language Archives - Page 7 of 9 - Ramblin' with Roger

October Rambling: Name That Tune

Me, uncharacteristically, if not ahead of the curve, at least with it.

Black and White Vernacular in American Sign Language.

Give this man a Silver Star; a future President got one.

I want to tell you something about the future. “It will either be: A mind-bendingly awesome; utopian landscape where all of Earth’s problems have been resolved and technology and humanity have evolved to create harmony. Or it might be a f@#$ed-up dystopian nightmare.” Gotta say that I’ve tired of the latter portrayal, but these movie clips are still interesting.

Erich Von Stroheim Radio Broadcast (1948) Talks about the Death of D.W. GRIFFITH, the early and controversial filmmaker.

Why film critic Roger Ebert won’t stick to his knitting, talking about (GASP!) politics when he “should” be limiting himself to movie reviews.

Sad that Alex Karras died. Followed him as an All-Pro defensive tackle for the Detroit Lions, on “Monday Night Football”, and as an actor in the movie Blazing Saddles.

Being hit on by a swinger couple. Actually, a lovely piece by Ken Levine on the phenomenon of storytelling. He also wrote a lovely tribute to the late NBC exec Brandon Tartikoff, which also explains why so much of today’s TV is lousy.

What IS the name of that mysterious music? YOU’VE heard it – it’s the thing playing HERE and HERE and even HERE. I’ve finally discovered from various sources that it’s called Mysterioso Pizzicato, a/k/a Here comes the villain. It was first published in the ‘Remick Folio of Moving Picture Music, vol. I,’ in 1914, compiled and edited by one J. Bodewalt Lampe, who may (or may not) have written it. The tune was used as background to scary scenes in silent movies.

The Beethoven Mystery: Why haven’t we figured out his Ninth Symphony yet?

“Perfessor” Bill Edward: Professional Purveyor of Pianistic Pyrotechnics.

The website for CBS Television City in Hollywood; fascinating history, which you can also see in this video.

Mark Evanier’s mother died at the age of 90. “Someone… might think, ‘Hey, smoking can’t be that bad if Mark’s mother smoked 75 years and made it to age 90.’ Yeah, but for about the last fifteen, she could barely walk and barely see.” He’s been writing a series called Tales of My Mother. The fourth one, about her and the TV show LA Law and Jimmy Smits, is a particular hoot, but they are all worth reading.

Glenn Fleishman describes what it’s like to be on the game show Jeopardy! Here are Jeopardy’s most memorable moments, including what happens if a certain person says something.

Ray Bradbury matches wits with Groucho Marx.

Charles Darwin And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.

Every Infomercial Ever.

Matching birthday probabilities and Johnny Carson.

Let’s look at the rise of Gangham Style and how media events and social networks can trigger massive sharing. I noticed that I blogged about it on August 15, which put me, uncharacteristically, if not ahead of the curve, at least with it. Then, of course, I find some real life Simpsons opening from June, and I realize, nope, still behind the curve.

Chuck Miller explains why 45s have big holes in the center, while vinyl albums have small holes.

The Marshmallow Test.

25 Foods You’ll Never Be Able To Eat Again. I never had most of these, though I did try Apple Newtons a few times.

Jaquandor writes about the superhero cat named Little Bootie; oh, and technology. Also, a pie to the face; no, I don’t quite understand, but it seems to make him SO happy.

FROM MY OTHER BLOGS

Robots shut down live broadcast of scfi award ceremony.

An unwitting participant in an international travesty.

RFID; the F does NOT mean freedom, or foolproof. This one got excerpted in the newspaper.

What if the technology went away?

Scanning whole books is fair use?

Obviously, we WERE a Christian nation. Ask a Native American.

GOOGLE ALERTS

In his attempt to compose a soundtrack to a novel — Lair Hunt’s The Impossibly — Roger Green, with the help of Mark Harris on saxophone and bass clarinet…

Roger Green and Associates, Inc.
Attribute importance is a key information need for marketers. An understanding of attribute importance can help explain physician prescribing, it can help identify …

P is for Portmanteau

One of the more unfortunate trends in portmanteau is called name-meshing.

