Showing only Notes + Links tagged language
I’ve never commented on the NYT before; that was kind of fun.
This guy’s like: “Oh god, can I Like this photo of people dying in Haiti?” and all of the Old People on the NYT are freaked out and suggesting new words, such as APPRECIATE (Marco: “because it’s better to APPRECIATE people dying it Haiti, right?”), and RECOMMEND or INTERESTED (wonder what that icon would look like?).
Also this is my favorite comment:
1. You don’t have to click on the Like button.
2. Instead of clicking on the Like button, you could have written something in response to the article’s posting.
3. You could have just done nothing — no one really cares about your opinion on their Facebook page posting.
4. Who cares?
5. Get a real job.HAH. People are the worst/best.
Hah is right.
Hey, ‘Friend,’ Do You ‘Like’ My Sad Story? — NY Times
I recently “liked” a story about five people dying in an explosion in Connecticut.
I didn’t actually “like” the fact that five people had died in a terrible accident. Technically, I didn’t even “like” the story — I found the reporting and writing informative and the narrative engrossing, but not the contents of the piece. On Facebook, however, the only option I had to tell people I had read the article was to either add a comment or press the little “like” button that appears at the bottom of everyone’s status update.
The same act of “liking” something applies to the Web site Tumblr. Several weeks ago, when I visited a friend’s Tumblr Web site, at the top of the page sat a series of photos from the devastation in Haiti. There were images of dead bodies, of toppled buildings and of a child crying in the street. Yet below all of this there were a series of tiny icons with people’s names saying they “liked” this set of images.
You can also find these strange juxtapositions on Google Buzz and on the fan pages of Facebook.
Although these calls for approval have been around for a long time on social networks, they can still be jarring and confusing when this terminology is used in the wrong context.
(via infoneer-pulse)
This story sounded suspiciously wiki.” The obvious colloquial analogue would be “the story seemed fishy.” But note the distinction. A “fishy” story, like a “fish story,” is a farfetched story that is probably a lie or exaggeration that in some way redounds to the teller’s benefit. A “wiki” story, on the other hand, is a story, perhaps farfetched, that is probably backed up by no authority other than a Wikipedia article, or perhaps just a random web site. The only advantage it yields to the user is that one appears knowledgeable while having done only the absolute minimum amount of research.
I dunno… seems a little “wiki” « Snarkmarket
Sometimes I love new words.
Explaining URLs is Surprisingly Hard
All old people should be snail-mailed a paper copy of this by their credit card company to tape to their screen. The internet has its own strange language.
I listened to a moderately interesting Security Now episode from a couple weeks ago. The topic was explaining security best practices to non-techno people. Specifically, can you tell if a URL is safe to click on. Turns out parsing URLs is a suprisingly hard problem that nerds completely take for granted.
Try explaining the following rules about clicking links to your grandma:
- www.paypal.com (that one is good)
- www.paypal.ru (bad, see the TLD is .ru and not .com?)
- www.paypal.co.uk (good, oh yeah, .co.uk is sometimes good)
- www.paypal.com.evil.com (see the evil.com is at the end? you need to read URLs from right to left)
- www.evil.com/paypal.com (well, except in this case)
- www.paypa1.com (bad, but very hard to see)
- <a href=”evil.com”>www.paypal.com</a> (bad, can’t you see the url in the chrome when you mouseover?)
It’s so intuitive for techies to see the good and bad URLs but there’s just no simple set of rules for explaining it. I guess you could forward them the RFC…
De-naturalization” is my favorite new term of art; I’ve heard it from several historians lately. If it’s not obvious, it means taking things that seem natural, inevitable, or just like part of the firmament and revealing them for the wacky, lucky historical accidents that they are. Because everything is.
Robin Sloan - Records made of whale blubber « Snarkmarket
Commenter Firmuhment points out:
This is a great quote, although actually Robin is wrong, the term is “defamiliarization” and has been around for years and years; it was coined in 1917 by the Russian literary critic Victor Shklovsky.
I thought this was interesting, so I sent Firmuhment’s response to Robin for his consideration and he responded:
That’s interesting — I don’t know if there’s a difference, but I do know that my two historian friends specifically used “de-naturalization” — so now you’ve got me wondering if there’s a specific nuanced meaning for that term… or if they were just choosing a random word from a general set (e.g. sometimes you say “big,” sometimes you say “huge”) … hmm. Thanks for mentioning it!
As I’m thinking about it, I think there might be a difference. This is totally an uneducated guess, but: de-familiarization seems like the more general term. De-naturalization seems to specifically hinge on, well, history — and causality. De-naturalization has to do with whether something was INEVITABLE or not. So when you de-familiarize something, you make it seem strange again (and that works for stuff here & now, and for stuff from the past, etc.) When you de-naturalize it you make it seem UNLIKELY — or at least highly contingent. The result of a specific cocktail of historical factors. But, again: just a guess.
5 emotions you never knew you had →
(fiero, amae, nache, schadenfreude, ennui)
Language is the strangest thing.
(via jennilee)
Human-centered prepositions →
Buckminster Fuller on a more human-centered approach to using the prepositions “down” and “up”:
The words “down” and “up”, according to Fuller, are awkward in that they refer to a planar concept of direction inconsistent with human experience. The words “in” and “out” should be used instead, he argued, because they better describe an object’s relation to a gravitational center, the Earth. “I suggest to audiences that they say, “I’m going ‘outstairs’ and ‘instairs.’” At first that sounds strange to them; They all laugh about it. But if they try saying in and out for a few days in fun, they find themselves beginning to realize that they are indeed going inward and outward in respect to the center of Earth, which is our Spaceship Earth. And for the first time they begin to feel real “reality.”
