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 Nigger, 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 Nigger,' the man might think appellant was calling him 'Mister Nigger.' 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.
According to a boat name database, here are the top 15 boat names:
Orion
Zephyr
Stargazer
Free Spirit
TBD
Cheers
Mariah
Solitude
Sandpiper
Calypso
Banana Wind
MoonDance
PATRIOT
Mental Floss
valhalla
For millennia, Martin Wattenberg's Name Voyager has been the gold standard in cool baby name web doohickeys. No longer...NameTrends gives it a serious run for its money. Lots of slicing and dicing of data going on there. Plus, popularity sparklines.
Since repeatedly spelling out proper names in sign language is time consuming, signers give people "sign names" that are faster to do.
When a sign name is given to you, it's special. A bit like losing your deaf virginity. It's thought up after an intense period of observation, when people have worked out firstly whether they like you enough to give you one (a sign name, that is), and they've taken all your habits and mannerisms into account to find a name that best sums you up.
(via lone gunman)
That string of typographic symbols that substitute for swearing in cartoons? It's called a grawlix.
The term is grawlix, and it looks to have been coined by Beetle Bailey cartoonist Mort Walker around 1964. Though it's yet to gain admission to the Oxford English Dictionary, OED Editor-at-Large Jesse Sheidlower describes it as "undeniably useful, certainly a word, and one that I'd love to see used more."
Well, @#$%&?!, that's cool.
Mamihlapinatapai, a most succinct word.
It describes a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start. This could perhaps be translated more succinctly as "eye-contact implying 'after you...'". A more literal approximation is "ending up mutually at a loss as to what to do about each other".
Heartbreaking. I wish we had an English word for that feeling. (via cyn-c)
A photo gallery of snack foods that sound a bit naughty. Salted Nut Roll, Dutch Crunch, Double Creme Betweens, etc. (via buzzfeed)
You've likely seen this by now but I've got to link it up anyway because whenever I think about it, it makes me LOLL (laugh out loud, literally). The American Family Association automatically replaces words like "gay" with "homosexual" in the AP stories they display on their news site. When an American sprinter named Tyson Gay is in the news, the practice leads to hilarity.
Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials
Tyson Homosexual easily won his semifinal for the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials and seemed to save something for the final later Sunday.
And on it goes..."On Saturday, Homosexual misjudged the finish in his opening heats...", "Homosexual runs wind-aided 9.68 seconds to make Olympics...", "Close call: Homosexual barely averts major flop in 100..." Fox News has applied the same technique to stories about suicide bombers...they changed all instances of that term to "homicide bombers".
Video of a Chinese farmer flying his homemade airplane. Nice landing! According to a post at IfGoGo, the plane is referred to in Chinese as "shanzhai huaxiangji". The "shanzhai" part literally means "little mountain village" but has developed into a slang word that denotes something homemade or counterfeit.
Date back to 2007, due to an open (maybe leak?) source of MTK platfrom (a wireless communication development platform), there are millions of cell phone factories burst out in south China. These factories made lots of famous-brand cell-phone-copies in a short period of time. They just copied the outline and software design from Nokia, Apple iPhone etc. The manufacturing cost is very low so many people are involved. However, these cell phones are not all completely copied. They are even totally redesigned and added a lot of features. A brand called "NCIKA" even went very popular in China. People're even joking that the farmers in big mountains can develop and design a cell phone too. So many people call it "Shanzhai Ji" (Ji means machine in Chinese, here means cell phone) and then the name is widespread in China.
Since then, many funny/weird stuff from ordinary people are called "shanzhai" something, and that's why this plane is named "Shanzhai Huaxiangji" in Chinese :)
Washington Post writer admits to having a fantasy of correcting typos in restaurant menus with "a distinctive purple pen". But sometimes the computer's spellchecker is no help.
Despite my attempts to stop it, my Microsoft Word program would always change the word for Italy's famous cured meat into what it assumed I meant to type. The night we closed an issue, I would have nightmares that when the magazine hit the stands, one of my reviews would describe "the delicate sweet and salty balance of melon and prostitute."
Not so long ago, on May 24th, IMDB message board participant beachedblonde coined a new phrase: nuke the fridge. Here's the definition from the Urban Dictionary...it's roughly equivalent to jumping the shark:
A colloquialism used to delineate the precise moment at which a cinematic franchise has crossed over from remote plausibility to self parodying absurdity, usually indicating a low point in the series from which it is unlikely to recover. A reference to one of the opening scenes of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, in which the titular hero manages to avoid death by nuclear explosion by hiding inside a kitchen refrigerator.
