polyglot conspiracy

Some semesters, you just aren’t into it. Right?

A brilliant little Shouts & Murmurs bit by Tom McNichol in the New Yorker, Emoticons During Wartime. E.g.

=|:-)= This e-mail is being monitored by Uncle Sam for your protection.
:-x I’d rather not say in an e-mail that’s being monitored for my protection.
:-w Our current leader speaks with forked tongue.
*:o) Our current leader is a bozo.
/:-=( Our current leader in some ways resembles Adolf Hitler, at least in hi disregard for civil liberties during wartime.
:-o Uh-oh, what was that? 

But there’s one I don’t get:

:-)8 Latest George Will column still doesn’t get it. 

I mean, I know who George Will is and everything, but I’m not connecting the dots with how this emoticon represents his failure to be relevant. He has no facial hair…is the 8 supposed to be the shape of his chin? Somebody help.

It is sometimes frightening how well data mining software works:

This series of ads, from my MySpace home page, could only be more fitting if it replaced one of the Garrison Keillor references with something in the vein of either yarn sales or linguistics books. Otherwise, it’s pretty much got me nailed.

I have been recorded a few times lately in assistance to some of the phonologists/phoneticians in our department. It’s great fun, repeating nonsense words over and over again while hoping that I’m a) not stressing the wrong syllable (or, sometimes I feel lots of pressure and freak out and just *lengthen* syllables instead of properly *stressing* them), b) not being too creaky, c) actually saying things like I’m a normal, native, American English speaker. But when it’s my friend Kevin recording me in the sound booth, there is a bigger problem: I can’t help but start cracking up in the middle, especially when HE starts cracking up and then *I* start cracking up and then we’re both cracking up and the word sounds like something ridiculous like “loose-a-tom”…

The formants of laughter!

This is a level I’m comfortable with: on par with Savage Minds and slightly above Language Log’s UNDERGRAD. I mean, I guess it’s appropriate, though maybe this means my audience is a little limited by my readability???

(ht/the bellman, though PS check the code when you embed that shit if you do the test - it’s got spammy alt linkage in it)

I totally do this:

Except it’s usually with verbal duels, and it’s usually trying to devise what my reaction will be if someone tries to cut in line in front of me. Though there are variations, depending on where I am - it’s common at the airport that I choreograph an oral argument with airline staff about something or another. This has occasionally come in handy when I’ve actually *needed* to argue with airline staff about something, realizing the dream.

This is kind of like the whole ASSU thing at Stanford, but the AoIR conference was held at Simon Fraser University, which presents itself as SFU. I don’t know about you, but it’s awful hard to see this over and over again without inserting a t in there in my head (i.e., STFU).

A very, very funny example of what can happen when you try to read out loud some nonstandard orthographic strategies that don’t have immediately apparent spoken analogues. And also when you intentionally ignore potentially inconsequential typos, favoring instead to read phonically. [hat tip to my class's discussion board!]

And, um, YTMND has some pretty damn weird stuff on it (all of those taken from a quick search for “language.” (Actually the first one - Ferdinand de Saussure/Magnetic Fields - is probably one of the least imaginative things I’ve ever seen, but perhaps it would be good for us linguists to all sing the chorus together, “We don’t know anything/you don’t know anything/I don’t know anything” but stop there, and plug in “about language” for “about love.” ??? English v. German Super Mario, on the other hand, is f’ing brilliance.)

I got back yesterday from the first Interdisciplinary Conference on Culture, Language, and Social Practice at CU-Boulder. I feel so privileged to have been a part of the weekend, which sets the stage for many more CLASP conferences in the future, or at least 2009. It was full of great talks, helpful workshops, great people, warm feelings, and thoughtful moments - fie on my last post about conferences! Hehe.

One of the best things that happened was when Lauren Hall-Lew, who has worked on a variety of really fascinating projects over at Stanford and so you should check out her webpage, and I introduced ourselves fairly close in time at one of the workshops.

Lauren S: I’m [lÉ‘rɪn] Squires…
Lauren H-L: I’m [lÉ”rɪn] Hall-Lew…
Someone: Oh no, two Lauren’s…
Lauren H-L: But we have different vowels!
Lauren S: So you don’t even need our last names!
Mary B: Noooo. Some of us have a merger?

Ah, geeky linguistics moments. Spectrograms:

“Lauren” S.

“Lauren” H-L.

Subtle, but different. Also, I won’t be posting much the next couple weeks, because I am ridiculously busy. Please stay my friend, though.

I have two academic conferences in the coming weeks (CLASP and AoIR). Both should be great fun. But they will only nominally be about Ideas, according to Thomas Strong’s post at Savage Minds. Which, however brutal it seems, I have to agree with about 85% of (based on my very limited conference-going experience). To quote Hipster Olympics, “so ironic it’s not, so unironic it is.”

Actually, I think interdisciplinary conferences like AoIR avoid this kind of obvious non-Ideas showiness to a great extent. It’s not immediately clear, career-wise, why I should care whether someone in performance studies or data security knows or cares who I am, for instance. But it’s very nice to hear what they’ve been thinking about. Maybe this is why AoIR always feels so productive to me: I actually feel like most people are there to listen and learn, because they know very little about what 80% of the other people are talking about.

I pulled those percentages out of my ass, btw.