of mine who works for a consulting company, one of their gags involves ordering workers to break up into teams, and then perform an exercise which involves each of them writing one or two words from a particular sentence on a index cards, until the entire sentence has been formed.  The sentences they use? "Caring parents are to be admired" and "Loving children are to be admired."
• Possibly the longest debate on German Anglicisms on this or any other Internet can be found in a discussion forum of the online dictionary LEO right here (g).  For an amusing short story composed almost entirely of French imports into English click here.
• Windows Vista has built-in speech recognition capability, which actually works amazingly well, no joke!  Just go to Control Panel, then Speech Recognition.  Why was I not informed of this long before?

Comments

[mawa]

I don't get the consulting »gag«. What's funny about it?

[doppelfish]

For the germanic ones among the readership of this blog, the german translation (hah!) of Vista calls it "Systemsteuerung -> Spracherkennungsoptionen".

For the english ones among the readership of this comment: Yes, this is actual german. We speak it every day.