Sample usage:
Man, when Peter Parker started doing the emo dance in Spider-Man 3, that franchise officially nuked the fridge.
Since then, things have progressed quickly. The original posting seems to have been deleted but the phrase caught on, infected other message boards and web sites, and is now a full-blown meme on the verge of nuking the fridge itself. Google currently returns close to 16,000 results for variations on the phrase. Some participants in the IMDB forums have already grown tired of the phrase's repeated use. A Wikipedia page was created and has already been deleted (reason: "Protologism with no RELIABLE sources evidencing more than extremely limited usage"). A web site dedicated to the meme is available at nukingthefridge.com, not to be confused with the movie review blog at nukedthefridge.com. And of course, no meme these days is complete without the proper new media accoutrements: Facebook page, MySpace page, t-shirt, YouTube page, an auction to sell the domain name, and a post on a large-ish general interest blog way after the whole thing's already played out. I only heard it for the first time an hour ago and I'm already sick of it. Memes seem to be spreading so rapidly now on the web that they burn out before they can properly establish themselves. It'll be interesting to see if nuke the fridge makes it through this ultra-virulent phase and somehow slows down enough to jump to casual mainstream usage. (via cyn-c)
The Chinese are encouraging their restaurants to change the names of some of their dishes before the Olympics start. Those dishes due for a name change include:
- Bean curd made by a pock-marked woman
- Chicken without sexual life
- Husband and wife's lung slice
Phrase of the day: serious leisure.
Any Wikipedia entry that references Adolf Wolfli is a friend of mine. Horror vacui:
Horror vacui is the filling of the entire surface of an artwork with ornamental details, figures, shapes, lines and anything else the artist might envision. It may be considered the opposite of minimalism.
(More of my friends here, apparently.)
Tweetup n.
A real world meeting between two or more people who know each other through the online Twitter service.
I had a tweetup with my wife this morning. And last night. And the day before that. TMI?
A fantastic example of my favorite kind of Wikipedia entry: placeholder name.
Placeholder names are words that can refer to objects or people whose names are either irrelevant or unknown in the context in which it is being discussed.
Whatchamacallit, junk, widget, gizmo, Joe Blow, shitload, Podunk, and beer o'clock are all examples. Placeholder names are also used extensively in non-English languages.
The German equivalent to the English John Doe for males and Jane Doe for females would be Max Mustermann and Erika Mustermann, respectively. For many years, Erika Mustermann was used on the sample picture of German id-cards ("Personalausweis"). In Austria, Max Mustermann is used instead. Sometimes the term Musterfrau is used as the last name placeholder, possibly because it is felt to be more politically correct genderwise.
(via gulfstream)
I just recently picked up on the visual pun on the cover of Cal Henderson's Building Scalable Web Sites.
The 10 most appropriate weatherperson names...like Ray Ban and Storm Field. When I was a kid watching the news out of Minneapolis, their morning weather guy's name was Sunny Haus. (Not his real name though...the station wouldn't let Steve Wolhenhaus go by his real name.)
Truckliness is next to Godliness.
Sen. Jim King, R-Jacksonville, said he had a set [of Truck Nutz] on one of his vehicles, which he described as "all pimped out." They are no more than "an expression of truckliness," he said, although he'd acceded to his wife's request to take them off.
"I find it shocking we'd tell people with metallic testicles on their bumpers that this is a violation," said Sen. Steve Geller, D-Hallandale. "There's got to be better things for us to spend time debating."
(via clusterflock)
"Innit" is a common contraction of "isn't it" in British English that is increasingly being used as an all-purpose end-of-sentence rhetorical question. For example:
"We need to decide what to do about that now innit." (don't we?)
"Now I can start calling you that, INNIT!" (can't I?)
"I can see where my REAL friends are, elsewhere innit!!" (aren't they?)
"I'll show young Miss Hanna round to all the shops, innit." (won't I?)
"I heard he was good in TNA when he was there so he can still wrestle good innit?" (can't he?)
A short history of the ampersand.
Ampersand usage varies from language to language. In English and French text, the ampersand may be substituted for the words and and et, and both versions may be used in the same text. The German rule is to use the ampersand within formal or corporate titles made up of two separate names; according to present German composition rules, the ampersand may not be used in running text. In any language, the ampersand's calligraphic qualities make it a compelling design element that can add visual appeal and personality to any page.
This page generates names by combining the first and last names from the 1990 US Census, creating names that may or may not actually exist. If you're tired of perusing gravestones for the names of your next novel's characters, this looks like a good alternative.
