Crash blossoms

Those funny double-meaning headlines -- like "Gator Attacks Puzzle Experts" or "McDonald's Fries the Holy Grail for Potato Farmers" -- now have a name: crash blossoms. (thx, paolo)

The history of typography in the OED

Over at Bygone Bureau, Nick Martens puts on his palaeotypography hat and plunges into the Oxford English Dictionary to learn about the history of typography.

To beat fat, 1683, "If a Press-man Takes too much Inck with his Balls, he Beats Fat."

Me and you and ours

From the Wikipedia page about the .me domain, the top-level domain for Montenegro:

The dot-ME top level domain replaced the dot-YU (Yugoslavia) domain previously used by Serbia and Montenegro. In addition to declaring .me independent of .yu, a new .rs domain was deployed for Serbian use.

Lemme get this straight...when me was subtracted from you, what's left over is ours?

Where the streets have your name

Stephen Von Worley wrote a nifty little web app for looking up US streets that share your (or your kid's or your spouse's) name. For instance, here are all the streets named Ollie and the streets named Meghan.

David Foster Wallace grammar challenge

From a nonfiction workshop taught by David Foster Wallace at Pomona College, a 10-question grammar worksheet that is titled:

IF NO ONE HAS YET TAUGHT YOU HOW TO AVOID OR REPAIR CLAUSES LIKE THE FOLLOWING, YOU SHOULD, IN MY OPINION, THINK SERIOUSLY ABOUT SUING SOMEBODY, PERHAPS AS CO-PLAINTIFF WITH WHOEVER'S PAID YOUR TUITION

Here are the answers and explanations. I think I got 0/10 and am preparing my lawsuit.

Word of the decade?

The American Dialect Society has put its annual call out for nominations for the 2009 word of the year *and* also for the word of the decade.

What is the word or phrase which best characterizes the year or the decade? What expression most reflects the ideas, events, and themes which have occupied the English-speaking world, especially North America? Nominations should be sent to woty@americandialect.org. They can also be made in Twitter by using the hashtag #woty09.

What do kids call Lego pieces?

Giles Turnbull convened a kiddie focus group and asked them what they call all the different Lego pieces.

Every family, it seems, has its own set of words for describing particular Lego pieces. No one uses the official names. "Dad, please could you pass me that Brick 2x2?" No. In our house, it'll always be: "Dad, please could you pass me that four-er?"

Don't miss the chart at the end.

How to write badly well

Writer Joel Stickley keeps a blog about how best to write badly. Here's a snippet from a recent entry titled "Describe every character in minute detail, taking no account of narrative pacing":

Terrence Handley shifted his weight, the weight that had been steadily increasing for the last ten years and showed no sign of diminishing, at least while his wife Marie continued to excel as she did at the design and production of delectable gourmet meat pies, and shuffled his feet restively as he waited.

Schott covers Single Serving Sites

Schott's Vocab blog covers Single Serving Sites today.

Bad words in the dictionary

Over the centuries, vulgar words like fuck and cunt have been included dictionaries, then cast out, then in again, then out, in, out, and so on.

One major problem dictionary editors face in defining sexual terms is deciding how explicit to be. Defining coitus as "an act of sexual intercourse" but leaving sexual intercourse undefined, for example (on the grounds that a reader could figure it out from the definitions of sexual and intercourse), would be a problem, not only because it makes the reader do too much page-flipping but also because the definitions probably still won't be sufficiently clear.

The rest of the article, by Jesse Sheidlower, the editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary, is deliciously vulgar and informative so be wary if you're easily offended and don't like information.

Hyperforeignism

Hyperforeignism is the mispronunciation of words borrowed from foreign languages...but it's actually a sort of an over-pronunciation, so correct that it's circled back around to incorrect again.

The noun octopus is often made plural in English as octopi, originally from the mistaken belief that all Latin nouns ending in -us take -i to form their plural. However, this is only correct for Latin masculine nouns of the second declension. For Latin fourth-declension nouns, such as manus, the singular and plural forms both end in -us. For third declension nouns such as octopus, the plural is less regular. The noun octopus in Latin is a third-declension noun borrowed from the Greek. Although octopuses is generally considered correct in modern English, its plural in Latin is actually octopodes.

An easier example of this is prix fixe. The common mispronunciation is something like "pricks ficks" but the hyperforeign version is "pree fee", which is how one might presume the French would pronounce it. The correct pronunciation is actually "pree ficks". See also gyros. (via clusterflock)

Small batch businesses

A few weeks ago, Matt Linderman asked the readers of 37signals' Signal vs. Noise blog for suggestions for a word or phrase to describe a certain type of small, focused company.

Sometimes I'm looking for a word to describe a certain kind of company. One that's small and cares about quality and is trying to do something great for a few customers instead of trying to mass produce crap in order to maximize profit. A company like Coudal Partners or Zingerman's.

Boutique was deemed too pretentious...small, indie, and QOQ didn't cut it either. Readers offered up craftsman, artisan, bespoke, cloudless, studio, atelier, long tail, agile, bonsai company, mom and pop, small scale, specialty, anatomic, big heart, GTD business, dojo, haus, temple, coterie, and disco business, but none of those seems quite right.

I've had this question rolling around in the back of my mind since Matt posted it and this morning, a potential answer came to me: small batch. As in: "37signals is a small batch business." The term is most commonly applied to bourbon whiskey:

A small batch bourbon is made for the true connoisseur, every sip a testament to the work and love that has gone into each handcrafted bottle.

but can also be used to describe small quantities of high quality products such as other spirits, baked goods, coffee, beer, and wine. When starting a small company that makes high quality web sites (Wikirank) and apps (Typekit), some friends of mine in San Francisco even picked the phrase for their company's name: Small Batch, Inc.

Must Pop Words

Boggle + Tetris/Snood = Must Pop Words. This is difficult for poor typists like me. (via vsl)

Would-be collective nouns

Culled from Twitter, a list of collective nouns that may or may not be in the dictionary. Some favorites:

a conspiracy of theorists
an array of geeks
a melancholy of goths (more here)
a pratfall of clowns
an argument of lawyers
a tantrum of 2 year olds
a fondling of vicars
a meta of collective nouns

Update: And I'd completely forgotten about the perfection of a fixie of hipsters.

Update: An Exaltation of Larks is a book chock full of collective nouns written by James Lipton (yes, that James Lipton). (thx, david)

Twitter = tunnel is in ore

Regarding the previous post on Twitter and the telegraph, eagle-eyed kottke.org reader Mark spotted this gem on page 401 of the telegraphic code book:

I heard that "tunnel is in ore" was @jack's first name for the service; that it was shortened to Twitter makes a lot of sense now. (thx, mark)

Twitter and the telegraph

Ben Schott on the similarities between the telegraph and Twitter:

The 140-character limit of Twitter posts was guided by the 160-character limit established by the developers of SMS. However, there is nothing new about new technology imposing restrictions on articulation. During the late 19th-century telegraphy boom, some carriers charged extra for words longer than 15 characters and for messages longer than 10 words. Thus, the cheapest telegram was often limited to 150 characters.

Schott also shares about 100 words from The Anglo-American Telegraphic Code, a code book that reduced long phrases into single words in order to cut down on telegraphic transmission costs. The full book is available for reading on Google and it includes over 27,000 code words on 460 pages!

Historical Thesaurus of The Oxford English Dictionary

The folks at Oxford University Press have finally finished their Historical Thesaurus of The Oxford English Dictionary after more than 40 years of effort. The book contains 4448 pages and nearly every word in the English language (according to the OED). I like that the synonyms are listed chronologically but this thing is crying out to be put online (or in some electronic format)...what a boon it would be for period novelists to able to press the "write like they did in 1856" button. Available for pre-order at Amazon for $316. (via long now)

Update: There will be an online version of the thesaurus...at some point.

Consider the gyro

Those spinning meat cylinders and the sandwiches that emerge from them...where did they come from? From something like this factory in Chicago.

The process starts with boxes of raw beef and lamb trimmings, and ends with what looks like oversized Popsicles the shade of a Band-Aid. In between, the meat is run through a four-ton grinder, where bread crumbs, water, oregano and other seasonings are added. A clumpy paste emerges and is squeezed into a machine that checks for metal and bone. ("You can never be too careful," Mr. Tomaras said.) Hydraulic pressure -- 60 pounds per square inch -- is used to fuse the meat into cylinders, which are stacked on trays and then rolled into a flash freezer, where the temperature is 20 degrees below zero.

But forget how they're made...how do you pronounce the damn word? The article gives what I would guess is the proper pronounciation of gyro: YEE-ro. I've ordered gyros using this pronounciation and have sometimes gotten confused looks in return. Alternate pronounciations that have worked in various situations include YUR-o, GEE-ro, JI-ro, and GUY-ro. The last pronounciation somehow seems the least correct to me but yields the best results. Somehow tzatziki is a lot easier.

You should follow me on Twitter

Using a link to his Twitter account from his blog, Dustin Curtis tested the effect of language on clickthrough rates.

Making the phrase more direct and personal by adding the words "you should" increased the clickthrough rate by 38% to 10.09%.

Curtis started out with "I'm on twitter" and eventually increased the clickthrough rate by more than double by changing the wording to "You should follow me on Twitter here." (And Jesus, gorgeous site design too.)

When it's your kid, it's not babysitting

New father Paul Drielsma thinks that the language around fatherhood needs to change.

Scour the parenting forums on the Internet and you'll find the common lament that "DH" (darling husband) expects a medal whenever he "babysits" junior for a few hours. I have little sympathy for DH in these cases, but maybe a step in the right direction would be to stop using language that suggests hired help -- to stop referring to DH's job in the same terms as somebody who could legitimately stick his hand out at the end of his shift and demand a tip. DH isn't babysitting, he's parenting, and just changing that one word changes, for me at least, all sorts of connotations.

