Look, her accent doesn’t bother me. (It’s the last thing about her that bothers me.) My family includes Minnesotans, so I kind of like her accent. But I’m not the only person who’s been wondering where it comes from. Slate.com called upon a regional-speech specialist, an Alaskan-native scholar, and Frances McDormand’s dialect coach to venture some guesses. Sounds like Minnesota after all:
[Some] have wondered whether her accent hails from Idaho, where her parents are from. But dialect features tend to come from one’s peers, not one’s parents, and Palin spent her childhood in Alaska’s Mat-Su Valley, which is where she got her distinctive manner of speaking. The next town over from Wasilla, Palmer, has a large settlement of Minnesotans—who were moved there by a government relief program in the 1930s—and features of the Minnesotan dialect are thus prominent in the Mat-Su Valley area. Hence the Fargo-like elements in Palin’s speech, in particular the sound of her “O” vowel. (Despite its name, Fargo took place mostly in Brainerd, Minn.) However, even in the area, many people speak a more general Alaskan English, the sort one would find in nearby Anchorage. Palin’s frequent dropping of the final G in -ing words and her pronunciation of terrorist with two syllables instead of three are characteristic of general Alaskan English (and Western English) rather than the specific Mat-Su Valley speech.
It may appear agrestic to ask, but The Times is calling on its readers to come to the rescue of words that risk fading into caliginosity.
Dictionary compilers at Collins have decided that the word list for the forthcoming edition of its largest volume is embrangled with words so obscure that they are linguistic recrement. Such words, they say, must be exuviated abstergently to make room for modern additions that will act as a roborant for the book.
The Phoenix lander aimed a laser at the clouds and found ice crystals about two miles above the surface. Mission scientists hope to see snow actually fall to the ground. NASA says the snow is water-based. Mars is too warm to support frozen carbon dioxide. “Scientists are able to determine that the snow is water-based and not carbon-dioxide snow, since temperatures on Mars are currently too warm to support the latter,” NASA adds.–Setting-the-record-straight-Tom
Peter Smith, the lead scientist for the mission from the University of Arizona, said the team is going to try something new in the last weeks of Phoenix’s life.
The lander carried a microphone, which was designed to listen to the roar of the descent engines as the craft settled onto the Martian surface. The microphone was not used then. Now, Smith said, the scientific team intends to turn on the microphone “and listen to Mars for the first time.”
He based the clock on a design by longitude pioneer John Harrison, who was calibrating the one he built himself when he died in 1776. The ominous grasshopper sculpture atop the face is a tribute to another Harrison invention, the “grasshopper escapement” that releases a clock’s gears with each swing of the pendulum. The “Chronophage” (time-eater) was unveiled at Cambridge by Stephen Hawking, in a ceremony that ran 14 minutes and 55 seconds late. Taylor says:
“I … wanted to depict that time is a destroyer – once a minute is gone you can’t get it back …. That’s why my grasshopper is not a Disney character. He is a ferocious beast that over the seconds has his tongue lolling out, his jaws opening, then on the 59th second he gulps down time.”
Look, her accent doesn’t bother me. (It’s the last thing about her that bothers me.) My family includes Minnesotans, so I kind of like her accent. But I’m not the only person who’s been wondering where it comes from. Slate.com called upon a regional-speech specialist, an Alaskan-native scholar, and Frances McDormand’s dialect coach to venture some guesses. Sounds like Minnesota after all:
“Conventional clocks with hands are boring,” says inventor John Taylor. Much more interesting to build a four-foot-wide mechanical timepiece that has 