lightcastle | Entries tagged with language

I was just told that a colleague is "cutting my lunch".

I had never heard this expression before. The urban dictionary version makes it all about sex, but my colleague says it can just be for someone dating/pursuing the kind of person you would be interested in.

This series of articles about Mountain Bike Champion Rowena Fry touched off a discussion here at the office. Our resident Australian insisted that her sister's name is the "female version of Rowan" and was shocked when a few of us pointed out that most of the Rowans we know are female.

So is Rowan as a feminine name a North American thing? A modern thing? Or is Australia just weird?

O.E. wogian, of uncertain origin and with no known cognates; perhaps related to woh, wog- "bent, inclined," as with affection.

Really? "Woo" as in "to woo him" is of uncertain origin? That's kind of neat.

Language log takes a peek at the regionally-idiomatic use of the definite article for highways, public transport systems, and neighborhoods. (Triggered by a NoCal/SoCal difference on the matter.)

Thinking quickly, Montreal English throws a definite article in front of all the highways. (Even the Decarie.) New York uses just numbers, and so does Boston. (I don't think I ever heard anyone use a definite article or even an "I" for the interstates.) Indiana uses the I, but not the definite article, although I'm not sure I'm remembering that correctly.

Public transit takes the definite article in Boston, Montreal, and New York, I think. (I will take the T, the Metro, the Subway.)

Anyone have thoughts on local idiosyncrasies they notice?

The Economist hosts a debate on whether the language we speak shapes the way we think.

As most of you know, I'm not a believer in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in any kind of strong form.

The "anti" position is being taken by one of the regulars at Language Log who freely admits he isn't all that "anti" the hypothesis so much as the way it get used in pop culture.

I think my favourite part of the debate, though, is the commenter who phrased things thusly:

"Eskimos have separate words for flurries, blizzard, slush, powder, sleet, hail, graupel, drifts, névé, frost, ice, glaciers, … while we poor benighted English-speakers are stuck with the work-around of sticking modifiers on one word, "snow", for any solid H2O from the atmosphere."

Congrats Alouettes!

By the way, photographing art is hard.

Some random links:

NPR had a bit about Why siblings so rarely have the same personality.

Of course, science should be written with a certain amount of distance, which results in
journal article abstracts sometimes seeming a bit understated.A patient had a fire in his chest cavity during dissection of the left internal mammary artery before coronary artery bypass graft.

There are some classes where it is best to pay attention

And now some videos.

The story of Sodom and Gomorrah as told by The Professor Brothers

A banned ad from Durex condoms using the lounge classic Feelings.

Current Music: Cell Block Tango - Original Broadway Soundtrack

My Skype phone number is set to expire soon. I set it up so my friends from the US could call me, but the only person who ever used it was Kendra and the Natural Products people for my job interview. It's only about $2 a month, so it might be worth keeping for the off chance I do a freelance projects in the US or some such. At the same time, with Google phone, is it really needed?

In other news, I spent all day at the office working overtime, which mostly sucked, but I may have gotten free imported artisanal olive oil out of it.

And since I always try to add some educational material in these things, this is for those of you who have these sorts of arguments (and you know who you are), a guide to pronouncing Latin

And while we're at it, can anyone translate "The Keeper of the things that make us happy"?

Language Log discussed what to use for a list of disjuncts instead of etc.

Etc., as almost everyone knows, abbreviates the Latin et cetera, so it means "and other things". Once you know that, it feels wrong to write something like The cause is typically rain, snow, or wind, etc., if you want to cover other such weather effects that you may not have thought of, as alternatives to be added to the list of disjuncts. You don't want to be taken as saying that the cause is typically both (i) either rain or snow or wind and (ii) some additional things you have not specified at all.

(vel sim seems to be winning in the comments)

This is a good time to note that I had mostly forgotten that an ampersand actually comes from a ligature of "et" meaning "and". (Which I first ever encountered trying to figure out why someone had written "&c" for "etc".

And speaking of how you choose to write things, they also discuss yet another battle over what alphabet should be used in Central Asia.

Further from Schott's Vocab, a list and explanation of number slang from 1960s New Orleans that's just awesome.

I have always found things such as this and the spelling alphabets great fun. I also can't help but notice that it is a way to take something difficult for most people (a string of numberS) and chunk it into bits, thus speeding it along from one number at a time while still keeping some clarity.

Some not-so-serious suggestions on an improved english.

How to explain your research at a party.

Schott's Vocab (which I really should be reading more often), points out an alternative to "racial passing" - "pheneticizing", which was taken from this book review in Quill & Quire.

Compton argues that the term “racial passing” (a mixed-race person presenting as white) is often misused because it assumes racially ambiguous folks are always actively trying to be something they’re not. Instead, he suggests a new term – “pheneticizing” – that shifts the focus from the viewed to the viewer, and dispels the gross assumptions at work in attempts to slot Canada’s racial populations into easy binaries.

I am probably going to mine the pages of that blog for fun things in the future (especially since I don't have my own subscription to the OED.)

I mean, come on, he put up grimalkin just because it's neat.

In other english language news, the fine folks at take down another linguistic pedant in a review of Simon Heffer's new tome. (In related news, I might have to take up Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage.)

