Shakespeare In Its Original Pronunciation
Speaking of inexpensive time travel, listen as David and Ben Crystal perform selections from Shakespeare in the original accent, as it would have been heard at the Globe in the early 1600s. (via @KBAndersen)
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kottke.org posts about language
The Saturn V rocket, simplified
Randall Munroe of XKCD drew the Saturn V rocket (aka Up Goer Five) annotated using only the 1000 most common English words.
See also Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity In Words of Four Letters or Less.
Regex crossword puzzles
This is a surprisingly helpful activity for learning about regular expressions. (via @bdeskin)
Anagram map of the London Underground
Otter Bends, Queer Spank, Frog Innard, and Lob Horn are some of the stations on the anagram map of the London Underground.
Maps of US linguistic patterns
Joshua Katz has been studying American dialects and has made more than 120 maps of some of the differences in American speech. Here are a few examples:
(thx, everyone)
Update: As he notes on the site, Katz’s maps are based on the research and work of Bert Vaux…Vaux’s maps of the same data can be found here. (thx, molly, margaret, & nicholas)
“You my Midga”
I’m reading back through my archive of stuff written by and about Roger Ebert and I realized I’ve never written about my favorite piece of his: Dwarfs, Little People and the M-Word. It’s nothing particularly earthshattering or insightful, but the piece demonstrates what I really liked about Ebert: humanist, happy to be corrected when in the wrong, not afraid to poke fun at himself, and a lover of both language and knowledge.
I had no idea the word “midget” was considered offensive, and you are the only person who has ever written to me about it. In my mind it is a descriptive term, like “dwarf.” “Little People” has seemed to me to have a vaguely condescending cuteness to it. If I am now informed that “midget” is offensive, I will no longer use it. What is your feeling about “dwarf?” Is “Little Person” always the preferred term? Our newspaper’s style book, based on Associated Press, does not consider “midget” or “dwarf” to be offensive terms, but perhaps we have not caught up.
The world championship of puns
Your endurance challenge for today: see how much of this video of the final round of the 2012 O. Henry Pun-Off World Championship you can watch before flinging your computing device across the room.
For bonus points, see if you can get through some of the comments…they are PUNishing. (Gah, I’ve been infected.)
The secret language of sommeliers
For the NY Times, Ben Schott compiles an extensive list of wine-related jargon.
WHALE . PLAYER . BALLER . DEEP OCEAN
A serious drinker who will regularly DROP more than $1,000 on a single bottle. When on a furious spending spree, a WHALE is said to be DROPPING THE HAMMER. BIG WALES — or EXTRA BIG BALLERS (E.B.B.) — can spend more than $100,000 on wine during a meal.
Schott expanded on this list in a companion blog post:
But, vocabulary aside, the central thing I learned from these talented people is that if you are dining in a restaurant which employs a Sommelier, you should never, ever order your own wine.
If you know little or nothing about wine, they will guide you to a bottle far more interesting and suited to your food than you could possibly pluck from the list.
And if you are a wine aficionado, you will not know more than the Somm about their list - or what they are hiding off-list in the cellar.
See also What Restaurants Know (About You)
An analysis of gender on Twitter
A study of 14,000 Twitter users was published recently (pdf) by a trio of linguists and computer scientists (Bamman, Eisenstein, Schnoebelen) that looks at the gendered expression of language online.
I don’t want to draw too many conclusions from a single study especially one that, in my opinion, makes some questionable methodology choices (people who follow or are followed by more than 100 people are excluded from the study?) but the results point to an interesting evolution in conversational, public speech.Female markers include a relatively large number of emotion-related terms like sad, love, glad, sick, proud, happy, scared, annoyed, excited, and jealous. All of the emoticons that appear as gender markers are associated with female authors, including some that the prior literature found to be neutral or male: :) :D and ;). […] Computer mediated communication (CMC) terms like lol and omg appear as female markers, as do ellipses, expressive lengthening (e.g., coooooool), exclamation marks, question marks, and backchannel sounds like ah, hmmm, ugh, and grr.
Swears and other taboo words are more often associated with male authors: bullshit, damn, dick, fuck, fucked, fucking, hell, pussy, shit, shitty are male markers; the anti-swear darn appears in the list as a female marker. This gendered distinction between strong swear words and mild swear words follows that seen by McEnry 2006 in the BNC. Thelwall 2008, a study of the social networking site MySpace produced more mixed results: among American young adults, men used more swears than women, but in Britain there was no gender difference
Update 2: Tyler Schnoebelen, one of the study’s authors reached out to clarify. The study says “we selected only those users with between four and 100 friends”, with friends being defined not as people you follow, people who follow you, or even mutual follow backs. They poll accounts and if you and someone else mention each other with a separation of at least two weeks (to eliminate one-off convos with strangers), then for the purposes of the study you and the other person are defined as friends. And they’re looking to isolate people who have between 4 and 100 of those friend connections.
