Mocketing: making fun of your product or
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.
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kottke.org posts about language
What a group of copy editors thought
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
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
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
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.
Cap’n Crunch’s full name is Captain Horatio Magellan Crunch.
Meta-Free-Phor-All
Sean Penn and Stephen Colbert competing in a metaphor competition:
Good lord that’s funny.
Results of the The Word-Lovers’ Boot Camp
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.”
A tale of two hoes
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
Old Language Log rant about how crappy the writing is in The Da Vinci Code.
Logical, linguistical, and infographical analysis of the #1
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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 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
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.”
Muttnik
Yesterday’s I Did Not Know That Yesterday! tidbit concerned Sputnik 1, the Soviet satellite launched in 1957.
But what fate befell the iconic satellite? After 1,400 trips around the Earth, Sputnik burned up when it reentered the atmosphere in January of 1958 (just as it was supposed to).
The very next Sputnick launched contained the first terrestrial space traveller, Laika, a dog. Ok, wait. The first one burned up in earth’s atmosphere after three months and the second one contained a dog…that’s right, the Soviets killed that poor dog! When I heard the story of Laika as a kid, whoever I heard it from omitted that part. Although Laika didn’t burn up in the atmosphere, she was also not euthanized after 10 days of flight as Soviet scientists had planned. A Sputnik scientist recently revealed that Laika died after only a few hours in orbit from stress and overheating.
Two other (unrelated) things I didn’t know about Sputnik: that it was tiny (smaller than a basketball) and that Herb Caen coined the word “beatnik” based on Sputnik.
Chart of the geek hierarchy. For example,
Chart of the geek hierarchy. For example, Trekkies who get married in Klingon garb are geekier than Trekkies who speak Klingon who are in turn geekier than normal Trekkies.
Thee Homophoner takes sum text and substitutes
Thee Homophoner takes sum text and substitutes homophones four any soundalike words it can fined.
Nomination for the most useless new word
Nomination for the most useless new word of 2007: beme. A beme is a meme that spreads via blogs and those that create and spread them are called bemerz.
How to learn a foreign language: read
How to learn a foreign language: read Harry Potter in translation. “The plots and scenarios are familiar enough that I can pick up the gist of what is going on even if the grammar and vocabulary escape me; but after a few times reading about the impatient lechuza in Harry’s room, I can’t help but gather that it is not lettuce but an owl.”
“Love bombing is the deliberate show of
“Love bombing is the deliberate show of affection or friendship by an individual or a group of people toward another individual. Critics have asserted that this action may be motivated in part by the desire to recruit or otherwise influence.”
Jargon watch! Gaysted (adj.): “when heterosexual people
Jargon watch! Gaysted (adj.): “when heterosexual people get so wasted, they slip into seemingly gay acts”.
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