Language shapes thought

Lera Boroditsky shares some recent studies which show that language shapes the way we think.

How does an artist decide whether death, say, or time should be painted as a man or a woman? It turns out that in 85 percent of such personifications, whether a male or female figure is chosen is predicted by the grammatical gender of the word in the artist's native language. So, for example, German painters are more likely to paint death as a man, whereas Russian painters are more likely to paint death as a woman.

One of my favorite examples of this is something that Meg told me about years ago. In English, you might say something like, "I lost the keys" whereas in Spanish you could use a reflexive verb and say something more like "the keys lost themselves". Her guess was that difference makes Spanish speakers somewhat less likely to take responsibility for their actions...e.g. I didn't knock that vase over, it knocked itself over. (thx, david)

Update: Boy, the old inbox is humming on this one. People, including several linguists wrote in objecting to two main points. First, some said that it is far from certain that the research shows that language shapes thought; a couple people even went so far as to say that what Boroditsky wrote was just plain wrong. So there's certainly some debate there.

The second batch of posts took issue with what my wife Meg said about Spanish speakers. Let me try to clarify and explain what she was getting at without sounding like I'm a racist who thinks the Spanish and Mexicans are irresponsible klutzes (which I don't, if it wasn't COMPLETELY FUCKING OBVIOUS from the subject and tone of everything else I've ever written on this site, but thanks for going there anyway). Instead of what I wrote above, let's try this instead:

In my wife's experience as a fluent speaker of Mexican Spanish and who lived in Mexico for a year, she observed that when people misplaced their keys (and this is just one of many possible examples), they are far more likely to say something like "the keys lost themselves" than "I lost the keys" whereas in American English, you would never say "the keys lost themselves". In fact, she says that this sort of formulation is one of the quick ways to tell who speaks Mexican Spanish as a native and who doesn't. A reader says this is called the accidental se (scroll to the bottom). So with Spanish, there's a sense that these inanimate objects have some say in their actions, that they are "alive" and the speaker is in fact the victim. Those michevious keys lost themselves and now I'm late for work, that crazy glass tipped itself over and now I need to clean it up, etc.

In English, you could certainly say "the keys are lost" when deflecting responsibility for their loss (something everyone does, regardless of race or culture or language) but that's clearly not the same as the keys losing themselves...that's the real difference. I'll let Boroditsky explain what effects this difference might have on how Spanish speakers think, if any, lest I get any more angry emails. (thx, everyone, esp. kyle)

Beautiful words

Are these the 100 most beautiful words in the English language?

Words from invented languages

Arika Okrent wrote a book on invented languages so University of Chicago Magazine asked her to share her ten favorite made-up words.

lxmsgevjltshevjlpshev: "179 degrees 59 minutes and 59 seconds of west longitude within one second of reaching 180 degrees west" Now that's a word!

Tom Swifties

Schott's Vocab is holding a Tom Swifty competition this weekend.

"Who discovered radium?" asked Marie curiously.
"Just parsley, sage and rosemary," said Tom timelessly.
"Show no mercy killing the vampire," said Tom painstakingly.
"It keeps my hair in place," said Alice with abandon.

There are already over 1000 comments.

Goodminton

Goodminton "is badminton where the object is to keep the birdie in play as long as possible".

Freeway interchange names

Infrastructurist has posted a nice two-part Field Guide to Freeway Interchanges: part one and part two. Meet The Double Trumpet, The Braided Cloverleaf, and The Spaghetti Bowl. This little fellow is The Whirlpool.

?

!

Update: !!

Dixie Upright and his friends

The pace of baseball is such that one wonders about all the baseball players whose last names are adjectives.

Woody Rich, Pop Rising. Harry Sage. Several Savages. Mac Scarce. Bill Sharp. Bill, Chris, Dave, and Rick Short. Many Smalls. One Smart guy (JD). Three Starks. Adam Stern. Of course, there's Doug Strange (and Alan and Pat, too). Jamal and Joe Strong. Even a guy named Sturdy, literally: Guy Sturdy. DIck Such. Bill Swift, x2.

Update: See also musicians whose names are sentences. (thx, colter)

Chic, a definition

While listing his ten favorite fragrances, NY Times perfume critic Chandler Burr recalls Luca Turin's definition of chic.

Luca once called something chic, and I asked him why, or rather what "chic" was exactly. He sighed and said despairingly, "Chic is the most impossible thing to define." He thought about it. "Luxury is a humorless thing, largely. Chic is all about humor. Which means chic is about intelligence. And there has to be oddness -- most luxury is conformist, and chic cannot be. Chic must be polite, but within that it can be as weird as it wants."

(via gold digger)

Sci-fi langauge

Nine words that came to us from science fiction and not science.

Deep space. One of the other defining features of outer space is its essential emptiness. In science fiction, this phrase most commonly refers to a region of empty space between stars or that is remote from the home world. E. E. "Doc" Smith seems to have coined this phrase in 1934. The more common use in the sciences refers to the region of space outside of the Earth's atmosphere.

Stealing thunder

In 1704, playright John Dennis invented a new method of producing the sound of thunder during a play. Dennis' play was unsuccessful, but his thunder technique was soon borrowed by another production, leading Dennis to exclaim:

Damn them! They will not let my play run, but they steal my thunder.

Drive under elephants

From Schott's Vocab: A Miscellany of Modern Words and Phrases:

Elephant Flyovers - Elevated crossings designed to protect Indian elephants from road and rail accidents.

While you're there, be sure to check out Schott's entries for Daggering and Fire Fatigue. Actually, they're all fantastic.

Retronovation

Retronovation n. The conscious process of mining the past to produce methods, ideas, or products which seem novel to the modern mind. Some recent examples include Pepsi Throwback's use of real sugar, Pepsi Natural's glass bottle, and General Mills' introduction of old packaging for some of their cereals. In general, the local & natural food and farming thing that's big right now is all about retronovation...time tested methods that have been reintroduced to make food that is closer to what people used to eat. (I'm sure there are non-food examples as well, but I can't think of any.)

Mentornship

Liz Danzico turned a malapropism into a useful word. Mentornship, n.

Internship for the bright or advanced individual under guidance of a more senior practitioner. No making copies or coffee.

I love this idea, although I've never been a believer in interns fetching coffee or doing the shopping at Staples. The bright-but-junior person sees obvious educational benefits from the arrangement but so does the senior practitioner; they get high quality work and access to a sharp beginner's mind. With the right people, the mentornship would likely morph into a collaboration before too long.

Update: Mentornship technically isn't a malapropism, it's a portmanteau word. (thx, dave)

Greek to me but not to you

When confronted with an incomprehensible language, an English speaker might say "it's all Greek to me" while a French or Finnish speaker might say that it sounds like Hebrew. Here's a flowchart that illustrates the different incomprehensibility relationships (discussion here). The most stereotypical incomprehensible language appears to be Chinese. (via strange maps)

The Linguists

Of the world's 7,000 languages, 40 percent are on their way to extinction, with the last fluent speaker of a language dying once every two weeks.

Every two weeks? Wow. That's from an article in Seed magazine about a PBS show airing tonight called The Linguists.

The Linguists is a hilarious and poignant chronicle of two scientists -- David Harrison and Gregory Anderson -- racing to document languages on the verge of extinction. In Siberia, India, and Bolivia, the linguists confront head-on the very forces silencing languages: racism, humiliation, and violent economic unrest. David and Greg's journey takes them deep into the heart of the cultures, knowledge, and communities at risk when a language dies.

Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss

After writing The Cat in the Hat in 1955 using only 223 words, Dr. Seuss bet his publisher that he could write a book using only 50 words. Seuss collected on the wager in 1960 with the publication of Green Eggs and Ham. Here are the 50 distinct words used in the book:

a am and anywhere are be boat box car could dark do eat eggs fox goat good green ham here house I if in let like may me mouse not on or rain Sam say see so thank that the them there they train tree try will with would you

From a programming perspective, one of the fun things about Green Eggs and Ham is because the text contains so little information repeated in a cumulative tale, the story could be more efficiently represented as an algorithm. A simple loop would take the place of the following excerpt:

I do not like them in a box.
I do not like them with a fox.
I do not like them in a house.
I do not like them with a mouse.
I do not like them here or there.
I do not like them anywhere.
I do not like green eggs and ham.
I do not like them, Sam I am.

But I don't know...foreach (\$items as \$value) doesn't quite have the same sense of poetry as the original Seuss.

A better panhandle

Writer Gay Talese recently helped a few panhandlers out with their signs.

I stopped talking and reached into my pocket for one of the strips of laundry board on which I make notes when I'm interviewing people. On one strip of laundry board I wrote: "Please Support Pres. Obama's Stimulus Plan, and begin right here ... at the bottom ... Thank you.'' I handed it to him, and he said he'd copy the words on his sign and have it on display the following day.

One of his "clients" says that the improved message is resulting in more business. I found photos on Flickr of a couple of panhandlers who have been using other Obama messages (e.g. "I need change like Obama"). (via collision detection)

Obama: grammatically sound

Garth Risk Hallberg of The Millions diagrammed a sentence spoken by Obama last week:

My view is also that nobody's above the law, and, if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen, but that, generally speaking, I'm more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards.

The analysis is full of nice little tidbits about how Obama communicates and why people respond to him.

This may be the essential Obama gift: making complexity and caution sound bold and active, even masculine... or rather, it may be one facet of a larger gift: what Zadie Smith calls "having more than one voice in your ear." Notice the canny way that the sentence above turns on the fulcrum of what may be Obama's favorite word: "but." What appears to be a hard line - "My view is... that nobody is above the law" - turns out to have been a qualifier for a vaguer but more inspiring motto: "I am more interested in looking forward than I am in looking back." The most controversial part of the sentence - "people should be prosecuted" - gets tucked away, almost parenthetically, in the middle.

