hands = wrist-mitts, finger-docks, arm paddles, cheek slappers, open-faced knuckle sandwiches, Michigan silhouettes (only use in Midwest), turkey tracers/stencils, clapping utensils (good for events), knuckle wagons, 5-pronged pals, knuckle steaks, shake traps, high-five dispensers, nail farms, finger farms

In fact, "pledge allegiance" is what linguists call a hapax legomenon, or hapax for short — an expression that only occurs in a single place in the language, like wardrobe malfunction, Corinthian leather or satisfactual. Or let's not leave out my favorite, ginchiest. People don't pledge allegiance to Hadassah or the U.S. Marines or Kappa Kappa Gamma, much less to other inanimate objects. We only use the words when we're either quoting the flag pledge or riffing on it. So there's no independent reference point, no way to know what you've just signed on for that you weren't down for already.

It turned out that what I had instead was a commercial telegraphic code. From the 19th through the mid-20th centuries, telegrams were integral to business and personal communications. Telegraph codes proliferated as a way to correspond economically and privately. Readily available code books such as the ABC Universal Commercial Electric Telegraph Code, not to mention many others, were published, with many businesses creating in-house codes. According to telegraphy historian-enthusiast John McVey, “Thousands of codes were published or issued privately, but they are largely forgotten now. They present a finely-grained window into their respective domains and their time. And they provide instances of sometimes stunning visual, technical, lexicographic and unwitting poetic achievement.”

I've gotten totally re-obsessed with Kathy Acker, the East Village writer who died in 1997. It started with this recording of Acker reading a poem [Warning: audio, 2 minutes, 28 seconds, and not really safe for work!] that was released in 1980 on the LP "Sugar, Alcohol & Meat" by Giorno Poetry Systems and recently digitized by UbuWeb. Her New York accent is one that has largely disappeared since; she sounds amazing. Then I found this, which is an incredibly long mp3, the first 3/4s of which is a Michael Brownstein reading. The end, though, is a monologue which then becomes a stageplay by Acker about a woman, her suicide, her grandmother, and her psychiatrist. It is absolutely not safe for work, what with its endless use of a certain word for ladyparts that goes over well in Scotland but not at all (yet!) in the U.S.

So this American-sounding person sounds smart and less annoying and picks up on my impatience and allows herself to be hurried through the list of offers. At the end, she asks, “Is there anything else I can help you with today?” And I say, “Yes, can you tell me if you’re American? I mean, you sound American, but it’s been so long since I’ve talked to someone who isn’t an Indian when I call in to my credit cards…” and she starts laughing. Says I’m the third person to ask her the question that month, and they all say the same thing about Indians. But yep, she’s in Ohio!

flesch-kincaid in ruby

David Farber, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Delaware, has been known to utter strange and wondrous remarks, which his students have dutifully recorded. Here is a sample.

What happened next was that, some time in late 1958, Steve Russell, one of McCarthy's grad students, looked at this definition of eval and realized that if he translated it into machine language, the result would be a Lisp interpreter.

This was a big surprise at the time. Here is what McCarthy said about it later in an interview:

Steve Russell said, look, why don't I program this eval..., and I said to him, ho, ho, you're confusing theory with practice, this eval is intended for reading, not for computing. But he went ahead and did it. That is, he compiled the eval in my paper into [IBM] 704 machine code, fixing bugs, and then advertised this as a Lisp interpreter, which it certainly was. So at that point Lisp had essentially the form that it has today....

When beetles fight these battles in a bottle with their paddles and the bottle’s on a poodle and the poodle’s eating noodles, they call this a
muddle puddle tweetle poodle beetle noodle bottle paddle battle.

Populating Unicode's seemingly bottomless namespace is a difficult task. You'd think with 7000+ languages around the world we'd be able to fill 'er up but there's still room in the damn thing. Seeing this serious problem, the Unicode standards folk have occasionally sought to fill the gap by tossing in a few "bonus features" at no cost to you. Today we will look at some of the symbols that appear in Unicode not to make it easier for other cultures to express themselves, but.... well.... who knows? Let's take a look:

Or rather, SpinSpotter does just one of the three things that its founder claims it does (and its press release and its web site likewise). The company has apparently implemented as a system for sharing distributed human commentary on news and other web pages, maintaining a database of which text stretches in which web pages have been flagged by users as allegedly being instances of "spin". That's an interesting thing to do, though anyone who's spent much time reading about politics or language on usenet groups or web forums will be forgiven for wondering whether the resulting annotations will be worth much.

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose construction is habitually dodged:

Palin's speech from last night is available at npr.org for download and the quality is good, so you can hear easily things and it's good enough for basic acoustic work. Just a few observations. First, she's got the classic western/northwestern features, things that are found elsewhere, but that many of us associate with the region. The first two examples illustrate that, and the next two are Upper Midwestern patterns that people have commented on, including on ads-l.

