I'm reading back through my archive of stuff written by and about Roger Ebert and I realized I've never written about my favorite piece of his: Dwarfs, Little People and the M-Word. It's nothing particularly earthshattering or insightful, but the piece demonstrates what I really liked about Ebert: humanist, happy to be corrected when in the wrong, not afraid to poke fun at himself, and a lover of both language and knowledge.
I had no idea the word "midget" was considered offensive, and you are the only person who has ever written to me about it. In my mind it is a descriptive term, like "dwarf." "Little People" has seemed to me to have a vaguely condescending cuteness to it. If I am now informed that "midget" is offensive, I will no longer use it. What is your feeling about "dwarf?" Is "Little Person" always the preferred term? Our newspaper's style book, based on Associated Press, does not consider "midget" or "dwarf" to be offensive terms, but perhaps we have not caught up.
Your endurance challenge for today: see how much of this video of the final round of the 2012 O. Henry Pun-Off World Championship you can watch before flinging your computing device across the room.
For bonus points, see if you can get through some of the comments...they are PUNishing. (Gah, I've been infected.)
WHALE . PLAYER . BALLER . DEEP OCEAN
A serious drinker who will regularly DROP more than $1,000 on a single bottle. When on a furious spending spree, a WHALE is said to be DROPPING THE HAMMER. BIG WALES -- or EXTRA BIG BALLERS (E.B.B.) -- can spend more than $100,000 on wine during a meal.
But, vocabulary aside, the central thing I learned from these talented people is that if you are dining in a restaurant which employs a Sommelier, you should never, ever order your own wine.
If you know little or nothing about wine, they will guide you to a bottle far more interesting and suited to your food than you could possibly pluck from the list.
And if you are a wine aficionado, you will not know more than the Somm about their list - or what they are hiding off-list in the cellar.
Female markers include a relatively large number of emotion-related terms like sad, love, glad, sick, proud, happy, scared, annoyed, excited, and jealous. All of the emoticons that appear as gender markers are associated with female authors, including some that the prior literature found to be neutral or male: :) :D and ;). [...] Computer mediated communication (CMC) terms like lol and omg appear as female markers, as do ellipses, expressive lengthening (e.g., coooooool), exclamation marks, question marks, and backchannel sounds like ah, hmmm, ugh, and grr.
Swears and other taboo words are more often associated with male authors: bullshit, damn, dick, fuck, fucked, fucking, hell, pussy, shit, shitty are male markers; the anti-swear darn appears in the list as a female marker. This gendered distinction between strong swear words and mild swear words follows that seen by McEnry 2006 in the BNC. Thelwall 2008, a study of the social networking site MySpace produced more mixed results: among American young adults, men used more swears than women, but in Britain there was no gender difference
I don't want to draw too many conclusions from a single study especially one that, in my opinion, makes some questionable methodology choices (people who follow or are followed by more than 100 people are excluded from the study?) but the results point to an interesting evolution in conversational, public speech.
Update 2: Tyler Schnoebelen, one of the study's authors reached out to clarify. The study says "we selected only those users with between four and 100 friends", with friends being defined not as people you follow, people who follow you, or even mutual follow backs. They poll accounts and if you and someone else mention each other with a separation of at least two weeks (to eliminate one-off convos with strangers), then for the purposes of the study you and the other person are defined as friends. And they're looking to isolate people who have between 4 and 100 of those friend connections.
Now that that's clarified, that seems a really reasonable way to try to determine friendships on Twitter.
It is a peculiar fact also that an experienced operator can almost invariably distinguish a woman's sending from a man's. There is nearly always some peculiarity about a woman's style of transmission. it is not necessarily a fault. Many women send very clearly and make their dots and dashes precisely as they were intended to be made. It is impossible to describe the peculiarity, but there is no doubt of its existence. Nearly all women have a habit of rattling off a lot of meaningless dots before they say anything. But some men do that too. A woman's touch is lighter than a man's, and her dots and dashes will not carry so well on a very long circuit. That is presumably the reason why in all large offices the women are usually assigned to work the wires running to various parts of the cities.
This is perfect...Riker Ipsum is lorem ipsum dummy text from Commander Riker's dialogue on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Our neural pathways have become accustomed to your sensory input patterns. Computer, belay that order. The game's not big enough unless it scares you a little. When has justice ever been as simple as a rule book? What's a knock-out like you doing in a computer-generated gin joint like this? Did you come here for something in particular or just general Riker-bashing?
I will henceforth and only talk about "gun safety" as a goal for America, as opposed to "gun control." I have no abstract interest in "controlling" someone else's ability to own a gun. I have a very powerful, direct, and legitimate interest in the consequences of others' gun ownership -- namely that we change America's outlier status as site of most of the world's mass shootings. No reasonable gun-owner can disagree with steps to make gun use safer and more responsible. This also shifts the discussion to the realm of the incremental, the feasible, and the effective.