A portmanteau word is a word that’s made up of 2 other words; for instance, motel from motor hotel, smog from smoke and fog, brunch between breakfast and lunch, chortle from chuckle and snort, malware from malicious software, or the previously mentioned gerrymander. Here are more portmanteau words.

From JEOPARDY! in 2001: “Lewis Carroll coined the term ‘portmanteau word’, explaining how “slithy” combines these 2 words.”

The question was slimy and lithe, which I didn’t get, and neither did any of the show’s contestants. Here are some easier ones from November 2011; questions at the end:

This 9-letter word for a procession of cars is often used to refer to that of the U.S. president
It’s the trademark name for the device used by police to measure a driver’s alcohol intake
It’s the code of online social behavior
It’s the smallest element of an image on a computer monitor
*This word refers to the visible path in the wake of an aircraft

As Wikipedia notes, “A portmanteau word typically combines both sounds and meanings.” It defines the word Wikipedia as a portmanteau, since “it combines the word ‘wiki’ with the word ‘encyclopedia’.”

Lots of place names are portmanteau words: Texarkana on the Texas-Arkansas border; Tanzania is the joining of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, e.g.

It seems that portmanteaux are becoming more popular:
Chief ACTA Eurocrat quits in disgust at lack of democratic fundamentals in global copyright treaty – Eurocrat from European bureaucrat
Fracktivists from hydrofracking (itself a portmanteau) and activists.
Mutterance – from muttering utterance

There are even portmanteau generators out there. The roots of a good portmanteau should be clear, even if it’s newly minted.

One of the more unfortunate trends in portmanteau is called name-meshing, which comes when two famous people’s names get merged, such as Billary (Bill and Hillary Clinton), Brangelina (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie) or TomKat (Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes). As often as not, the newer combos are lost on me.

The questions to those JEOPARDY! answers. What are: motorcade, Breathalyzer, netiquette, pixel, contrail.

ABC Wednesday – Round 10

Storage media creep, dismal future, and what if Lincoln had lived

Would Lincoln have run for a third term?

Jaquandor, Buffalo’s favorite blogger, who answered so many of my questions that you’d think I was from New Jersey, writes:
(Sorry to be so late in the game with these!)

You’re not late. One can ask me questions anytime, though I specifically request them periodically. Hey, if anyone else has questions, ask away.

To what degree are you tired of “storage media creep” — meaning, the progression from LPs to CDs to MP3s or from VHS to DVD to Blu-ray to streaming?

I am EXHAUSTED by it. I rant about it periodically, especially when it leads to what I like to call W.W.C.T.G.Y.T.B.N.C.O.S.Y.A.O. (the World Wide Conspiracy To Get You To Buy New Copies Of Stuff You Already Own). This is why I 1) still have an LP player, a CD player, a VHS player, DVD player, and 2) don’t jump on the next technology bandwagon very quickly. I’m not going to get all of those newfangled things, because of cost and some incompatibility with each other. I do have music in the cloud – I have no idea what that means – but it’s mostly stuff I got from Amazon for free or cheap (Lady Gaga’s last album for 99 cents.)

And what do you think of the increasing sense in which when we buy something, we’re not getting ownership of anything for our money, but merely permission to use it?

It angers me. One library vendor decided, after the fact, that library patrons can only take out an e-book, I believe, 28 times, because that’s some average book circulation number. Then the “book” would cease to operate. It’s also true of library databases, where what’s available seems to change from year to year, not to mention soaring prices.

To this day, I get peeved around Neil Diamond’s birthday. I bought his CD, 12 Songs. Then I discovered that SONY had placed essentially malware on its own disc which prevents me from copying an album that I own onto my iTunes or other devices; indeed, I believe that even playing the album on my computer could damage the computer. So I must play it on a CD player. I read, well after the fact, that there was a recall, but I keep the disc as a reminder of corporate copyright overreach.

When you think of the long-term problems we face, which one(s) bother you the most from the perspective of your daughter having to be part of the generation that deals with them?

The environment, clearly. I think that the melting ice caps will mean catastrophic weather. Corporations will dupe people into thinking that hydrofracking is a good thing until some disaster that will make the BP oil spill look like lint on a new pair of pants. I also expect that there will be major wars in the 21st century over potable water, more so than fuel.

