Flickr raid: Words, words

Power of words/Power of writing photoset.





Canterbury Tales photoset.





1 hour alphabet photoset.





Grocers Apostrophe photopool.

How to talk right

I came across this great little resource at PBS recently: Beastly Mispronunciations, 100 excerpts from The Big Book Of Beastly Mispronunciations: The Complete Opinionated Guide For The Careful Speaker by Charles Harrington Elster, which sets the record straight on the beastly and acceptable pronunciations of common words. Loads of these were questions that had been plaguing me for a long time (Alumnae, Chamois, Machination, Niche, Often, Route, Yarmulke), and with the firm, well-supported cases made for the author's favored pronunciations, I can now consider the matter settled.

Via Bits & Pieces.

Words, words, words. Etc.

Everyone and her great-aunt has posted a thumbnail from Snap Shirts, which has probably attracted some quite large number of vain bloggers and sold some quite small number of actual t-shirts. In case this is actually the first time you've seen this, what they do is make a pretty word cloud out of common words from your blog or site, then hope you'll want to buy a t-shirt of it. It makes a very nice little blog-thingy. Here's mine, which I finally managed to produce after many failed attempts to pass the human test. I had actually given up for a while.




Another fun toy is What's Up?, which bills itself as "an indispensable tool for the global newsjunkie," but might be better filed as "a slick, shiny plaything for the bored blogger". It's a techno-cool dot-matrix map of the world with blinking hotspots and fun bubbly pops flashing headlines of breaking news. I'm not sure about its indispensability as a news source, but it does make you long for a future world when real utilities might be this sleek and attractive.
Via orangeblog.




I've unfortunately lost the referrer, but Cabinet Magazine has a very nice Timeline of Timelines detailing the development of timekeeping and and representations of time through time. With pictures!




From another missing referrer comes a link to a delightful post at winterson.com, showing us what happens when Star Wars Episode III is translated from English into Chinese and back into English again. I'm a sucker for trans-linguistic obfuscation, and some of these are really howlers. Even better, each of the fifty-odd caps includes a comment or an explanation of what went wrong from the original, which is pretty interesting. Oh, I almost forgot to tell you the movie's title -- it's "Backstroke of the West."




Found is a neat site that collects found objects and the detritus of everyday life. Their statement: We collect FOUND stuff: love letters, birthday cards, kids' homework, to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, telephone bills, doodles - anything that gives a glimpse into someone else's life. Anything goes... I didn't see a way to browse the whole collection, but there is a featured Find of the Day, plus a search feature, in case you happen to have a special interest in shopping lists featuring cheese, or some other such specific need.




I'm unaware of its provenance, but hosted among random other files at janpeters.net is a nice little animation showing the evolution of the English alphabet.

Random of interest

I like things made out of Legos. I like Escher. So I was happy to discover architecture blog gravestmor's post about this incredibly nifty Lego recreation of Escher's famous staircases. Kind of mindbending.



It was created by Lego artist Andrew Lipson, who specializes in rendering Escher's illusions in solid 3d, and has also done Escher's "Ascending and Descending" and "Belvedere" (featured on Amazing Art). He has his own website, which I couldn't visit because he has exceeded his bandwidth, but I bet it's pretty interesting.




In November, Spacing Photoblog, a Toronto group blog featuring submitted photos on a certain theme, did a series on the abandoned Whitby Psychiatric Hospital. Here is the permalink to the first page, but in order to get the navigation links it seems you have to use this link, which counts backward from the most recent entry so might only be good for today. If you see the title page, good, just click the "previous" link to see the series; otherwise, you might have to use "next" until you see the title page, or just go to the archive to find the start of the series. Sorry I can't give a better link, but anyway, they're some pretty neat photos.