NOC is a white whale that, for a period of four years, could make human speech-like sounds. Take a listen:
"The whale's vocalizations often sounded as if two people were conversing in the distance," says Dr. Sam Ridgway, President of the National Marine Mammal Foundation. "These 'conversations' were heard several times before the whale was eventually identified as the source. In fact, we discovered it when a diver mistook the whale for a human voice giving him underwater directions."
As soon as the whale was identified as the source, NMMF scientists recorded his speech-like episodes both in air and underwater, studying the physiology behind his ability to mimic. It's believed that the animals close association with humans played a role in how often he employed his 'human' voice, as well as in its quality.
Perhaps instead of the machines taking over as with Skynet in the Terminator movies, we should be worried about Seanet: talking whales, dolphins, and octopuses working together to fight humanity. (via @DavidGrann)
According to research done by Stanford University's Tyler Schnoebelen, the type of smiley you use is determined in part by your age.
Emoticons with noses are historically older. Since it is words that unite and distinguish clusters, this means that people who use old-fashion noses also use a different vocabulary -- nose users don't mention Bieber or omg.
I am obviously a non-noser because I am down, as we kids say, with Beibler and Carly Mae and Gandgum Style and Skillet. :) (via the atlantic)
As it turns out, the manager there is also my college batchmate. You can use my connection there. Just give your good name. We were both backbenchers but he was actually rusticated for ragging and bunking. The final straw was when he was caught eve-teasing the dean's daughter. But, he did some jugaad and palm greasing, and got himself a license to manufacture Indian-made foreign liquor. Rags to riches story. Now he is a mover and shaker. For a while he was under the scanner of the IT authorities and they chargesheeted a disproportionate-asset case against him. I think he may have been doing some hawala transactions. The whole official machinery was after him. He tried to file a grievance but there was no redressal mechanism for such cases. Ultimately, he went on an indefinite fast.
My favorite term from the rest of the thread is "prepone", which means to move something ahead in the schedule, i.e. the opposite of postpone. (via @ftrain)
What is the color of honey, and "faces pale with fear"? If you're Homer--one of the most influential poets in human history--that color is green. And the sea is "wine-dark," just like oxen...though sheep are violet. Which all sounds...well, really off. Producer Tim Howard introduces us to linguist Guy Deutscher, and the story of William Gladstone (a British Prime Minister back in the 1800s, and a huge Homer-ophile). Gladstone conducted an exhaustive study of every color reference in The Odyssey and The Iliad. And he found something startling: No blue! Tim pays a visit to the New York Public Library, where a book of German philosophy from the late 19th Century helps reveal a pattern: across all cultures, words for colors appear in stages. And blue always comes last.
It's worth listening to the whole thing...the bit at the end with the linguist's daughter and the color of the sky is especially cool.
On this day full of red, white, and blue in the US, it's interesting to note that, in a large number of languages, when colors start getting their own words, red is usually the first color defined after black and white (or light and dark), and that blue and green are often not defined individually, at least at first. Those facts and more in this super long/interesting article about color and language and how colors got their names and and and...just read it already. Here's part 2.
The figure above is really telling a story. What it says is this. If a language has just two color terms, they will be a light and a dark shade - blacks and whites. Add a third color, and it's going to be red. Add another, and it will be either green or yellow - you need five colors to have both. And when you get to six colors, the green splits into two, and you now have a blue. What we're seeing here is a deeply trodden road that most languages seem to follow, towards greater visual discernment (92 of their 98 languages seemed to follow this basic route).
The food truck trend has invaded Paris, where young people use the phrase "très Brooklyn" to denote food that combines "informality, creativity and quality".
On a bright morning last month at the Marché St.-Honoré, a weekly market in an elegant residential section of Paris, several sleekly dressed women struggled to lift the thick burgers to their mouths gracefully. (In French restaurants, and sometimes even fast-food joints, burgers are eaten with utensils, not hands.) A few brave souls were trying to eat tacos with a knife and fork. "C'est pas trop épicé," said one, encouraging a tentative friend -- "It's not too spicy," high praise from the chile-fearing French.
Street food itself isn't new to France. At outdoor markets like this one, there is often a truck selling snacks like pizza, crepes or spicy Moroccan merguez sausages, cooked on griddles and stuffed into baguettes.
But the idea of street food made by chefs, using restaurant-grade ingredients, technique and technology, is very new indeed.
This thread at Ask MetaFilter contains several examples of English words and phrases that sound current but actually aren't.
"Fly" mentioned above is one of my favorites (though it's considered dated by youngsters today -- they'll basically only use it ironically), but one not mentioned so is "crib" (also a bit dated) which has meant something like "house" or "home" since 1600. OED: "A small habitation, cabin, hovel; a narrow room; fig. a confined space. In N.Z. now esp. a small house at the seaside or at a holiday resort."
I particularly liked this early example of the maternal insult from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus:
Demetrius: "Villain, what hast thou done?"
Aaron: "That which thou canst not undo."
Chiron: "Thou hast undone our mother."
