polyglot conspiracy

Francis at Heaneyland! shares a curious tidbit of experience regarding Bartleby.com (apologies for reprinting almost his entire post, it being so short):

So I was looking up “palindrome” in the online Columbia encyclopedia at bartleby.com for a boring reason, and the entry read, in full, “See anagram.” Well, that’s odd, I thought. So I went over to “anagram”, and this is what it had to say about palindromes:

–An anagram that reads the same backward as forward is a palindrome, e.g., “Able was I ere I saw Elba.”

Francis points out that this makes sense - any word/phrase can spell itself, forwards OR backwards - but it doesn’t do justice to the palindrome, which is ANYthing that’s the same forwards and backwards.

So, linguanerds, does anyone know the history of the palindrome? Was it once only recognized as a special kind of anagram, or has it always been independently considered, and applicable to things other than language as well? Any good pages on the history of wordplay?

There’s an article in the NYT Sunday Styles today, “Do You MySpace?” It’s mostly just a survey of MySpace’s features, its uses among users, its growing popularity, and its upcoming acquisition by News Corporation (more on this later). I’m reminded of two years ago when Friendster was talked about in the same way (and MySpace was in its nascency). Now, MySpace’s hits have surpassed even Google (even Google!), and there seems to be no end in sight.

Here are a few quotes-followed-by-comments, in no particular order.

Exhibitionism

Members customize their home pages with zebra-stripe backgrounds and giant pictures of their favorite motocross riders, rock singers or bikini models. The site is also a testament to the exhibitionism spawned by cellphone cameras.

Cell phone cameras didn’t spawn exhibitionism, man. They enable it to be visually enacted by more and more teenagers daily, sure, but the impulse was largely already there.

The MySpace Generation Gap, and the Understanding of Those at the Upper Side

The time-sucking potential of MySpace became an issue at the small record label where Ms. Ward works, Suburban Home Records, at least in the eyes of her boss, Virgil Dickerson. He said he started worrying when he noticed younger employees spending hours surfing through MySpace. “It was a drag on productivity, for sure,” Mr. Dickerson, 30, said. “They were always goofing around, seeing if such-and-such added them as a friend or whatever.”

In the winter three of his single employees got into relationships around the same time, meaning they could all graduate from the “single” designation on their MySpace pages. It was a big deal, and Mr. Dickerson gave an office party, complete with an ice cream cake with the message in frosting “Congrats Kyle, Joey, and Naomi on your MySpace Upgrade!”"

This is a great example of there being no strict boundaries between online and offline life; they bleed together. But it also can have an affect on one’s relationships, it seems. Friendster recently added a relationship status possibility of “It’s complicated,” which reflects the tendency among young adults now to refuse definition of relationships. Something like Friendster or MySpace veritably forces you to define yourself in all these little categories, as well as defining your relationship to others. You have to ask: At what point do I change the status to “in a relationship”? Does the other person I’m “in a relationship” with think that we’re “in a relationship”? Should I leave it to “single” so I can continue to see who else is out there? Will the person I’m dating be upset if they see my profile and that it says “single” still? I would LOVE to do a study on status changes in online networking sites and what perceptions accompany them. Similar to at what point after meeting someone in real life, and from what motivation, you think it’s appropriate to “MySpace her” or “Friendster him.”

Bigger than MTV

As a man who makes his living from youth culture, [Dickerson] had to make peace with MySpace. His company has responded to a slow period in the record business by selling T-shirts on eBay that read, “MySpace ruined my life.” “They’re doing pretty awesome actually,” Mr. Dickerson said. “I’d say, as far as a cultural phenomenon, MySpace is as important, if not more important, than MTV.”

