kottke.org posts about language
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.
Writer Gay Talese recently helped a few panhandlers out with their signs.
I stopped talking and reached into my pocket for one of the strips of laundry board on which I make notes when I’m interviewing people. On one strip of laundry board I wrote: “Please Support Pres. Obama’s Stimulus Plan, and begin right here … at the bottom … Thank you.” I handed it to him, and he said he’d copy the words on his sign and have it on display the following day.
One of his “clients” says that the improved message is resulting in more business. I found photos on Flickr of a couple of panhandlers who have been using other Obama messages (e.g. “I need change like Obama”). (via collision detection)
Garth Risk Hallberg of The Millions diagrammed a sentence spoken by Obama last week:
My view is also that nobody’s above the law, and, if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen, but that, generally speaking, I’m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards.
The analysis is full of nice little tidbits about how Obama communicates and why people respond to him.
This may be the essential Obama gift: making complexity and caution sound bold and active, even masculine… or rather, it may be one facet of a larger gift: what Zadie Smith calls “having more than one voice in your ear.” Notice the canny way that the sentence above turns on the fulcrum of what may be Obama’s favorite word: “but.” What appears to be a hard line - “My view is… that nobody is above the law” - turns out to have been a qualifier for a vaguer but more inspiring motto: “I am more interested in looking forward than I am in looking back.” The most controversial part of the sentence - “people should be prosecuted” - gets tucked away, almost parenthetically, in the middle.
Within Obama’s speech patterns, Hallberg also detects a way out of the Obama Comedy Crisis. His sample joke:
“The beef, assuming it’s in a port wine reduction, sounds, uh, amazing, but on the other hand, given that the chicken is, ah, locally grown, I’d be eager to try it.”
Rapper/producer 88-Keys is a Lo Head, an obsessive collector and wearer of Ralph Lauren Polo clothing and accessories. He’s been wearing nothing but Polo every single day since 1993. This interview with rapper and Lo Head Rack-Lo functions as a sort of Lo Head manifesto.
A lot of street dudes have paved the way and paid a hefty price for all of you to even be able to rock Lo and all those other name brands as well. Other names like North Face, Benetton, Gucci, Spyder, Gortex, Louis Vutton and the list goes on - Lo-Life’s did it all first. So let me school ya’ll for a second. This Lo movement officially started in 1988. And even before 1988, the movement was in development. Have ya’ll ever heard of Ralphies Kids or USA (United Shoplifters Association), that’s the foundation right there. Those are basically the two crews that Rack-Lo united as Lo-Life’s to form voltron on the Hip Hop world. And a lot of you dudes probably weren’t even born then. So what the fuck are you really saying? So I’m just making it clear that if your going to rep that Lo shit and be apart of a fashion institution there’s a certain way to do it. Word, it rules and laws to this shit. This aint no fly by night shit where u wake up one morning and decide to rock Lo like Kayne West did. That shit there is a fairy tale a lot of heads are living.
Kanye defended his status as a Lo Head in the song Barry Bonds from his Graduation album.
Andrew Anker warns against companies having more than one “flashlight”.
This is a term I learned from a banker I worked for 20 years ago, people who shine brightly in one direction, but don’t let off too much light otherwise. Flashlights are kind of useless as board members, despite big reputations and good resumes — they’re just not lateral thinkers and don’t really want to dig in. Every company is allowed one flashlight, but it better be the CEO. It’s hard to know where to go when the light is shining in two (or more) different directions.
(thx, djacobs)
All the dev team had after month of effort was a black triangle on a screen…but it was more than that.
Afterwards, we came to refer to certain types of accomplishments as “black triangles.” These are important accomplishments that take a lot of effort to achieve, but upon completion you don’t have much to show for it — only that more work can now proceed. It takes someone who really knows the guts of what you are doing to appreciate a black triangle.
When working on complex projects, the black triangle moment is always the high point for me; it’s when success occurs. Before you’ve got a framework built, there’s significant doubt about how the project will turn out, if can even be done. After you get that first little result through the whole maze and it’s clear how the whole thing will work, the rest becomes almost inevitable. (via migurski)
Updated: Actress Jenna Fischer wrote about hard-to-explain milestones in acting.
