Best Of MetaFilter

Grace - Mirror by phil41dean (cc by)

Kid, champ, you, we: what do you call yourself when you're talking to yourself?

Humor, family history and linguistic innovation: some great Mefite stories about minority languages in threads on Yiddish and Chinese dialects

Rolling your tongue and using bright light to induce a sneeze: body tricks that not everybody can do

Seeing where it all starts: fun experiments on your toddler's amazing brain

Seb Lester calligraphy

Lovely ink links recently on Mefi:

Penmenship isn't dead: the vibrant art of well-crafted written forms introduces two talented young penmen

Chinese calligraphy and painting manual from 1633 now online, in full offers a view of "the earliest and the most beautiful example of multicolor printing anywhere in the world"

How the ballpoint pen killed cursive looks at the surprisingly complicated influence of the biro

I should be able to read that discusses Copperplate, a beautiful and elaborate script that in its time was considered a basic penmanship style

And in Ask Me: "What are some good resources for a southpaw to improve his handwriting that don't involve the kind of cursive I was (not) taught as a child?" and "What's the best non-bulky fountain pen you've used?"

Lying Liars by katmeresin (cc by)

Next you're going to tell me it was actually only a couple of hundred yards to go before he slept? – not_on_display

"the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep’s cloth" explains how everyone knows Robert Frost’s "The Road Not Taken" – and how almost everyone gets it wrong (though not everyone: "I wrote a whole commencement speech about this general idea")

Plus a post about Best American Poetry guest editor Sherman Alexie's response re a white male poet who appropriated a Chinese name for submission to the anthology

and in Ask Me, looking for the author who said (something like) "The poet lies ... most especially when writing about himself"