Aaron: "Villain, I have done thy mother."
Prochronism analyzes word usage in shows like Mad Men and Downton Abbey to hunt down anachronisms...like "a callback for" and "pay phone" from a recent episode of Mad Men.
The big one from the charts: Megan gets "a callback for" an audition. This is, the data says, a candidate for the worst anachronism of the season. The word "callback" is about 100x more common by the 1990s, and "callback for" is even worse. The OED doesn't have any examples of a theater-oriented use of "callback" until the 1970s; although I bet one could find some examples somewhere earlier in the New York theater scene, that may not save it. It wouldn't really suite Megan's generally dilettantish attitude towards the theater, or the office staff's lack of knowledge of it, for them to be so au courant. "call-back" and "call back" don't seem much more likely.
A number of banking machines in London offer Cockney rhyming slang as a language option. Operating the machine is simple...just insert your barrel of lard and punch in your Huckleberry Finn to get your sausage and mash.
The company has also been responsible for introducing cash machines which only dispense £5 notes -- fivers as they are colloquially named or Lady Godivas in cockney.
It also allows people to withdraw a pony -- which is £25 to non-cockney folk.
"I was talking to Andrew Bailey, the chief cashier of the Bank of England, and he said they were trying to get more £5 notes into circulation," Mr Delnevo reflects.
He came up with the idea that, rather than putting £5 notes in as one choice, it would be better to have £5-note only cash machines.
"We were getting to the state where we were a £20 note society - handing over £20 for an item which cost £4.50 and handed back enough metal to act as an anchor for the aircraft carrier Ark Royal," he says.
New essay from Errol Morris in the NY Times, What's in a Name? In it, he talks about the two Rockefellers that appeared in the newspapers a few years ago...one an imposter and one real.
Clearly, the name was also responsible for the attention he was getting in the newspaper. Clark is not just any impostor; he is a Rockefeller impostor. And as such he becomes more important, more significant. It is as if the name gives him some of the stature and allure of a real Rockefeller. A perfect example of this is the importance given to Clark in both The New York Times and The Boston Globe. He even managed to outshine Barack Obama and Joseph Biden during the week that Obama picked his running mate. Obama and Biden get a little picture at the bottom of the right-hand side of the front page. Clark gets a photo spread -- one big picture and four little ones -- at the top of the left-hand side. He also got more column inches in the newspaper than Clayton, the real Rockefeller. It's impressive.
ATMs in the Vatican City have Latin as one of the language options:
Anyone know what that means? Google Translate spits out a bunch of jibberish... (Photo by Seth Schoen)
Update: Lots of slightly different answers as to what this says, but this email from a Ph.D. candidate in Classics at Columbia is representative of the spread:
Anyhow, a super-literal translation would be something like this:
I ask that you insert [your] card in order that you come to understand the method needing to be used.
But more colloquially, we can do this:
Please insert your card to learn the instructions.
or even (although I'm really getting into sloppy translation territory here):
Please insert your card for instructions.
(thx, charles)
Update: And it may be more accurate to say that Vatican City ATMs previously offered a Latin option. According to @johnke, "they removed the Latin option with a software update sometime in late 2010/early 2011".
FLOGGING CULLY. A debilitated lecher, commonly an old one.
COLD PIG. To give cold pig is a punishment inflicted on sluggards who lie too long in bed: it consists in pulling off all the bed clothes from them, and throwing cold water upon them.
TWIDDLE-DIDDLES. Testicles.
TWIDDLE POOP. An effeminate looking fellow.
ROUND ROBIN. A mode of signing remonstrances practised by sailors on board the king's ships, wherein their names are written in a circle, so that it cannot be discovered who first signed it, or was, in other words, the ringleader.
The Pronunciation Book channel on YouTube shows you how to say various words in American English in a straightforward fashion. Here's how to say Zegna, the men's clothing brand:
This is not to be confused with the Pronunciation Manual channel, which does the same thing in the same format but much funnier and more incorrect.
I could have embedded a dozen more...I have no idea why I think these are so funny but I just cannot stop laughing at them. Ok, one more:
This is a node.js module that determines if a sentence can be replied to with "that's what she said". You can use either a naive Bayes or k-nearest neighbor algorithm. This totally paves the way for a Michael Scott auto-replying Twitter bot. (via @kellan)
You've probably seen the NY Times correction that everyone's talking about. Ok, not everyone, just everyone who works in media. Anyway, here it is:
An article on Monday about Jack Robison and Kirsten Lindsmith, two college students with Asperger syndrome who are navigating the perils of an intimate relationship, misidentified the character from the animated children's TV show "My Little Pony" that Ms. Lindsmith said she visualized to cheer herself up. It is Twilight Sparkle, the nerdy intellectual, not Fluttershy, the kind animal lover.
I was accompanying Kirsten to school, taking notes on my laptop as she drove. She was listening to music on her iPod known to Pony fans as "dubtrot," -- a take-off on "dubstep,'' get it? -- in which fans remix songs and dialogue from the show with electronic dance music.