Within Obama's speech patterns, Hallberg also detects a way out of the Obama Comedy Crisis. His sample joke:

"The beef, assuming it's in a port wine reduction, sounds, uh, amazing, but on the other hand, given that the chicken is, ah, locally grown, I'd be eager to try it."

Lo Heads

Rapper/producer 88-Keys is a Lo Head, an obsessive collector and wearer of Ralph Lauren Polo clothing and accessories. He's been wearing nothing but Polo every single day since 1993. This interview with rapper and Lo Head Rack-Lo functions as a sort of Lo Head manifesto.

A lot of street dudes have paved the way and paid a hefty price for all of you to even be able to rock Lo and all those other name brands as well. Other names like North Face, Benetton, Gucci, Spyder, Gortex, Louis Vutton and the list goes on - Lo-Life's did it all first. So let me school ya'll for a second. This Lo movement officially started in 1988. And even before 1988, the movement was in development. Have ya'll ever heard of Ralphies Kids or USA (United Shoplifters Association), that's the foundation right there. Those are basically the two crews that Rack-Lo united as Lo-Life's to form voltron on the Hip Hop world. And a lot of you dudes probably weren't even born then. So what the fuck are you really saying? So I'm just making it clear that if your going to rep that Lo shit and be apart of a fashion institution there's a certain way to do it. Word, it rules and laws to this shit. This aint no fly by night shit where u wake up one morning and decide to rock Lo like Kayne West did. That shit there is a fairy tale a lot of heads are living.

Kanye defended his status as a Lo Head in the song Barry Bonds from his Graduation album.

One flashlight per organization

Andrew Anker warns against companies having more than one "flashlight".

This is a term I learned from a banker I worked for 20 years ago, people who shine brightly in one direction, but don't let off too much light otherwise. Flashlights are kind of useless as board members, despite big reputations and good resumes -- they're just not lateral thinkers and don't really want to dig in. Every company is allowed one flashlight, but it better be the CEO. It's hard to know where to go when the light is shining in two (or more) different directions.

(thx, djacobs)

The words of David Foster Wallace

The David Foster Wallace Dictionary, Words I Learned From Reading David Foster Wallace, and the Infinite Jest Vocabulary Glossary.

Black triangles

All the dev team had after month of effort was a black triangle on a screen...but it was more than that.

Afterwards, we came to refer to certain types of accomplishments as "black triangles." These are important accomplishments that take a lot of effort to achieve, but upon completion you don't have much to show for it -- only that more work can now proceed. It takes someone who really knows the guts of what you are doing to appreciate a black triangle.

When working on complex projects, the black triangle moment is always the high point for me; it's when success occurs. Before you've got a framework built, there's significant doubt about how the project will turn out, if can even be done. After you get that first little result through the whole maze and it's clear how the whole thing will work, the rest becomes almost inevitable. (via migurski)

Updated: Actress Jenna Fischer wrote about hard-to-explain milestones in acting.

I remember one year my proudest moment was at an audition for a really slutty bar maid on a new TV show. It was written for a Pam Anderson type. I thought, "I can never pull this off. I just don't have the sex appeal. I feel stupid. No one is going to take me seriously." But, I committed to the role and gave the best audition I could. I didn't get the job. I didn't get a callback. But I conquered my rambling, fear-driven brain and went balls out on the audition anyway. That was a huge milestone for me -- but hard to explain at Christmas.

(via pageslap)

Blow

Funny surname/subject collision from the Times over the weekend: Cocaine and White Teens by Charles M. Blow.

Update: See also nominative determinism and aptronym.

An aptronym is a name aptly suited to its owner.

I knew I'd posted something about this previously. (thx, mark)

Heavy metal band name chart

According to this extensive chart, names of heavy metal bands fit into five main categories: death, deadly things, animals, religion, and badass misspellings. (thx, janelle)

Buzzwords, 2008

Grant Barrett and Mark Leibovich review the buzzwords of 2008. Good to see "nuke the fridge" and Flickr's "long photo" make it.

Project management lingo

Michael Sippey collected a bunch of project management lingo from a PM mailing list. Hit with the scope bat, analysis paralysis, eating the elephant one bite at a time, come to Beavis meeting, nine women can't have a baby in one month, schedule chicken...collect them all.

Update: You may now play project management lingo bingo.

"Classy"

Sugar Daddy Online Dating, "where the classy, attractive, and affluent meet". In my experience, use of the word "classy" means the opposite of what the speaker intends. The jarring "AS SEEN ON TV" graphic isn't helping either. (Note: I saw the URL for this site on TV.)

Dubbing The Wire into German

An interview with a translator about the difficulty of dubbing The Wire into German.

To bring over the style of the speech out of the slums or ghettos, we haven't used very exact, grammatically correct German. Nobody says "Wegen des Fahrrads" (because of the bikes), rather "wegen dem Fahrrads" ('cause of them bikes), for example there we use wrong German. Here and there we've used other phrases, sometimes with an English or American sentence structure.

The interview itself was translated from German to English. (via panopticist)

The Atlas of True Names

The Atlas of True Names contains maps with very literal place names.

Called the "Atlas of True Names," the new map traces the etymological roots of European and global place names and then translates them into English. The "City of Boatmen" is also known as Paris. Should you travel to the Land of the Fire Keepers, you'd find yourself in Azerbaijan. And Italy comes from the Latin word vitulus, which means "calf."

New York is "Wild Boar Village", Chicago is "Stink Onion", Great Britain is "Great Land of the Tattooed", and Grozny is "The Awesome". However, Language Log notes that some of the translations should be taken with a grain of salt. (thx, andreas)

American Dialect Society

The American Dialect Society is now accepting nominations for the word of the year of 2008.

The best "word of the year" candidates will be:

-new or newly popular in 2008
-widely or prominently used in 2008
-indicative or reflective of the national discourse

Multi-word compounds or phrases that act as single lexical items are welcomed, as well.

Hit up their email address with your nomination.

Williams Poems

Inspired by Emmett Williams, a practitioner of concrete poetry, Rob Giampietro has written three poems: Wastebasket, Snowflakes, and Spraypaint.

Giampietro has put out a call for someone to develop a Williams Word Generator. Drop him a line if you can help out...shouldn't be too much different than the many "words within words" generators scattered around the web.

Texting drives viewing of subtitled movies?

Actress Kristin Scott Thomas made an interesting observation the other day while discussing foreign language films:

"People will now go to films with subtitles, you know," she added. "They're not afraid of them. It's one of the upsides of text-messaging and e-mail." She smiled. "Maybe the only good thing to come of it."

The abundance of scrolling tickers on CNN, ESPN, and CNBC may be even more of a contributing factor...if in fact people are more willing to see films with subtitles. (via ben and alice)

All sorts of accents

The speech accent archive:

The speech accent archive uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed. The archive is used by people who wish to compare and analyze the accents of different English speakers.

See also the International Dialects of English Archive.

WASP clubs

While clubs that admit only WASPs are still around, their power and influence have diminished and their diversity has increased. A little. The language employed by WASPs in describing outsiders is interesting:

Acronyms like N.O.C.D. and P.L.U. are used to mean Not Our Class, Dear and People Like Us. W.O.G. refers to Wealthy Oriental Gentleman or Wise Oriental Gentleman, depending on whom you ask for a definition. "Hawaiian," "Canadian," and "Eskimo" all have special meaning as well. I was told by one Palm Beach resident that Hawaiian refers to anyone who pronounces the phrase "how are you" as "how ahhh yaaa" (they are howahhhyaaa-n, or Hawaiian). Another Wasp told me that, at the establishment-incubating St. Paul's School in the early 1960s, Hawaiian was used to refer to anyone who was considered "trash." To say that someone is Canadian can mean that they are Jewish, and Eskimo that they are African American.

Biking terminology

From a Copenhagen blog that highlights biking style, a plea to cool it with all the subculture cycling attitude and terminology already.

Let's straighten things out, shall we? What you see in the photo above, taken in Copenhagen, is something we call a "cyclist".

Not a "bicycle commuter", nor a "utility cyclist". Certainly not a "lightweight, open air, self-powered traffic vehicle user". It's a cyclist.

The Copenhagener above is not "commuting" - or at least she doesn't call it that. She's not going for a "bike ride" or "making a bold statement about her personal convictions regarding reduction of Co2 levels and sustainable transport methods in urban centers".

She's just going to work. On her bike.

(via gulfstream)

Update: The problem with biking in America: people don't feel safe, mainly because people in cars just aren't that aware of people on bicycles.

English spelling inconsistencies

102-year-old Ed Rondthaler on the English language's spelling inconsistencies. Well dun.

Tumbrel remarks

Christopher Hitchens is an expert on the tumbrel remark.

A tumbrel remark is an unguarded comment by an uncontrollably rich person, of such crass insensitivity that it makes the workers and peasants think of lampposts and guillotines. I can give you a few for flavor. The late queen mother, being driven in a Rolls-Royce through a stricken district of Manchester, England, said as she winced at the view, "I see no point at all in being poor." The Duke of St. Albans once told an interviewer that an ancestor of his had lost about 50 million pounds in a foolish speculation in South African goldfields, adding after a pause, "That was a lot of money in those days." The Duke of Devonshire, having been criticized in the London Times, announced in an annoyed and plaintive tone that he would no longer have the newspaper "in any of my houses."

Someone please start a Tumblr of tumbrels. (via clusterflock)

Unobtainium

Unobtainium is any very rare, expensive, or impossible material needed to suit a particular application.

Engineers have long (since at least the 1950s) used the term unobtainium when referring to unusual or costly materials, or when theoretically considering a material perfect for their needs in all respects save that it doesn't exist. By the 1990s, the term was widely used, including formal engineering papers. (As an example, Towards unobtainium [new composite materials for space applications], by Misra and Mohan describes how the ideal material (unobtainium) would weigh almost nothing, but be very stiff and dimensionally stable over large temperature ranges.)

