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 [email protected]. 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?”
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