Dubtrot! And leave it Urban Dictionary to gild the lily.
Dubstep music relating to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Often created by bronies, dubtrot can include dubstep remixes of songs from the show and original pieces created as homage or in reference to the show.
If Nigel has a weakness, it's that his wide-open, high-scoring style often leaves him vulnerable to counterattack by opponents who also have prodigious word knowledge. And Nigel is regarded as having a less-than-proficient endgame, which is variously attributed to his lack of interest in strategic play or his reluctance to study board positions. Indeed, Nigel doesn't record his racks, doesn't review games, rarely kibitzes about particular plays. The other top experts, particularly the Americans, talk disdainfully about this gap in Nigel's ability, how it makes him an incomplete player. Naturally, Nigel doesn't care.
According to Wikipedia, Richards has continued his winning ways since 2001...he's a two-time World Championship winner and has won the U.S. National Scrabble Championship three out of the last four years.
The middle finger and the British "up yours" don't make the abbreviated list, but if you want to know how to piss people off in their native land without talking, this is a nice little guide. From a book called Rude Hand Gestures of the World.
Well, the way they make shows is, they make one show. That show's called a pilot. Then they show that show to the people who make shows, and on the strength of that one show they decide if they're going to make more shows. Some pilots get picked and become television programs. Some don't, become nothing. She starred in one of the ones that became nothing.
Who else has a good lorem ipsum name? Lorem Bacall? Buddy Ipsum? Anthony Lorem Hall? Lorem Fishburne? Loremington Steele?
From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.
John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
That first one...I can't decide if it's bad or the best analogy ever.
For all of the other languages, the researchers discovered, the more data-dense the average syllable is, the fewer of those syllables had to be spoken per second -- and the slower the speech thus was. English, with a high information density of .91, is spoken at an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second. Mandarin, which topped the density list at .94, was the spoken slowpoke at 5.18 syllables per second. Spanish, with a low-density .63, rips along at a syllable-per-second velocity of 7.82. The true speed demon of the group, however, was Japanese, which edges past Spanish at 7.84, thanks to its low density of .49. Despite those differences, at the end of, say, a minute of speech, all of the languages would have conveyed more or less identical amounts of information.
Need some "artisanal text filler" for your latest project? Hipster Ipsum provides dummy text in two great flavors: "Hipster w/ a shot of Latin" and "Hipster, neat."
Organic sustainable lomo, +1 irony McSweeney's skateboard Portland PBR tattooed farm-to-table Terry Richardson Williamsburg. Organic farm-to-table wolf, next level shit put a bird on it freegan American Apparel Williamsburg chambray gentrify viral you probably haven't heard of them keffiyeh Cosby sweater. Pitchfork photo booth fuck, DIY cardigan messenger bag butcher Thundercats tofu you probably haven't heard of them whatever squid VHS put a bird on it. Thundercats fixie Williamsburg, photo booth synth vinyl dreamcatcher Wes Anderson cliche. You probably haven't heard of them DIY mlkshk biodiesel McSweeney's raw denim. Skateboard Pitchfork Etsy, photo booth messenger bag artisan raw denim beard Tumblr retro Austin. Wes Anderson sustainable keffiyeh, blog lomo craft beer cliche brunch homo skateboard biodiesel fanny pack Pitchfork you probably haven't heard of them Stumptown.
To say a French word in the middle of an English sentence exactly as it would be said by a Frenchman in a French sentence is a feat demanding an acrobatic mouth; the muscles have to be suddenly adjusted to a performance of a different nature, & after it as suddenly recalled to the normal state; it is a feat that should not be attempted; the greater its success as a tour de force, the greater its failure as a step in the conversational progress; for your collocutor, aware that he could not have done it himself, has his attention distracted whether he admires or is humiliated.
I think that's what Feynman was getting at here in his discussion with Murray Gell-Mann, although, in typical Feynman fashion, not in so many words.
Richard Feynman, Gell-Mann's chief competitor for the title of the World's Smartest Man but a stranger to pretension, once encountered Gell-Mann in the hall outside their offices at Caltech and asked him where he had been on a recent trip; "Moon-TRAY-ALGH!" Gell-Mann responded in a French accent so thick that he sounded as if he were strangling. Feynman -- who, like Gell-Mann, was born in New York City -- had no idea what he was talking about. "Don't you think," he asked Gell-Mann, when at length he had ascertained that Gell-Mann was saying "Montreal," "that the purpose of language is communication?"
Characters' names are often also common words. A dumbledore is a bumblebee. Snape is a ship-building term that means "to bevel the end of (a timber or plank) so that it will fit accurately upon an inclined surface." Hagrid is the past participle of hagride, which means "to harass or torment by dread or nightmares." Skeeter is a term for an annoying pest, and not just Rita Skeeter, blood-sucking journalist. Mundungus is "waste animal product" or "poor-quality tobacco with a foul, rancid, or putrid smell," a good name for a sneaky thief.