(via migurski)

Word of the day: leitmotif

I've seen this word in two separate articles today: leitmotif.

A leitmotif is a recurring musical theme, associated with a particular person, place, or idea. The word has also been used by extension to mean any sort of recurring theme, whether in music, literature, or the life of a fictional character or a real person.

Chimping

Chimping is the practice of checking your just-taken photos on your DSLR's LCD screen. (via textism)

How to solve crossword puzzles

NY Times resident crossword puzzle master Will Shortz on how to solve the NY Times crossword puzzle.

Mental flexibility is a great asset in solving crosswords. Let your mind wander. The clue "Present time" might suggest nowadays, but in a different sense it might lead to the answer yuletide. Similarly, "Life sentences" could be obit, "Inside shot" is x-ray and my all-time favorite clue, "It turns into a different story" (15 letters), results in the phrase SPIRAL STAIRCASE.

Singular capitalization

Why is the word "I" capitalized?

English quiz

How many of the 100 most common English words can you name in 5 minutes? Surely you can do better than my pathetic 42/100.

Micro-tampering

From an article on a new book written by a woman whose ex-boyfriend has been stalking her for more than a decade, a curious phrase: micro-tampering.

No matter how many times Ms. Brennan changed the locks, she writes, her apartment was entered and subtly rearranged. "I find a bar of soap from the second-floor bathroom on the third-floor kitchen counter," she writes. "A teaspoon from a kitchen drawer lies on the middle of my bed."

Update: See also: gaslighting. (thx, alex)

Odd name changes

Law professor Eugene Volokh rounds up some cases where courts ruled on unusual name changes (like Talula Does the Hula From Hawaii).

Misteri Nigger, second "i" silent. No, said the California Court of Appeal in 1992, because it constitutes "fighting words": "[I]f a man asks appellant his name and he answers 'Mister Nigger,' the man might think appellant was calling him 'Mister Nigger.' Moreover, third persons, including children hearing the epithet, may be embarrassed, shocked or offended by simply hearing the word.

Ah, the old "them's fightin' words" argument.

Variety's slanguage

"Words" used in this article about the season premiere of Mad Men:

skein
aud
preem
competish
skeds
spec
cabler

Here's a list of the other "words" used by Variety in their "articles".

Popular boat names

According to a boat name database, here are the top 15 boat names:

Orion
Zephyr
Stargazer
Free Spirit
TBD
Cheers
Mariah
Solitude
Sandpiper
Calypso
Banana Wind
MoonDance
PATRIOT
Mental Floss
valhalla

Baby Name Trends

For millennia, Martin Wattenberg's Name Voyager has been the gold standard in cool baby name web doohickeys. No longer...NameTrends gives it a serious run for its money. Lots of slicing and dicing of data going on there. Plus, popularity sparklines.

BBC - Ouch! - Features - What's your Sign Name?

Since repeatedly spelling out proper names in sign language is time consuming, signers give people "sign names" that are faster to do.

When a sign name is given to you, it's special. A bit like losing your deaf virginity. It's thought up after an intense period of observation, when people have worked out firstly whether they like you enough to give you one (a sign name, that is), and they've taken all your habits and mannerisms into account to find a name that best sums you up.

(via lone gunman)

@#$%&?! = grawlix

That string of typographic symbols that substitute for swearing in cartoons? It's called a grawlix.

The term is grawlix, and it looks to have been coined by Beetle Bailey cartoonist Mort Walker around 1964. Though it's yet to gain admission to the Oxford English Dictionary, OED Editor-at-Large Jesse Sheidlower describes it as "undeniably useful, certainly a word, and one that I'd love to see used more."

Well, @#$%&?!, that's cool.

Mamihlapinatapai

Mamihlapinatapai, a most succinct word.

It describes a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start. This could perhaps be translated more succinctly as "eye-contact implying 'after you...'". A more literal approximation is "ending up mutually at a loss as to what to do about each other".

Heartbreaking. I wish we had an English word for that feeling. (via cyn-c)

Snack food sexual innuendo

A photo gallery of snack foods that sound a bit naughty. Salted Nut Roll, Dutch Crunch, Double Creme Betweens, etc. (via buzzfeed)

Tyson Homosexual

You've likely seen this by now but I've got to link it up anyway because whenever I think about it, it makes me LOLL (laugh out loud, literally). The American Family Association automatically replaces words like "gay" with "homosexual" in the AP stories they display on their news site. When an American sprinter named Tyson Gay is in the news, the practice leads to hilarity.

Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials
Tyson Homosexual easily won his semifinal for the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials and seemed to save something for the final later Sunday.

And on it goes..."On Saturday, Homosexual misjudged the finish in his opening heats...", "Homosexual runs wind-aided 9.68 seconds to make Olympics...", "Close call: Homosexual barely averts major flop in 100..." Fox News has applied the same technique to stories about suicide bombers...they changed all instances of that term to "homicide bombers".

Chinese homemade airplane

Video of a Chinese farmer flying his homemade airplane. Nice landing! According to a post at IfGoGo, the plane is referred to in Chinese as "shanzhai huaxiangji". The "shanzhai" part literally means "little mountain village" but has developed into a slang word that denotes something homemade or counterfeit.

Date back to 2007, due to an open (maybe leak?) source of MTK platfrom (a wireless communication development platform), there are millions of cell phone factories burst out in south China. These factories made lots of famous-brand cell-phone-copies in a short period of time. They just copied the outline and software design from Nokia, Apple iPhone etc. The manufacturing cost is very low so many people are involved. However, these cell phones are not all completely copied. They are even totally redesigned and added a lot of features. A brand called "NCIKA" even went very popular in China. People're even joking that the farmers in big mountains can develop and design a cell phone too. So many people call it "Shanzhai Ji" (Ji means machine in Chinese, here means cell phone) and then the name is widespread in China.

Since then, many funny/weird stuff from ordinary people are called "shanzhai" something, and that's why this plane is named "Shanzhai Huaxiangji" in Chinese :)

Menu typos

Washington Post writer admits to having a fantasy of correcting typos in restaurant menus with "a distinctive purple pen". But sometimes the computer's spellchecker is no help.

Despite my attempts to stop it, my Microsoft Word program would always change the word for Italy's famous cured meat into what it assumed I meant to type. The night we closed an issue, I would have nightmares that when the magazine hit the stands, one of my reviews would describe "the delicate sweet and salty balance of melon and prostitute."

Indiana Jones and Nuke the Fridge

Not so long ago, on May 24th, IMDB message board participant beachedblonde coined a new phrase: nuke the fridge. Here's the definition from the Urban Dictionary...it's roughly equivalent to jumping the shark:

A colloquialism used to delineate the precise moment at which a cinematic franchise has crossed over from remote plausibility to self parodying absurdity, usually indicating a low point in the series from which it is unlikely to recover. A reference to one of the opening scenes of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, in which the titular hero manages to avoid death by nuclear explosion by hiding inside a kitchen refrigerator.

Sample usage:

Man, when Peter Parker started doing the emo dance in Spider-Man 3, that franchise officially nuked the fridge.

Since then, things have progressed quickly. The original posting seems to have been deleted but the phrase caught on, infected other message boards and web sites, and is now a full-blown meme on the verge of nuking the fridge itself. Google currently returns close to 16,000 results for variations on the phrase. Some participants in the IMDB forums have already grown tired of the phrase's repeated use. A Wikipedia page was created and has already been deleted (reason: "Protologism with no RELIABLE sources evidencing more than extremely limited usage"). A web site dedicated to the meme is available at nukingthefridge.com, not to be confused with the movie review blog at nukedthefridge.com. And of course, no meme these days is complete without the proper new media accoutrements: Facebook page, MySpace page, t-shirt, YouTube page, an auction to sell the domain name, and a post on a large-ish general interest blog way after the whole thing's already played out. I only heard it for the first time an hour ago and I'm already sick of it. Memes seem to be spreading so rapidly now on the web that they burn out before they can properly establish themselves. It'll be interesting to see if nuke the fridge makes it through this ultra-virulent phase and somehow slows down enough to jump to casual mainstream usage. (via cyn-c)

Chinese restaurant name changes

The Chinese are encouraging their restaurants to change the names of some of their dishes before the Olympics start. Those dishes due for a name change include:

- Bean curd made by a pock-marked woman
- Chicken without sexual life
- Husband and wife's lung slice

Serious leisure

Phrase of the day: serious leisure.

Horror vacui

Any Wikipedia entry that references Adolf Wolfli is a friend of mine. Horror vacui:

Horror vacui is the filling of the entire surface of an artwork with ornamental details, figures, shapes, lines and anything else the artist might envision. It may be considered the opposite of minimalism.

(More of my friends here, apparently.)

Tweetup

Tweetup n.

A real world meeting between two or more people who know each other through the online Twitter service.

I had a tweetup with my wife this morning. And last night. And the day before that. TMI?

Placeholder name

A fantastic example of my favorite kind of Wikipedia entry: placeholder name.

Placeholder names are words that can refer to objects or people whose names are either irrelevant or unknown in the context in which it is being discussed.

Whatchamacallit, junk, widget, gizmo, Joe Blow, shitload, Podunk, and beer o'clock are all examples. Placeholder names are also used extensively in non-English languages.

The German equivalent to the English John Doe for males and Jane Doe for females would be Max Mustermann and Erika Mustermann, respectively. For many years, Erika Mustermann was used on the sample picture of German id-cards ("Personalausweis"). In Austria, Max Mustermann is used instead. Sometimes the term Musterfrau is used as the last name placeholder, possibly because it is felt to be more politically correct genderwise.

(via gulfstream)

It's a fish!

