Word: star
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Arika 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...
...clicks and hisses and pops. He wondered if you could create a whole language without vibrating your vocal cords. It sounds very strange. I've never heard a natural language that sounds like it, but it still seems like a system. For him, that was an artistic challenge. (See Star Trek's most notorious villains...
...return, locals were privy to some camptastic performances. In a delightful English-as-a-second-language moment, Romania's Elena Gheorghe, the daughter of a priest, sang that her "hips are ready to glow, this record is so hot and I have so much to show." American burlesque star Dita von Teese stripped down to a black bustier to play the title role of Germany's entry, "Miss Kiss Kiss Bang"; she had originally hoped to go further, but officials warned her to respect "cultural differences." And the Ukraine's Svetlana Loboda, singing "Be My Valentine," did the splits...
...Among the effects you won't see in Star Trek (the sensitive reader may wish to skip the rest of this paragraph, or story): a brief glimpse of sexual penetration, the whacking of an erect penis by a plank, the snipping off of a clitoris, in surgical closeup, and the boring of a hole through a man's leg, to which a heavy grinding wheel is attached. (Though the lead actors gave their all to the movie, the closing credits list stunt doubles, body doubles and special-effects artists...
...History repeats itself. On April 22, 2004, an American football star named Pat Tillman was killed in action in Afghanistan. After September 11, Tillman had eschewed a $3.6 million sports contract to volunteer for the Army Rangers. Selfless and ruggedly handsome, he could have played himself in the Hollywood movie about his life—had he not been shot by his own troops. On April 28, Rene Gonzalez, a political science graduate student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, objected to calling Tillman a war hero, pointing out in an essay that this “anti-hero?...