Herrera also discovered teens in the Phillippines and Mexico who think it's "cool" to send text messages in regional endangered languages like Kapampangan and Huave. Almost as soon as text messaging exploded on the world stage as a means to reach anyone, anywhere, and anytime, young people began to find a way to scale it back, make it more exclusive and develop their own code or doublespeak to use on the widely used devices.
As a general rule, do not use the serial/Oxford comma: so write 'a, b and c' not 'a, b, and c'. But when a comma would assist in the meaning of the sentence or helps to resolve ambiguity, it can be used -- especially where one of the items in the list is already joined by 'and'.
The kottke.org style guide still advocates the use of the Oxford comma, but take that with a grain of salt; I also misuse semicolons, use too many (often unnecessary) parentheses -- not to mention m-dashes that are actually rendered as two n-dashes in old-school ASCII fashion -- use too many commas, and place punctuation outside quotation marks, which many people find, in the words of Bill S. Preston Esq. and Ted "Theodore" Logan, "bogus". Oh, and in another nod to the old-school, I also use "dumb quotes" instead of the fancier and, I guess, technically more correct "smart quotes". (via, who else?, @tcarmody (or should that be "whom else?"))
Update:The document I linked to above is from a branding style guide for Oxford University. It recommends against using the Oxford comma in most cases. The Oxford Style Manual, meant for the general public and last published in 2003 by Oxford University Press, "a department of the University of Oxford", recommends using the Oxford comma in all cases. So basically, Oxford is telling us to use the Oxford comma but isn't going to use it internally. Oxford gone schizo, y'all! (thx, @rchrd_h)
motherfucker First used: 1994, Ian Frazier, "On the Floor" It sounded like a chorus of high-pitched voices shouting the word "motherfucker" through a blender.
It all depends on what your baseline is -- x percent of what. But it's usually easier for tongue-clicking know-it-alls to just assume athletes are dumb than to try to actually figure out what it is they might be talking about.
Here's actually a more serious (and more mathematically precise) way to look at this. Economist Stephen Shmanske has a new paper in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports titled "Dynamic Effort, Sustainability, Myopia, and 110% Effort" that actually brings some stats and benchmarks to bear to figure this out in the context of the NBA.
For Shmanske, it's all about defining what counts as 100% effort. Let's say "100%" is the maximum amount of effort that can be consistently sustained. With this benchmark, it's obviously possible to give less than 100%. But it's also possible to give more. All you have to do is put forth an effort that can only be sustained inconsistently, for short periods of time. In other words, you're overclocking.
And in fact, based on the numbers, NBA players pull greater-than-100-percent off relatively frequently, putting forth more effort in short bursts than they can keep up over a longer period. And giving greater than 100% can reduce your ability to subsequently and consistently give 100%. You overdraw your account, and don't have anything left.
I haven't dived into the paper (it's behind a subscription wall, natch), but doesn't this seem like a rough-but-reasonable analysis of what athletes and other people mean when they use language this way? Shouldn't we all calm down a little with rulers across the fingers, offering our ready-made "correct" use of the rhetoric of percentages?
That's how Clockwords bills itself...you try words containing the available letters to shoot badguys coming your way. More fun than it sounds, especially for Boggle/Scrabble nerds.
Ok smartypants, put your hand down. It's antidisestablishmentarianism, right? Maybe not. Robert Krulwich explains.
Science writer Sam Kean, in his book The Disappearing Spoon, worked really hard on this and after much sleuthing, he landed on a word that comes not from dancing English nannies but from virus-hunting scientists. It's a protein, found in a virus, but this is a very dangerous, economically important virus, the first ever discovered.
Compare with the Wikipedia entry on long words, which contains this glorious non-word: Twoallbeefpattiesspecialsaucelettucecheesepicklesonionsonasesameseedbun. (via @bobulate)
As you can see in this visualization created by Information is Beautiful, the most commonly used words in horoscopes are amazingly consistent across the twelve different signs. As part of the analysis, they also created a meta-horoscope reading for use anytime during the year:
Ready? Sure? Whatever the situation or secret moment, enjoy everything a lot. Feel able to absolutely care. Expect nothing else. Keep making love. Family and friends matter. The world is life, fun, and energy. Maybe hard. Or easy. Taking exactly enough is best. Help and talk to others. Change your mind and a better mood comes along...
The idea of a more politically correct Finn came to the 69-year-old English professor over years of teaching and outreach, during which he habitually replaced the word with "slave" when reading aloud. Gribben grew up without ever hearing the "n" word ("My mother said it's only useful to identify [those who use it as] the wrong kind of people") and became increasingly aware of its jarring effect as he moved South and started a family. "My daughter went to a magnet school and one of her best friends was an African-American girl. She loathed the book, could barely read it."
I wonder how many times that word was used in songs appearing on Billboard's Hot 100 chart last year? Or perhaps nigga != nigger.