I just recently picked up on the visual pun on the cover of Cal Henderson's Building Scalable Web Sites.

The 10 most appropriate weatherperson names...like Ray

The 10 most appropriate weatherperson names...like Ray Ban and Storm Field. When I was a kid watching the news out of Minneapolis, their morning weather guy's name was Sunny Haus. (Not his real name though...the station wouldn't let Steve Wolhenhaus go by his real name.)

Truckliness is next to Godliness.

Truckliness is next to Godliness.

Sen. Jim King, R-Jacksonville, said he had a set [of Truck Nutz] on one of his vehicles, which he described as "all pimped out." They are no more than "an expression of truckliness," he said, although he'd acceded to his wife's request to take them off.

"I find it shocking we'd tell people with metallic testicles on their bumpers that this is a violation," said Sen. Steve Geller, D-Hallandale. "There's got to be better things for us to spend time debating."

(via clusterflock)

"Innit" is a common contraction of "isn't

"Innit" is a common contraction of "isn't it" in British English that is increasingly being used as an all-purpose end-of-sentence rhetorical question. For example:

"We need to decide what to do about that now innit." (don't we?)

"Now I can start calling you that, INNIT!" (can't I?)

"I can see where my REAL friends are, elsewhere innit!!" (aren't they?)

"I'll show young Miss Hanna round to all the shops, innit." (won't I?)

"I heard he was good in TNA when he was there so he can still wrestle good innit?" (can't he?)

A short history of the ampersand.

A short history of the ampersand.

Ampersand usage varies from language to language. In English and French text, the ampersand may be substituted for the words and and et, and both versions may be used in the same text. The German rule is to use the ampersand within formal or corporate titles made up of two separate names; according to present German composition rules, the ampersand may not be used in running text. In any language, the ampersand's calligraphic qualities make it a compelling design element that can add visual appeal and personality to any page.

This page generates names by combining the

This page generates names by combining the first and last names from the 1990 US Census, creating names that may or may not actually exist. If you're tired of perusing gravestones for the names of your next novel's characters, this looks like a good alternative.

Graphical demonstration of the hand signals needed

Graphical demonstration of the hand signals needed to buy and sell commodities on the floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Saying words wrong on purpose

Fun little article by Grant Barrett about people saying words wrong on purpose.

I sometimes say "muscles" so that the 'c' has a 'k' sound (the same way the cartoon character Popeye says it), computor instead of "computer" (after Ned Beatty's exaggerated pronunciation of "Mr Luthor" in the Superman movies), and I occasionally say benimber instead of "remember" because it was something my cousin Paul said more than 20 years ago.

I use several of these mispronunciations regularly, which drives Meg nuts. Nucular, saxamaphone, muscles with Popeye's hard c, computor, robit for robot, etc. Those of you who speak other languages...is this a common behavior outside of English?

Update: Language Log found a 1932 article about Intentional Mispronunciations. From a summary of the article:

Her categories include everything from adding or subtracting syllables and restressing (antique as "an-tee-cue", "champeen", "the-'ater"), tensing lax vowels ("genu-wine"), borrowing of "vulgar" pronunciations ("agin", "extry", "who'd-a thunk it", "varmint")...

Funny restaurant names

A list of amusing restaurant names presented somewhat oddly in scholarly paper format. Pony Espresso is a coffeehouse in Wyoming, Wiener Takes All in a hot dog place in Illinois, and Wholly Mackerel is a Gulf Coast seafood place.

Michael Bierut on the concept of bershon,

Michael Bierut on the concept of bershon, defined by Sarah Brown thusly:

The spirit of bershon is pretty much how you feel when you're 13 and your parents make you wear a Christmas sweatshirt and then pose for a family picture, and you could not possibly summon one more ounce of disgust, but you're also way too cool to really even DEAL with it, so you just make this face like you smelled something bad and sort of roll your eyes and seethe in a put-out manner. Kelly Taylor from Beverly Hills, 90210 is the patron saint of bershon, as her face, like most other teenagers', was permanently frozen in this expression.

Bierut notes that Jennifer Grey's performance in Ferris Bueller embodies the spirit of bershon, but Molly Ringwald does bershon pretty well in Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club.

Four words that prove how difficult the

Four words that prove how difficult the English language is: lose, loose, chose, choose.

Update: Doug points out: bough, cough, dough, rough, through.

Update: Ubi says: I can point out one that is really hard to deal with for us Italians. We always pronounce 'steak' with the 'ea' of 'freak'. So, here's my list: steak, stake, freak, break, weak.

Update: Anissa points us to Hints on pronunciation for foreigners.

Update: BJ says: This post reminded me of a word constructed to demonstrate that fact explicitly: ghoti (pronounced 'fish').

Update: Ben says: I'm reminded of the Dr. Seuss compilation The Tough Coughs As He Ploughs the Dough.

Some cultures use whistling languages to communicate

Some cultures use whistling languages to communicate when regular speech becomes ineffective over large distances. From Wikipedia:

Whistled languages are normally found in locations with difficult mountainous terrain, slow or difficult communication, low population density and/or scattered settlements, and other isolating features such as shepherding and cultivation of hillsides. The main advantage of whistling speech is that it allows the speaker to cover much larger distances (typically 1 - 2 km but up to 5 km) than ordinary speech, without the strain (and lesser range) of shouting. The long range of whistling is enhanced by the terrain found in areas where whistled languages are used.

Here's an mp3 of two men communicating via whistling. It sounds very much like R2-D2.

Grant Barrett researches the origins of the

Grant Barrett researches the origins of the word "w00t" and determines that it probably originated from the "whoot/whoomp there it is" dance craze of the early 90s and not from the hacker/gaming community. Which conclusion provoked a little nerdfury in the comments. (via waxy)

From a site that tracks "false words,

From a site that tracks "false words, usages, or expressions", the definition of Michael Bayesian Filters:

1. a series of computer based filters, trained over time through an artificial intelligence process, which allow computer controlled motion picture cameras to automatically record high budget action sequences in the style of producer/director Michael Bay.

2. a method of filtering email spam that relies on producer/director Michael Bay to manually read and sort all incoming messages.

I can't think of Michael Bay without humming this song. (via crazymonk)

The year in buzzwords from the NY

The year in buzzwords from the NY Times. Written by Grant Barrett of the excellent Double-Tongued Dictionary.

Why have I not looked at the

Why have I not looked at the Wikipedia page for Ocean's Eleven before now? Best part is the description of the crazy names for the cons referenced in the movie.

Off the top of my head, I'd say you're looking at a Boesky, a Jim Brown, a Miss Daisy, two Jethros and a Leon Spinks, not to mention the biggest Ella Fitzgerald ever.

Sadly, the page for Ocean's Twelve has no corresponding list, save for a description of the Lookie-Loo with a Bundle of Joy.

Non-profit writing organization 826NYC is holding a

Non-profit writing organization 826NYC is holding a Scrabble for Cheaters competition on January 19th with the proceeds going to benefit their programs and students. The more money a team raises, the more they can cheat. Here are some of the cheats:

Flip a letter over and make it blank: $100
Add Q, Z, or X to any word, anywhere: $200
Passport: play a word in any language: $250
Reject another team's word: $450
Invent a word (must have a definition): $500

Entry information and rules available on the web site. Oh, and you'll be playing against John Hodgman.

Anyone in a coining mood? If one

Anyone in a coining mood? If one doesn't already exist, there needs to be a term for writing a blog comment or Twitter update, thinking better of it, and then discarding it by closing the browser tab without clicking "Post". As in: "Jason, I would have responded to this post in the comments, but I ________ it instead." Any ideas?

Regret the Error's annual list of media

Regret the Error's annual list of media errors and corrections is one of my favorites...the 2007 installment doesn't disappoint. The corrections in the UK newspapers are awesome:

An article about Lord Lambton ("Lord Louche, sex king of Chiantishire", News Review, January 7) falsely stated that his son Ned (now Lord Durham) and daughter Catherine held a party at Lord Lambton's villa, Cetinale, in 1997, which degenerated into such an orgy that Lord Lambton banned them from Cetinale for years. In fact, Lord Durham does not have a sister called Catherine (that is the name of his former wife), there has not been any orgiastic party of any kind and Lord Lambton did not ban him (or Catherine) from Cetinale at all.

Funny Engrish menu error at a Beijing

Funny Engrish menu error at a Beijing restaurant: "stir-fried wikipedia". (via waxy)

Coincidences in linguistics.

Coincidences in linguistics.

The top 60 Japanese buzzwords and buzzphrases of 2007.

The top 60 Japanese buzzwords and buzzphrases of 2007.

The term "monster parents" refers to Japan's growing ranks of annoying parents who make extravagant and unreasonable demands of their children's schools.

(via bb)

This article about tracing American slang words

This article about tracing American slang words to their Gaelic roots seemed interesting at first but by the end I was wondering what the odds were that so many slang words came from Ireland. By chance shortly after I finished the article, Grant Barrett emailed me a piece he wrote in response to the article and its subject, Daniel Cassidy.

Cassidy's theories are insubstantial, his evidence inconclusive, his conclusions unlikely, his Gaelic atrocious and even factitious, and his scholarship little better than speculation. In short, his book is preposterous.

A story by J. Robert Lennon using

A story by J. Robert Lennon using only words from The Cat In The Hat.

I have to say one thing here: it is not fun to be with me. I like books and things. Tame: that is I. I get no kicks, fly no kites, play no games. Hops and pot are not my things. If you are here, I want you to go away. So what should this dish, this fox want out of me? I sat and picked at the fish and looked at those hands, so white.

Anagrams for "Ann Coulter" include "Rectal Noun", "

Anagrams for "Ann Coulter" include "Rectal Noun", "Loaner Cunt", "Real Con Nut", and "Unclean Rot".

