tags: linguistics
2003
August
- 2003 Aug 23
- the gender genie
A little script that supposedly is able to tell the gender of the author of a scrap of text.
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2006
April
- 2006 Apr 28
- words and nothing more
I am reading a book whose main character is a linguist, so I can’t help but ponder the use of words. What is language for, really? If not for connection?
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July
- 2006 Jul 9
- consolation
I am trying to trace down the etymology of the word “consolation,” wondering if it is necessarily related to “isolation.” Alas, there are no clear answers, but are there ever?
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August
November
- 2006 Nov 27
- tongue-tied
“You have a Midland accent” is just another way of saying “you don’t have an accent.” You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
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December
- 2006 Dec 15
- it’s the same
Greg of Futility Closet writes about sentences composed entirely of one word. I think these are rather arcane, though. My favorite is Tagalog, where an entire conversation can be composed entirely by one syllable, and it’s something that has more common usage:
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2007
June
- 2007 Jun 5
- from phoenicia to austronesia?
(revised from ”The meaning of syllables”)
· Read more… - 2007 Jun 5
- on gods and spirits
(revised from ”Re: response to victor & malaki)
· Read more… - 2007 Jun 6
- alibata
Ang hindi marunong magmahal sa sariling wika ay higit pa ang amoy sa bulok at mabahong isda — Jose Rizal (Anyone who doesn’t know how to love their own language is worse than the smell of a rotten, stinky fish)
· Read more… - 2007 Jun 15
- bathala
I don’t know how this managed to elude me for so long, and I don’t really know what prompted me to look this up. Somehow I had stumbled upon the word kairos, which up to now I had merely thought of as the high-school retreat that my high school, along with many Catholic high schools, has seniors participate in. At my school, it wasn’t mandatory, so I never went. I hear that it can be quite life-changing and that it’s very touchy-feely. There insider motto is “Live the Fourth.” Since the Kairos retreat is three days long, I have been told that “the Fourth” means the fourth day, which basically means that one’s life should be lived as an extension of the Kairos experience.
· Read more… - 2007 Jun 15
- lord of the universe?
I also wonder where exactly my last name comes from. It’s a really unique name, and pretty much anyone who has it is almost certainly related to me somehow.
· Read more… - 2007 Jun 29
- the etymology of "gorked" and its cognates
Gorked is a word we like to throw around the emergency department and the hospital wards from time to time. In our general usage of the term, it basically means someone who is non-responsive, generally comatose (as opposed to mere altered mental status/delirium.) In some ways, it has an iatrogenic connotation to it, as it is sometimes used to describe patients who are inadvertantly rendered unresponsive due to excessive dosing of medication (although the more common terminology for this condition is snowed) or unresponsive because of a bad clinical outcome, such as massive stroke, brain hemorrhage, post-code brain (so called because this is what tends to happen when they call a code blue [cardiac and/or respiratory arrest emergency] and it takes more than 8 minutes to get you back, meaning that there is bigtime hypoxic-ischemic brain injury—no oxygen or bloodflow to the brain), or post-bypass brain (which is usually a lot more subtle, and usually has psychiatric qualities to it, but occasionally, someone who gets a coronary artery bypass graft—abbreviated as CABG and affectionately pronounced like “cabbage”—gets gorked.)
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August
- 2007 Aug 10
- the flossy flossy
Interesting. You may have heard the song ”Glamorous” by Fergie. The chorus has been driving me crazy:
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September
- 2007 Sep 4
- whispers of the gods
On panspermia and ancient aliens (at least in science fiction.)
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October
- 2007 Oct 5
- inconceivable!
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
· Read more… - 2007 Oct 7
- infixation
Neil Gaiman brings up the linguistic phenomenon of infixation, which is extremely rare in English, but is part and parcel of Austronesian languages.
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November
- 2007 Nov 23
- false etymologies
I have a thing for trying to discover the underlying etymologies of proper names. It becomes a fun game to generate names in imaginary languages that have similar meanings to names in real languages.
· Read more… - 2007 Nov 29
- coping with existence
Not sure what exactly changed this evening, after I gave up with lying in bed, weary, defeated. Maybe it was the odd impulse to write this line on a random scrap of paper:
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2008
March
- 2008 Mar 14
- semantics of time
I must admit that I like the fact that the sun is still up when I come home from work. It gives me the illusion that my time off from work is much longer than it actually is. Waking up in the morning sucks big time, though. Nothing makes you want to pull the covers back over your head than waking up to your alarm clock, looking outside the window, and finding it pitch black.
· Read more… - 2008 Mar 31
- swears like a sailor
Apparently, I'm a foul-mouthed bastard.