We may have already passed the tipping points on global warming, say scientists at the Planet Under Pressure conference. Worse. on March 19, Tennessee became “the fourth state with a legal mandate to incorporate climate change denial as part of the science education curriculum when discussing climate change… The ALEC bill passed as H.B. 368 and S.B. 893, with 70-23 and 24-8 roll call votes, respectively.”

How different do you think the post-Civil War era would have been had Lincoln not been assassinated?

Wow, this is SUCH a good question, because it’s so TOTALLY UNANSWERABLE. Which won’t keep me from trying.

Like an assassinated President a century later, I believe that Lincoln was evolving on civil rights issues. I can only wonder how he would have dealt with the Radical Republicans that drove much of Reconstruction in his absence. Would there have been compensation to slave owners that remained loyal to the Union? Would blacks ex-slaves have gotten their 40 acres and a mule, which Lincoln supported but which Andrew Johnson rescinded? If these two things had taken place, might some of the racial animosity that exists in America today have been better ameliorated?

And here’s yet another question: would Lincoln have run for a third term? I always thought he felt his destiny to serve. It was only tradition, not the Constitution, which barred it at the time. And he may have proved more tolerable terms for Southern states to re-enter the union, without the seceding states feeling totally demoralized. I think it was the quick end to Reconstruction that helped allow for the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings, and the like.

And I just had a debate with someone online about this, so I’ll ask your opinion: how much does the common usage of the phrase ‘begging the question’ bother you? This to me leads to a lot of interesting issues regarding how languages evolve. Thoughts?

It doesn’t annoy me. It has an ancient construction that most people don’t understand. Maybe because it involves “proof” and “logic”, and those are not elements of modern discourse. Politicians beg the question, in the classic sense, all the time.

Its more modern meaning, “raising the question,” the more pedantic complain about, and I can be rather that way, but not on this. Language changes.

I remember that my good Internet friend Arthur was complaining about those folks in the Guy Fawkes masks not knowing who Fawkes really was, or what he stood for. Didn’t bother me.

Whereas I’m still bugged by it’s/its, et al. And the word among no longer seems to be in use at all. I learned that it was between two, but among three or more, yet between is now being used to the exclusion of among. I’ve pretty much given up that fight.

Jaquandor, this begs the question (modern sense): what was the nature of the debate you were having?

March Rambling: Accidental Racism, Verb Tenses and Marvel Movie Boycott

The Kind Of Intellectual

(From The Bad Chemicals; used by permission)

God is a second-rate fiction writer. “There are true stories, short stories, fabrications, misrepresentations, novels, insurance reports, family sagas, testimonials, memorials, fairy tales, myths and arguments, the point of all being some kind of narrative persuasion. It’s a kind of stubborn, human-nature way of insisting things be seen from my point of view because that particular point of view is more entertaining, or more valid, or funnier or more beneficial.”

“When the news broke that ‘This American Life’ was retracting the episode ‘Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory,’ Ira Glass made an effort to be clear that the show has verification standards, but that they fell short in this instance.”

The sequence of verb tenses: “You get to decide which verb forms to use based on your intentions and your understand of the language from reading, speaking, and hearing it.”

Dangerous Konymania, and that was before the story got really weird
On the other hand, Carl Weathers is not your enemy, plus more fun examples of accidental racism.

The Nazis’ rules for jazz performers.

The Othello rap (via HERE).

From Robert Reich: “America’s problem isn’t a breakdown in private morality. It’s a breakdown in public morality. What Americans do in their bedrooms is their own business. What corporate executives and Wall Street financiers do in boardrooms and executive suites affects all of us.”

Interesting piece on body image.

Albert Wood and the secrets of the funeral reveal

Advance review of the new John Grisham novel about baseball, Calico Joe.

Jim Shooter explains The Cory Doctorow Doctrine and Other Techno-Tectonic Upheavals HERE and HERE and HERE.

The Marvel Super-Heroes cartoon series (1966). And re: those superheroes, Steve Bissette on boycotting Marvel/Disney movies such as The Avengers because of the treatment of Jack Kirby HERE and HERE.

500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art

Military STD Posters, 1918-1945.

Do you want to know a secret? Secrecy News: a favorite source

A maker in Scotland has created an elaborate, steampunk-style, hand-cranked corkscrew. Rube Goldberg would be pleased.

