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Congressman Mark Sanford has returned to frontline politics after ensuring “hiking the Appalachian Trail” became a euphemism for infidelity. What other scandals have enriched the lexicon?

1. “Hiking the Appalachian Trail” When South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford disappeared for six days in 2009, his aides told reporters he had gone for a walking holiday along the US’s most celebrated hiking route. In fact, it soon transpired Sanford had been with his Argentine mistress in Buenos Aires. The phrase quickly ignited the imaginations of the press corps. “I think we should start using ‘hiking the Appalachian trail’ for discussions of future political scandale, don’t you?”, suggested commentator Andrew Sullivan. The subsequent popularity of the phrase did not prevent Sanford winning election to the House of Representatives, where he is due to be sworn in.

2. “Discussing Uganda” In 1973, the satirical magazine Private Eye reported that journalist Mary Kenny had been disturbed in the arms of a former cabinet minister of President Obote of Uganda during a party. Variations of “Ugandan discussions” or “discussing Uganda” – the term is believed to have been coined by the poet James Fenton – were subsequently used by the Eye to describe any illicit encounter, and the phrase soon became part of common usage.

3. “Didn’t inhale” The political career of Bill Clinton has been far from unencumbered by scandal – not least when he attempted to redefine “sexual relations”. But perhaps his greatest linguistic legacy came during his campaign for the presidency when he admitted he had smoked marijuana but “didn’t inhale”. Almost immediately, the verb “to inhale” was deployed on campuses everywhere in place of “to get high”. Even Clinton’s successor-but-one got in on the act. “The point was to inhale,” Barack Obama told reporters in 2008, admitting his own youthful drug use. “That was the point.”

4. “Tired and emotional” In 1957 The Spectator lost a libel trial brought by three Labour politicians whom it accused of having been drunk. Intoxication being difficult to prove retrospectively in court without a blood sample, British journalists cast around for an alternative phrase. The result, at first, tended to be associated with Labour’s deputy leader George Brown. Some sources suggest the phrase was first coined by Brown’s agent, Edward Eldred, when making excuses for his erratic boss. But it was popularised when Brown made a televised tribute after President John F Kennedy’s assassination while visibly inebriated. A press release the following day described his condition as “tired and emotional” – a form of words adopted by Private Eye and others in their wake.

5. “Final user” The carnivalesque private life of Silvio Berlusconi introduced a bemused world to the notion of “bunga bunga”. An escort named Patrizia D’Addario, who said she slept with the former Italian prime minister at a party, extended his linguistic legacy. The politician’s lawyer Niccolo Ghedini denied the claims – and said because D’Addario said Berlusconi had not personally hired or paid her he would have been the “utilizzatore finale” or “final user” of her services, and thus was not criminally liable. Despite Ghedini’s protestations of his client’s innocence, the phrase has become a euphemism for men who use prostitutes.

6. “Economical with the truth” A term with a habit of surfacing during politically-charged legal cases. UK Cabinet Secretary Robert Armstrong used the phrase in a Sydney court in 1986, when the British government took legal action in Australia to try to stop the publication of Spycatcher, the memoirs of a former MI5 agent. A few years later, former minister Alan Clark admitted he had been “economical… with the actualite” during the Matrix Churchill trial in 1992. Armstrong later wrote a letter to the Times newspaper in which he said he derived the phrase from 18th Century statesman Edmund Burke.

7. “Wide stance” – Idaho senator Larry Craig was arrested for lewd conduct in an airport toilet during a police sting operation. The arrest report stated that Craig claimed his foot had touched that of an undercover officer in an adjacent cubicle “because he has a wide stance when going to the bathroom”. Craig pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of disorderly conduct but, when the case became public, protested his innocence and denied he was gay. Although Craig may not have actually used the term himself, “wide stance” was swiftly seized upon by comedians and slang dictionaries.

8. “Mis-speak” In 2008, Hillary Clinton claimed to have been pinned down by sniper fire while on a trip to Bosnia. When video footage suggested otherwise, she went in front of the cameras and admitted: “I did mis-speak the other day.” At the time, lexicographer Tony Thorne predicted in the Magazine that in future the term “will probably only be used ironically or mockingly”. It had, however, previously been used by Republican candidate John McCain and the staffs of Presidents George W Bush and Ronald Reagan.