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May
- 2008 May 15
- infectious diseases and other medical conditions as a source of band names
While I was writing a consult note today, I was highly amused by the word "mucormycosis." There is something lyrical about it's dactyl-trochee stress pattern. "Myxomatosis" (which features most prominently as a Radiohead track from Hail to the Thief) is also a dactyl-trochee combo.
· Read more… - 2008 May 25
- chart abbreviation or not?
July
- 2008 Jul 13
- software release terminology
People shouldn't be mucking around with software release terminology. I just read Rob Diana's rant about the abuse of the term "beta" on the Internet on Mashable! and the terms really shouldn't be as fungible as that.
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2009
February
- 2009 Feb 25
- stat
Just came across a tumblr entry which demonstrates a novel (to me, at least) use of the word "stat".
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April
- 2009 Apr 1
- twitter vs tweet: there's more than one way to do it
transitive verb 1. to utter in chirps or twitters 2. to shake rapidly back and forth :
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2010
April
- 2010 Apr 20
- grammar nazis
You may scoff at this as being mere political correctness, but I say it's about precision.
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2015
July
- 2015 Jul 30
- Google ngrams
In an effort to become even less prescriptivist and even more descriptivist, I've decided to stop using dictionaries to determine proper spelling and have started relying on Google ngrams usage data instead.
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August
- 2015 Aug 7
- Random Welsh Word of the Day
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- 2015 Aug 17
- Tangents of Ice and Fire
So I've been having tooth pain for a couple of weeks now, and I was worried I had a cavity, so I went to see the dentist.
· Read more… - 2015 Aug 17
- On the Etymology of Fail
So I'm still converting over old blog posts to Jekyll and I've been tagging them, and it occurred to me that using the tag #epic fail is probably anachronistic, at least in older entries.
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October
- 2015 Oct 1
- Gotham
Referenced in an old post about DC Comics geography
· Read more… - 2015 Oct 20
- Fake Grammar Rules
I don't know/remember who to blame for teaching me the bogus rule that you can't use "whose" to refer to nouns that are not people, but I find myself constantly second-guessing myself when I do use it.
· Read more… - 2015 Oct 27
- Hotline Bling
So by now everyone knows what the noun "bling" means.
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2016
January
- 2016 Jan 14
- Cry Havoc
So in the course of converting some of my old blog posts to YAML+Markdown (and adding more tags to them) I found myself wondering what the adjectival form of "havoc" would be.
· Read more… - 2016 Jan 14
- Polymorphism
It occurs to me that people who disdain nouning verbs and verbing nouns are probably the same people who insist on explicit static typing.
· Read more… - 2016 Jan 14
- Etymology of Element Names
Reading about Poul Anderson's treatise on atomic theory written entirely in Anglo-Saxon-derived words (entitled "Uncleftish Beholding") got me thinking about the etymology of various element names.
· Read more… - 2016 Jan 21
- Super Earth
I was unaware that "super-earth" has a specific (although still informal) definition, roughly, a planet with a mass greater than Earth but less than a gas giant in the Sol system (i.e., less massive than Uranus or Neptune).
· Read more… - 2016 Jan 25
- The Persistence of Ephemerality
I am currently on a quest to rescue all the old comments to old posts on my old blog.
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February
- 2016 Feb 25
- Eleven and Twelve
It's interesting how different languages count from 11 to 20.
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March
- 2016 Mar 9
- Tongvan Language
I was looking for the Tongvan (also known as Gabrielino) word for coyote (it's
‘iitar
) and ran across this article: · Read more… - 2016 Mar 11
- The Importance of Orthography
If you're going to be a bank robber when you grow up, you still need to learn how to spell correctly.
· Read more… - 2016 Mar 30
- Errant Pedantry
Pointing out typos and grammatical errors is basically a derailment tactic. If you didn't understand the text, then ask for clarification, but disqualifying an argument that you clearly understood because it has a typo or grammatical error in it really is kind of assholish.
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April
- 2016 Apr 14
- Kilig
Another Tagalog word makes it into the OED!
· Read more… - 2016 Apr 21
- Dictionary Definitions and Disingenuity
Dictionary definitions are the last refuge of scoundrels.
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May
- 2016 May 10
- Utopia
Since "utopia" literally means "nowhere", isn't every place that actually exists by definition not a utopia?
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July
- 2016 Jul 19
- Unamazing
I can't explain it, but I never really liked the word "amazing". It's even worse now that I can't tell when people are using it to denote something wonderful vs. something bewilderingly awful.
· Read more… - 2016 Jul 23
- High as the Expectations
The radio has been playing the shit out of "Too Good" by Drake featuring Rihanna.
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