New vocabulary word (to me): gangsta nerd.
New vocabulary word (to me): gangsta nerd.
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kottke.org posts about language
The letter-pairs analysis application reads in some
The letter-pairs analysis application reads in some text and displays a graphical representation of distribution of letter pairs used in the text. Love the aesthetics of the information display.
Dingle’s name change from its English name
Dingle’s name change from its English name to the now-official Gaelic one (An Daingean) is messing with the Dingle brand…opponents to the change say that the tourists, upon which Dingle depends, are gonna get confused.
Bullshit parallels
In Jim Holt’s review of three recent books about bullshit, he writes:
The essence of bullshit, Frankfurt decides, is that it is produced without any concern for the truth. Bullshit needn’t be false: “The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong.” The bullshitter’s fakery consists not in misrepresenting a state of affairs but in concealing his own indifference to the truth of what he says. The liar, by contrast, is concerned with the truth, in a perverse sort of fashion: he wants to lead us away from it. As Frankfurt sees it, the liar and the truthteller are playing on opposite sides of the same game, a game defined by the authority of truth. The bullshitter opts out of this game altogether. Unlike the liar and the truthteller, he is not guided in what he says by his beliefs about the way things are. And that, Frankfurt says, is what makes bullshit so dangerous: it unfits a person for telling the truth.
In thinking about Judeo-Christian religion, atheism is a bit like bullshitting in this respect. If you believe in God, you also necessarily believe in the existence of Satan. So too for Satanists…like the liar, they are concerned with the counterpart to their main interest (i.e. God) as something to defend against. But atheists opt out and don’t believe in the existence of either.
Update: There’s been a bit of confusion as to what I’m actually trying to say here. My fault. I’m definitely not trying to say that atheists are bullshitters. Or that Satanists are liars. Or that Christians believe in Satan (as opposed to believing in the existence of Satan). What I’m saying that as both truth-tellers and liars are concerned with the true and false, so too are Christians and Satanists both concerned with God and Satan. But the bullshitter cares little for the true or false, just as an atheist is little concerned with God or Satan.
Also, someone pointed out that Satanists often don’t worship Satan. Sez the Wikipedia entry on Satanism:
Many Satanists do not worship a deity called Satan or any other deity. Unlike many religions and philosophies, Satanism generally focuses upon the spiritual advancement of the self, rather than upon submission to a deity or a set of moral codes.
So my whole point is shot anyway. (thx, kevin)
To protect against wholesale theft of words (
To protect against wholesale theft of words (theft of words? I feel silly just writing that…), dictionaries insert fake words in their listings. The article says that the New Oxford American Dictionary’s fake word showed up on dictionary.com, but as of today, it’s gone.
The competitive Scrabble world is starting to
The competitive Scrabble world is starting to see some top-notch players for whom English is not their native language. At he highest level of competition, “Scrabble’s secret is that it’s a math game: board geometry, strategic decision making, probability and chance.” And sometimes it’s better not knowing English so the player can focus solely on the memorization of patterns and gameplay. Interesting stuff.
Color Code is a “color portrait of
Color Code is a “color portrait of the English language”. It’s a treemap visualization created by assigning over 33,000 words its own color (colors are determined by averaging the colors of images found for each word on the web). If it’s running a little slow on your machine, check out the gallery for some neat examples. By Martin Wattenberg, creator of the grandaddy treemap app, Map of the Market.
The last surviving WWII Comanche code talker dies
The last surviving WWII Comanche code talker dies.
The group of Comanche Indians from the Lawton area were selected for special duty in the U.S. Army to provide the Allies with a language that the Germans could not decipher.
Don Watson and Clive Thompson on the
Don Watson and Clive Thompson on the assembly-lining of thought and discourse via modern jargon. “That’s the true malaise of modern jargon: It forces people to treat any subject as if it were always a managerial problem of inputs and outputs.”
A guide on how to speak gangsta
A guide on how to speak gangsta. “I give yous props for dat phat ride man” means “I give you thanks for the good ride my friend”. And don’t miss the step-by-step instructions for high fiving someone.
Merriam-Webster has compiled a list of words
Merriam-Webster has compiled a list of words that aren’t yet in the dictionary, but are in widespread use anyway. “cognitive displaysia (n): the feeling you have before you even leave the house that you are going to forget something and not remember it until you’re on the highway”.
The origins of “lorem ipsum…”
The origins of “lorem ipsum…” explained:
Going through the cites of the word in classical literature, he found one that looked familiar. Aha! Lorem ipsum was part of a passage from Cicero, specifically De finibus bonorum et malorum, a treatise on the theory of ethics written in 45 BC. The original reads, Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit… (‘There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain…’).
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