I recently came across the essay "Shakespeare in the Bush", about an anthropologist's experiences with a West African tribe and an evening of storytelling. When she decides to share the tale of Shakespeare's Hamlet around the fire, she discovers some pretty wide cultural gaps as the elders interrupt to make "corrections," reinterpreting and making sense of the narrative on their own terms. It's an interesting read, suggesting that some of literature's "universal" themes aren't quite as universal as we think.

The old man handed me some more beer to help me on with my storytelling. Men filled their long wooden pipes and knocked coals from the fire to place in the pipe bowls; then, puffing contentedly, they sat back to listen. I began in the proper style, "Not yesterday, not yesterday, but long ago, a thing occurred. One night three men were keeping watch outside the homestead of the great chief, when suddenly they saw the former chief approach them."

"Why was he no longer their chief?"

"He was dead," I explained. "That is why they were troubled and afraid when the saw him."

"Impossible," began one of the elders, handing his pipe on to his neighbor, who interrupted, "Of course it wasn't the dead chief. It was an omen sent by a witch. Go on."

For the longest time I've been meaning to link to this -- it's a coverpop featuring a few thousand covers from some seventy years of science fiction magazines, arranged in a huge spread by year and hue. The main site features a random coverpop from genres like horror, vintage, or art. Neat concept.




And now, some more Samorost stuff:

Adventure Gamers has a nice interview with Samorost creator Jakub Dvorsky in which he talks about his work, influences, the success of Samorost, other projects, and the meaning of the names amanita and samorost.

E-mental is the new media lab of Tomas Dvorak, creator of the Samorost 2 soundtrack, and there's a page where you can listen to some nice samples of the tracks.

Assorted articles

Are you familiar with the life and history of the illustrious photographer Lillian Virginia Mountweazel? No? Well, she doesn't exist -- she is the subject of a fake entry in the New Columbia Encyclopedia, which was written as copyright protection. Dictionaries do it too, inserting definitions for fake words. A New Yorker article explores one investigator's attempt to locate the spurious entry somewhere within the E's of the New Oxford American Dictionary, with experts weighing in on which of the likely candidates was the made-up word.

So when word leaked out that the recently published second edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary contains a made-up word that starts with the letter “e,” an independent investigator set himself the task of sifting through NOAD’s thirty-one hundred and twenty-eight “e” entries in search of the phony. The investigator first removed from contention any word that was easily recognized or that appears in Webster’s Third New International; the remaining three hundred and sixty words were then vetted with a battery of references.

Six potential Mountweazels emerged. They were:

earth loop—n. Electrical British term for GROUND LOOP.
EGD—n. a technology or system that integrates a computer display with a pair of eyeglasses . . . abbreviation of eyeglass display.
electrofish—v. [trans.] fish (a stretch of water) using electrocution or a weak electric field.
ELSS—abbr. extravehicular life support system.
esquivalience—n. the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities . . . late 19th cent.: perhaps from French esquiver, “dodge, slink away.”
eurocreep—n. informal the gradual acceptance of the euro in European Union countries that have not yet officially adopted it as their national currency.


I was a player on Ultima Online for a period of time, and I knew that player accounts and sums of in-game gold, usually in denominations of millions, could be traded for real-world cash. What I didn't know is that there is an entire industry of full-time workers in "video game sweatshops" doing nothing but bringing in the gold in pretty much every MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) out there, assets which are then sold off to net a tidy profit for the enterprising entrepreneurs who mastermind it all. An article at 1Up, "Wage Slaves", tells the whole story.

Weeks go by as I chase ghosts and rumors of Chinese workers clicking 12 hours a day. Word has it that 300 farmers are working at computers lined up in airport hangars somewhere in Asia. After all, Lineage II banned certain Chinese IPs for a reason. Finally, I get in contact with a man in his 30s who goes by the name Smooth Criminal. He's a partner in one of the largest sellers of MMORPG gold, and he isn't apologetic. His rap sheet: banned from Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, Shadowbane, Star Wars Galaxies, and Ultima Online again. He says once someone even traded him a wedding ring worth $2,000 for WOW gold.