Plane 101, verified by Snopes, no less.

Whatever that guy said? Do the other thing! Worf from Star Trek: The Next Generation gets the short end of EVERY conversation.

Here is a video of a person in a Darth Vader mask and cape, and a Utilikilt, riding a unicycle, playing Star Wars music on a bagpipe, in Portland, OR, which took you longer to read than the video runs. Plus, Seussical Siths.

In honor of Robert Sherman, who died this month, one of his and his brother Richard’s most famous compositions, It’s a Small World (via HERE). Oh, and some more Sherman Brothers songs.

Eddie discusses how he sells stuff on Craigslist, much of which could be used selling on eBay, e.g.

GOOGLE ALERTS

From Australia: ROGER Green may be a modest man, but for Vicki Doherty and many others in the Clarence Valley, the well-known Grafton musician is a living treasure.

Unemployment numbers down for sixth straight month: “Roger Green is also looking for something more. ‘I’m an ex-felon, it’s been pretty hard for me personally,’ Green said. He has a part-time gig now but wants to find something full-time. This morning, he’s feeling inspired.”

That darned American English!

I’m a sucker for Yiddish terms.

Right before the family went on vacation, what the Brits (and others) call holiday, this summer, I came across this cause celebre involving the differences between British English and that which is spoken across the pond in the United States.

From LynneGuist: I refrained from saying much about the BBC Magazine piece by Matthew Engel on ‘Why do some Americanisms annoy people?’, pointing readers instead to Mark Liberman/Language Log’s analysis of the so-called Americanisms identified by…Engel. She then analyzed at the previous link and here, that some of the idioms criticized in this BBC piece on Americanisms: 50 of your most noted examples, which was derived by “thousands of e-mails, aren’t even American English in origin.

1. When people ask for something, I often hear: “Can I get a…” It infuriates me. It’s not New York. It’s not the 90s. You’re not in Central Perk with the rest of the Friends. Really.”

In a different context, I know this from much earlier. “Can I get an amen?” from a black preacher. And after that, “Can I Get A Witness” by Marvin Gaye; it may be an Americanism, but hardly that new.

2. The next time someone tells you something is the “least worst option”, tell them that their most best option is learning grammar.

There may be two different issues here. If the objection is “Why not just say ‘best’, then it’s missing the point; it’s a Sophie’s Choice situation.
Whereas if it’s the two superlatives, I’m more sympathetic. One wouldn’t say ‘least ugliest’, one would say ‘least ugly’.

3. The phrase I’ve watched seep into the language (especially with broadcasters) is “two-time” and “three-time”. Have the words double, triple etc, been totally lost? Grammatically it makes no sense, and is even worse when spoken. My pulse rises every time I hear or see it. Which is not healthy as it’s almost every day now. Argh!

I don’t understand the British terms at all. Maybe because JEOPARDY uses ‘one-day champion’.

4. Using 24/7 rather than “24 hours, 7 days a week” or even just plain “all day, every day”.

Yeah, it bugged me early on, mostly because it was business speak. But frankly, it has fewer syllables and I’ve learned to live with it.

5. The one I can’t stand is “deplane”, meaning to disembark an aircraft, used in the phrase “you will be able to deplane momentarily”.

As one of Lynneguist’s correspondents noted, the term came out in 1923. My problem with it is that it reminds me, every time, of Fantasy Island’s Hervé Villechaize calling to Ricardo Montalbán, “De plane! De plane!”

6. To “wait on” instead of “wait for” when you’re not a waiter – once read a friend’s comment about being in a station waiting on a train. For him, the train had yet to arrive – I would have thought rather that it had got stuck at the station with the friend on board.

As Lynnequist noted, writers from Chaucer to George Eliot used ‘wait on’.

7. “It is what it is”. Pity us.

Do people still say that? I heard it a lot in the 1970s.

8. Dare I even mention the fanny pack?

What DOES this mean in Britain?

9. “Touch base” – it makes me cringe no end.

Some Brits particularly hated terms that seem to come from American sports.

10. Is “physicality” a real word?

“First noted in a book published in London in 1827.”

11. Transportation. What’s wrong with transport?

Different meanings to me.