I get into arguments with people about the need for a final serial comma. Really. It needs to be there.

I have to go and see if I can finally get TekSavvy to get my internet to work, so I don't have time to discuss this at length, but Pandagon has launched a rather interesting debate on censorship. (The linked post actually spins off the debate in the comments of this post about the John Stagliano trial.

Amanda comes down firmly on the "do not censor" side of things, and that is certainly my gut reaction. At the same time, I'm not a free speech absolutist. I do think there can be legal penalties for certain kinds of speech. I've always been less worried about hate speech laws than some. (As with all laws, it depends how they are written and how they are enforced.)

At the same time, as a Canadian, I know very well that obscenity laws in this country were used to target queer literature (or indeed anything remotely out of 'mainstream porn') far more often than anything else. As an American, I was raised with a visceral distrust of censorship and an idealized notion that free speech - specifically political and artistic speech - is crucial to the health of a democracy.

I'm leaving aside the "is porn bad for you" argument for the moment and basically assuming the argument that a particular type of porn amounts to hatespeech against women. That makes it, specifically, a political statement, and then what does one think of censoring that?

Again, my gut says no, but I'm far from solid in this stance. Could perhaps opening things to civil legislation (thus making it not criminal but subject to redress) be an option? Are the unintended consequences too great?

I don't actually know and can't sort through it now, but am always interested in hearing what intelligent people have to say.

Shakil, one of the people here in the job-hunting workshop, just related a story about how a girl in Bangladesh, when asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, answered "Corruptionist."

I want this job.
It sounds like GREAT fun.
I might even be good at it.

LC - Professional Corruptionist.

(Of course, those who have known me long enough remember when my sigfile read "Professional Innocent" or "Innocent-for-Hire".)

Some Language Log fun:

1) The guy who designed the Na'vi language for the Avatar film explains the structural basis of the language.

2) An interesting study on how conceptual frames can bleed into each other. In this case, reading a story about dangerous invisible bacteria and a story using body metaphors for the country then resulted in harsher attidudes about illegal immigration.

3) Two fun articles from the Economist.

The first article is a wonderful examination of politeness in various languages, how it has evolved over time, and how it plays into any number of social dynamics. (For instance, across cultures, the tendency is for left-wingers to like intimate forms of address while right wingers favour formality. I leave it as an exercise to the reader why that might be so.)

The second involves "the world's hardest language" (with appropriate caveats) and has lots of neat stuff.
I liked learning that Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350 genders and that some languages distinguish whether "we" means "me and other people including you" and "me and other people but not including you".

And finally, for the more epistemologically-oriented among you, some languages have "evidentiality" - you not only accord things with gender and number and time but you must accord statements with how you know this information.

Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”.

According to someone at Language Log, a book on the subject in 2004 estimated that about 1/4 of the world's languages have this property in some form hardwired into their grammar.

No, not the film. The word, and how it illustrates one of those wonderful vagaries of language.

As most know, it is a word borrowed from Sanskrit meaning a representation on Earth of a deity - the form the deity descends with. (It's been used that way since the late 1700s, and probably got into English from the Dutch, who first stole it from India.)

As long as I've been aware of the word, it has meant something like that. It quickly showed up in cyber-life as a person's representative in the online world. (I'd guess sometime around the mid-80s from what I remember.)

Unsurprisingly, French and Italian have this usage as well - manifestation/incarnation.

Interestingly, they both also have a use of the word meaning "transformation" - a nuance not really seen in English.

But French has another use, one which my mother grew up with and assures me was far more common until not too long ago. Avatars were "troubles or misadventures". D'avoir des avatars dans ton vie - To have troubles in your life.

It seems sometime in the early 20th century a French writer thought avatar was a version of or related to avanie, which is a public affront or humiliation. Perhaps he just thought it sounded enough like it that avatars should be a bearer of such misfortune. Regardless, the word took on an entirely different meaning in French which eclipsed the initial one. Only now, with the rise of avatar in the computer sense does it seem to be swinging back.

Words are weird.

Word of the day: hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia

And now some paranoia from the US from earlier this week.
1) Canadian coins are spying on them!
2) Tattoo artists should report suspicious people. (please look at what makes for "suspicious behaviour". I think the "changing appearance" one alone would qualify many of my friends.)

I end, of course, with a cute kitty video.

Posts such as these:

* Did it really change from "The United States are" to "The United States is" due to the Civil War?

* Whether or not dangling participles are really ungrammatical in English.

* A discussion of sentence fragments, specifically if you can start a sentence with an initial coordinator such as "and" or "but", inspired by Where the Wild Things Are. With follow-up asking for a new term.

* How *not* to learn Chinese Characters.

* Which leads nicely into why translation software isn't always the best choice. Spread to fuck the fruit.

The moment the Mark Saford thing was revealed as an affair, I started debating whether "Hiking in Appalachia" or "Gone to Argentina" was going to become slang for "sneaking off to see my lover".

Seems to Hiking in Appalachia is winning, although it seems to be just being used for "having an affair".

Also, I am brain fried and exhausted from work, and desperately need out of there.