I remember one year my proudest moment was at an audition for a really slutty bar maid on a new TV show. It was written for a Pam Anderson type. I thought, “I can never pull this off. I just don’t have the sex appeal. I feel stupid. No one is going to take me seriously.” But, I committed to the role and gave the best audition I could. I didn’t get the job. I didn’t get a callback. But I conquered my rambling, fear-driven brain and went balls out on the audition anyway. That was a huge milestone for me — but hard to explain at Christmas.
(via pageslap)
Funny surname/subject collision from the Times over the weekend: Cocaine and White Teens by Charles M. Blow.
Update: See also nominative determinism and aptronym.
An aptronym is a name aptly suited to its owner.
I knew I’d posted something about this previously. (thx, mark)
According to this extensive chart, names of heavy metal bands fit into five main categories: death, deadly things, animals, religion, and badass misspellings. (thx, janelle)
Grant Barrett and Mark Leibovich review the buzzwords of 2008. Good to see “nuke the fridge” and Flickr’s “long photo” make it.
Michael Sippey collected a bunch of project management lingo from a PM mailing list. Hit with the scope bat, analysis paralysis, eating the elephant one bite at a time, come to Beavis meeting, nine women can’t have a baby in one month, schedule chicken…collect them all.
Update: You may now play project management lingo bingo.
Sugar Daddy Online Dating, “where the classy, attractive, and affluent meet”. In my experience, use of the word “classy” means the opposite of what the speaker intends. The jarring “AS SEEN ON TV” graphic isn’t helping either. (Note: I saw the URL for this site on TV.)
An interview with a translator about the difficulty of dubbing The Wire into German.
To bring over the style of the speech out of the slums or ghettos, we haven’t used very exact, grammatically correct German. Nobody says “Wegen des Fahrrads” (because of the bikes), rather “wegen dem Fahrrads” (‘cause of them bikes), for example there we use wrong German. Here and there we’ve used other phrases, sometimes with an English or American sentence structure.
The interview itself was translated from German to English. (via panopticist)
The Atlas of True Names contains maps with very literal place names.
Called the “Atlas of True Names,” the new map traces the etymological roots of European and global place names and then translates them into English. The “City of Boatmen” is also known as Paris. Should you travel to the Land of the Fire Keepers, you’d find yourself in Azerbaijan. And Italy comes from the Latin word vitulus, which means “calf.”
New York is “Wild Boar Village”, Chicago is “Stink Onion”, Great Britain is “Great Land of the Tattooed”, and Grozny is “The Awesome”. However, Language Log notes that some of the translations should be taken with a grain of salt. (thx, andreas)
The American Dialect Society is now accepting nominations for the word of the year of 2008.
The best “word of the year” candidates will be:
-new or newly popular in 2008
-widely or prominently used in 2008
-indicative or reflective of the national discourse
Multi-word compounds or phrases that act as single lexical items are welcomed, as well.
Hit up their email address with your nomination.
Inspired by Emmett Williams, a practitioner of concrete poetry, Rob Giampietro has written three poems: Wastebasket, Snowflakes, and Spraypaint.
Giampietro has put out a call for someone to develop a Williams Word Generator. Drop him a line if you can help out…shouldn’t be too much different than the many “words within words” generators scattered around the web.
Actress Kristin Scott Thomas made an interesting observation the other day while discussing foreign language films:
“People will now go to films with subtitles, you know,” she added. “They’re not afraid of them. It’s one of the upsides of text-messaging and e-mail.” She smiled. “Maybe the only good thing to come of it.”
The abundance of scrolling tickers on CNN, ESPN, and CNBC may be even more of a contributing factor…if in fact people are more willing to see films with subtitles. (via ben and alice)
The speech accent archive:
The speech accent archive uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed. The archive is used by people who wish to compare and analyze the accents of different English speakers.
See also the International Dialects of English Archive.
While clubs that admit only WASPs are still around, their power and influence have diminished and their diversity has increased. A little. The language employed by WASPs in describing outsiders is interesting:
Acronyms like N.O.C.D. and P.L.U. are used to mean Not Our Class, Dear and People Like Us. W.O.G. refers to Wealthy Oriental Gentleman or Wise Oriental Gentleman, depending on whom you ask for a definition. “Hawaiian,” “Canadian,” and “Eskimo” all have special meaning as well. I was told by one Palm Beach resident that Hawaiian refers to anyone who pronounces the phrase “how are you” as “how ahhh yaaa” (they are howahhhyaaa-n, or Hawaiian). Another Wasp told me that, at the establishment-incubating St. Paul’s School in the early 1960s, Hawaiian was used to refer to anyone who was considered “trash.” To say that someone is Canadian can mean that they are Jewish, and Eskimo that they are African American.