Graphical demonstration of the hand signals needed to buy and sell commodities on the floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange.
Fun little article by Grant Barrett about people saying words wrong on purpose.
I sometimes say "muscles" so that the 'c' has a 'k' sound (the same way the cartoon character Popeye says it), computor instead of "computer" (after Ned Beatty's exaggerated pronunciation of "Mr Luthor" in the Superman movies), and I occasionally say benimber instead of "remember" because it was something my cousin Paul said more than 20 years ago.
I use several of these mispronunciations regularly, which drives Meg nuts. Nucular, saxamaphone, muscles with Popeye's hard c, computor, robit for robot, etc. Those of you who speak other languages...is this a common behavior outside of English?
Update: Language Log found a 1932 article about Intentional Mispronunciations. From a summary of the article:
Her categories include everything from adding or subtracting syllables and restressing (antique as "an-tee-cue", "champeen", "the-'ater"), tensing lax vowels ("genu-wine"), borrowing of "vulgar" pronunciations ("agin", "extry", "who'd-a thunk it", "varmint")...
A list of amusing restaurant names presented somewhat oddly in scholarly paper format. Pony Espresso is a coffeehouse in Wyoming, Wiener Takes All in a hot dog place in Illinois, and Wholly Mackerel is a Gulf Coast seafood place.
Michael Bierut on the concept of bershon, defined by Sarah Brown thusly:
The spirit of bershon is pretty much how you feel when you're 13 and your parents make you wear a Christmas sweatshirt and then pose for a family picture, and you could not possibly summon one more ounce of disgust, but you're also way too cool to really even DEAL with it, so you just make this face like you smelled something bad and sort of roll your eyes and seethe in a put-out manner. Kelly Taylor from Beverly Hills, 90210 is the patron saint of bershon, as her face, like most other teenagers', was permanently frozen in this expression.
Bierut notes that Jennifer Grey's performance in Ferris Bueller embodies the spirit of bershon, but Molly Ringwald does bershon pretty well in Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club.
Four words that prove how difficult the English language is: lose, loose, chose, choose.
Update: Doug points out: bough, cough, dough, rough, through.
Update: Ubi says: I can point out one that is really hard to deal with for us Italians. We always pronounce 'steak' with the 'ea' of 'freak'. So, here's my list: steak, stake, freak, break, weak.
Update: Anissa points us to Hints on pronunciation for foreigners.
Update: BJ says: This post reminded me of a word constructed to demonstrate that fact explicitly: ghoti (pronounced 'fish').
Update: Ben says: I'm reminded of the Dr. Seuss compilation The Tough Coughs As He Ploughs the Dough.
Some cultures use whistling languages to communicate when regular speech becomes ineffective over large distances. From Wikipedia:
Whistled languages are normally found in locations with difficult mountainous terrain, slow or difficult communication, low population density and/or scattered settlements, and other isolating features such as shepherding and cultivation of hillsides. The main advantage of whistling speech is that it allows the speaker to cover much larger distances (typically 1 - 2 km but up to 5 km) than ordinary speech, without the strain (and lesser range) of shouting. The long range of whistling is enhanced by the terrain found in areas where whistled languages are used.
Here's an mp3 of two men communicating via whistling. It sounds very much like R2-D2.
Grant Barrett researches the origins of the word "w00t" and determines that it probably originated from the "whoot/whoomp there it is" dance craze of the early 90s and not from the hacker/gaming community. Which conclusion provoked a little nerdfury in the comments. (via waxy)
From a site that tracks "false words, usages, or expressions", the definition of Michael Bayesian Filters:
1. a series of computer based filters, trained over time through an artificial intelligence process, which allow computer controlled motion picture cameras to automatically record high budget action sequences in the style of producer/director Michael Bay.
2. a method of filtering email spam that relies on producer/director Michael Bay to manually read and sort all incoming messages.
I can't think of Michael Bay without humming this song. (via crazymonk)
Why have I not looked at the Wikipedia page for Ocean's Eleven before now? Best part is the description of the crazy names for the cons referenced in the movie.
Off the top of my head, I'd say you're looking at a Boesky, a Jim Brown, a Miss Daisy, two Jethros and a Leon Spinks, not to mention the biggest Ella Fitzgerald ever.
Sadly, the page for Ocean's Twelve has no corresponding list, save for a description of the Lookie-Loo with a Bundle of Joy.