9. “Watching badgers” Ron Davies had already experienced what he called a “moment of madness” on London’s Clapham Common in 1998, during which he was mugged. The incident led to his resignation as Welsh Secretary. Then in 2003 The Sun newspaper claimed it had photographed him engaging in a sex act with a stranger at a picnic spot. After initially denying he had ever visited the area, Davies then changed his story and said he had been there “watching badgers”, a phrase that the tabloid suggested should find its way into the Oxford English Dictionary.

10. “Slipping my moorings” Innuendo travels quickly in the age of social media. No sooner had former CIA chief David Petraeus apologised in March 2013 for “slipping my moorings” by having an affair with his biographer, the Sunday Times’ Camilla Long tweeted: “Best euphemism for illicit sex so far today.”

Trekkies looking to translate the famous Klingon battle cry Heghlu’meH QaQ jajvam! — or any other phrase from the fictional alien race’s language — will soon have a new tool at their disposal.

Starting on Tuesday, Bing, Microsoft Corp.’s Internet search engine, will include Klingon in its web-based translation service. The move is part of a broad marketing partnership between the Redmond, Wash., software giant and Paramount Pictures, which will release the upcoming “Star Trek Into Darkness.”

The Bing service will translate text written in any one of 41 supported languages — including English, French, Hebrew and Urdu — into Klingon. Fear not, native Klingon speakers: words or phrases written in that language can be translated into the more than three dozen available tongues.

(For what it’s worth, that Klingon battle cry translates into “Today is a good day to die!”)

Bing developed the translator with help from Microsoft engineer Eric Andeen, one of the few people in the world who speaks Klingon.

“We have people who understand the deep science of linguistics and we also have people who are passionate about the “Star Trek” franchise,” said Craig Beilinson, director of communications for Bing. “This was a labor of love from a lot of different avenues.”

Klingon was developed by linguist Marc Okrand, who based the language on vocabulary created by “Star Trek” actor James Doohan.

Doohan, who died in 2005, played Montgomery Scott in 1979′s “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.” The actor made up a handful of Klingon words for the film, which marked the first time the language was spoken in a movie. In addition to consulting Andeen, Bing worked with Okrand on developing the translator.

The Klingon translator will also be available on Bing’s Windows Phone application.

“Recognizing Klingon language on the Bing translator, along with other elements of this partnership, truly underscores the pop culture relevance of the film,” said LeeAnne Stables, executive vice president of worldwide marketing partnerships for Paramount.

In the early years of the “Star Trek” franchise, the Klingons were enemies of the members of the USS Enterprise. They later became the allies of humans.

The Bing translator isn’t the only tool “Star Trek” fans have at their disposal when it comes to the invented language: Okrand published “The Klingon Dictionary” in 1985.

And there are other Internet-based Klingon translators and language tools, which are largely operated by “Star Trek” fan sites. The Klingon Language Institute, a nonprofit corporation, publishes a quarterly academic journal, “HolQeD,” which delves into issues such as Klingon linguistics and culture.

But he didn’t invent just one or tow words.  Or even 5.  Instead, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, Fitzgerald may have been responsible for inventing at least 10 modern words that have ended up in the annals of English language.

“We try to find the earliest recorded usage of every word in every sense, because we’re trying to tell the history of the English language,” says Katherine Martin, head of Oxford’s U.S. dictionaries. “Sometimes literature is the best first place to find things. Authors are innovators.”

daiquiri: a cocktail containing rum, lime, etc., named after a district in Cuba.

From This Side of Paradise (1920): “Here’s the old jitney waiter. If you ask me, I want a double Daiquiri.”

doggone!: a general exclamation.

From “May Day” (1920): “Doggone! Here’s some liquor I’ll say!”

dopeless: useless; foolish; socially inadequate.