Like MTV, it is starting to create stars that glow brightly within its own universe. The band Hollywood Undead, which did not exist three months ago, has achieved celebrity thanks to MySpace…

Now we’re getting somewhere. So as a cultural phenomenon, MySpace creates this “own universe” of popularity for artists, musicians, etc., and it’s a universe that largely lies under the radar of mainstream popular culture, though there’s undoubtedly a huge amount of overlap. It’s this potential to effect such low-level widespread popularity that, to me, gives the internet the potential to free us from our shackles of celebrity cult, to unseat the mainstream media’s power over what we get for entertainment, what entertainment we view as “good,” etc. It could do this in two ways: One, by giving ordinary people an outlet for their pinings for self-celebrity, and introducing ordinary people to an external audience, however small, thereby reducing the “specialness” of “being seen” (through things like, e.g., my blog). Two, by circumventing Big Media to create organic followings based on personal, not prescribed, taste.

Oh, but enter Rupert Murdoch…

One adult who has paid attention is Rupert Murdoch, the chief executive of the News Corporation, which agreed in July to pay $580 million to buy the site’s parent company. At the time News Corporation executives explained the investment by citing MySpace’s surging popularity among young people, who are often difficult to reach through newspapers and television.
…
The founders seem reluctant to discuss anything about their coming absorption into the world’s largest media conglomerate. Their silence suggests they may be nervous about losing their credibility as alternative-culture figures with MySpace members. They insist nothing will change. They will keep the same job titles, they say, and the site will look and feel the same.

“We get to keep doing what we’re doing, and have more money to do it,” Mr. Anderson said. “We’re not moving over there, they’re not coming over here. We just kind of go talk to them once a month and let them know what’s up.”

Riiiiight. Just keep thinking that. Just keep thinking that. Myself being a vitriolic Rupert Murdoch detester (please, please watch this), this acquisition is almost enough to make me want to take myself off of MySpace. Thing is, probably 90% of the people on MySpace who think about such things would agree (the young hip crowd no likey the Bush, you see?), but of course we’re not all going to just up and drop something that has become such a part of our lives, something that makes us feel connected to a larger world even if only through a tiny screen. Something that, in however a way, makes us feel cool. Murdoch knows this, and therein lies his evil, evil genius. We’ll have to see what happens to the site in order to know the effects of the acquisition, of course - but when the mondo corporation gets involved, the hipsters might walk. [WHAT MAKES IT EVEN THE LEAST BIT COOL IS ITS LACK OF ASSOCIATION WITH ANY BRAND THAT ALREADY HAS MAINSTREAM CONNOTATIONS. -PC's Inner Hipster, who is aware of the fact that MySpace and Friendster both make money via targeted advertisements, but maintains that this is different from joining a Media Empire] Then again, already MySpace is only cool amongst a certain kind of hipster, with the hippesters* swearing off it altogether.

*Please, let’s start using this word.

UPDATE: I just found this AP story from earlier this month about users’ concerns about Fox’s buying MySpace. Also this Voice article.

Tulane University’s website, like most university websites, has a way for students to post questions and get feedback, then have discussion on the topic. A succinct way to put all that would have been to say that it has a “message board.” This message board is a forum for students to ask the question on everyone’s mind: “What’s up with that?” Seriously. The message board is called “What’s up with that?” Unfortunately, the board doesn’t seem to have any snarky posters creating subject titles like “What’s up with the campus store?” or “What’s up with Thanksgiving?” Perhaps the title is actually meant to preempt any uses of this phrase on the board, lest the administrators get real annoyed real quick by the lingo of the kids.

*Attempted clever pun of “us” and also the plural of the abbreviation for “universities.”

Excellent, excellent spelling snafu via Low Culture. MWM wishes Kanye would write a fictional yet allusive and therefore allegorical rhyme about his alterego Kayne, who killed his brother, named something like Aybel or Ayble.