Non-profit writing organization 826NYC is holding a Scrabble for Cheaters competition on January 19th with the proceeds going to benefit their programs and students. The more money a team raises, the more they can cheat. Here are some of the cheats:
Flip a letter over and make it blank: $100
Add Q, Z, or X to any word, anywhere: $200
Passport: play a word in any language: $250
Reject another team's word: $450
Invent a word (must have a definition): $500
Entry information and rules available on the web site. Oh, and you'll be playing against John Hodgman.
Anyone in a coining mood? If one doesn't already exist, there needs to be a term for writing a blog comment or Twitter update, thinking better of it, and then discarding it by closing the browser tab without clicking "Post". As in: "Jason, I would have responded to this post in the comments, but I ________ it instead." Any ideas?
Regret the Error's annual list of media errors and corrections is one of my favorites...the 2007 installment doesn't disappoint. The corrections in the UK newspapers are awesome:
An article about Lord Lambton ("Lord Louche, sex king of Chiantishire", News Review, January 7) falsely stated that his son Ned (now Lord Durham) and daughter Catherine held a party at Lord Lambton's villa, Cetinale, in 1997, which degenerated into such an orgy that Lord Lambton banned them from Cetinale for years. In fact, Lord Durham does not have a sister called Catherine (that is the name of his former wife), there has not been any orgiastic party of any kind and Lord Lambton did not ban him (or Catherine) from Cetinale at all.
The top 60 Japanese buzzwords and buzzphrases of 2007.
The term "monster parents" refers to Japan's growing ranks of annoying parents who make extravagant and unreasonable demands of their children's schools.
(via bb)
This article about tracing American slang words to their Gaelic roots seemed interesting at first but by the end I was wondering what the odds were that so many slang words came from Ireland. By chance shortly after I finished the article, Grant Barrett emailed me a piece he wrote in response to the article and its subject, Daniel Cassidy.
Cassidy's theories are insubstantial, his evidence inconclusive, his conclusions unlikely, his Gaelic atrocious and even factitious, and his scholarship little better than speculation. In short, his book is preposterous.
A story by J. Robert Lennon using only words from The Cat In The Hat.
I have to say one thing here: it is not fun to be with me. I like books and things. Tame: that is I. I get no kicks, fly no kites, play no games. Hops and pot are not my things. If you are here, I want you to go away. So what should this dish, this fox want out of me? I sat and picked at the fish and looked at those hands, so white.
Anagrams for "Ann Coulter" include "Rectal Noun", "Loaner Cunt", "Real Con Nut", and "Unclean Rot".
Chuck Adams is one of the few remaining Morse code aficionados in the world. Adams records audiobooks in Morse, chats with others in Morse via ham radio, and can transcribe Morse at 140 words/minute.
Earlier this year, Mr. Adams sent Barry Kutner, a 50-year-old ophthalmologist from Newtown, Pa., and another world-class coder, a 100-words-per-minute version of the book. To Mr. Adams's chagrin, Mr. Kutner wrote an email back pointing out that the gap between words was eight dits long, instead of the prescribed seven. At that pace, a dit lasts 1.2 one-thousandths of a second.
See also: Tales of the telegraph.
It's worth sitting through the first several minutes of this documentary on the speech patterns of Edwardian-era Britons to hear Joan Washington, the host and an accent expert, speak with several different British accents.
The half-life of irregular verbs scales with the square root of usage frequency. "Be" and "have" will be irregular for a long time but "dive", "sting", and "wring" have less time before they're regularized.
The past-tense of regular verbs end in "ed." For example, the past-tense of chide was chode, but has now regularized into chided.
Another recent study has found that the evolution of words decreases with usage. Nature has the abstract of the paper and the NY Times has a short piece as well.
"Bird," for example, takes many disparate forms across other Indo-European languages: oiseau in French, vogel in German and so on. But other words, like the word for the number after one, have hardly evolved at all: two, deux (French) and dos (Spanish) are very similar, derived from the same ancestral sound.
Do you make a distinction between typos and misspellings, or is that just me? For example, "regualr" is a typo while "refridgerator" is a misspelling. The former is a mechanical error while the latter demonstrates a lack of specific knowledge. Both are signs of sloppy writing which might be why people don't often distinguish the two.
"The full Ginsburg" is the term for appearing on all five of the big Sunday morning political shows: This Week, Meet the Press, Face the Nation, Fox News Sunday, and Late Edition. The term is named after William Ginsburg, Monica Lewinsky's attorney and the first person to complete this political Pokemon collection. According to Wikipedia, four individuals have completed the full circuit: Ginsburg, Dick Cheney, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton. Source: Brouhahaha, The New Yorker.
