May 2009
Twittered Shakespeare Synopses →
AYLI: Exiled rich people live in the forest and fall in love with each other. Later, the deposed duke gets his dukedom back as he likes it.
R&J: Boy meets girl, boy kills girl’s cousin & gets banished, girl fakes death, boy thinks it’s real, kills self, girl wakes & kills self
Reduplication
filigree:
Malagasy makes use of reduplication to encode semantic distinctions. The semantic effect of verbal reduplication is that of indicating manner (mainly iterativity or unmotivated/unsystematic event processing):
mihèrka ‘to look back’ > mih-erik-èrika ‘to look behind one repeatedly’
mandròvita ‘to tear’ > mand-rovi-ròvitra ‘to tear up into pieces’
Calling tristanjay.
...
April 2009
“Reform is born of need, not pity. No vital movement of the people’s has...”
– Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills. I finished reading this 1861 novella.
The protagonist is a foundry worker who carves crude sculptures out of the leftover material. Some bourgeois big-wigs see a particular sculpture and sympathetically remark that factory-work has stunted his creative...
uw white whines
angstinmypants:
Now it’s 1 AM, I’m not even doing any work anymore, just sitting here watching FNL instead of being in, you know, BED.[…]Why I can’t wait until after grades are in to start behaving this way I do not know, but I really hope it doesn’t end up fucking my life too much.
luminosa:
I have six papers to write. Instead of doing them, I spent all night working on stupid NGO stuff...
Upcoming Popular Stuff on Tumblr →
In case you were wondering, this is where the white women are at.
the old english word for sneeze is
ragbag:
fnéosan
regrettably the o.e.d. does not venture a pronunciation. also, the much more stuffy (ie. latin) word for the same act is: sternutation.
Seeing Old English fnéosan, English sneeze, and Latinate sternutation makes me suspect there’s some Indo-European trickery going on here—i.e. do these all have the same root? Thus here’s a list of suspicious cognates for the...
Delusional misidentification syndromes →
The Capgras delusion is the belief that (usually) a close relative or spouse has been replaced by an identical-looking impostor.
The Fregoli delusion is the belief that various people the believer meets are actually the same person in disguise.
Intermetamorphosis is the belief that people in the environment swap identities with each other whilst maintaining the same appearance.
Subjective...
infandous
wordjournal:
adjective • /in FAN duss/ • too horrible to mention.
I like to read the definition as an editorial comment—i.e. that the real definition for infandous is too horrible to mention or include in a dictionary.
“The sentence “I never said she stole my money” can have seven different meanings...”
– A neat anecdote from the New York Times article on IBM’s Jeopardy-playing computer. (via peterwknox, gregbrown, setuplikeadeckofcards, luminosa)
It’s called focus. Also, I’m not getting the special meaning for the reading in which “money” is stressed.
From: UW-Madison Pandemic Info To: Tristan Mahr Subject: UW-Madison monitoring swine flu
I guess there’s an official “Pandemic Info” university emailer. Who knew?
Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-4-26) →
up-schist-creek:
Battlestar Galactica (141)
Do You Speak American?: The Truth About Change →
spellingbee:
PBS subtly blames women for the demise of English?
Nonsense. The assumption that the change of English is somehow the demise of the language is absurd, since the language has been steadily evolving, you know, since forever and will continue to evolve, you know, until forever. If English meets its cruel demise, it’s only the next in an indefinite series of many such demises.
As...
stream The Linguists →
Like modern-day explorers, the two academics featured in The Linguists travel to forgotten places around the globe to unearth rare treasures—in this case, endangered languages. On a shoestring budget, professors David Harrison and Gregory Anderson navigate difficult terrain, searching for speakers of these forgotten and mostly hidden languages. While more than 7,000 different languages are...
tumview: anthropophagous →
tumblr.com/popular →
A dashboard-view of the radar.
hooings:
be we in paris or in lansing…
magnetic...
WatchNate Silver: Picking apart the puzzle of racism in elections
For the Nate Silver fans out there. I like it when he refers to the election as a “national experiment”.
Paging Mr. Pynchon?
Someone on History Channel just claimed that the Germans lost WW2 because they didn’t have weaponized flying saucers. This fucking channel...
Something Fowl
Walking home today I saw two male ducks (“drakes” [attn: ragbag]) fighting, and it looked like one Mallard was trying to drown the other. The two separated and both leaned backwards, raised their chests and spread their wings at each other. I then saw a nearby female duck (“duck”, or marked with “hen”) and realized what was going on. The drake chased his rival...
Secrets of TV Pitchmen Billy Mays and Anthony... →
Billy Mays is such a surreal person(ality):
As successful as Mays and Sullivan are today, they have plenty of competition. And their fiercest rival at the moment is a new phenom named Vince Offer, the man behind the ShamWow absorbent chamois cloth….After Mays and Offer attended this year’s Super Bowl in Tampa Bay as guests in the same suite, Mays went on the Adam Carolla radio show...
“Other people tell me they “can’t understand” sentences with...”
– Language Log: Prejudices, egocentrism, impositions, and intransigence
Great post about the various levels of language prejudice, including a new one for me: “intransigence, a willful failure to understand.” I really like the above quote because it highlights a difference between the...
“In another notable Times crossword, 27 year-old Bill Gottlieb proposed to his...”
– Wikipedia: The New York Times crossword puzzle Also, 18-Across (”poet Dickinson”) is her first name.
11 Extinct Animals That Have Been Photographed... →
(via takethecityandrun)
Researchers use brain interface to post to Twitter →
In early April, Adam Wilson posted a status update on the social networking Web site Twitter — just by thinking about it. Still from video Watch a video of Wilson using the brain-computer interface to post to Twitter.
Just 23 characters long, his message, “using EEG to send tweet,” demonstrates a natural, manageable way in which “locked-in” patients can couple...
"The reality could not be further from the truth" →
This morning, email from Yu Guo drew my attention to yet another example where the combination of a negation, a modal, and a scalar predicate leaves writers and readers in a state of confusion. In this case, however, the result is not a phrase that means the opposite of what its author intended, but rather an expression that seems to have no coherent literal meaning at all.