12. The word I hate to hear is “leverage”. Pronounced lev-er-ig rather than lee-ver -ig. It seems to pop up in all aspects of work. And its meaning seems to have changed to “value added”.

Business jargon that most people hate.

13. Does nobody celebrate a birthday anymore, must we all “turn” 12 or 21 or 40? Even the Duke of Edinburgh was universally described as “turning” 90 last month. When did this begin? I quite like the phrase in itself, but it seems to have obliterated all other ways of speaking about birthdays.

Turning an age seems to suggest a calendar; I like it.

14. I caught myself saying “shopping cart” instead of shopping trolley today and was thoroughly disgusted with myself. I’ve never lived nor been to the US either.

A trolley suggests a much larger, motorized vehicle.

15. What kind of word is “gotten”? It makes me shudder.

“First OED citation, ca. 1380.”

16. “I’m good” for “I’m well”. That’ll do for a start.

They are not synonymous. “I’m good” has a non-medical slant.

17. “Bangs” for a fringe of the hair. Philip Hall, Nottingham

As noted, “bangs and fringe would be somewhat different styles. (Nuance!)”

18. Take-out rather than takeaway!

I hear takeaway, I think American football fumbles and interceptions.

19. I enjoy Americanisms. I suspect even some Americans use them in a tongue-in-cheek manner? “That statement was the height of ridiculosity”.

Absitively!

20. “A half hour” instead of “half an hour”.

“The OED has citations back to 1420.”

21. A “heads up”. For example, as in a business meeting. Lets do a “heads up” on this issue. I have never been sure of the meaning.

“To give someone a heads up is to give them a warning.” But the example given is bizarre to me.

22. Train station. My teeth are on edge every time I hear it. Who started it? Have they been punished?

I don’t understand the irritation, frankly.

23. To put a list into alphabetical order is to “alphabetize it” – horrid!

Ditto.

24. People that say “my bad” after a mistake. I don’t know how anything could be as annoying or lazy as that.

Yeah, it bugged me initially. But not so much now, and people seem to use it less, at least around me.

25. “Normalcy” instead of “normality” really irritates me.

“For a long time, it was considered non-standard in AmE too, but we’ve overcome that and it’s now nearly twice as common as normality.”

26. As an expat living in New Orleans, it is a very long list but “burglarize” is currently the word that I most dislike. Simon, New Orleans

Again, I fail to see the issue.

27. “Oftentimes” just makes me shiver with annoyance. Fortunately I’ve not noticed it over here yet.

“This is one of those things that’s an archaism in BrE (OED has it going back to the 14th century.” I don’t hear it myself, though people speaking poetically will use oftimes, which I rather like, actually.

28. Eaterie. To use a prevalent phrase, oh my gaad!

I’ve never seen that word spelled that way, and I’ve seen bad spelling.

29. I’m a Brit living in New York. The one that always gets me is the American need to use the word bi-weekly when fortnightly would suffice just fine.

Actually, I like the very British fortnightly, but only because I dislike biweekly. And I dislike it because it means both “Occurring once every two weeks” AND “Occurring twice a week”, which I find confusing.

30. I hate “alternate” for “alternative”. I don’t like this as they are two distinct words, both have distinct meanings and it’s useful to have both. Using alternate for alternative deprives us of a word.

“This is something that people complain about on both sides of the Atlantic.”

31. “Hike” a price. Does that mean people who do that are hikers? No, hikers are ramblers!

“Rambler [in the UK] is a very BrE word–one that Americans in the UK tend to find amusing, since we only use the verb to ramble with the older meaning…: ‘With reference to physical pursuits: to wander or travel in a free, unrestrained manner, without a definite aim or direction.'”

32. Going forward? If I do I shall collide with my keyboard.

“The OED’s first citations of ‘go forward’ to mean ‘make progress’ come from Sir Thomas More…”

33. I hate the word “deliverable”. Used by management consultants for something that they will “deliver” instead of a report.

It is ugly business jargon, I’d agree.

34. The most annoying Americanism is “a million and a half” when it is clearly one and a half million! A million and a half is 1,000,000.5 where one and a half million is 1,500,000.

