Heavy metal drümmer

Filed under:Sheer Cleverness — posted by squires on 6/28/2005 @ 11:13 am

You must look at the “heavy metal umlaut” entry on Wikipedia, courtesy of Language Log. This is a decorative use of linguistic symbols that I never really thought much about (though I often think about the not unrelated “Cöven” of American Movie). Check it out:

The spoof band Spinal Tap raised the stakes in 1982 by using an umlaut over the letter N, a consonant. This is a construction only found in the Jacaltec language of Guatemala and in some orthographies of Malagasy, although it is unlikely that the writers of This Is Spinal Tap knew this at the time.

Also mentioned: Charlottesville’s own Dürty Nelly’s Pub, an infamously gratuitous umlaut user. Nice.

Get ready to comment

Filed under:CMC, Gender Games — posted by squires on 6/24/2005 @ 10:29 am

I’ve been wanting to do this for a while. It might seem kind of weird, stupid, silly, obvious, whatever - but I have my reasons. Readers (or passersby), I have a question for you.

When performing this exercise, please ignore any prior posts on here you may have read that implicate or explicitly state the gender of their author, as well as any information you may otherwise have about my gender. If you do not know me in real life, please respond to Version 1. If you know me in real life, please respond to Version 2. PLEASE RESPOND! And be honest. This is research.

Version 1. Based on just my blog (this includes the whole package of writing style, categories, even layout), for instance if you came across it without any prior knowledge of it or me, would you guess that I am male or female? Why?

Version 2. Forget for a moment that you know me. Based on just my blog (this includes the whole package of writing style, categories, even layout), for instance if you came across it without any prior knowledge of it or me, would you guess that I am male or female? Why?

OK. Go.

(Also, I probably shouldn’t [have to] condescend to you by saying this, but please don’t indicate my gender in your response, if you know it. Don’t ruin the game, buster!)

Can any kind of film be rated?

Filed under:Words & Phrases — posted by squires on 6/23/2005 @ 2:07 pm

From the Washington Post:

Films Rated UV Are Hitting the Home Market

I’m like, “What the hell is UV? Is that a new rating of UltraViolence, like in A Clockwork Orange?”

No. It means “UV-filtering film” that one applies to windows; the article is in the Home section. Still: Way to confuse the crap out of me, WP.

You say ‘potato,’ I say ’slouch’

Filed under:So-so Social, Words & Phrases — posted by squires on @ 10:48 am

{’Potato!’ ‘Slouch!’ ‘Potato!’ ‘Slouch!’}

This “couch potato” story is getting a lot of attention, from blogs to actual news outlets (see Language Log, A Capital Idea, the Guardian, BBC). The Guardian printed on Monday:

British farmers have launched a campaign to remove the term “couch potato” from the dictionary because they fear its negative connotations are putting people off buying the vegetable.

The British Potato Council has written to the Oxford English Dictionary to ask for it to be taken out.

It has also planned demonstrations outside the offices of the Oxford University Press and in Parliament Square in London today to demand that it be replaced with the term “couch slouch”.

The argument is that potatoes are an “inherently healthy” food, according to a spokeswoman for the Council - and so “couch potato” mistakenly connotes the potato as unhealthy. I get their beef* with the term, but I guess the semantics of the term is a little different for me. I think of “couch potatoes” as being potato-esque because they just sit there in a stagnant blob, not moving - not because they’re somehow internally unhealthy. So, yeah, it could have been any food I suppose, since foods for the most part don’t themselves walk around or otherwise perform physical activity. Maybe it’s potato because they have eyes? Regardless, it’s a potato-like activity because it’s no activity at all, not because it’s void of nutrition. Am I making any sense here?

At any rate, this obviously isn’t going to work. Dictionaries don’t make language, people like the term, it’s silly to think that people wouldn’t be buying potatoes because of the term, etc. etc. But it is going to be hugely successful in spreading the word about potatoes being healthy, and this is the business move the industry has planned all along, I’m quite sure.

*Sadly, I cannot take credit for this pun - Mark Liberman at LL originated it in his post [link above], at least in this context and to my knowledge.

Dear apostrophe nemesis

Filed under:CMC, Words & Phrases — posted by squires on 6/21/2005 @ 5:20 pm

According to this article in the New Zealand Herald, a professor at Monash University wants to abolish the possessive apostrophe:

In a counter-argument to [Lynne] Truss’s book [Eats, Shoots and Leaves] - which sets out to preserve traditional conventions of grammar and punctuation - Kate Burridge, a linguistics professor at Australia’s Monash University, calls for the apostrophe to be dropped.

“When I suggested on radio that the possessive apostrophe should be dropped … because people get it wrong so often, you would have thought a public flogging would not have been a severe enough punishment,” she says.

Burridge seems to be a maven in support of “bad language,” as the NZH headline rather dumbly puts it - in addition to the apostrophe mission, she wants to get rid of euphemisms and valorize cant. The article is unclear as to when exactly Burridge called for getting rid of the apostrophe, but this blog entry at Catallaxy and this article in The Age would indicate that it was in her book Blooming English, which came out in 2002.

It doesn’t seem like we should make conscious efforts to change apostrophes or anything related to punctuation, really - that’s a bit like the arguments for using invented neuter pronouns, which just doesn’t take off because it doesn’t feel natural (and combating sexism in language, from my view, is a worthy cause, whereas getting rid of apostrophes doesn’t seem to have much social value). Can’t we just kind of stop worrying about punctuation being “right”?