Chuck Adams is one of the few

Chuck Adams is one of the few remaining Morse code aficionados in the world. Adams records audiobooks in Morse, chats with others in Morse via ham radio, and can transcribe Morse at 140 words/minute.

Earlier this year, Mr. Adams sent Barry Kutner, a 50-year-old ophthalmologist from Newtown, Pa., and another world-class coder, a 100-words-per-minute version of the book. To Mr. Adams's chagrin, Mr. Kutner wrote an email back pointing out that the gap between words was eight dits long, instead of the prescribed seven. At that pace, a dit lasts 1.2 one-thousandths of a second.

See also: Tales of the telegraph.

It's worth sitting through the first several

It's worth sitting through the first several minutes of this documentary on the speech patterns of Edwardian-era Britons to hear Joan Washington, the host and an accent expert, speak with several different British accents.

The half-life of irregular verbs scales with

The half-life of irregular verbs scales with the square root of usage frequency. "Be" and "have" will be irregular for a long time but "dive", "sting", and "wring" have less time before they're regularized.

The past-tense of regular verbs end in "ed." For example, the past-tense of chide was chode, but has now regularized into chided.

Another recent study has found that the evolution of words decreases with usage. Nature has the abstract of the paper and the NY Times has a short piece as well.

"Bird," for example, takes many disparate forms across other Indo-European languages: oiseau in French, vogel in German and so on. But other words, like the word for the number after one, have hardly evolved at all: two, deux (French) and dos (Spanish) are very similar, derived from the same ancestral sound.

Do you make a distinction between typos

Do you make a distinction between typos and misspellings, or is that just me? For example, "regualr" is a typo while "refridgerator" is a misspelling. The former is a mechanical error while the latter demonstrates a lack of specific knowledge. Both are signs of sloppy writing which might be why people don't often distinguish the two.

"The full Ginsburg" is the term for

"The full Ginsburg" is the term for appearing on all five of the big Sunday morning political shows: This Week, Meet the Press, Face the Nation, Fox News Sunday, and Late Edition. The term is named after William Ginsburg, Monica Lewinsky's attorney and the first person to complete this political Pokemon collection. According to Wikipedia, four individuals have completed the full circuit: Ginsburg, Dick Cheney, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton. Source: Brouhahaha, The New Yorker.

A glossary of cheese terms.

A glossary of cheese terms.

Giganti: A very large style of Provolone, typically weighing 200 to 600 pounds and measuring up to approximately 7 feet in length.

There's a surprising amount of language around cheese.

A fixie of hipsters: the perfect collective

A fixie of hipsters: the perfect collective noun for two or more hipsters. Coined by Erika Hall on Flickr. Fixie is slang for a fixed gear bicycle, increasingly the urban 20-something's conveyance of choice. Other favorite collective nouns: a murder of crows, a blessing of unicorns, and shimmer of hummingbirds.

Anagram menu items:

Anagram menu items:

Roast taros.
Broccoli rabe with cool crab brie.
A steak and skate duo.
Melon and lemon sorbet.

Being sent to Mordor:

Being sent to Mordor:

Hardware techies at Apple are regularly sent from California for intense two-week shifts to the city-sized FoxConn factory in Shenzhen, China where iPods are made and tested. Internally at Apple this is known as "being sent to Mordor."

Tauba Auerbach: startling starting staring string sting

Tauba Auerbach: startling starting staring string sting sing sin in i. More of her typographic work here.

Several of the web's most popular sites (

Several of the web's most popular sites (Digg, YouTube, MySpace, CNN) are using the mullet strategy (business up front, party in the rear) for content to attract both boisterous users and well-heeled advertisers. "They let users party, argue, and vent on the secondary pages" -- that's the party in the rear -- "but professional editors keep the front page looking sharp" -- the business up front.

According to a recent poll, folksonomy tops

According to a recent poll, folksonomy tops the list of annoying words spawned by the internet, followed by blogosphere, blog, netiquette, and blook. Also of note: an mp3 of a religious service is referred to as a godcast.

Somehow I never pointed to this article

Somehow I never pointed to this article from April about Dan Everett and his efforts to understand the language of the Piraha, an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe. Everett's position on Piraha linguistics is controversial because he believes their language doesn't adhere to Noam Chomsky's idea of universal grammar. "The Piraha, Everett wrote, have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for 'all,' 'each,' 'every,' 'most,' or 'few' -- terms of quantification believed by some linguists to be among the common building blocks of human cognition." Everett recently wrote a piece for Edge on the Piraha's lack of recursion and engaged in a debate with Steven Pinker and Robert Van Valin on the topic.

Missed this from a couple of weeks

Missed this from a couple of weeks ago: Chinese writing may be 8,000 years old, far older than the previous estimate of 4,500 years.

Facekicking, n. The act of accessing Facebook

Facekicking, n. The act of accessing Facebook from your T-Mobile Sidekick. Coined while chatting with Jonah the other night...we decided that "facekicking" was more exciting to say than "sidebooking".

Pirate myths uncovered: they never said "arrr",

Pirate myths uncovered: they never said "arrr", there was no plank walking, and no treasure maps. The "arrr" and the pirate accent "originated with Robert Newton, the actor who played Long John Silver in the movies and on TV through much of the 1950s".

Embiggen, a perfectly cromulent word

Embiggen, the fauxcabulary word created for an episode of The Simpsons, has found its way into string theory. Here's the usage from a recently published paper on Gauge/gravity duality and meta-stable dynamical supersymmetry breaking:

Here's the original quote from The Simpsons episode, Lisa the Iconoclast:

A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.

The uses are probably not related, but you never know.

100 words every high school graduate should know.

100 words every high school graduate should know. Alternate title: 100 mostly useless words.

Popular names for twins born in 2006. Almost

Popular names for twins born in 2006. Almost all of the top name pairs start with the same letter: Jacob/Joshua, Landon/Logan, Ella/Emma, and the stunningly confusing Taylor/Tyler.

Mocketing: making fun of your product or

Mocketing: making fun of your product or brand in order to sell the product and build the brand. Found out about mocketing from this Book Design Review post on a book called Unmarketable.

What a group of copy editors thought

What a group of copy editors thought of the best headline ever (Skywalkers in Korea cross Han solo). "For the the Han solo hed to work, there'd have to be a reason for the allusion to Star Wars. Since there isn't, it's a forced attempt to be clever. Your average rap artist has a far better grasp of cleverness than whoever wrote that headline." (thx, braulio)

I was telling a friend this weekend

I was telling a friend this weekend about an article I'd read long ago about Larry Wall approaching the development of Perl as if it were a natural language. I think this is the article in question. Perl, the first postmodern computer language and a conversation with Larry Wall also touch on Perl and linguistics.

Update: Here's the original post to comp.lang.perl.misc by Wall. (thx, marc)

Email bankruptcy: "choosing to delete, archive, or

Email bankruptcy: "choosing to delete, archive, or ignore a very large number of email messages without ever reading them, replying to each with a unique response, or otherwise acting individually on them".

A voxel is smallest unit of volume

A voxel is smallest unit of volume in a 3D image. Voxel = volumetric + pixel. (via best thing)

Cap'n Crunch's full name is Captain Horatio Magellan Crunch.

Cap'n Crunch's full name is Captain Horatio Magellan Crunch.

Slang of the 90s.

Slang of the 90s.

Meta-Free-Phor-All

Sean Penn and Stephen Colbert competing in a metaphor competition:

Good lord that's funny.

Results of the The Word-Lovers' Boot Camp

Results of the The Word-Lovers' Boot Camp held by Erin McKean at Gel 2007. Boot campers were encouraged to create a new word of their choosing. The winning word was "crappyjack", meaning "any kind of empty, snacky junk food". David Yee's ubiquinpotaqueous means "the state of water in which it is everywhere, and yet there is not a drop of it to drink". Matt Haughey didn't attend the boot camp but contributes this late entry: "decursivication. n. The process of losing one's penmanship, thanks to automatic billing and an increasingly electronic world."

A tale of two hoes

Snoop Dogg recently explained the difference between the language used by old, white radio announcers and rappers:

It's a completely different scenario. [Rappers] are not talking about no collegiate basketball girls who have made it to the next level in education and sports. We're talking about hos that's in the 'hood that ain't doing shit, that's trying to get a nigga for his money. These are two separate things. First of all, we ain't no old-ass white men that sit up on MSNBC going hard on black girls. We are rappers that have these songs coming from our minds and our souls that are relevant to what we feel. I will not let them muthafuckas say we in the same league as him.

What Mr. Dogg is arguing here is that it's ok to refer to actual hoes as hoes in the service of artistic expression but it is not ok to refer to college basketball players as such for the purpose of demeaning people. As we're currently engaged in another go-round on the issue of speech, political correctness, and its potential enforcement, it's not hard to imagine that someday an argument like Snoop Dogg's will be deployed in a court of law. I wonder if anyone will buy it?

Old Language Log rant about how crappy

Old Language Log rant about how crappy the writing is in The Da Vinci Code.

Logical, linguistical, and infographical analysis of the #1

Logical, linguistical, and infographical analysis of the #1 single on the Billboard chart, This Is Why I'm Hot by Mims. "Mims is hot because he's fly. But it raises the question: Does being hot guarantee one's being fly? [...] It would appear that fly and hot are interchangable. If you are one, you are both; if you aren't at least one, you are neither." (via khoi)

I feel like I've linked to this

I feel like I've linked to this before but here it is again (maybe): a list of how companies got their names. "Mattel - a portmanteau of the founders names Harold 'Matt' Matson and Elliot Handler." (via khoi)

Back when type was set with individual

Back when type was set with individual metal letters, those letters were called "sorts". Popular letters like a, e, t, i, etc. would occasionally run out and the printer would then be "out of sorts".

