Breaking news: world's fastest linguist wins gold

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Christine Ohuruogu, who Benjamin Zimmer described as "the world's fastest linguist", just won a gold in the Olympics 400m final, hence becoming the first British woman with a linguistics degree to win Olympic gold at this distance. Or any other, we assume. Ohuruogu commented "Take the word 'shit'. Does it mean a pile of faeces, or something is rubbish?" But that was a while ago. This is a great day for the linguistics of taboo vocabulary!



5 Comments

  1. Bird's One View said,

    August 19, 2008 @ 12:30 pm

    Stunning.

  2. Alex said,

    August 19, 2008 @ 2:23 pm

    "The first British woman with a linguistics degree to win gold at that distance" That is a lot of qualifiers. Have there been other gold medalists with linguistic degrees?

  3. Doc Rock said,

    August 19, 2008 @ 6:06 pm

    All politics and, I guess, all sports is local.

  4. Jonathan said,

    August 19, 2008 @ 8:16 pm

    Wouldn't the word's fastest linguist be the person who actually does linguistics the fastest, not the person who runs the fastest who also happens to be a linguist?

  5. Stephen Jones said,

    August 20, 2008 @ 1:42 am

    What about the fastest cunnilinguist? I'm all for new Olympic Sports.

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