Page 12 - Language Facts

The English word 'tycoon' comes from a Japanese word that means 'great lord.'

The Japanese word Taikun means 'great lord.' Commodore Perry brought the word to the United States in 1857 when he returned from his travels. It gained popularity in the United States when two aides of Abraham Lincoln, John Nicolae and John Hay, took to calling Lincoln a tycoon as a joke. It would later spread to use in the business world, which soon became its normal usage.

A tycoon is generally someone well known in the business world who has dominated an area of business. They are powerful and have great wealth. Other words to describe a tycoon might be a magnate, czar, mogul, baron, or oligarch. It generally implies a great deal of power. 

Some tycoons throughout history have been oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, whose company was Standard Oil, steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie, and automobile tycoon Henry Ford. It was a very popular term in the 29th and 20th centuries. Who would you consider to be modern-day tycoons? 

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There's nothing wrong with ending a sentence on a preposition.

For many English teachers, ending a sentence with a preposition is something that won't be put up with. The reality, though, is that this idea is a fallacy, and in the vast majority of cases, where the sentence is structurally sound, ending on a preposition is nothing to be corrected for. 

It is the Latin roots of English from which this idea has been spread about. In Latin grammar, a preposition was the one type of word that was wrong for a writer to end a sentence with. This idea has somewhat devolved in its translation into English, where the same rule has truthfully been more of a stylistic preference since. 

If you’re really concerned about stylistic correctness, then generally speaking, the “rule” is more a guideline of rhetoric to be tread about. 

The modern idea behind it is that it sounds much better to end a sentence in such a way that sounds firm and drives a point home, which is generally not something prepositions are good for. Though it’s still a fallacy we hear today, examples debunking it can be found at the source, and date as far back as 110 years before. Image: 

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A group of ravens is called an unkindness.

Talk to an engineer or any other science-minded person and they’ll tell you that language is merely a means to an ends. We have language for the practical reason of communication and nothing more. 

Somewhere along the lines language goes beyond all practicality. Poetry, for example, has no practical reasoning. It is an arrangement of words as art to express an idea creatively. In the same way, some words are artistic in and of themselves. 

For example, calling a group of ravens an unkindness is strangely poetical. Ravens are archetypically cast as a symbol of death are some bad omen. To call multiple ravens an unkindness is to call a group of ravens what they symbolicaly mean. They mean ill-will or a bad omen… in other words, an unkindness. 

Here are some other strange names: a group of rhinoceroses is called a crash, a group of apes is a shrewdness, and a group of ferrets is called a business. Did you know any of these? Want to learn some other strange names for groups of animal? Read more at the source. 

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There is a man who graduated high school, college, and taught high school English and Social Studies for 19 years all without knowing how to read.

His name is John Corcoran, and today he is an American author. Until he was 48, his reading comprehension was only about that of a second grade level. He wasn’t discovered throughout his entire education and 29 years of his career.

Because he was one of six children, his parents were too overwhelmed to notice he had trouble reading. At school, he was assigned to the “dumb row,” but because of other disciplinary issues, teachers often forgot about his reading difficulties. He attended two junior colleges after graduating high school, and eventually went to and graduated from the University of Texas at El Paso.

He managed a bachelor’s degree in Education and Business administration thanks to his athletic scholarship and aggressive cheating. For his first job as a high school teacher, Corcoran had his students write their names on a seating chart and pronounce them for him daily.

Because his literacy had only fallen since second grade, he couldn’t even tell one name from the next. After 17 years of teaching, followed by ten years as a real estate developer, he decided it was time to learn to read. Since then, he has become a spokesman for literacy programs and has even started his own foundation devoted to reading.

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A linguist and Star Trek fan tried to bring up his son with Klingon as his first language.

Star Trek has developed quite a following from when it came out to now. Fans continue to enjoy the Star Trek series and obsess over it in new ways. For a linguist, the best way to appreciate the Star Trek culture is to learn a little Klingon. 

Klingon (or tlhIngan Hol) is the language of the fictional Klingon species. Klingon was included in the books, but wasn’t used on screen until Star Trek: The Motion Picture. 

Marc Okrand developed Kligon to be used on screen, and would later develop it into a full-fledge language. It has lots of vocabulary for a language mainly used in spacecrafts, but can be difficult to use for everyday sort of things. 

Linguist d'Armond Speers spoke only Klingon to his son Alec, though his mother spoke English to him. Alec rarely responded to his father in Klingon, and by his fifth birthday it was clear he wasn’t interested in speaking it. 

D'Armond Speers switched back to speaking in English with his son. Klingon is believed to have somewhere between 20-30 fluent speakers.

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