Preoccupations

Cerebrotonic

No sooner do I post about Auden and include 'The Fall of Rome' ('Cerebrotonic Cato may / Extol the Ancient Disciplines'), than up pops 'cerebrotonic' in another blog post.

'Cerebrotonic' sounds like an Auden coinage, but isn't. Here's the OED:

A. adj. Designating or characteristic of a type of personality which is introverted, intellectual, and emotionally restrained, classified by Sheldon as being associated with an ECTOMORPHIC physique. B. n. One having this type of personality. So cerebrotonia (-tn), cerebrotonic personality or characteristics.

1937 A. HUXLEY Ends & Means xi. 165 Dr. William Sheldon, whose classification [of types of human beings] in terms of somatotonic, viscerotonic and cerebrotonic I shall use. Ibid. xii. 193 The cerebrotonic is not such a ‘good mixer’ as the viscerotonic. 1940 W. H. SHELDON Var. Human Physique 8 In the economy of the cerebrotonic individual the sensory and central nervous systems appear to play dominant roles. 1945 A. HUXLEY Let. 2 Apr. (1969) 517 There was just enough of the somatotonic in his..cerebrotonic make-up to make him regret his cerebrotonia. 1950 Themes & Var. i. 121 Too secretively the introvert, too inhibitedly cerebrotonic, to be willing to take the risk of ‘giving himself away’. 1951 AUDEN Nones (1952) 28 Cerebrotonic Cato may Extol the Ancient Disciplines. 1954 R. FULLER Fantasy & Fugue iv. 75 You..unfortunately incline to the cerebrotonic ectomorphyou worry too much, you're too good looking, and you can't abandon yourself happily to booze.

The other blog post? Momus' Celebrating diversity means measuring difference. Momus writes about William Sheldon:

I discovered his writings when I was 20, and trying to understand my own problems and potentialities better. Sheldon proposed what seems at first like a very simple way to measure body types. He isolates three basic components: fatness, muscularity and thinness, which he calls endomorphy, mesomorphy and ectomorphy. … "Ectomorphy means linearity, fragility, flatness of the chest, and delicacy throughout the body," he wrote. "We find a relatively scant development of both the visceral and the somatic structures. The ectomorph has long, slender, poorly muscled extremities with delicate pipe-stem bones, and he has, relative to his mass, the greatest surface area and therefore the greatest sensory exposure to the outside world. He is thus in one sense overly exposed and naked to the world." …

I'm a classic ectomorph, which means that by temperament I'm a cerebrotonic. In ectomorph-cerebrotonics, "the sensory-receptor properties are well developed. As a consequence however the central nervous system (CNS) is soon overloaded and rapidly tires. The cerebrotonic has the gift of concentrating his attention on the external world as well as on his internal world. His vigilance and autonomic reactivity make him behave in an inhibited and uncertain way: introverted behaviour. He has problems with expressing his feelings and with establishing social relationships, and can very well bear to be alone. The elementary strategies of coping with life are perception, reconnaissance and vigilance, cognition and anticipation, and a certain amount of privacy." …

Personally, I like people who structure the world boldly, especially if their structurations ring true. I don't take any structuration as holy writ, though -- I like to play with them, snap them together and pull them apart. But I also like it when structurations make for lovely poetry. The way Sheldon describes the ectomorph has a behaviourist beauty, a 1940s severity. He has "a relative predominance of skin and its appendages, which includes the nervous system; lean, fragile, delicate body; small delicate bones; droopy shoulders; small face, sharp nose, fine hair; relatively little body mass and relatively great surface area".

"The cerebrotonic may be literate or illiterate," says Sheldon, "may be trained or untrained in the conventional intellectual exercises of his milieu, may be an avid reader or may never read a book, may be a scholastic genius or may have failed in every sort of schooling. He may be a dreamer, a poet, philosopher, recluse, or builder of utopias and of abstract psychologies. He may be a schizoid personality, a religious fanatic, an ascetic, a patient martyr, or a contentious crusader. All these things depend upon the intermixture of other components, upon other variables in the symphony, and also upon the environmental pressures to which the personality has been exposed. The essential characteristic of the cerebrotonic is his acuteness of attention. The other two major functions, the direct visceral and the direct somatic functions, are subjugated, held in check, and rendered secondary. The cerebrotonic eats and exercises to attend."

I know next to nothing about Sheldon and need to go back to Momus and read it all again. John Fuller, in his W H Auden: A Commentary, says only this apropos 'The Fall of Rome' and 'cerebrotonic':

Stanza 4: Auden was inclined to prefer the endomorphic type to either the ectomorphic ('Cerebrotonic Cato') or the mesomorphic ('muscle-bound Marines'). The typology is from W H Sheldon.