Update: Scratch that. Individual letters are called "sorts", but "out of sorts" came from somewhere else. (thx grant and hal)

Incubus is a 1965 horror film that was

Incubus is a 1965 horror film that was filmed in Esperanto and starred William Shatner. What more could you want, really?

The phrase "au contraire mon Frere-Jones" is

The phrase "au contraire mon Frere-Jones" is just hanging out there, waiting for someone to use it.

Vogue is adding blogs to their site

Vogue is adding blogs to their site but editor Anna Wintour hates the word "blog" so much that she's got her staff working on alternate language. Wintour's a little late to the party...everyone I know has been hating that word since 1999. (via fashionologie)

The verbing of English nouns continues unabated.

The verbing of English nouns continues unabated. A music producer being sentenced for attempted theft tells the court that he's got six children "on the way". The judge thinks he's marrying a women with 6 children but the producer replies, "no, I be concubining".

Simlish is the fictional language spoken in

Simlish is the fictional language spoken in the Sims games. Several music artists have recorded songs sung in Simlish.

Dysgraphia is a condition that causes difficulty

Dysgraphia is a condition that causes difficulty with the ability to write, independent of reading ability. I happened upon this word this morning in a forum about car racing. A guy posted an articulate answer to someone else's question except that many of the words were spelled phonetically and his signature said, basically, "don't give me any crap for my bad spelling, I'm dysgraphic".

The Morning News announces the results of

The Morning News announces the results of the Non-Expert's Contest for Total Idioms. The phrase "if a bird can't fly, it walks [is] used to suggest someone should stop making excuses why they can't do something".

Slang suggestion: "bang the bricks" as a

Slang suggestion: "bang the bricks" as a euphemism for getting money from an ATM. "Everybody knows how Mario from the Super Mario Brothers is getting money: He bangs against a brick with his head."

Muttnik

Yesterday's I Did Not Know That Yesterday! tidbit concerned Sputnik 1, the Soviet satellite launched in 1957.

But what fate befell the iconic satellite? After 1,400 trips around the Earth, Sputnik burned up when it reentered the atmosphere in January of 1958 (just as it was supposed to).

The very next Sputnick launched contained the first terrestrial space traveller, Laika, a dog. Ok, wait. The first one burned up in earth's atmosphere after three months and the second one contained a dog...that's right, the Soviets killed that poor dog! When I heard the story of Laika as a kid, whoever I heard it from omitted that part. Although Laika didn't burn up in the atmosphere, she was also not euthanized after 10 days of flight as Soviet scientists had planned. A Sputnik scientist recently revealed that Laika died after only a few hours in orbit from stress and overheating.

Two other (unrelated) things I didn't know about Sputnik: that it was tiny (smaller than a basketball) and that Herb Caen coined the word "beatnik" based on Sputnik.

Chart of the geek hierarchy. For example,

Chart of the geek hierarchy. For example, Trekkies who get married in Klingon garb are geekier than Trekkies who speak Klingon who are in turn geekier than normal Trekkies.

Thee Homophoner takes sum text and substitutes

Thee Homophoner takes sum text and substitutes homophones four any soundalike words it can fined.

Nomination for the most useless new word

Nomination for the most useless new word of 2007: beme. A beme is a meme that spreads via blogs and those that create and spread them are called bemerz.

How to learn a foreign language: read

How to learn a foreign language: read Harry Potter in translation. "The plots and scenarios are familiar enough that I can pick up the gist of what is going on even if the grammar and vocabulary escape me; but after a few times reading about the impatient lechuza in Harry's room, I can't help but gather that it is not lettuce but an owl."

The Merriam-Webster and Garfield Dictionary. (via andrea)

The Merriam-Webster and Garfield Dictionary. (via andrea)

"Love bombing is the deliberate show of

"Love bombing is the deliberate show of affection or friendship by an individual or a group of people toward another individual. Critics have asserted that this action may be motivated in part by the desire to recruit or otherwise influence."

Jargon watch! Gaysted (adj.): "when heterosexual people

Jargon watch! Gaysted (adj.): "when heterosexual people get so wasted, they slip into seemingly gay acts".

A new form of gambling called historical

A new form of gambling called historical racing allows people to "wager on horse races that have already taken place" and promises to be as fast & addictive as slots. (via mr)

Update: Here's a company that provides an historical racing service. (thx, sam)

In this video, an autistic woman speaks

In this video, an autistic woman speaks in her native language and then translates it into English. But it's not really a direct translation because, as she states, her language is not limited to expressing her thoughts to other human beings...it's more about her reacting to every element of her environment. More about the video on MetaFilter (one commenter calls the thread "perhaps the most enlightening thing I've ever read on MetaFilter"), including a comment from the video's creator.

Diagram that charts instances of the "x

Diagram that charts instances of the "x is the new y" snowclone from 2005. See also: a list I compiled last last year.

English Sentences Without Overt Grammatical Subjects, or

English Sentences Without Overt Grammatical Subjects, or the grammar of swearing. "Chomsky observes that the adverbial elements of (39)-(42) are outside of the verb phrase and that only elements within the verb phrase play a role in strict subcategorization of verbs. That principle would clearly be violated if fuck were a verb."

The best niche blog yet: it's devoted

The best niche blog yet: it's devoted to the use of the lowercase "L" in otherwise uppercase text. "WHAT THE HEll? WHY DO PEOPlE WRITE lIKE THIS?"

The web is perfect for taking jokes

The web is perfect for taking jokes too far: a list of the phrase "my hovercraft is full of eels" in dozens of languages.

Jargon watch: "book" as a synonym for "

Jargon watch: "book" as a synonym for "cool". Sample usage: "That YouTube video is so book." As books are decidedly uncool, you might wonder how this usage came about. Book is a T9onym of cool...both words require pressing 2665 on the keypad of a mobile phone but book comes up before cool in the T9 dictionary, leading to inadvertent uses of the former for the latter. (thx, david)

An Elvis taxon is the apparent rediscovery

An Elvis taxon is the apparent rediscovery of an animal that has vanished from the fossil record, but that is really the discovery of a look-alike animal. "The term Elvis taxon is used because of the large number of sightings of Elvis Presley long after his death, as well as for his many impersonators."

True Hoop's Henry Abbott does a bit

True Hoop's Henry Abbott does a bit of research into baby names inspired by NBA players. "[Kobe] was drafted in 1996, and in 1997 the name debuted at #553. 2001 was its best year ever, when it was the 223rd most common name in America. Donald, Keith, Troy, Lance, Simon, Chad, Dante, Douglas, Tony, Joe all ranked lower."

Hillel Cooperman purchased a small autograph book

Hillel Cooperman purchased a small autograph book dating from the 1940s in a Hong Kong shop and has posted scans of the book online in hopes that people will help translate it. A commenter says: "This book is used to leave comments -- quite popular at graduation time when your classmates left you good wishes of your future. The owner of the book is named 'Xi Rao', and the college he graduated from in Spring 1942 is 'Jiao Tong' university."

What is Wrong with the Use of

What is Wrong with the Use of these Terms: "Deaf-mute", "Deaf and dumb", or "Hearing-impaired"? "Overwhelmingly, deaf and hard of hearing people prefer to be called 'deaf' or 'hard of hearing.'"

Gawker has a list of blog-media cliches.

Gawker has a list of blog-media cliches. I'm especially tired of "Best. Thing. Evar!" and "teh". They also forgot "Internets" and "the Google". Then again, I'm partial to "wait for it" so whatever.

"Pizza upskirt" is the term for a

"Pizza upskirt" is the term for a from-underneath-the-crust photo of a slice of pizza. Example. Does that make this a hamburger down blouse?

Prewalking

Prewalking: walking down the subway platform so that when you board the train, you'll be close to the exit or transfer point when the train reaches its destination.

Update: Photo of the Way Out -> tube map, which marks which side of the train to exit from and where exits/transfers are for each station. (thx, tom)

Update: Exit maps are available for the Toronto and Toyko subways. (thx, adam)

A paper by two economists tracks politically

A paper by two economists tracks politically loaded phrases used by Democrats and Republicans. For instance, the Republicans use "illegal aliens" while the Democrats speak of "veterans health". Full list of loaded phrases is here and the original paper is here.

Wordie is "like Flickr, but without the

Wordie is "like Flickr, but without the photos". "Wordie lets you make lists of words -- practical lists, words you love, words you hate, whatever. You can then see who else has listed the same words, and talk about it." Lots of people love schadenfreude. (via clusterflock)

Worst analogies ever written in a high

Worst analogies ever written in a high school essay. "He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree. "

In an entry yesterday, I (knowingly) used

In an entry yesterday, I (knowingly) used the word nonplussed in a non-standard fashion. The Oxford American Dictionary on my computer tells me: "In standard use, nonplussed means 'surprised and confused'. In North American English, a new use has developed in recent years, meaning 'unperturbed' -- more or less the opposite of its traditional meaning. Although the use is common, it is not yet considered standard." I'm happy to help move the English language forward (backward?) in this manner. That and I wanted to see if the language pedants in the audience were paying attention...and they certainly were. ;) (thx, everyone who sent this in)

The Google 15

The Google 15:

the fifteen pounds that new Google employees supposedly gain in their first year at Google from gorging on the omnipresent free food.

Finally! An answer to the question "if

Finally! An answer to the question "if a thousand monkeys robots type at a thousand typewriters for one thousand years, will they produce Shakespeare?" The answer is "police undies".

I'm sure native Bostonians will find much

I'm sure native Bostonians will find much to argue about in this list of Boston slang. (via cyn-c)

The Cupertino effect: a term for incorrect

The Cupertino effect: a term for incorrect spellcheck suggestions that make it into finalized documents. The term comes from the appearance of the word "Cupertino" in several European Union documents in the place of "cooperation". "The fact that Secretary General Robertson is going to join this session this afternoon in the European Union headquarters gives you already an idea of how close and co-ordinated this Cupertino is and this action will be."