From “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” (1920): “He had to admit that Cousin Bernice was sorta dopeless.”

impactive: of, pertaining to, or characterized by impact; having an impact.

From Tender Is the Night (1934): “Feeling the impactive scrutiny of strange faces, she took off her bath-robe and followed.”

-parter: forming compounds denoting something, esp. a published work, with a specified number of parts.

From a letter in 1939: “I have … over half-finished what will be a two-parter for the Saturday Evening Post.”

pepped out: exhausted.

From This Side of Paradise (1920): “Don’t say a word; I’m tired and pepped out.”

sardine: a young woman.

From This Side of Paradise (1920): “I’d like to bring a sardine to the prom in June.”

splush!: nonsense, rubbish.

From “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” (1920): “‘Splush!’ said Marjorie. ‘Admit it!’”

stinko: of a very low standard.

From a letter in 1924: “I thought The White Monkey was stinko.”

T-shirt: a simple kind of garment, orig. a man’s undershirt, typically short-sleeved and forming the shape of a letter T when spread out flat.

From This Side of Paradise (1920):  “Amory, provided with ‘six suits summer underwear … one sweater or T shirt..’, set out for New England, the land of schools.”

well-concealed: hidden, disguised, put out of sight in an efficient manner.

From Great Gatsby (1925): “He put out his … hand with well-concealed dislike. ‘I’m glad to see you, sir.’”

wicked: excellent, splendid; remarkable

From This Side of Paradise (1920): “‘Tell ‘em to play “Admiration”!’ shouted Sloane … ‘Phoebe and I are going to shake a wicked calf.’”

Ackuna, the free open-source translation platform designed specifically for app developers who want to make their applications multi-lingual, now offers a professional translation option for more accurate results and a faster delivery.

New Jersey-based tech startup Ackuna, http://www.ackuna.com, has quickly garnered much attention and praise from the tech and language community over the past year.  Ackuna has been featured in Mashable, WIRED, and VentureBeat, and is gaining momentum as the go-to resource for translating apps.

While Ackuna still offers the free translation option through crowdsourcing to a community of bi-lingual users and translators, the new professional translation option is a paid service.  While the fee is quite nominal compared to traditional professional translation services, the results are 100% accurate and the turn around time is just as fast as the crowdsourcing option.

For developers, Ackuna seems to be a dream come true. As apps continue to gain popularity all over the world, the biggest dilemma for developers is trying to make their apps stand out and reach the most people.  Since the majority of apps still remain monolingual, many foreign language speakers bypass using apps that aren’t in their native language, thus limiting the number of users of that app.

Ackuna solves this issue for developers by offering a fast, easy, and free (or inexpensive) solution. The developer simply uploads their native files to Ackuna, and the system handles the rest.  There is no extra formatting or ‘stripping’ of the text from the code required.  Once the translation is completed, the developer can then download their translated files in the same native format as the original.

To find out more about Ackuna, you can visit http://www.ackuna.com to sign up or http://ackuna.com/pages/about to read more about how it works.

About Ackuna

Ackuna was created by Translation Cloud, LLC. Translation Cloud, http://translation-cloud.com, is one of the leading translation services companies in the Global Translation and Communications Industry.

The sentence is made from some of the 23 words researchers believe have remained unchanged through the millennia and are part of a “super language” Ice Age people used to communicate.

The claim is published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

In the study Professor of Evolutionary Biology Mark Pagel and his team use statistical methods to show that certain words have changed so slowly over long periods of time as to retain traces of their ancestry for up to 10,000 or more years.

These words, they say, point to the existence of a linguistic super-family tree from which the seven major language families of Eurasia (Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Kartvelian, Dravidian, Chuckchee-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut) have evolved.

‘Ultra-conserved’

The 23 “ultra-conserved words” uncovered by the study are: thou, I, not, that, we, to give, who, this, what, man/male, ye, old, mother, to hear, hand, fire, to pull, black, to flow, bark, ashes, to spit, worm.

Pagel, from the University of Reading in Britain, says certain very commonly used words, like pronouns, are more likely to stay the same over the millennia.