A glossary of cheese terms.
Giganti: A very large style of Provolone, typically weighing 200 to 600 pounds and measuring up to approximately 7 feet in length.
There's a surprising amount of language around cheese.
A fixie of hipsters: the perfect collective noun for two or more hipsters. Coined by Erika Hall on Flickr. Fixie is slang for a fixed gear bicycle, increasingly the urban 20-something's conveyance of choice. Other favorite collective nouns: a murder of crows, a blessing of unicorns, and shimmer of hummingbirds.
Anagram menu items:
Roast taros.
Broccoli rabe with cool crab brie.
A steak and skate duo.
Melon and lemon sorbet.
Being sent to Mordor:
Hardware techies at Apple are regularly sent from California for intense two-week shifts to the city-sized FoxConn factory in Shenzhen, China where iPods are made and tested. Internally at Apple this is known as "being sent to Mordor."
Tauba Auerbach: startling starting staring string sting sing sin in i. More of her typographic work here.
Several of the web's most popular sites (Digg, YouTube, MySpace, CNN) are using the mullet strategy (business up front, party in the rear) for content to attract both boisterous users and well-heeled advertisers. "They let users party, argue, and vent on the secondary pages" -- that's the party in the rear -- "but professional editors keep the front page looking sharp" -- the business up front.
According to a recent poll, folksonomy tops the list of annoying words spawned by the internet, followed by blogosphere, blog, netiquette, and blook. Also of note: an mp3 of a religious service is referred to as a godcast.
Somehow I never pointed to this article from April about Dan Everett and his efforts to understand the language of the Piraha, an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe. Everett's position on Piraha linguistics is controversial because he believes their language doesn't adhere to Noam Chomsky's idea of universal grammar. "The Piraha, Everett wrote, have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for 'all,' 'each,' 'every,' 'most,' or 'few' -- terms of quantification believed by some linguists to be among the common building blocks of human cognition." Everett recently wrote a piece for Edge on the Piraha's lack of recursion and engaged in a debate with Steven Pinker and Robert Van Valin on the topic.
Facekicking, n. The act of accessing Facebook from your T-Mobile Sidekick. Coined while chatting with Jonah the other night...we decided that "facekicking" was more exciting to say than "sidebooking".
Pirate myths uncovered: they never said "arrr", there was no plank walking, and no treasure maps. The "arrr" and the pirate accent "originated with Robert Newton, the actor who played Long John Silver in the movies and on TV through much of the 1950s".
Embiggen, the fauxcabulary word created for an episode of The Simpsons, has found its way into string theory. Here's the usage from a recently published paper on Gauge/gravity duality and meta-stable dynamical supersymmetry breaking:
Here's the original quote from The Simpsons episode, Lisa the Iconoclast:
A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.
The uses are probably not related, but you never know.
Popular names for twins born in 2006. Almost all of the top name pairs start with the same letter: Jacob/Joshua, Landon/Logan, Ella/Emma, and the stunningly confusing Taylor/Tyler.
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.
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 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 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".
Sean Penn and Stephen Colbert competing in a metaphor competition:
Good lord that's funny.
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."
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 nigga 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?
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 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 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)
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 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. 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 the Sims games. Several music artists have recorded songs sung in Simlish.
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 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 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."
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, 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 homophones four any soundalike words it can fined.
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 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 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 get so wasted, they slip into seemingly gay acts".
A new form of gambling called historical racing allows people to "wager on horse races that have already taken place" and promises to be as fast & addictive as slots. (via mr)
Update: Here's a company that provides an historical racing service. (thx, sam)
In this video, an autistic woman speaks in her native language and then translates it into English. But it's not really a direct translation because, as she states, her language is not limited to expressing her thoughts to other human beings...it's more about her reacting to every element of her environment. More about the video on MetaFilter (one commenter calls the thread "perhaps the most enlightening thing I've ever read on MetaFilter"), including a comment from the video's creator.
English Sentences Without Overt Grammatical Subjects, or the grammar of swearing. "Chomsky observes that the adverbial elements of (39)-(42) are outside of the verb phrase and that only elements within the verb phrase play a role in strict subcategorization of verbs. That principle would clearly be violated if fuck were a verb."
The best niche blog yet: it's devoted to the use of the lowercase "L" in otherwise uppercase text. "WHAT THE HEll? WHY DO PEOPlE WRITE lIKE THIS?"