Smooth Criminal's game cartel made $1.5 million from Star Wars Galaxies alone last year, and individually, he's made as much as $700,000 in a single year. "[SWG] built my new house, which I paid for in cash," he says. "So when you ring my doorbell, it plays the Star Wars music." Smooth Criminal is in charge of writing programs, finding exploits, and locating in-game "dupes" (bugs for duplicating gold or items). "I have a real job, but when there's a dupe, I call in sick," he says. It costs him more money to actually go to his "real job." "When I dupe," Smooth Criminal adds, "I farm billions on every game server and spread out my activities." He then uses three accounts to launder the gold: a duper account, a filter account, and a delivery account—each created using different IPs, credit cards, and computers. This way, it's hard to trace the source, and the gold comes back clean.


Where London Stood is an interesting article about ruined cityscapes in the futures of science fiction worlds. The article explores the different forms that these scenes take -- overgrown city, sleeping city, blasted city, dying city -- with descriptions and examples of occurrences of these various themes. There is, of course, a nice picture gallery to accompany the list, along with some links.

I think that there are three broad categories into which the vast majority of SF's ruined cities can be placed. The power of all of these comes from a subversion of a familiar landscape. Sobchack's remark about the vastness of alien landscapes in film can be applied in temporal terms - "Our civilization and its technological apparatus is at best a small town set on the edge of an abyss. Watching these films with their abundance of long shots in which human figures move like insects, their insistence on a fathomless landscape, we are forced to a pessimistic view of the worth of technological progress and of man's ability to control his destiny. We are shown human beings set uncomfortably against the vastness and agelessness of the desert and sea, are reminded by the contrast that land and water were here long before us and our cities and towns will be here long before us and our cities and towns and will be here long after we and are artefacts are gone."

More wordplay

Still feeling verbal after that test, so here's a quiz to start...

ellipsis You scored 38% Sociability and 82% Sophistication!

Your life can be difficult because of your insecurities, but you should know that it isn't your fault. YOU didn't ask to be thrown in around thirty times per page in every bodice-ripper on the shelf! Those who overuse you can kiss your . . . you know. You need to learn to hold your head high and glory in your solitude. You really do have excellent, scholarly tastes. You must never forget that your friend, the period, will be there to support you at the end of every sentence where you truly belong, and, if what is left out is as important as what is said, why, then you are as vital as the alphabet!

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 21% on Sociability You scored higher than 94% on Sophistication

Link: The Which Punctuation Mark Are You Test written by Gazda on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

Unfortunately, I can't find the blog where I first heard this story...I'll add it later if I come across it again. But Number 2 Pencil has a comprehensive post on the story, and a follow-up. It's about Maria Alquilar, a Miami artist who created a mural mosaic for a Livermore, CA library featuring the images and names of historical figures such writers, artists, and scientists -- only she misspelled eleven of the 175 names. And then got upset when people got upset about it. The San Francisco Chronicle has another short article about it. Mispellings aside, I don't even think the mural looks very nice. Those colors!


A couple of fun Wikipedia word lists: neologisms on the Simpsons, like "embiggen" and "cromulent", and fictional expletives from science fiction and fantasy worlds, like "frell" (from Farscape), or "p'tahk" (that potent Klingon insult). Though I have occasionally savored a geeky curse from the latter list, the former has certainly enriched my vocabulary in many ways.
Simpsons list via A Sweet, Familiar Dissonance.

I may as well mention this Guardian article, "Can you trust Wikipedia?" which casts doubt on Wikipedia's merit by sending an array of experts out to sample various entries that fall within their areas of study, and rate them objectively. The results were not stellar. While occasionally coming up short in fields such as literature and anthropology, Wikipedia's authors are almost invariably experts in one field in particular: pop culture. Whatever its future as an academic reference, I have no doubt that Wikipedia will always remain a top-notch resource in this one regard. And it's still pretty damn good with everything else, anyway.