“We discovered numerals, pronouns and special adverbs are replaced far more slowly, with linguistic half-lives of once every 10,000 or even more years,” Pagel says.

In other words, everyday words like “I, you, we, man and bark” have, in certain languages, the same meaning and nearly the same sound as they did thousands of years ago.

“As a rule of thumb, words used more than about once per 1000 in everyday speech were seven to 10 times more likely to show deep ancestry in the Eurasian super-family,” Pagel says.

This equates roughly to their being used 16 times a day per speaker, the researchers say.

Focusing on these common lexical items helped the researchers avoid a common pitfall of historical linguistics – that it is difficult to distinguish between words that sound alike because of common ancestry and words that sound alike because of simple coincidence.

For instance, “team” and “cream” in English are unrelated, but sound quite similar.

But the everyday words were statistically likely to be related, and so when the researchers found ones that sounded alike, they were able to conclude with fair confidence that it was not simply by chance.

Pagel’s previous research has looked into the evolution of more than 7000 Indo-European languages, looking for shared patterns in how language is used and why some words stay in use while others disappear over time.

“Our results suggest a remarkable fidelity in the transmission of some words and give theoretical justification to the search for features of language that might be preserved across wide spans of time and geography,” Pagel and his team write.

Source: ABC

By Nick Squires, Rome

Author Dan Brown Photo: EPA

For two months, 11 translators of different nationalities were tucked away in an underground “bunker” near Milan where they worked under the strictest security to translate Brown’s new book into French, German, Italian and other languages for its simultaneous release on May 14.

Today we have a pretty funny commercial for Berlitz language courses.

As always, don’t forget to check out our previous videos.

Guest post. My name is Kandace. I’m from Orlando, Florida and I am new to freelance writing. I have an article I think you might be interested in. The article highlights some of the most marveled inventions from the last 500 years.

Inventions help make our lives easier. Over the course of history, thousand of incredible inventions have been made. This article will talk about some of the most impressive inventions within the last 500 years. These inventions include the optical lens, the refrigerator, the cell phone and the computer. These inventions have added tremendous value to our lives.

The Refrigerator

The household refrigerator, which stores and chills food, is a marvelous invention. The first refrigeration method was invented in 1748, by William Cullen at the University of Glasgow. This form of refrigeration evolved and later incorporated toxic refrigerants. In 1926, a Berlin family was found dead due to the leakage of methyl chloride. Albert Einstein, with former student Leó Szilárd, decided to solve this problem and invented an alternative design. Leó Szilárd and Albert Einstein may be considered the founding fathers of modern day refrigeration.

Optical Lenses

Throughout human history optical lenses have made an astounding contribution to several inventions, including the microscope – http://www.microscope.com/digital-microscopes/, telescope and eyeglasses. Optical lens are a truly incredible invention with a mysterious origin. The present method of reading through a lens predates Roman philosopher and statesman Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the Younger (4 B.C. To 65 A.D.) who mentioned using a glass globe of water to read Roman literature. In 1021, the convex lens was mentioned in “The Book of Optics” by author Alhazen who penned the title, which was then translated to Latin around the 12th century. This translation in 1284, assisted Italian inventor Salvino D’Armate to invent the first wearable eyeglasses. Then, In the 17th century, Anton van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch scientist invented the microscope. In many of his microscopic observations made of the unfathomable inner life of biology, Leeuwenhoek reported his optical findings to the Royal Society of England.

The Cell Phone

The first claim on inventing the mobile phone was by inventor Charles E. Alden, who in 1906, claimed to have invented the “vest pocket telephone”. This device was never produced in large quantities and in 1973, the first official hand-held mobile phone was demonstrated by John F. Mitchell and Dr. Martin Cooper of Motorola. It weighed more than two pounds. Things sure have advanced since then!

The Computer

The modern computer has its humble beginnings, which originate in 1801, when Joseph Marie Jacquard improved the textile loom to utilize punched paper cards. These cards held a set of data instructions with a template image, which allowed the loom to weave intricate patterns. This form of programming became the basis and evolution of programming languages that gave rise to the invention of the modern day computer, which is used today for countless calculations.