From a Copenhagen blog that highlights biking style, a plea to cool it with all the subculture cycling attitude and terminology already.
Let’s straighten things out, shall we? What you see in the photo above, taken in Copenhagen, is something we call a “cyclist”.
Not a “bicycle commuter”, nor a “utility cyclist”. Certainly not a “lightweight, open air, self-powered traffic vehicle user”. It’s a cyclist.
The Copenhagener above is not “commuting” - or at least she doesn’t call it that. She’s not going for a “bike ride” or “making a bold statement about her personal convictions regarding reduction of Co2 levels and sustainable transport methods in urban centers”.
She’s just going to work. On her bike.
(via gulfstream)
Update: The problem with biking in America: people don’t feel safe, mainly because people in cars just aren’t that aware of people on bicycles.
Christopher Hitchens is an expert on the tumbrel remark.
A tumbrel remark is an unguarded comment by an uncontrollably rich person, of such crass insensitivity that it makes the workers and peasants think of lampposts and guillotines. I can give you a few for flavor. The late queen mother, being driven in a Rolls-Royce through a stricken district of Manchester, England, said as she winced at the view, “I see no point at all in being poor.” The Duke of St. Albans once told an interviewer that an ancestor of his had lost about 50 million pounds in a foolish speculation in South African goldfields, adding after a pause, “That was a lot of money in those days.” The Duke of Devonshire, having been criticized in the London Times, announced in an annoyed and plaintive tone that he would no longer have the newspaper “in any of my houses.”
Someone please start a Tumblr of tumbrels. (via clusterflock)
Unobtainium is any very rare, expensive, or impossible material needed to suit a particular application.
Engineers have long (since at least the 1950s) used the term unobtainium when referring to unusual or costly materials, or when theoretically considering a material perfect for their needs in all respects save that it doesn’t exist. By the 1990s, the term was widely used, including formal engineering papers. (As an example, Towards unobtainium [new composite materials for space applications], by Misra and Mohan describes how the ideal material (unobtainium) would weigh almost nothing, but be very stiff and dimensionally stable over large temperature ranges.)
(via migurski)
I’ve seen this word in two separate articles today: leitmotif.
A leitmotif is a recurring musical theme, associated with a particular person, place, or idea. The word has also been used by extension to mean any sort of recurring theme, whether in music, literature, or the life of a fictional character or a real person.
Chimping is the practice of checking your just-taken photos on your DSLR’s LCD screen. (via textism)
NY Times resident crossword puzzle master Will Shortz on how to solve the NY Times crossword puzzle.
Mental flexibility is a great asset in solving crosswords. Let your mind wander. The clue “Present time” might suggest nowadays, but in a different sense it might lead to the answer yuletide. Similarly, “Life sentences” could be obit, “Inside shot” is x-ray and my all-time favorite clue, “It turns into a different story” (15 letters), results in the phrase SPIRAL STAIRCASE.
From an article on a new book written by a woman whose ex-boyfriend has been stalking her for more than a decade, a curious phrase: micro-tampering.
No matter how many times Ms. Brennan changed the locks, she writes, her apartment was entered and subtly rearranged. “I find a bar of soap from the second-floor bathroom on the third-floor kitchen counter,” she writes. “A teaspoon from a kitchen drawer lies on the middle of my bed.”
Update: See also: gaslighting. (thx, alex)
Law professor Eugene Volokh rounds up some cases where courts ruled on unusual name changes (like Talula Does the Hula From Hawaii).
Misteri N***er, second “i” silent. No, said the California Court of Appeal in 1992, because it constitutes “fighting words”: “[I]f a man asks appellant his name and he answers ‘Mister N***er,’ the man might think appellant was calling him ‘Mister N***er.’ Moreover, third persons, including children hearing the epithet, may be embarrassed, shocked or offended by simply hearing the word.
Ah, the old “them’s fightin’ words” argument.
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