I’m starting today.
(via bobulate)
God, Bucky was a genius!
Entropy of English →
Examples of simulated English:
Zeroth-order approximation: the symbols are independent and equiprobable. XFOML RXKHRJFFJUJ ZLPWCFWKCYJ FFJEYVKCQSGXYD QPAAMKBZAACIBZLHJQD
First-order approximation: the symbols are independent, but frequency of letters matches English text. OCRO HLI RGWR NMIELWIS EU LL NBNESBEYA TH EEI ALHENHTTPA OOBTTVA NAH BRL
Second-order approximation: the frequency of pairs of letters matches English text. ON IE ANTSOUTINYS ARE T INCTORE ST BE S DEAMY ACHIN D ILONASIVE TUCOOWE AT TEASONARE FUSO TIZIN ANDY TOBE SEACE CTISBE
Third-order approximation: the frequency of triplets of letters matches English text. IN NO IST LAT WHEY CRATICT FROURE BERS GROCID PONDENOME OF DEMONSTURES OF THE REPTAGIN IS REGOACTIONA OF CRE
Fourth-order approximation: the frequency of quadruplets of letters matches English text. THE GENERATED JOB PROVIDUAL BETTER TRAND THE DISPLAYED CODE ABOVERY UPONDULTS WELL THE CODERST IN THESTICAL IT DO HOCK BOTHE MERG INSTATES CONS ERATION NEVER ANY OF PUBLE AND TO THEORY EVENTIAL CALLEGAND TO ELAST BENERATED IN WITH PIES AS IS WITH THE
It’s fascinating to see how this grows increasingly realistic. I wonder how high-order you need to go before the result would be exclusively actual English words.
MonaTweeta →
This is Mona Lisa in poem form:
The whip is war
that easily comes
framing a wild mountain.Hello, you in the closet,
singing—posing carved peaks
of sound understanding.Upon a kitchen altar
visit a prostitute—
an ugly woman saint—
who decoys.Particularly
lonesome mountain valley,
your treasury: a dumb corpse and
funeral car, idle choke open.Reclassification:
exactly what you would call nervous.
Well, do not suggest recalcitrance
those who donated sad.The smell of a rugged frame
strikes cement block once.Where you?
Cape. Cylinder. Cry.
The poem is a result of the following circuitous method:
- Announce a competition where the goal is to write a program that can encode and decode images that fit in a 140-character tweet.
- Create an algorithm that reduces an image to a bunch of vectors and then encodes the result in a sequence of Chinese characters, in order to make room for more data.
- Run the algorithm on a jpg of the Mona Lisa.
- Run the resulting Chinese characters through Google Translate.
- Have a commenter freely interpret the resulting Chinese-to-English translation, with lots of poetic license.
The best thing about this, or worst, depending on your perspective, is that the resulting poem is as meaningful as most poetry, if not more.
If you interpret this poem, I’m sure you can find the plot of Dan Brown’s next book.
(via dailymeh)
From the previously linked to post on BLDGBLOG:
Quipu, to make a very long story short, is a way of braiding strands of animal hair or colored yarn together, using specific types of knot; these knots, arrayed in specific orders, thus communicate things to others – whether that’s accounting information or perhaps even cultural myths. It was a form of writing, in other words, although its words were 3D shapes. As a brief aside, the possible paranoias of a quipu translator have always seemed particularly stunning to me: for instance, someone over-immersed in the world of Andean knot-languages becomes convinced that, in the drooping symmetry of a basketball net or in the shoelaces of strangers walking past on the street, there might be written messages: epic poems, secret codes, unintended diary entries. Instead of Freudian dream-analysis, you perform quipu knot-analysis, even examining the micro-fibers of strangers’ clothing for hidden meanings
Fascinated, I did a quick search to find an image of Quipu. Above is one from Wikipedia. Amazing. I once saw a dying street light and was convinced it was Morse Code.
Mentornship
Liz Danzico turned a malapropism into a useful word. Mentornship, n.
Internship for the bright or advanced individual under guidance of a more senior practitioner. No making copies or coffee.
I love this idea, although I’ve never been a believer in interns fetching coffee or doing the shopping at Staples. The bright-but-junior person sees obvious educational benefits from the arrangement but so does the senior practitioner; they get high quality work and access to a sharp beginner’s mind. With the right people, the mentornship would likely morph into a collaboration before too long.
(via Kottke)
Mentornship sounds cheezy, but it’s exactly what I look for. And I learned a new word: Malapropism, a mistaken use of a word, e.g. “dance the flamingo”
Writing is physical for me. I always have the sense that the words are coming out of my body, not just my mind. I write in longhand, and the pen is scratching the words onto the page. I can even hear the words being written. So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I’m hearing in my head. It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be. That music is a physical force. Not only do you write books physically, but you read books physically as well. There’s something about the rhythms of language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies. An attentive reader is finding meanings in the book that can’t be articulated, finding them in his or her body. I think this is what so many people don’t understand about fiction. Poetry is supposed to be musical. But people don’t understand prose. They’re so used to reading journalism—clunky, functional sentences that convey factual information—facts, more than just the surfaces of things.The Believer - Jonathan Lethem talks with Paul Auster (via mikereview)