Now that that’s clarified, that seems a really reasonable way to try to determine friendships on Twitter.
Update 1: David Friedman reminded me of a post he did on telegraph operators in 1890 and how female operators have a different and identifiable transmission style.
It is a peculiar fact also that an experienced operator can almost invariably distinguish a woman’s sending from a man’s. There is nearly always some peculiarity about a woman’s style of transmission. it is not necessarily a fault. Many women send very clearly and make their dots and dashes precisely as they were intended to be made. It is impossible to describe the peculiarity, but there is no doubt of its existence. Nearly all women have a habit of rattling off a lot of meaningless dots before they say anything. But some men do that too. A woman’s touch is lighter than a man’s, and her dots and dashes will not carry so well on a very long circuit. That is presumably the reason why in all large offices the women are usually assigned to work the wires running to various parts of the cities.
Commander Riker lorem ipsum
This is perfect…Riker Ipsum is lorem ipsum dummy text from Commander Riker’s dialogue on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Our neural pathways have become accustomed to your sensory input patterns. Computer, belay that order. The game’s not big enough unless it scares you a little. When has justice ever been as simple as a rule book? What’s a knock-out like you doing in a computer-generated gin joint like this? Did you come here for something in particular or just general Riker-bashing?
(via ★interesting)
“Gun safety”, not “gun control”
James Fallows suggests talking about “gun safety” and not “gun control”.
I will henceforth and only talk about “gun safety” as a goal for America, as opposed to “gun control.” I have no abstract interest in “controlling” someone else’s ability to own a gun. I have a very powerful, direct, and legitimate interest in the consequences of others’ gun ownership — namely that we change America’s outlier status as site of most of the world’s mass shootings. No reasonable gun-owner can disagree with steps to make gun use safer and more responsible. This also shifts the discussion to the realm of the incremental, the feasible, and the effective.
AOL’s history as told by NY Times crossword clues
Over on Quartz, Zach Seward takes a neat look at the 14 year rise and fall of AOL through the zeitgeist-y lens of clues for that short, double vowel word being used in the New York Times crossword.
Mar. 29, 1998: Netcom competitor
Jun. 17, 1998: Chat room inits.
Oct. 4, 1998: Part of some E-mail addresses
(via ★faketv)
White whale mimics human speech
NOC is a white whale that, for a period of four years, could make human speech-like sounds. Take a listen:
“The whale’s vocalizations often sounded as if two people were conversing in the distance,” says Dr. Sam Ridgway, President of the National Marine Mammal Foundation. “These ‘conversations’ were heard several times before the whale was eventually identified as the source. In fact, we discovered it when a diver mistook the whale for a human voice giving him underwater directions.”
As soon as the whale was identified as the source, NMMF scientists recorded his speech-like episodes both in air and underwater, studying the physiology behind his ability to mimic. It’s believed that the animals close association with humans played a role in how often he employed his ‘human’ voice, as well as in its quality.
Perhaps instead of the machines taking over as with Skynet in the Terminator movies, we should be worried about Seanet: talking whales, dolphins, and octopuses working together to fight humanity. (via @DavidGrann)
A video pronunciation guide to Scotch
Actor & Scotsman Brian Cox pronounces the names of different kinds of Scotch, including Bruichladdich, Laphroaig, An Cnoc, Auchentoshan, and Lagavulin.
Of course, this is how you really pronounce Laphroaig, courtesy of Pronunciation Manual.
(via @benhammersley)
The best word ever
Over the past two months, Ted McCagg has been running a contest on his blog to find the best word ever. A winner was recently announced.
(via @bobulate)
Generational warfare in the 2010s: :) vs :-)
According to research done by Stanford University’s Tyler Schnoebelen, the type of smiley you use is determined in part by your age.
Emoticons with noses are historically older. Since it is words that unite and distinguish clusters, this means that people who use old-fashion noses also use a different vocabulary — nose users don’t mention Bieber or omg.
I am obviously a non-noser because I am down, as we kids say, with Beibler and Carly Mae and Gandgum Style and Skillet. :) (via the atlantic)
English phrases common only to India
In response to this question on Quora — What are some English phrases and terms commonly heard in India but rarely used elsewhere? — Pushpendra Mohta offers up a story with many examples.
As it turns out, the manager there is also my college batchmate. You can use my connection there. Just give your good name. We were both backbenchers but he was actually rusticated for ragging and bunking. The final straw was when he was caught eve-teasing the dean’s daughter. But, he did some jugaad and palm greasing, and got himself a license to manufacture Indian-made foreign liquor. Rags to riches story. Now he is a mover and shaker. For a while he was under the scanner of the IT authorities and they chargesheeted a disproportionate-asset case against him. I think he may have been doing some hawala transactions. The whole official machinery was after him. He tried to file a grievance but there was no redressal mechanism for such cases. Ultimately, he went on an indefinite fast.