Geoff Pullum over at the Log has provided another example along the lines of *@# Earl’s: Watch Your F*cking Language: How to Swear Effectively, Explained in Explicit Detail and Enhanced by Numerous Examples Taken from Everyday Life , by Sterling Johnson. (Johnson also wrote an earlier book titled, unsurprisingly, English as a Second F*cking Language: How to Swear Effectively, Explained in Detail with Numerous Examples Taken From Everyday Life.) Pullum writes:

…[I]n this case it is not a matter of modesty, as when NPR refuses to read a title out loud because it contains an Anglo-Saxon term for excrement, but rather that there is strictly no possible out-loud reading: it is a book whose orthographic title has no phonetic counterpart…

It seems like this doesn’t really make the title “unspeakable” - just malleable in pronunciation. In fact, it really indicates that the contentious word is unwritable, not unspeakable. When people read it, of course they’ll say “fucking.” Like I just did.

[Addendum: See Arnold Zwicky's response to Pullum's post, about unpronounceability, here.]

Google has introduced instant messaging - it was only a matter of time. The IMs will have text and voice capabilities, and will be connected to your Gmail address, which now everyone will be able to obtain (no more pesky beggings for invitations! [by the way, does anyone need one? I have lots left over.]).

The NYT article points out this evolution of Google’s mission: from informative to communicative:

At present, Mr. Harik [Google executive] would only say that there are “several million” Gmail customers, but he would not disclose a precise number. He said that Google saw its entry into the communications world in the context of a corporate mission of organizing and making all of the world’s information accessible.

“It is important that you be able to find information, but it is also important that you be able to communicate it,” Mr. Harik said.

It shall be called Google Talk, to the chagrin of your author, who wishes it to be called Gabble.

In looking at some of the online articles about National Punctuation Day (thanks to Language Hat and Blogos for the heads ups), I found this tasty bit from The Billings Outpost (in Montana, I guess?):

Do your teeth grind when you hear people confuse a dash with a hyphen? Or stick apostrophes at random into their prose, like so many Easter eggs? Then you should celebrate National Punctuation Day.

Unless the author is synesthetic, I don’t get where this sensory confusion could possibly come from. (And please spare me the reactions that are like, “But you can tell, you can hear it when someone is reading and mistakes punctuation.” No. This is not that.)

[It occurs to me that the author could mean simply the name of the punctuation mark, as in someone saying, "I think you need to put a hyphen there," when they really meant to say "a dash." Still, it's an embarrassingly weird sentence.]

Over at The Language Guy, Mike Geis has a post about politics and blogging, left and right wings, and the fact that “ideologues” “use language as if it were a weapon” (is it not?).

Anyway, Geis’ post contains these two sentences:

There are two aspects to this blog of interest. It, like other conservative bloggists, loves to smear any opposition to Bush and his supporters by referring to them as “left wingers,” as if there were no centerist opposition to Bush…

I have never heard the term bloggist before, but it gets 10,500 Ghits. There’s a website for it that says it’s “going to be a newsletter based on blogging.” There’s a Salon blog called The Occasional Bloggist and another blog called The Charlotte Bloggist.

But I can’t figure out what it means. Geis’ usage would make it seem that bloggist refers to the blog itself, not the person writing the blog. But the other uses seem to mean either blogger or expert on blogging.

Ah, here’s something. James M. Branum wrote a 2001 paper on “The Blogging Phenomenon,” and says this:

To prevent confusion with the Blogger web interface, I will eschew the commonly used term “blogger” (and use instead “bloggist”) to refer to the author of a blog, and will reserve the term in its capitalized form to refer to the popular web-interface.

Was this term ever really popular? Does it have somehow more theoretical connotations than blogger? Do any of you use it?

Yesterday’s WP contained a nice rumination, by Sandy M. Fernandez, on the new portable social worlds we all maintain via technology, and the etiquette we attempt to keep up while dealing with them. There are some really interesting bits in it, some “I don’t usually think of it that way” moments:

Yes, every time you interrupt “real life” to attend to a device, you’re short-changing a relationship — but you’re also feeding one, with the person on the other side of that electronic impulse. Cell phone and PDA users are constantly balancing the rights and expectations of those in their “real” reality with the rights and expectations of their virtual relationships — a relatively new situation for humankind. With this double community now a 24-hour-a-day thing, we’re still trying to figure out how to deal with it politely. And we don’t always get it right.