Jargon watch: "book" as a synonym for "cool". Sample usage: "That YouTube video is so book." As books are decidedly uncool, you might wonder how this usage came about. Book is a T9onym of cool...both words require pressing 2665 on the keypad of a mobile phone but book comes up before cool in the T9 dictionary, leading to inadvertent uses of the former for the latter. (thx, david)
An Elvis taxon is the apparent rediscovery of an animal that has vanished from the fossil record, but that is really the discovery of a look-alike animal. "The term Elvis taxon is used because of the large number of sightings of Elvis Presley long after his death, as well as for his many impersonators."
True Hoop's Henry Abbott does a bit of research into baby names inspired by NBA players. "[Kobe] was drafted in 1996, and in 1997 the name debuted at #553. 2001 was its best year ever, when it was the 223rd most common name in America. Donald, Keith, Troy, Lance, Simon, Chad, Dante, Douglas, Tony, Joe all ranked lower."
Hillel Cooperman purchased a small autograph book dating from the 1940s in a Hong Kong shop and has posted scans of the book online in hopes that people will help translate it. A commenter says: "This book is used to leave comments -- quite popular at graduation time when your classmates left you good wishes of your future. The owner of the book is named 'Xi Rao', and the college he graduated from in Spring 1942 is 'Jiao Tong' university."
What is Wrong with the Use of these Terms: "Deaf-mute", "Deaf and dumb", or "Hearing-impaired"? "Overwhelmingly, deaf and hard of hearing people prefer to be called 'deaf' or 'hard of hearing.'"
Gawker has a list of blog-media cliches. I'm especially tired of "Best. Thing. Evar!" and "teh". They also forgot "Internets" and "the Google". Then again, I'm partial to "wait for it" so whatever.
Prewalking: walking down the subway platform so that when you board the train, you'll be close to the exit or transfer point when the train reaches its destination.
Update: Photo of the Way Out -> tube map, which marks which side of the train to exit from and where exits/transfers are for each station. (thx, tom)
Update: Exit maps are available for the Toronto and Toyko subways. (thx, adam)
Wordie is "like Flickr, but without the photos". "Wordie lets you make lists of words -- practical lists, words you love, words you hate, whatever. You can then see who else has listed the same words, and talk about it." Lots of people love schadenfreude. (via clusterflock)
In an entry yesterday, I (knowingly) used the word nonplussed in a non-standard fashion. The Oxford American Dictionary on my computer tells me: "In standard use, nonplussed means 'surprised and confused'. In North American English, a new use has developed in recent years, meaning 'unperturbed' -- more or less the opposite of its traditional meaning. Although the use is common, it is not yet considered standard." I'm happy to help move the English language forward (backward?) in this manner. That and I wanted to see if the language pedants in the audience were paying attention...and they certainly were. ;) (thx, everyone who sent this in)
The Google 15: "the fifteen pounds that new Google employees supposedly gain in their first year at Google from gorging on the omnipresent free food".
Finally! An answer to the question "if a thousand monkeys robots type at a thousand typewriters for one thousand years, will they produce Shakespeare?" The answer is "police undies".
I'm sure native Bostonians will find much to argue about in this list of Boston slang. (via cyn-c)
The Cupertino effect: a term for incorrect spellcheck suggestions that make it into finalized documents. The term comes from the appearance of the word "Cupertino" in several European Union documents in the place of "cooperation". "The fact that Secretary General Robertson is going to join this session this afternoon in the European Union headquarters gives you already an idea of how close and co-ordinated this Cupertino is and this action will be."
Alright, anyone using the term Web 3.0 gets poked in the eye. Cripes.
The entry for calling shotgun on Wikipedia. There are almost 60 special amendments to the "official" rules, including "Amendment IX: Australian Shotgun. Originally from Australia, if two people tie for shotgun, then the first person to put their thumb on their head is awarded shotgun. If they both do this at the same time, then an immediate pissbolt (race) to the car is required." (via zach, who says "best Wikipedia entry ever?")
James Gleick on how the Oxford English Dictionary staff is dealing with the proliferation of words on the internet. "New words weren't proliferating at quite the rate they have done in the last 10 years. Not just the Internet, but text messaging and so on has created lots and lots of new vocabulary."
Cockney rhyming slang meets celebrity namedropping. "I left my Clare Rayners down the Fatboy Slim so I was late for the Basil Fawlty. The Andy McNab cost me an Ayrton Senna but it didn't stop me getting the Britney Spears in. Next thing you know it turned into a Gary Player and I was off my Chevy Chase."