Enter electronically mediated text communication. I’m particularly fond of the apostrophe example, as regular readers will notice, but using CMC voids many expectations for standard punctuation usage all around. The lack of punctuation in general, and more specifically the attitude that doesn’t care about the lack of punctuation, indicate - whether people agree with this or not - that some things in written language are superfluous. People are communicating here, just fine thank you, with or without certain punctuation marks. That’s why CMC is so interesting: after the rules are relaxed, we get to use just what we need, and create what we don’t have, to get our messages across clearly, effectively, and affectively.

[ADDENDUM: Today I saw a sub-head in the Washington Post that says

Public Broadcasting Fight's Partisan Divide

Now, I thought this was a misplaced apostrophe at first, thinking that public broadcasting is fighting against a partisan divide. Really, there is a partisan divide that belongs to public broadcasting. So in this instance, i have to say: Thanks, Apostrophe.]

Pork worse than jackal?

Filed under:Sheer Cleverness, Words & Phrases — posted by squires on 6/18/2005 @ 1:21 am

Grammar Cop. Funny. Recent special on greengrocer’s apostrophe, here.

Null Word Iregiving: fleeting pop phenomena, lasting referential power

Filed under:Media, Words & Phrases — posted by squires on 6/16/2005 @ 10:08 am

Seth D. presented me with this query, which I now open up to you, readers, because I can’t think of anything suitable. I paraphrase his challenge:

There was a reference to “Weekend at Bernie’s” in the most recent Atlantic Monthly. Figure out a name for this particular phenomenon - i.e., a piece of pop-culture that is purely ephemeral and inconsequential, but instantly understandable as a reference, even to the readers of an august publication like the Atlantic Monthly. Or, phrased differently, a piece of pop-culture whose value as a metaphor or joke vastly outlives its value as entertainment.

The best I can come up with is popference, but I don’t think it captures the fact that “Weekend at Bernie’s” really wasn’t that important a film, despite being fleetingly popular. He also asked for other examples; I think references to similar films like “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” would count.

Ideas?

Taxicab Expressions, Episode 8

Filed under:Words & Phrases — posted by squires on 6/15/2005 @ 11:43 am

A few days ago I posted about the trifling trick of putting “just” or “only” in front of a price so as to lessen the blow for whoever is paying. Here is a taxi slogan along the same lines, only kind of different:

Serving Charlottesville since 1993…NO JOKE!!!

This cracks me up. Are we supposed to be incredulous that this cab company has been around for 12* years? Is 12 years really that long for a business to be in business? I doubt the cab industry here is too terribly cutthroat. Furthermore, is mis-claiming a length of time in operation a common “joke” for businesses to play? I don’t usually see signs like, “Fine Art in Charlottesville since 1990″ and think, “Naw, it can’t be - they must be joking about that.”

*It’s probably even less than 12, since the slogan was probably printed before just this year.

Target’s color scheme

Filed under:Outliers — posted by squires on 6/12/2005 @ 3:12 pm

Target has a clothing color named “Grassy Knoll” (via Heaneyland). Hilarious. Well, what else would you expect from a place called “Target”?

Digital language bridging the geek divide

Filed under:CMC, Media, So-so Social — posted by squires on @ 3:08 pm

Thursday on The Connection, three young inventors (two high schoolers, one PhD student) talked about their experiences as technologists and young people in this day and age. An interesting point raised was that nowadays, “geeks” aren’t ridiculed so much because technology is so ubiquitous. The host Dick Gordon made the interesting observation that with that ubiquity comes a common technological language which works to bridge the gap between laypeople and tech people:

Computers bring a new language to our everyday discourse, and the verbs and the nouns that go with even the basics of operating a computer, whether it’s email or working on the internet…it’s the familiar language for all of us, and that takes us a little bit in the direction that you guys are talking about, doesn’t it?

The PhD candidate responded with a ‘yes’:

The fact that computers are becoming more readily available to almost everyone and everyone is becoming more comfortable with integrating computers into daily life, I think that’s helping to blend the lines that used to be very apparent…now that everybody has a little bit of common ground to work with, it’s getting to where people are not so cut out from the rest of everyone else just because they like computers or just because they like technology.

They go on to discuss that terms affiliated with computers are now socially equalized: everyone knows what “email” is, everyone knows what LOL means. Well, that’s obviously not true - there are huge age-related differences in who does or does not know things about technology, and there are still huge class-related differences in who has access to technology and what they use it for. The language you have for technological things depends on the applications you use. So maybe geekspeak has shifted: it’s not just talking about “email” or “the internet” anymore, which most wired people know and use, but talking about more esoteric things like 733t, code, blogs, or ROTFL.

One of the other students said:

We’re [members of the Invent team] not all geeks and we’re not all jocks and we’re not all preps or whatever…we all kind of come from a little bit different place in the social structure….Everybody has a little bit of geek in them somewhere.

The infusion of technology-related terms into everyday discourse would seem to reveal, enable, and validate that geek. I suppose this is like any subculture-specific lingo that eventually becomes known to the general public (hippies, urban youth, role playing gamers, etc.). The difference might be that more than just knowing about these terms, we’re now in a place to have to actually use them (those of us who have access to their referents, of course) to go about our everyday business. And, these aren’t terms simply made known to us by the mass media or pop culture - these terms are now part of the infrastructure of the mass media and pop culture.


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