Oxford University Press has announced their word

Oxford University Press has announced their word of the year for 2006: carbon neutral. Runners up included DRM, ghostriding, CSA, and Islamofascism.

Alright, anyone using the term Web 3.0 gets

Alright, anyone using the term Web 3.0 gets poked in the eye. Cripes.

The entry for calling shotgun on Wikipedia.

The entry for calling shotgun on Wikipedia. There are almost 60 special amendments to the "official" rules, including "Amendment IX: Australian Shotgun. Originally from Australia, if two people tie for shotgun, then the first person to put their thumb on their head is awarded shotgun. If they both do this at the same time, then an immediate pissbolt (race) to the car is required." (via zach, who says "best Wikipedia entry ever?")

James Gleick on how the Oxford English

James Gleick on how the Oxford English Dictionary staff is dealing with the proliferation of words on the internet. "New words weren't proliferating at quite the rate they have done in the last 10 years. Not just the Internet, but text messaging and so on has created lots and lots of new vocabulary."

Headline: Naked man arrested for concealed weapon.

Headline: Naked man arrested for concealed weapon. This reads like an entry in a six words story competition.

Cockney rhyming slang meets celebrity namedropping. "I

Cockney rhyming slang meets celebrity namedropping. "I left my Clare Rayners down the Fatboy Slim so I was late for the Basil Fawlty. The Andy McNab cost me an Ayrton Senna but it didn't stop me getting the Britney Spears in. Next thing you know it turned into a Gary Player and I was off my Chevy Chase."

"Wans sup pawn at I'm their worth

"Wans sup pawn at I'm their worth reel ladle pegs hole eft tome deuce seethe a whirled." Listen to the audio file and it'll all make sense. (thx, azrael)

Update: See also Ladle Rat Rotten Hut. (thx, carol)

Snowclone watch watch: Anil discovers the multivalent story of America.

Snowclone watch watch: Anil discovers the multivalent story of America.

The new

A brief history of ten minutes from now, courtesy of ten minutes ago (and Google (Google is the new Yahoo? Google is the new Microsoft? Google is the new Borg? Google is the new Yellow Pages? Google is the new library?)):

Breast-feeding is the new labor
Dumb is the new smart
Cobain is the new Elvis
Fundamentalists are the new avant-garde
Black is the new Jewish
SnowJoggers are the new Uggs
Square watermelons are the new round watermelons
Negative publicity is the new hot hype
Small is the new big
Yellow is the new black
Islamism is the new Nazi-Fascism
Armand De Brignac is the new Cristal
Vertical stripes are the new horizontal stripes
Awake is the new sleep
Cell phones are the new cigarettes
Pale is the new tan
JSON Serialization is the new XML Serialization
Sincerity is the new irony
Black is the new gay
Anti-terrorism is the new terrorism
Non-fiction is the new Fiction
RVs are the new homes
Gay cowboys are the new penguins
Oral is the new second base
Libertarians are the new swing vote
Green is the new Black
Bamboo is the new cotton
Cripples are the new Gay
Searing pretension is the new punk rock
Mannies are the new Mary Poppins
Referrer spam is the new Amway
Videogames are the new graffiti
Eco-apocalypticism is the new religion
Colspan is the new <blink>
Foleygate is the new Watergate
Java is the new Cobol
Muslims are the new Jews
Bo Bice is the New Clay Aiken
Clarendon is the new Helvetica
Coke is the new Nike
Gamma is the new beta
Secrecy is the new black
Spim is the new spam
Nanotubes are the new superconductors
No tagline is the new tagline
Organic is the new kosher
Sliders are the new drop-downs

Because nothing is new ("seen it" is the new creativity), this has been done before: Things that are the new black, This Is The New That, Cliches are the new cliche, In with the new..., and Something is the new something.

If you're curious as to how this particular snowclone (snowclones are the new cliches) came about, Wikipedia (Wikipedia is the new Google) tells us (we are the new network):

The phrase is commonly attributed to Gloria Vanderbilt, who upon visiting India in the 1960s noted the prevalence of pink in the native garb. She declared that "Pink is the new black", meaning that the color pink seemed to be the foundation of the attire there, much like black was the base color of most ensembles in New York.

India is the new pink.

Short review of New Partridge Dictionary of

Short review of New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. "'I like the cut of his jib' resonates a lot differently than 'shizzle my mizzle fizzle dizzle!'"

A new book called They Never Said

A new book called They Never Said That debunks some famous phrases that were never actually said by those that supposedly coined them. "Hundreds of pithy remarks from 'Let them eat cake' to 'Elementary, my dear Watson', turn out to be adaptations of comments that were more clumsy or more boring -- or which were never said by those thought to have coined them."

Glossary of 1920s English slang.

Glossary of 1920s English slang.

Peter Sellers doing various English accents

During an interview in support of the premiere of Dr. Strangelove, an unheard interviewer expresses surprise at Peter Sellers' use of an American accent and asks him to use an English one. Here's a video of Sellers trying to find an accent to the interviewer's liking:

What is that, nine different completely plausible accents in 45 seconds? I love actors who can do accents well. Sellers is my favorite, but I also like Aussie Rachel Griffiths playing Californian Brenda in Six Feet Under and Brits Idris Elba & Dominic West (drug dealer Stringer Bell and officer Jimmy McNulty on The Wire). American actors often seem to have problems doing accents although Gwyneth Paltrow does a nice posh Londoner. We saw The Departed this weekend (really good, BTW), which takes place in Boston, always an accent minefield for actors. Locally grown Mark Wahlberg and Matt Damon acquitted themselves quite well. The rest? Not so much. DiCaprio was alright, but the rest of the cast was tuning in and out like an old AM radio.

Typography language pedantry: font vs. typeface. "'Fonts'

Typography language pedantry: font vs. typeface. "'Fonts' and 'typefaces' are different things. Graphic designers choose typefaces for their projects but use fonts to create the finished art."

Jargon watch: dog whistle politics.

Jargon watch: dog whistle politics.

Update: The Double-Tongued Dictionary has more on the etymology of this phrase. (thx, grant)

How to swear in Latin. (via cyn-c)

How to swear in Latin. (via cyn-c)

Nobel Prize winning physicist Gerard 't Hooft

Nobel Prize winning physicist Gerard 't Hooft on how to become a good theoretical physicist. He lists the subjects you need to learn (from languages to quantum field theory) and resources (both online and off) for learning them. A note on the 't in his name.

If you need to read any literature

If you need to read any literature from Krypton (Superman's home planet), here's the 118 letter alphabet you'll need to know.

Synecdoche, New York script

Jay Fernandez of the LA Times gets his hands on the screenplay for Charlie Kaufman's new movie, Synecdoche, New York -- which Charlie will also be directing (in the absence of Spike Jonze) -- and loves it. "No one has ever written a screenplay like this. It's questionable whether cinema is even capable of handling the thematic, tonal and narrative weight of a story this ambitious." Incidentally, synecdoche.

David Sedaris, plagued as usual by language

David Sedaris, plagued as usual by language problems, has a taxing time at a French doctor's office. "It's funny the things that run through your mind when you're sitting in your underpants in front of a pair of strangers."

Is "dwarf planet" an ironym? "Pluto is

Is "dwarf planet" an ironym? "Pluto is a dwarf planet, but we are now faced with the absurdity that a dwarf planet is not a planet." (thx, adriana)

Pluto mnemonic device contest results

After hearing the news that Pluto had been demoted from its full planetary status in the solar system, Meg and I decided to hold a contest to find a new mnemonic device for the planets, replacing the old "My very elegant mother just served us nine pizzas" (among others). The mnemonic could work for either the new 8 planet line-up, the 8 major + 3 dwarf planets, or the old 9 planet arrangement in protest of Pluto's demotion. Thanks to everyone who entered; we received a bunch of great entries and it was hard to choose a winner. But first place goes to Josh Mishell for:

My! Very educated morons just screwed up numerous planetariums.

Josh's protest mnemonic is memorable, topical, and goes beyond a simple description of the shameful proceedings in Prague to real-world consequences. As the winning entrant, Josh will receive a print from HistoryShots...we're suggesting Race to the Moon. Congratulations to Josh.

Now, some runners-up. These came very close to winning:

Many Very Earnest Men Just Snubbed Unfortunate Ninth Planet (Dave Child)

"My vision, erased. Mercy! Just some underachiever now." (Delia, as spoken by Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh)

Most vexing experience, mother just served us nothing! (Bart Baxter)

There were several entries that referenced vegetarianism and veganism; this haiku by Evan Norris was my favorite:

most vegans envy
my jovian silhouette,
not usually

Update: A reader noted that Evan's haiku incorrectly swaps the positions of Neptune and Uranus. Happily, "usually not" works just as well. (thx, peter)

The honorary mention for lack of sophistication goes to Andrea Harner and Jonah Peretti for:

Molesting Very Excitedly, Michael Jackson Sucks Underage Nipples

Best foreign language award goes to Bernardo Carvalho for his Portuguese mnemonic (remember, "Earth" is something like "Terra" in Portuguese so the t fits. And we'll ignore the e too...):

minha velha, traga meu jantar: sopa, uva, nozes e pão (Translated: "Old woman, bring me dinner: soup, grapes, nuts and bread")

And here are some of the best of the rest:

Mollifying voluminous egos means judiciously striking underappreciated named planetoid (Bruce Turner)

Most Virgins Eventually Marry Jocks So Unscrupulously Naughty (Aaron Arcello)

Morons Violate Every Map Just So UFOs Navigate Poorly (Sean Tevis)

My violin emits minimal joy since union nixed Pluto (C.D.)

Maximum velocity earns many joyous shouts, unless not planetary (Scott Tadman)

Thanks again to everyone who entered!