My favorite term from the rest of the thread is “prepone”, which means to move something ahead in the schedule, i.e. the opposite of postpone. (via @ftrain)
Why isn’t the sky blue?
This segment of the most recent episode of Radiolab about color is super interesting. It seems that people haven’t always seen colors in the same way we do today.
What is the color of honey, and “faces pale with fear”? If you’re Homer—one of the most influential poets in human history—that color is green. And the sea is “wine-dark,” just like oxen…though sheep are violet. Which all sounds…well, really off. Producer Tim Howard introduces us to linguist Guy Deutscher, and the story of William Gladstone (a British Prime Minister back in the 1800s, and a huge Homer-ophile). Gladstone conducted an exhaustive study of every color reference in The Odyssey and The Iliad. And he found something startling: No blue! Tim pays a visit to the New York Public Library, where a book of German philosophy from the late 19th Century helps reveal a pattern: across all cultures, words for colors appear in stages. And blue always comes last.
It’s worth listening to the whole thing…the bit at the end with the linguist’s daughter and the color of the sky is especially cool.
Language X is essentially language Y under conditions Z
A large collection of expressions compiled by John Cowan in which languages are explained in terms of other languages. Like so:
English is essentially a half dozen other languages locked in a small room. They fight.
Icelandic is essentially Norwegian spoken with an American accent.
English is what you get from Normans trying to pick up Saxon girls.
Spanish is what happened when Moors tried to learn Latin and said “screw it.”
Dutch is English spelt funny and spoken in a Klingon accent.
English is essentially French converted to 7-bit ASCII.
(thx, rasmus)
How colors get their names
On this day full of red, white, and blue in the US, it’s interesting to note that, in a large number of languages, when colors start getting their own words, red is usually the first color defined after black and white (or light and dark), and that blue and green are often not defined individually, at least at first. Those facts and more in this super long/interesting article about color and language and how colors got their names and and and…just read it already. Here’s part 2.
The figure above is really telling a story. What it says is this. If a language has just two color terms, they will be a light and a dark shade - blacks and whites. Add a third color, and it’s going to be red. Add another, and it will be either green or yellow - you need five colors to have both. And when you get to six colors, the green splits into two, and you now have a blue. What we’re seeing here is a deeply trodden road that most languages seem to follow, towards greater visual discernment (92 of their 98 languages seemed to follow this basic route).
Also note the Wikipedia entry for “distinguishing blue from green in language.” (via The Millions)
Food trucks in Paris and they going gorillas
The food truck trend has invaded Paris, where young people use the phrase “très Brooklyn” to denote food that combines “informality, creativity and quality”.
On a bright morning last month at the Marché St.-Honoré, a weekly market in an elegant residential section of Paris, several sleekly dressed women struggled to lift the thick burgers to their mouths gracefully. (In French restaurants, and sometimes even fast-food joints, burgers are eaten with utensils, not hands.) A few brave souls were trying to eat tacos with a knife and fork. “C’est pas trop épicé,” said one, encouraging a tentative friend — “It’s not too spicy,” high praise from the chile-fearing French.
Street food itself isn’t new to France. At outdoor markets like this one, there is often a truck selling snacks like pizza, crepes or spicy Moroccan merguez sausages, cooked on griddles and stuffed into baguettes.
But the idea of street food made by chefs, using restaurant-grade ingredients, technique and technology, is very new indeed.
Anachronisms that aren’t actually anachronistic
This thread at Ask MetaFilter contains several examples of English words and phrases that sound current but actually aren’t.
“Fly” mentioned above is one of my favorites (though it’s considered dated by youngsters today — they’ll basically only use it ironically), but one not mentioned so is “crib” (also a bit dated) which has meant something like “house” or “home” since 1600. OED: “A small habitation, cabin, hovel; a narrow room; fig. a confined space. In N.Z. now esp. a small house at the seaside or at a holiday resort.”
I particularly liked this early example of the maternal insult from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus:
Demetrius: “Villain, what hast thou done?”
Aaron: “That which thou canst not undo.”
Chiron: “Thou hast undone our mother.”
Aaron: “Villain, I have done thy mother.”
Hunting for anachronisms in Mad Men and Downton Abbey
Prochronism analyzes word usage in shows like Mad Men and Downton Abbey to hunt down anachronisms…like “a callback for” and “pay phone” from a recent episode of Mad Men.