This is just flat out magical...you hold your iPhone running Word Lens up to some text in, say, Spanish, and you'll automatically see it translated into English.
The world's most isolated continent has spawned some of the most unusual words in the English language. In the space of a mere century, a remarkable vocabulary has evolved to deal with the extraordinary environment and living organisms of the Antarctic and subantarctic.
The first entry in the dictionary is "aaaa, aaaaah, aaahh See ahhh". The entry for "ahhh" reads:
'Halt', a sledge dog command, usually softly called
The point of a but-head is to preemptively deny a charge that has yet to be made, with a kind of "best offense is a good defense" strategy. This technique has a distinguished relative in classical rhetoric: the device of procatalepsis, in which the speaker brings up and immediately refutes the anticipated objections of his or her hearer. When someone says "I'm not trying to hurt your feelings, but..." they are maneuvering to keep you from saying "I don't believe you -- you're just trying to hurt my feelings."
A translation of 50 Cent's hit single In Da Club into the Queen's English.
When I arrive in my Mercedes-Benz I find the nightclub is full of actors Basically, a lot of different people want to have sex with me And I mean A LOT I fear change Xzibit is preparing a marijuana cigarette I am very good at interpretive dance Gunshot injuries have had no effect on my gait
Wikipedia has a list of all the ridiculous titles that have been used in the North Korean media to refer to Dickhead-in-Chief Kim Jong-il. A sampling:
Superior Person
Sun of Communist Future
Highest Incarnation of the Revolutionary Comradely Love
Beloved and Respected General
Invincible and Iron-Willed Commander
World's Leader of The 21st century
Glorious General, Who Descended From Heaven
Quite a bit is known about how English was spoken back when Shakespeare wrote his plays but productions of his plays using the original pronunciation (OP) are quite rare. Now a University of Kansas theater professor and his students are putting on a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the OP.
"American audiences will hear an accent and style surprisingly like their own in its informality and strong r-colored vowels," Meier said. "The original pronunciation performance strongly contrasts with the notions of precise and polished delivery created by John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and their colleagues from the 20th century British theater."
Meier said audiences will hear word play and rhymes that "haven't worked for several hundred years (love/prove, eyes/qualities, etc.) magically restored, as Bottom, Puck and company wind the language clock back to 1595."
"The audience will hear rough and surprisingly vernacular diction, they will hear echoes of Irish, New England and Cockney that survive to this day as 'dialect fossils.' And they will be delighted by how very understandable the language is, despite the intervening centuries."
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Integer ultricies mi nec elit pretium porta. Ut pellentesque mollis magna et molestie. In elementum nulla vel augue tempor non ultrices mauris semper. Vestibulum nulla augue, volutpat at bibendum id, interdum ut ante. Pellentesque vestibulum erat suscipit nisl placerat pharetra. Maecenas a metus eros, non feugiat metus. Phasellus fermentum felis eu leo sagittis pellentesque. Mauris quis felis eu nibh bibendum dignissim vel et tortor. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Quisque a ante eget erat accumsan volutpat. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Nunc pretium iaculis diam, non ullamcorper urna viverra quis. Mauris egestas lorem eu magna tempus egestas. Sed ac lorem ac quam lacinia rutrum sed a metus. Ut diam sem, elementum rutrum dapibus ut, dictum nec turpis. Fusce tempor, arcu quis bibendum porta, massa leo scelerisque eros, nec convallis lacus lorem in nunc. Vestibulum fringilla dictum scelerisque. Donec eget elit ac magna placerat suscipit. Morbi tempor nisl eu est ultrices vehicula.
translates to:
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The brand-new Radiolab episode "Words" is characteristically terrific; I tweeted this after listening to just the opening section:
I love hearing @JadAbumrad's voice fill my room, but @wnycradiolab's "Words" is fucking me up right now. You've made a grown man cry. Shit.
There's also an accompanying video, made by Will Hoffman, Daniel Mercadante, and Keith Kenniff:
Also, it's not the VERY best section of the program, but there is a very nice exploration of Shakespeare's inventive use of language that word/history nerds like me will especially enjoy. (I'm using inventive in its proper dual sense of innovative inventory, making new use of material already at hand. It's easy to overstate how many words Shakespeare "actually" "invented.")
Now "Words" is mostly about the relationship between language and our ability to make conceptual distinctions to connect or distinguish between different things. The 2006 episode "Musical Language" traces the other path words take to the brain, through our ears. (Note: I still think this is the greatest episode of Radiolab of ALL TIME. Story, reporting, production - just note and letter perfect.)
This show starts out by introducing a random earworm so insistent and amazing, it would wreck everything if I were to give it away. Instead, I'll just give you the summary of the historically-tasty middle of the show, and let you take it away from there:
Anne Fernald explains our need to goochie-goochie-goo at every baby we meet, and absolves us of our guilt. This kind of talk, dubbed motherese, is an instict that crosses cultural and linguistic boundaries. Caecilius was goochie-goochie-gooing in Rome; Grunt was goochie-gooing in the caves. Radio Lab did our own study of infant-directed speech, recording more than a dozen different parents. The melodies of these recordings illustrate Fernald's findings that there are a set of common tunes living within the words that parents all over the world intone to their babies.
