Automatic FAIL

Want to lose an argument with a linguist? Here's some help, garnered from actual internet discussions:

"It's not a dialect difference. It's just wrong."

"Why can't people just pronounce it the way it's spelled?"

"Well, I've never heard anyone say that, so it's wrong."

"That's not what the dictionary says."

"That's not what my middle school English teacher said."

"People like YOU are the reason the English language is deteriorating."

"If it were anyone else, it might be dialect, but because I believe this person is stupid, it's just because they're stupid."

"That's not your dialect. You're just lazy."

Use of any of the above lines of reasoning is grounds for automatic FAIL. Using one of them seriously is grounds for a beat-down.

David Tennant, will you marry me?

And talk to me in your sweet accent?

I don't have anything useful to say; I just had to see if it would work twice.

Using our powers for good

So, the thing is, I'm a linguist. Playing around with made-up languages is fun; I get that. But there's a sobering statistic that bothers me.

2,251 of the world's languages need a Bible and have none of it. Not a single verse.

On the other hand, there are at least partial translations of the Bible into:
Lolcat
Klingon
Pig Latin
Quenya (that's Elvish, for non-LotR fans)
D'ni (okay, I'm the guilty party here)

...and any number of other conlangs, probably. Think about all the translation power that's getting used up in wikis and forums across the net. Imagine what that could do, were it loosed on natural languages, ones that actually need translations.

The internet is a great place to see the power of lots of people to do little things that add up to big things, like Wikipedia or Knitters without Borders. I wonder, are there ways to loose this flood of power into the realm of Bible translation or literacy?

While I wonder about that, ponder this bit of good news:

"So liek teh Ceiling Cat lieks teh ppl lots and he sez 'Oh hai I givez u me only kitteh and ifs u beleevs in him u wont evr diez no moar, k?'"

Iz John 3:16, k?