The big one from the charts: Megan gets “a callback for” an audition. This is, the data says, a candidate for the worst anachronism of the season. The word “callback” is about 100x more common by the 1990s, and “callback for” is even worse. The OED doesn’t have any examples of a theater-oriented use of “callback” until the 1970s; although I bet one could find some examples somewhere earlier in the New York theater scene, that may not save it. It wouldn’t really suite Megan’s generally dilettantish attitude towards the theater, or the office staff’s lack of knowledge of it, for them to be so au courant. “call-back” and “call back” don’t seem much more likely.
(via waxy)
Cockney rhyming slang ATM
A number of banking machines in London offer Cockney rhyming slang as a language option. Operating the machine is simple…just insert your barrel of lard and punch in your Huckleberry Finn to get your sausage and mash.
The company has also been responsible for introducing cash machines which only dispense £5 notes — fivers as they are colloquially named or Lady Godivas in cockney.
It also allows people to withdraw a pony — which is £25 to non-cockney folk.
“I was talking to Andrew Bailey, the chief cashier of the Bank of England, and he said they were trying to get more £5 notes into circulation,” Mr Delnevo reflects.
He came up with the idea that, rather than putting £5 notes in as one choice, it would be better to have £5-note only cash machines.
“We were getting to the state where we were a £20 note society - handing over £20 for an item which cost £4.50 and handed back enough metal to act as an anchor for the aircraft carrier Ark Royal,” he says.
See also ATMs in Latin. (via @nrturner)
A tale of two Rockefellers
New essay from Errol Morris in the NY Times, What’s in a Name? In it, he talks about the two Rockefellers that appeared in the newspapers a few years ago…one an imposter and one real.
Clearly, the name was also responsible for the attention he was getting in the newspaper. Clark is not just any impostor; he is a Rockefeller impostor. And as such he becomes more important, more significant. It is as if the name gives him some of the stature and allure of a real Rockefeller. A perfect example of this is the importance given to Clark in both The New York Times and The Boston Globe. He even managed to outshine Barack Obama and Joseph Biden during the week that Obama picked his running mate. Obama and Biden get a little picture at the bottom of the right-hand side of the front page. Clark gets a photo spread — one big picture and four little ones — at the top of the left-hand side. He also got more column inches in the newspaper than Clayton, the real Rockefeller. It’s impressive.
Vatican City ATMs use Latin
ATMs in the Vatican City have Latin as one of the language options:
Anyone know what that means? Google Translate spits out a bunch of jibberish… (Photo by Seth Schoen)
Update: Lots of slightly different answers as to what this says, but this email from a Ph.D. candidate in Classics at Columbia is representative of the spread:
Anyhow, a super-literal translation would be something like this:
I ask that you insert [your] card in order that you come to understand the method needing to be used.
But more colloquially, we can do this:
Please insert your card to learn the instructions.
or even (although I’m really getting into sloppy translation territory here):
Please insert your card for instructions.
(thx, charles)
Update: And it may be more accurate to say that Vatican City ATMs previously offered a Latin option. According to @johnke, “they removed the Latin option with a software update sometime in late 2010/early 2011”.
Blog skis
Atomic sells a ski called the Blog.
The Blog is ideal for freeskiers who refuse to compromise on airs and tricks in the backcountry.
(via meg)
1811 Dictionary in the Vulgar Tongue
From Project Gutenberg, Francis Grose’s Dictionary in the Vulgar Tongue was published in 1811 and gives the reader a full account of the slang, swears, and insults used at the time.
FLOGGING CULLY. A debilitated lecher, commonly an old one.
COLD PIG. To give cold pig is a punishment inflicted on sluggards who lie too long in bed: it consists in pulling off all the bed clothes from them, and throwing cold water upon them.
TWIDDLE-DIDDLES. Testicles.
TWIDDLE POOP. An effeminate looking fellow.
ROUND ROBIN. A mode of signing remonstrances practised by sailors on board the king’s ships, wherein their names are written in a circle, so that it cannot be discovered who first signed it, or was, in other words, the ringleader.
A modern copy is available on Amazon.
How to Pronounce Things Hilariously
The Pronunciation Book channel on YouTube shows you how to say various words in American English in a straightforward fashion. Here’s how to say Zegna, the men’s clothing brand:
This is not to be confused with the Pronunciation Manual channel, which does the same thing in the same format but much funnier and more incorrect.
I could have embedded a dozen more…I have no idea why I think these are so funny but I just cannot stop laughing at them. Ok, one more:
And this one! Make it stop!!
Update: My kids and I still use these mispronunciations around the house all the time. I cannot help looking at even the fanciest bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape without thinking choody-noofy-doopy-poopy.
Is that what she said or not?
This is a node.js module that determines if a sentence can be replied to with “that’s what she said”. You can use either a naive Bayes or k-nearest neighbor algorithm. This totally paves the way for a Michael Scott auto-replying Twitter bot. (via @kellan)
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