Irrefragable ≈ confutable?

Sorry for the dearth of communication lately. I didn't actually mean for the Halloween post to last for the whole year.

So while I work up the energy for a real post, have fun taking this 200-question vocabulary test in which you must make a simple determination for each pair of words you are presented with: same meaning or opposites? Some of them get pretty tough. My final score, for the record, was 168. And the above pair is one of those that I missed.

If your curiosity is piqued after taking the test, don't forget the lovely selection of dictionary links in my sidebar!

Fun with words

The Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus is an interesting experiment in organizing and associating words. Have you ever brainstormed by drawing webs connecting different terms and ideas? It's a little like that. Unfortunately, the free version is only an evaluation, and you can only play around a little before you'll be prompted to buy. But what're you gonna do.




The Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form, or OEDILF, is a project to define every word in the dictionary with its own limerick. They're up through the bn's. Wish them luck.

Be you human or canine or camel
Your ameloblasts make enamel;
Thus the teeth in your mouth
Right and left, north and south,
Have some apatite—if you're a mammal.
(S. A. McBurnie)

Color Code, "a full-color portrait of the English language," is a really neat experiment. Words are given a color based on the results of a Yahoo! image search for that particular word; the colors of associated images are averaged together to determine that the word "class," for example, is a soft pastel blue. The words are grouped together in giant maps based on related meanings, in clusters like "furniture," "disease," "happening," or "flower" (shown below); they can also be arranged in one big spectrum according to color. As a synaesthete who does habitually associate color with words, I find this project especially intriguing.
Via Mindful Things.




Color in Motion, "an animated and interactive experience of color communication and color symbolism," is a cute flash animation exploring various associations for different colors. Each color is featured as a stick-figure character in a movie showcasing different aspects of that color. There are also "meet the colors" features which list different words and associations that apply to the them, and finally, at the end, there are some toys you can play with to make your own movies.




The Quack-Project goes around the world collecting recordings of children performing animal noises in many different languages, and shares the results. You can listen to audio files of children quacking, mooing, oinking, crowing, neighing, barking, and ribbitting in Cantonese, Bengali, Italian, Hindi, Somali, and many more. No written animal sounds, unfortunately -- those can be quite interesting, too.

The Eggcorn Database is an amusing and sometimes surprising listing of misheard and commonly-mistaken idioms and turns-of-phrase -- "dog-eat-dog" becomes "doggy-dog," "boisterous" becomes "voiceterous," "cease and desist" becomes "cease and decease," and, providing the project its title, "acorn" becomes "eggcorn." It's interesting what people come up with when they only hear these expressions in speech and never see them written down.

Speak Up has a carefully-considered critique of the alphabet.

B b
This is a very nice pair; whoever did this was really thinking about the relationship between the two. I like the way the capital B can have some variation in the proportions from top to bottom. Obviously designed by a man, the ball and stick of the lowercase b is simple and, appropriately, half of the cap B. Talk about male and female! The buxom, pregnant cap together with the excitable lowercase.

SEW is a short film about a girl diagnosed with OCD who can't stop playing a particular, very demanding word game in her head. Artistic, informative, and touching, the film was made by a student about one of his close friends, who is also a filmmaker. Both of them have made a lot of other films which are well worth checking out (just click on their names on the intro page to see their other work).




The Phrontistry is a great site with obscure word lists and vocabulary resources. Visit the International House of Logorrhea or the Compendium of Lost Words; learn about lipograms, writing omitting a letter of the alphabet; read essays and rants on language; or browse an extensive list of glossaries, from Divination and Fortune Telling to Feeding and Eating, Three-Letter Rare Words, Manias and Obsessions, and Words of Wisdom.

Fun with Words is "a celebration of the English language" with lots of neat features for the logophile: lists of collective nouns for animals, commonly confused words, word oddities, palindromes, pangrams, conflicting proverbs, unusual word forms...oh, so much good stuff.

