Best Of MetaFilter

A slightly belated congratulations to MeFi's own Languagehat on the twentieth anniversary of his blog.

stacking chairs abstract by Muffet (cc by)

A self-proving premise appears!

All roads lead to Rome series by Nick Kenrick. (cc by)

But what's The Peutinger Map? Also known as Tabula Peutingeriana, it is a Medieval copy of highly stylized 4th Century map of the Roman road network, extending to India.

Kattullus invites us to explore the roads leading to Rome via "The Peutinger Map Reconsidered" with a variety of ways to view this ancient artifact, including overlays and lists of geographical features, while BWA offers What Latin Sounded Like and How We Know, and other linguistic treats from Nativlang.

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

The Brox Sisters tune their radio

I'm working on a performance bit that uses 1920s diction, but there's something I'm missing. What are the elements of the popular radio voice that make it distinctive?

Some interesting answers to monkihed's interesting question, Linguists: what makes the 1920s voice so distinctive?

FGR: Belly by bloody marty mix (cc by-nc-nd)

The oldest use of the f-word has been discovered, dating the word some 165 years earlier that had ever been seen. It appeared in the name "Roger Fuckebythenavele"

and in the dream-jobs-you-never-knew-you'd-kill-to-have department, litlnemo offers, "I teach a class on dirty surnames (yes, really) and this one so has to go into my list. Those medieval English people were not the most delicate of speech, let's just put it that way."

In other deep thoughts on names and other things, MCMikeNamara asks, Has Axl Rose ever commented on the fact that his stage name is an anagram for "oral sex"?

Huge congratulations to longtime Metafilter member and sociolinguist iamkimiam for completing her PhD disstertation, which grew from a simple question—just how the hell do you pronounce 'mefi'?—into a 250 page study of community practice and linguistic enregisterment.

sex on the beach by emme-dk (cc by)

What do you call it when you have more than one Sex on the Beach?