To really take in what a change this has been in American society, think back to the introduction of the Sony Walkman, in 1979. It’s been said that this moment marked a human paradigm shift — it was the first time people could carry their private worlds with them everywhere, no sharing. Sony co-founder Akio Morita understood this and was so nervous about it that he insisted that the device carry two earphone jacks, so people could listen together. He thought it would be “rude for one person to be listening to his music in isolation,” he later wrote in his autobiography.

There’s also stuff about how Americans feel so fettered by work ties that they feel obligated to check email on vacation, etc.; this isn’t really anything new. The gem of the discussion, though, is the talk about how people in the service industry are increasingly on their mobile phones while performing their services. Why? Because their customers are, of course!

E-mailing-while-traveling is also part of another American obsession: multi-tasking. Which brings us back to people in the services industry who are talking on the phone, while ignoring you.

Imagine this: You serve streams of people every day. And, increasingly every day, the customers ignore you, because they’re on their cell phones. So you buy one and use it at work because — well, they’re on the phone, aren’t they?

It happened to cab drivers. First, riders stopped “seeing” them by deciding the backseat could be used as a private phone booth; then, so ignored, the drivers got on the horn themselves, removing anything but the barest function of getting riders from Point A to Point B.

Now imagine all the people who deal with distracted customers every day, finding themselves asking questions several times because the customer is on the cell or wearing those little white iPod buds. We’ve all seen pictures of power brokers on the phone while getting a manicure or a haircut. Why not me? the stylist must think.

Maybe we are missing out on something here, after all: conversation with strangers. I’m not deterministic about technology, and I’m guilty of public cell phone talk. But I’ve met some of my most valuable friends when they were total strangers, randomly: on the street, at a festival, on the train, at a protest. Likewise, some of the best stories of my life are from moments when I was connected wholly to the “real-life” situation at hand, when I could just as easily have been on my cell phone talking to people I already knew. And I think this is the kind of erosion of “community” that technology can, if we’re not careful, effect: not that everyone is going to sit in their homes all the time on their computers, but that we’ll lose the flavor for the lives of unknown others, the excitement of meeting people F2F with no prior conceptions of who they are or what they might mean for our own lives.

Mark Liberman at LL already posted some stuff mentioning Jim Holt’s New Yorker piece on some books about bullshit and truth. I got something from this article too. It was a pretty simple misinterpretation due to metaphorical polysemy (does that make sense? What I mean is that the word has a regular meaning, but also a metaphorical meaning.), but I believe there’s a lesson in it. The article contains this passage:

Our knowledge of the world, it seem reasonable to suppose, is founded on causal interactions between us and the things in it. The molecules and photons impinging on our bodies produce sensations; these sensations give rise to basic beliefs—like “I am seeing red now”—which serve as evidence for higher-level propositions about the world.

Sometimes when I read, you know, I get lost in the world of letters and sounds and forget what I’m actually reading about. So when I saw the part above in bold - “I am seeing red now” - I totally thought Holt was going to start talking about metaphors, maybe even the metaphors we live by, and my mind was all like, “Prepare, Self, there’s bound to be an exciting Lakoff reference coming up!” Um, no. Instead Holt went on to mention Davidson’s theory of belief, and something called the Myth of the Given, and some bullshit* about knowledge.

“Seeing red” was definitely literal in this case, but the mind is easily tricked. The lesson: choose examples carefully so as to avoid confusion due to common metaphors and/or idioms related to those examples. If you’re talking about colors literally, and any old color will do to illustrate your point, don’t choose one that is so commonly used metaphorically.

*Not actually bullshit. Just a really easy cheap shot.