The sidebar has been updated with a lot of new dictionaries and language sites, too. Happy browsing!

Varia

I've just finally caught up on the archives of my latest obsession, 8-bit Theater, a sprite webcomic based on Final Fantasy I. Tonight I finally made it through all 574 back episodes. Enough nostalgia was also stirred in me to prompt me to download a rom of the original NES game, which I started playing tonight. I've had vague urges to play it again for some time. I do still have the game and my Nintendo system somewhere, sealed up in a box in the back of a storage unit where I can't get it, but I don't know why it never occurred to me to download the rom before.

For years I loved Final Fantasy, without even knowing it was part of a series. When I saw ads for FF7, I was blown away. And also a little confused. How had my beloved childhood swords-and-sorcery epic turned into a futuristic techno-world? Time passes, I guess.




And now a series of links with no thematic relevance...

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about the latest trends in controversial young adult literature. There's Rainbow Party, the book about a teen oral-sex party that's sparked plenty of debate, but that's just the beginning.




Deadprogrammer's Cafe tells the story of How the Starbucks Siren Became Less Naughty.




I've just discovered an entertaining and informative blog called Fascinating History, which is quickly becoming one of my favorites. A recent entry discusses Elizabethan Food.

A columnist at the Globe and Mail vents his frustration with the relentless verbing of nouns.

Google just released Google Earth, the amazing satellite-imagery software that used to be Keyhole. Unlike the subscription-only Keyhole, Google Earth is all free. You can spend hours just exploring the planet in high-resolution photographs (not everywhere, of course...but just give it a couple years and it'll be really amazing). Some places, like the Grand Canyon, also have 3-D elevation. There's a lot you can do with this thing.




What is EPIC? A video from the Museum of Media History in the year 2014 presents a sobering and thought-provoking future history of the media. See where we're headed.


reading: haven't finished anything yet, still plodding along on Fast Food Nation
saw: Three Kings; 30 Days; Donnie Darko; Matrix: Revolutions; The Office (American); Undeclared
playing: Final Fantasy I

music: the Shade: Wrath of Angels soundtrack, very nice music to a game I've never heard of but found free to download the other day
beverage: Twinings Prince of Wales tea

Where does it bilong?

Vitamin Q has posted a fascinating list of terms in Tok Pisin (the Pidgin English spoken in Papa New Guinea) using the term "bilong," "belonging," which is used as "from" or "to" to construct a variety of interesting phrases. We came across this briefly in a History of the English Language class when we were discussing pidgins, and the only one I remember now is "gras bilong fes," "grass belonging to face" -- beard. (This list offers "gras bilong ai," eyebrow.) Some quite interesting ones. One of my favorites is "ol pikinini bilong rop wain" -- "those babies belonging to wine rope" -- grapes.

Grab bag

I was going to tell you about a spectacularly fascinating dream I had yesterday, but I may have lost too much of it since to be able to retell it coherently. It was great, though.

So instead, I'm going to empty out my links folder and post some random stuff.

These two articles challenge prescriptive grammar, reassuring us that it's all right (and preferred) to use "data" as singular and end sentences with prepositions -- because English isn't Latin. While I want to agree with them, I still find myself having trouble letting go.

The essay portion of the new SAT rewards kids for length, even if the writing is poor, sloppy, and even factually inaccurate.

Research suggests that women are far more susceptible to the effects of alcohol than men, but that feminism prevents this fact from being widely admitted, leading to increased alcoholism among women.

This BBC quiz that measures types of intelligence and tests What Kind of Thinker Are You? doesn't have any code you can cut and paste at the end (gasp!), so I'll give you the link to it, tell you that I scored as an Existential Thinker, and invite you to take it yourself and then read all the results.

This quiz also said I was quite existentialist, interestingly.