Here at Google Research we have been using word n-gram models for a variety of R&D projects, such as statistical machine translation, speech recognition, spelling correction, entity detection, information extraction, and others. While such models have usually been estimated from training corpora containing at most a few billion words, we have been harnessing the vast power of Google's datacenters and distributed processing infrastructure to process larger and larger training corpora. We found that there's no data like more data, and scaled up the size of our data by one order of magnitude, and then another, and then one more - resulting in a training corpus of one trillion words from public Web pages.

The tone in Nudge is chummy and agreeable and sunnily ameliorist. Which makes you feel a bit like an axe-grinding killjoy bent on hair-splitting “semantics” when you insist on pointing out that they spend the entire book more or less inverting the normal meaning of certain politically-loaded words. But I really do insist on pointing it out, because these brilliant guys are native English speakers and they’ve got to know that the meanings of words matters. So you’re left wondering why they are so determined to play dumb about their own language.

Funner. Impactful. Blowiest. Territorialism. Multifunctionality. Dialoguey. Dancey. Thrifting. Chillaxing. Anonymized. Interestinger. Wackaloon. Updatelette. Noirish. Huger. Domainless. Delegator. Photocentric. Relationshippy. Bestest. Zoomable.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008 • 7:30 PM • James A. Little Theater, New Mexico School for the Deaf
Dmitri Tymoczko Arthur Scribner Bicentennial Preceptor and Assistant Professor, Music, Princeton University
The Geometry of Consonance: Music and Mathematics
Elementary concepts of music theory can be translated into the language of contemporary geometry. Musical chords live in interesting geometrical spaces called "orbifolds"—spaces that contain unusual twists and strange "singularities," analogous to the black holes of General Relativity. Tymoczko provides an accessible, multimedia introduction to this new way of thinking about music, in which the audience can both listen to and watch pieces of music as they move along cones, Mobius strips, and other interesting spaces. He will conclude by explaining how Chopin's famously mysterious E minor prelude traces an interesting path along a necklace of four-dimensional cubes.

116.199 words 30.589 pronunciations 189 languages

Why would you change a sentnece aso that it meant something i didn't mean? I don't know, but you risk doing it every time you change something. And the way you avoid this kind of fuck up is by not changing a word of my copy without asking me, okay? it's e

"Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra";

how language changes in the emoticon space

And of course, if you've been following along for a week or two, you know that this (BING!) is a Useless Use of Cat!

" Best to just avoid the word altogether."

"I suggest adopting some of the non-ridiculous blogger terms: wikisphere, wikiverse, wikiroll, mowiki, warwiki, wikirati, wikistan, wikipundit, and so on. Also, those wiki people should start using terms like "anti-idiotarian" in their writing."

"In French we write the same vowel four different ways in terrain, plein, matin, chien. Now when this vowel is written ain, I see it in pale yellow like an incompletely baked brick; when it is written ein, it strikes me as a network of purplish veins; whe

The Netherlands has shrunk to a small, northern appendage that ‘speaks a dialect of Flemish’. France ‘speaks a dialect of Walloon’, and West Germany (‘speaks dialect of Luxembourgeois’) – which is all sort of true, come to think of it.

decafalon the grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you

japanese asterisk is "rice symbol", usage notes

with notes for the optometrist

online peer community of language learning. based in Ann Arbor, MI.

on the audio communications patterns of leafhopper insects, as recorded through a phono cartridge

What is the difference between hand-work and machine work, and what has caused it? How can we improve the situation? This essay explains problems in music notation (software), and our approach to solving them.

on the goodness of ☃

The North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NAMCLO) is modeled after similar Linguistics Olympiads held in the United States and Europe. In these events, hundreds of high school age students have participated, challenged by interesting linguist

WHAT THE HEll!

we poor 7100t users are cut off from this linguistic innovation, since we don't use t9.

online language learning center, using shockwave, available to all ann arbor district library card holders. didn't work for me the first time (shockwave problems?)

Bruce Sterling's mashup of two days of talks at Idea. Did we really sound like this? Yup.

When you have a toolbox with gadgets like this in it, tasks such as blog analysis and aggregation are cast in a much different light. High end toolmakers are major force multipliers

Sawzall is a high level, parallel data processing scripting language built on top of MapReduce. The system allows Google to do distributed, fault tolerant processing of very large data sets.

hello is "guten tag" or just "tag" in German.

"They always ask if you can play it on the Internet—it's so cute how they still call it 'the Internet'—and I tell them, 'Hey, you can play this against 63 other PS5 owners simultaneously. At least you can in 14 years,'"

still musing modeling online communities as mmos, ask yourself which ones behave like this and which don't. places like flickr don't have this problem, and many social network apps run in people's native languages.

"only one native speaker"

from Freakonomics, on language in real estate listings

delicious screencast

cross-language tagging - one world, one tagspace