Then, science reporter Jonah Lehrer takes us on a tour through the ear as we try to understand how the brain makes sense of soundwaves and what happens when it can't. Which brings us to one particularly riotous example: the 1913 debut performance of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." Jonah suggests that the brain's attempt to tackle disonant sounds resulted in old ladies tackling each other.
What are you waiting for? Go! Listen to them both!
See, we have hidden numbers in the words like "wonderful," "before," "create," "tenderly." All these numbers can be inflated and meet the economy, you know, by rising to the occcassion. I suggest we add one to each of these numbers to be prepared. For example "wonderful" would be "two-derful." Before would be Be-five. Create, cre-nine. Tenderly should be eleven-derly. A Leiutenant would be a Leiut-eleven-ant. A sentance like, "I ate a tenderloin with my fork" would be "I nine an elevenderloin with my five-k."
You wouldn't think a Korean man teaching his class how to swear in English would be so funny.
I love his mannerisms when he says the swears in English; he channels Goodfellas-era Joe Pesci a little bit during his discussion of "fucking". (via mike industries)
Video of a Valley Girl contest that took place in Encino, CA in 1982.
The footage is from a show called Real People, which was a big hit with adolescent Jason (although I loved That's Incredible more). If you want to learn more about Valley Girls -- sure you do! -- Wikipedia has almost too much info. (via lowindustrial)
My use of the phrase "ATM machines" in a post the other day had my inbox buzzing. I've become more lax in my language use recently...I just don't have the energy to be pedantic about grammar and usage anymore. (Or perhaps I'm thinking more about writing and less about editing.) Anyway, there's a name for using terms like "ATM machine" and "PIN number": RAS syndrome:
RAS syndrome stands for redundant acronym syndrome syndrome and refers to the redundant use of one or more of the words that make up an acronym or initialism with the abbreviation itself, thus in effect repeating one or more words. Usage commentators consider such redundant acronyms poor style and an error to be avoided in writing, though they are common in speech. The term "RAS syndrome" is itself a redundant acronym, and thus is an example of self-referential humor.
My name is Jason Kottke and I have RAS syndrome. (via @tylercowen)
Q. Hi there! For a sign for bachelorette parties, would the phrase "Bachelorette Out of Control" be more appropriate than "Bachelorette's Out of Control"? The question is one of contraction, because I don't see how "Bachelorette's Out of Control" can be correct without "The" prefacing it. Thank you!
A. Out-of-control bachelorettes who require appropriate signage aren't very convincing, but the first version is better.
I think they punted a bit on the "how to cite a tshirt" question.
For grammarians, it's a dependent clause + colon + just about anything, incorporating any and all elements of the other four colons, yet differing crucially in that its pre-colon segment is always a dependent clause.
For everyone else: its usefulness lies in that it lifts you up and into a sentence you never thought you'd be reading by giving you a compact little nugget of information prior to the colon and leaving you on the hook for whatever comes thereafter, often rambling on until the reader has exhausted his/her theoretical lung capacity and can continue to read no longer.
Bottom line: the 140 character limit of Twitter and general move towards concision in online writing is credited for the rise of the jumper colon.
"Soccer," by the way, is not some Yankee neologism but a word of impeccably British origin. It owes its coinage to a domestic rival, rugby, whose proponents were fighting a losing battle over the football brand around the time that we were preoccupied with a more sanguinary civil war. Rugby's nickname was (and is) rugger, and its players are called ruggers-a bit of upper-class twittery, as in "champers," for champagne, or "preggers," for enceinte. "Soccer" is rugger's equivalent in Oxbridge-speak. The "soc" part is short for "assoc," which is short for "association," as in "association football," the rules of which were codified in 1863 by the all-powerful Football Association, or FA-the FA being to the U.K. what the NFL, the NBA, and MLB are to the U.S.
Former NBA player, shot blocker extraordinaire, and humanitarian Manute Bol died over the weekend at age 47. He died of a rare skin condition caused by a medication he took while in Africa.
"You know, a lot of people feel sorry for him, because he's so tall and awkward," Charles Barkley, a former 76ers teammate, once said. "But I'll tell you this -- if everyone in the world was a Manute Bol, it's a world I'd want to live in."
Ken Arneson emailed me to say that he heard the phrase was first used by the Sudanese immigrant basketball player Manute Bol, believed to have been a native speaker of Dinka (a very interesting and thoroughly un-Indo-Europeanlike language of the Nilo-Saharan superfamily). Says Arneson, "I first heard the phrase here in the Bay Area when Bol joined the Golden State Warriors in 1988, when several Warriors players started using the phrase." And Ben Zimmer's rummaging in the newspaper files down in the basement of Language Log Plaza produced a couple of early 1989 quotes that confirm this convincingly:
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jan. 10, 1989: When he [Manute Bol] throws a bad pass, he'll say, "My bad" instead of "My fault," and now all the other players say the same thing.
