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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 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 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 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”, 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, 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. Alternate title: 100 mostly useless words.
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 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 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 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 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 in a 3D image. Voxel = volumetric + pixel. (via best thing)
Cap’n Crunch’s full name is Captain Horatio Magellan Crunch.
Sean Penn and Stephen Colbert competing in a metaphor competition:
Good lord that’s funny.
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.”
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 n***a 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 the writing is in The Da Vinci Code.
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 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 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 filmed in Esperanto and starred William Shatner. What more could you want, really?
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 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. 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 the Sims games. Several music artists have recorded songs sung in Simlish.
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 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 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.”
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