You scored as Modernist. Modernism represents the thought that science and reason are all we need to carry on. Religion is unnecessary and any sort of spirituality halts progress. You believe everything has a rational explanation. 50% of Americans share your world-view. Modernist 94% Existentialist 94% Materialist 88% Postmodernist 63% Romanticist 38% Cultural Creative 38% Idealist 19% Fundamentalist 19% What is Your World View? (updated) created with QuizFarm.com

reading: Charles de Lint, The Newford Stories; Ben Bradlee, A Good Life (K's pick)
saw: Die Hard; Die Hard 2; Die Hard 3; Shattered Glass; Enterprise; Law & Order; Red vs. Blue; Rocky
game of the day: Fly Guy, a delightful bit of pixel-art fun.

music: my "Oddtunes" mix, curr. necros - mystery mix
beverage: Twinings English Breakfast tea

A post I want to entitle "Errata" but can't

I have it in my head that "errata" should mean a collection of miscellaneous, meandering things, wandering here and there, but it doesn't. Pity.

I've submitted my senior project, had my board. The semester -- the year -- college -- is ending. I've got my Class of 2005 shirt on right now. Lots to be said about that, but I don't feel like going into it at the moment. So instead, I'll empty out some links I've been collecting.

First, because of all the language and lit blogs I read, stuff about ... well, language and lit.

An April Fool's joke proposing a march to end the abuse of the widely misused phrase, "beg the question." Sounds like a worthy cause to me.

It came up in our field studies class, so Bill sent us all a list (several lists, actually...this was the first and seemed sufficient to me) of collective nouns for groups of animals. I knew there were some crazy ones, but there are some crazy ones. A charm of hummingbirds? An ostentation of peacocks? I like "a memory of elephants" and "a storytelling of rooks" ... and "a tower of giraffes" is pretty amazing, as is a "crash" or "bloat" of hippotami. Last of all is the impressive "zeal of zebras"...

I may have posted this previously, I may not have. It's a bit old, but the sarcasm point is introduced.

Booksellers in Scotland stage a promotional book-burning.

The entire literary edifice of the West is built on a lie. According to one suspicious sleuth, "Proust didn't know from madeleines,", and his famous crumbly scallop-shaped cookie never existed.

Harvard students win prizes for the quality of their personal libraries. I want one of those. I also want a prize-worthy library.

Reasons Why the Female Characters in Certain Male-Written Fiction Are Not Like Actual Women at All.

All right, now some other stuff. Let's have a go at religion.

High-schoolers don't know enough about the Bible. They're talking about history and literature, so I agree with them there. I really need me a student's lit Bible.

From The Onion: "Scientology Losing Ground to New Fictionology".

A beautiful comic for the creationists: Science vs. Norse Mythology.

Let's see, what category next. How about "stuff I like."

A Yahoo! News story explains how fairy tales are linked to violent relationships. Seems Andrea Dworkin was right about all those passive heroines waiting for Princes Charming.

I'm increasingly considering copyediting as a profession. Which is probably why this article, an interview with a number of copy editors discuss the details of their largely uncredited and overlooked work, is interesting to me and me alone.

They're having a concert in California of orchestral music from video games performed live. It's called Video Games Live, and Jack Wall, the composer of the brilliant music in Myst III: Exile, is one of the people behind it.

The Forbes.com article Is Sex Necessary? discusses all the beneficial effects conferred by "having regular and enthusiastic sex."

Last category...a kind of alarming article that I post for the public benefit:

"The End of Analog TV? Will America's favorite technology really go dark next year?" Analog television broadcasts are supposed to be discontinued next year, to be replaced by entirely digital broadcasts. It was all part of a federal ruling aimed at switching everyone over to digital -- only no one bought digital, and now the deadline for the change is coming up. Even if it doesn't happen next year -- it will likely be postponed -- it will be happening pretty soon, and currently there is no warning in place for those who buy new analog tvs telling them that their sets might be obsolete in a year! So if you buy a new tv -- buy digital!

I think that's all for now... I'll post some talky stuff later.