USA Today, Jan. 27, 1989: After making a bad pass, instead of saying "my fault," Manute Bol says, "my bad." Now all the other Warriors say it too.
Update: As a recent post on Language Log notes, several people picked up on this and kinda sorta got rid of the "may have" and the story became that Bol absolutely coined the phrase "my bad". Unfortunately, the evidence doesn't support that theory (although it doesn't entirely disprove it either). The internet is so proficient at twisting the original meaning of things as they propagate that Telephone should really be called Internet.
n. the phenomenon of observing your parents interact with people they grew up with, which reboots their personalities into youth mode, reverting to a time before the last save point, when they were still dreamers and rascals cooling their heels in the wilderness, waiting terrified and eager to meet you for the first time
n. an innocuous touch by someone just doing their job -- a barber, yoga instructor or friendly waitress -- that you enjoy more than you'd like to admit, a feeling of connection so stupefyingly simple that it cheapens the power of the written word, so that by the year 2025, aspiring novelists would be better off just giving people a hug.
6. Visualization. Where will I wear this dress? Who will be there? Will I wear it once, or over and over again? Will I blog it?
7. Shoes. Which ones? Do I already own them? Would this dress require shoes that do not, in fact, actually exist? (E.g., every pair of boots I've ever wanted.) Do I have a pair of shoes in a weird color that I need to make a dress to match? Am I looking for an excuse to buy a new pair of shoes in a weird color? (Lather, rinse, repeat for "Coat" and "Bag".)
McKean is perhaps better known as a lexicographer...I like her McKean's Law:
Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical error.
Madonna uses a surprising number of cliches and figures of speech in this interview (conducted by Gus Van Sant).
his Girl Friday
talks the talk
walks the walk
lots of ways to skin the cat
he's got a fire under his ass
a bee in his bonnet
a trip down memory lane
turn my lemons into lemonade
clotheshorses
so far, so good
reinvent the wheel
The interview itself may not be worth looking at unless you're already a Madonna, GVS, or cliche fan.
Frustrated by the quality of the embossed reading systems he tried, and eager to improve worldwide literacy and access to the Bible, he set about developing his own system based on roman lettering. Moon's system was easy to master, particularly for those who had learned to read before they lost their sight, and it became very successful.
This means that in addition the 31,534 words that Shakespeare knew and used, there were approximately 35,000 words that he knew but didn't use. Thus, we can estimate that Shakespeare knew approximately 66,534 words.
According to one estimate, the average speaker of English knows between 10,000-20,000 words.
Globish is a "decaffeinated English" that is increasingly becoming a widely used international language.
The Times journalist Ben Macintyre described how, waiting for a flight from Delhi, he had overheard a conversation between a Spanish UN peacekeeper and an Indian soldier. "The Indian spoke no Spanish; the Spaniard spoke no Punjabi. Yet they understood one another easily. The language they spoke was a highly simplified form of English, without grammar or structure, but perfectly comprehensible, to them and to me. Only now," he concluded, "do I realise that they were speaking 'Globish', the newest and most widely spoken language in the world."
Before Minna was born, we didn't know if she was a boy or a girl, so we had a bunch of names picked out for both genders. Since we are so so (SO!) done having kids, I thought I'd share our list in case someone else finds any of them useful.
Girls:
Beatrix
Greta
Coralie
Boys:
Milton
Emory
Milo
Emmett
Max/Maximilian
Hugo
Nico
Oscar
Finn
Sam
Ford
Of the girls names, Minna was my frontrunner from when we first heard it. Meg favored Beatrix for a long time but I finally convinced her of Minna's intrinsic correctness. Milo was the clear frontrunner had Minna been a boy.
'Smolt', 'grilse': as Richard Shelton observes, salmon are spoken of in a 'stained-glass language' of their own, their life stages marked by an ichthyological lexicon unchanged since Chaucer's time. Born in a 'redd', a shallow, gravel-covered depression dug by the female in the days before spawning, newly hatched salmon begin life as 'alevins', tiny, buoyant creatures with their yolk sacs still attached.
A "jiffy" actually has a formal definition. More than one, in fact.
In electronics, a jiffy is the time between alternating current power cycles, 1/60 or 1/50 of a second in most countries.
In astrophysics and quantum physics a jiffy is the time it takes for light to travel one fermi, which is the size of a nucleon.
In computing, a jiffy is the duration of one tick of the system timer interrupt. It is not an absolute time interval unit, since its duration depends on the clock interrupt frequency of the particular hardware platform.
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)
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?
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
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.
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?"
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.
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 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)
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.
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)
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!
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)
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.
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.)
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.
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)
"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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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 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.
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.
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 coupleof panhandlers who have been using other Obama messages (e.g. "I need change like Obama"). (via collision detection)
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."
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.
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.
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)
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.
