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Sometimes linguistics can be intriguing. When I taught English abroad I invested a lot of time into thinking about word and phrase origins. In fact, one of my best word-investments was to buy a dictionary of idioms (another was to buy a visual dictionary).

According to this linguist wanna has connections with invisible words in sentneces.

Much of the linked-page is boring except for the explanation itself:

“This is where we come back to wanna. You see, wanna provides a neat bit of evidence that traces are real. Take the following two sentences:

[1] (a) I want to invite Carlotta to the party.
(b) I want Carlotta to come to the party.

Now turn these sentences into questions:

[2] (a) Who do you want to invite to the party?
(b) Who do you want to come to the party?

Now, of course, these two sentences look the same, on the surface. They’re word for word identical, except for the words invite and come. But we know they’re not the same underneath, because the corresponding statements have a different structure. So let’s put those traces in the proper spots and see what happens. I’ve marked them with , which is typical notation. (You can substitute whom if you prefer; I use who because, like most English speakers, I usually don’t maintain the historical distinction between who and whom.)

[3] (a) Who do you want to invite [who] to the party?
(b) Who do you want [who] to come to the party?

[my note: the word “who” is placed after the verb in both places — as in the brief questions: “invite who?” and “want who?”. The difference is that the second one has “additional stuff” after it, i.e. “to come”]

Those invisible words are in two different places in the two questions. And lo and behold, something interesting happens when you try contracting want to:

[4] (a) Who do you wanna invite to the party?
(b) *Who do you wanna come to the party?

Whoops. If you’re a typical English speaker, (4a) sounds just fine. Perfectly natural. But (4b) sounds, well, odd. It’s ungrammatical (which is indicated by prefixing a sentence with an asterisk.) This isn’t just my intuition, either — examination of people’s spontaneous speech confirms that people simply don’t do wanna-contraction there. Why? Because there’s an invisible word in the way.”

Now here is something you don’t see everyday: The French Parliament switches to Ubuntu. The idea, of course, is to save money. But think about the legitimizing power the government has. This type of action will fuel private citizens (organizations, probably) to rethink their decision to purchase Windows/Vista/OS X whateva.

My problem with Ubuntu–which I haven’t yet explained is simply an open-source operating system– is that, well, what the heck do I need it for?

So the top 1 reason to choose Ubuntu:

it is free.