Multi-tasking millions

Incredibly cool discussion of the "captcha", and how it's being used not only to screen out non-human users, but to digitize old books and newspapers.  Seriously awesome. 

A piece of work, forsooth!

Adopt-a-Word

When I heard about the decisions made at Oxford [to retire certain words from the Oxford Concise Dictionary] my first reaction was “Forsooth!” Well, OK, not absolutely the first but among the first. Because “forsooth” is a spectacular case of an abandoned word. It now lives in the shadows, reduced from a common term meaning “truly” to an archaic fragment for jocular use only. It will remain in good dictionaries for centuries, if only because it’s part of enduring masterpieces by great writers (“Yes, forsooth, I will hold my tongue,” says the Fool to Goneril in King Lear). But its future as a way of expressing thoughts and ideas is non-existent.

Shouldn’t we have a category for endangered words? Perhaps we need a system of adopting words to keep them safe and well, the way people adopt favourite stretches of highway. We would sign up, promise to use our chosen words as often as possible and of course object when they are misused or threatened with abandonment.

~"When Words Die," by Robert Fulford (on nationalpost.com)

Oft-turned phrases

Using the Oxford English Corpus, encompassing about two billion words of 21st-century English, Hargraves found peculiar patterns in simple words like the verb “brush.” Everybody talks about brushing their teeth, but other possible companions, like “hair,” “strand,” “lock” and “lip,” appear up to 150 times more frequently in fiction than in any other genre. “Brush” appears near “lips” when two characters’ lips brush against each other or one’s lips brush against another’s cheek — as happens so often in novels. For the hair-related collocations, Hargraves concludes that “fictional characters cannot stop playing with their hair.”

“Bolting upright” and “drawing one’s breath” are two more fiction-specific turns of phrase revealed by the corpus.

~"The Mechanic Muse: The Jargon of the Novel, Computed," by Ben Zimmer (in The New York Times)

Presumably the study would also reveal the myriad barking dogs in the fictional distance. 

Spaced out

Monospaced type gives you text that looks "loose" and uneven; there's a lot of white space between characters and words, so it's more difficult to spot the spaces between sentences immediately. Hence the adoption of the two-space rule—on a typewriter, an extra space after a sentence makes text easier to read. Here's the thing, though: Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s. First electric typewriters and then computers began to offer people ways to create text using proportional fonts. Today nearly every font on your PC is proportional. (Courier is the one major exception.) Because we've all switched to modern fonts, adding two spaces after a period no longer enhances readability, typographers say. It diminishes it.

~"Space Invaders: Why You Should Never, Ever Use Two Spaces After a Period," by Farhad Manjoo

The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster

****

A delightful read, full of humor and whimsy. If you have a fondness for words, it is quite likely that you will enjoy this book. In his "Appreciation," Maurice Sendak compares The Phantom Tollbooth to Alice in Wonderland; he is not mistaken.

Also, Norton Juster's opinions to the contrary notwithstanding, the Chuck Jones movie is quite good.

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English, by John McWhorter

***

An interesting read. McWhorter obviously has pet interests in linguistic history--interests which his readers may not always share (see, e.g., his obsession with the moderately intriguing, but not necessarily fascinating 'meaningless do'). Still, he makes seemingly logical arguments for the influence of Celtic languages on English grammar, the "strip down" of the language as a result of the Vikings, and the possibility that Proto-German finds many of its roots in Phoenician.

In fact, in my opinion, he actually argues too persuasively. If the situation were really as obvious as he claims, how could anyone disagree with him? And yet, linguists do disagree with him--a fact which he freely admits and summarily dismisses. As a result, I felt that I was not being told the whole story; there must be some reason why all these other linguists rejected McWhorter's theories. Rather than convincing me of the soundness of his conclusions, he made me want to read what the opposition has to say.

A side note: I felt McWhorter was overly dismissive of Whorf's hypothesis. While correlation does not always imply causation, or tell us which direction the causal arrow points, McWhorter seems to deny not only causation but any correlation at all. But for whatever reason, languages and cultures sometimes do reflect similar attitudes (rf. Yiddish).

Verbing weirds language

Verbing—or denominalisation, as it is known to grammarians—is not new. Steven Pinker, in his book “The Language Instinct” (1994), points out that “easy conversion of nouns to verbs has been part of English grammar for centuries; it is one of the processes that make English English.” Elizabethan writers reveled in it: Shakespeare’s Duke of York, in “Richard II” (c1595), says “Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle”, and the 1552 Book of Common Prayer includes a service “commonly called the Churching of Women”. [...]

What makes these leaps so easy is that English, unlike other Indo-European languages, uses few inflections. The infinitive does not take a separate ending, so while in French the noun “action” has to become the verb “actionner”, English can use the same form for both. In German (apart from “essen” meaning “food” or “eat”), such words are virtually unknown; the same is true of Chinese—though the noun meaning “thunder” can be used as the verb “to shock”. In Arabic such formations are not found at all. [...]

Sometimes the results are ridiculous—notably when verbs are minted from nouns which were formed from verbs in the first place. To say “Let’s conference” instead of “Let’s confer”, “I’ll signature it” instead of “I’ll sign it”, or “they statemented” instead of “they stated”, makes the speaker seem either ignorant or pretentious. 

~"You've Been Verbed," by Anthony Gardner