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...Okrent is fluent in English, Hungarian, American sign language and ... Klingon. (O.K., so she has only first-level certification in Star Trek-speak.) Okrent, a linguistics scholar, spent the better part of five years perusing library card catalogs and attending colorful conferences to learn about languages created by one person and, in some cases, adopted by thousands. Her new book, In the Land of Invented Languages, chronicles the scientists, idealists and eccentrics who tried - and failed - to create the perfect parlance from scratch. TIME spoke with Okrent about defending the cranks from the critics, ordering sandwiches in Esperanto...
...supposedly got from aliens. That was painful in the sense that he devoted his life to this project and he was only ever mocked for it. I didn't want to necessarily contribute to the mocking, so I tried to understand the motivations and the struggle that a person like that would go through...
...Indeed, Marshall was, or would have been, the eighth person Dowd cited in her 16-paragraph story, which quoted four sources directly. It's that cherry-picking of others' thoughts and opinions that agitates her detractors, of whom she has many - even (or especially?) within the Times newsroom. In one Dowd column on anti-Semitic remarks made by Mel Gibson in 2006, more than half the text comprised direct quotes from her friend New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier. "It was seven paragraphs of a 13-paragraph story," grumbles one Times staffer...
...descends from its decades-long, debt-fueled, free-spending high, Americans are finding ways to save more money. In March, the average person saved 4.2% of disposable income, compared with just 0.2% a year earlier. Thanks to a deep recession, our buy-it-now-and-buy-it-big culture is moving into a lower gear, at least temporarily...
...good for them. As one of them, a comedy writer named Jeff Schimmel, said to me: "It's sad to think that my love for my fellow man is due to a temporal lobe gone awry. But I don't really care. I'm happier and a better person because of this...