“If I go somewhere for an hour and a half, I am going for an hour and a half an hour. If a horse wins by a length and a half, it wins by a length and a half a length. On the same analogy, a million and a half is a million and a half a million…” This seemed particularly fussy to me.

35. “Reach out to” when the correct word is “ask”. For example: “I will reach out to Kevin and let you know if that timing is convenient”. Reach out? Is Kevin stuck in quicksand? Is he teetering on the edge of a cliff? Can’t we just ask him?

True enough, though it does have a nuanced different meaning, to seek someone’s help and support. For instance, one might reach out to Turkey to support sanctions againsat Iran, e.g.

36. Surely the most irritating is: “You do the Math.” Math? It’s MATHS.

Here is the true, muddled story of maths, a term I had never heard.

37. I hate the fact I now have to order a “regular Americano”. What ever happened to a medium sized coffee?

I imagine this is more nationalism than anything else; not a term I’ve heard.

38. My worst horror is expiration, as in “expiration date”. Whatever happened to expiry?

“Expiration in the ‘ending of something that was meant to last a certain time’ sense goes back to the 1500s. First recorded use of expiry is in 1752. So, shouldn’t it be Whatever happened to expiration?”

39. My favourite one was where Americans claimed their family were “Scotch-Irish”. This of course it totally inaccurate, as even if it were possible, it would be “Scots” not “Scotch”, which as I pointed out is a drink.

“Scotch-Irish is an American term to refer to a particular immigrant group.”

40.I am increasingly hearing the phrase “that’ll learn you” – when the English (and more correct) version was always “that’ll teach you”. What a ridiculous phrase!

“If you express a ‘that’ll teach you’ message, you’re putting yourself above the person you were talking to. If you want to soften that grab for social/moral superiority, you make it a non-standard way of expressing it, in order to humorously put yourself down a (more BrE) peg/(more AmE) notch. To do this in an emphatic way, people who wouldn’t usually do so sometimes spell/pronounce this as that’ll larn ya.”

41. I really hate the phrase: “Where’s it at?” This is not more efficient or informative than “where is it?” It just sounds grotesque and is immensely irritating.

Seems that the former is talking informal English about what’s going on, whereas the latter is geographical. If the former is meant as geographical, then the preposition could be an irritant.

42. Period instead of full stop.

“Another case of Americans using a British cast-off. (Now-AmE) period for this . punctuation mark dates to the 16th century. The first record of (BrE) full stop is from just a few decades later, in 1600. It looks like both terms were introduced around the same time, and a different one won the battle for supremacy in different places.”
In any case “full stop” is what drivers should be coming to at red lights.

43. My pet hate is “winningest”, used in the context “Michael Schumacher is the winningest driver of all time”. I can feel the rage rising even using it here.

I wish the writer had offered an alternative. “Most winning” means something entirely different. “Winningest” doesn’t bother me.

44. My brother now uses the term “season” for a TV series. Hideous.

AmE uses the term season and series for different television-related meanings, but BrE doesn’t make that distinction at the lexical (word) level.

45. Having an “issue” instead of a “problem”.

“This has been much-maligned in AmE too, but I think it’s thrived because it’s less negative and confrontational to talk of having an issue with something rather than a problem with it.”
I thinks she’s exactly right. Issue seems softer.

46. I hear more and more people pronouncing the letter Z as “zee”. Not happy about it!

“Fear of ‘zee’ is a major reason that Sesame Street is no longer broadcast in most of the UK.” To-MAY-toe, to-MAH-toe.

47. To “medal” instead of to win a medal. Sets my teeth on edge with a vengeance.

“The noun already was a verb,” going back to Byron, not an American.

48. “I got it for free” is a pet hate. You got it “free” not “for free”. You don’t get something cheap and say you got it “for cheap” do you?

“Some of the early OED examples–from just 1887 and 1900–sound very old-fashioned, if not completely odd: a for-true doctor and goin’ to railroad him for fair.”

49. “Turn that off already”. Oh dear.

“Utterance-final already comes to AmE via Yiddish. It’s used to mark exasperation, and it does so very well.” I agree with that assessment, but I’m a sucker for Yiddish terms.

50. “I could care less” instead of “I couldn’t care less” has to be the worst. Opposite meaning of what they’re trying to say.

I always took it as ironic, but I know it bugs a lot of people.