Momus, quoting Sheldon on endomorphs and mesomorphs:

For comparison, in endomorphs "The body is rounded and exhibits a central concentration of mass. The trunk predominates over the limbs, the abdomen over the thorax, and the proximal segments of the limbs predominate over the distal segments. The bones are gracile and the muscle system is poorly developed. Muscle relief and bone projections are absent. The body displays a smoothness of contour owing to subcutaneous padding. The head is large and spherical, the face is wide with full cheeks. The neck is frequently short and forms in side view an obtuse angle with the chin. The shoulders are high and rounded. The trunk is relatively long and straight, the chest is wide at the base. The limbs are comparatively short and tapering with small hands and feet."

"When mesomorphy predominates, the body is sturdy, hard and firm. The bones are large and heavy, the muscles well-developed, massive and prominent. The heavily muscled thorax predominates over the abdomen. The proximal and distal segments of the limbs are evenly proportioned. The bones of the head are heavy. The face is large in relation to the cranial part of the head. Massive cheekbones and square jaws are the rule. The arms and legs are uniformly massive and muscular, strongly built knees, massive wrists."

Ah, classificatory schema: they have their own fascination …

Oh, and one other gem from Momus:

Interestingly, Sheldon met and befriended Aldous Huxley during a residence at a writers and artists' refuge at Dartington Hall in Devon, England. Huxley also recognized himself as an ectomorph and cerebrotonic, and saw it as a limitation …

(Have another look at the clip from the OED above. Wouldn't it be interesting if we could overlay the OED with transfers of social and intellectual relationships? … Hey OUP, open up the OED!) You'll have to click through to iMomus to hear what Huxley had to say.

Technorati tags: William Sheldon, Shedlon, Momus, iMomus, Auden, W H Auden

Friends and friends

Oops ... John Naughton:

I’ve been writing something about the MySpace phenomenon and decided that I’d better sign up. I was then confronted by this rather depressing analysis of my condition! Zero friends! The thing that’s really weird about MySpace is its concept of what constitutes a ‘friend’ — which seems to be anyone whose profile takes your fancy. It’s much closer to the teenager idea of friendship than the adult concept. Certainly, it isn’t anyone you actually know. For me, a friendship denotes a serious relationship that’s been built up over time (otherwise it’s an acquaintanceship). So it’s unsettling to see fiftysomethings on MySpace — who really ought to know better — using ‘friend’ in the shallow, teen sense of the word.

Sorry, John, but I think that's both patronising and just a little out of touch. Here's danah boyd:

Why does everyone assume that Friends equals friends? Here are some of the main reasons why people friend other people on social network sites:

1. Because they are actual friends 
2. To be nice to people that you barely know (like the folks in your class) 
3. To keep face with people that they know but don't care for 
4. As a way of acknowledging someone you think is interesting 
5. To look cool because that link has status 
6. (MySpace) To keep up with someone's blog posts, bulletins or other such bits 
7. (MySpace) To circumnavigate the "private" problem that you were forced to use cuz of your parents 
8. As a substitute for bookmarking or favoriting 
9. Cuz it's easier to say yes than no if you're not sure

The term "friend" in the context of social network sites is not the same as in everyday vernacular. And people know this. This is why they used to say fun things like "Well, she's my Friendster but not my friend." (The language doesn't work out so cleanly on Facebook.) The term is terrible but it means something different on these sites; it's not to anyone's advantage to assume that the rules of friendship apply to Friendship.

Teenagers know a lot about friendship and I don't think they're confused either by the difference between the friendships they're growing (over time!) and friendships that have been grown over many years, or by the way 'friend' is used online. Where they see adults with good, lifelong friendships, then that's what they look forward to growing, too.

If the adults are confused … But I suspect many adults have also worked out that 'friends' online isn't quite the same as 'friends' offline.

Of course, there is a big issue here concerning how social software differentiates between "real" friends and acquaintances. That theme has cropped up this summer in postings on Vox: Don (Park) has said there that 'the  Privacy categories need more work' (ie, for whom am I posting this?), and

I think Vox will eventually need to provide more means for users to organize their neighborhood into cliques without exposing embarassing details to neighbors. By embarrasing, I mean I don't (want) a distant friend to know that I consider him to be a distant friend.

This is true generally of social software — if we want it to conform to the patterns of offline behaviour. On the other hand, I've found it challengingly discomforting and also liberating to have my nice little sense of 'private self' shaken about a bit …

Technorati tags: MySpace, friends, teenagers, danah boyd

Paris burning

Good coverage in this morning's Observer of the last 10 days of civil unrest in Paris and elsewhere in France. With a son studying in Paris (UPX), I'm following this with more attention than I would anyway:

• Violence sweeps France in 10th night of riots
• The week Paris burned: 'The riots that have convulsed France over the past week have raised huge questions over the country's ability to integrate its Muslim population - concerns which have implications for the rest of Europe.'
• An outcast generation: 'it is important not to confuse actions by youths from poor, largely immigrant neighbourhoods with ordinary delinquency. These riots show evidence of social protest. In one group of five youths questioned about the riots, three had left school at 15 or 16 with no qualifications and against the wishes and knowledge of their family. Another was an absentee father, while the last had a criminal record for abusing the police and handling stolen goods. None envisaged any employment beyond a job at McDonald's'.
• 'We're not germs or louts. Sarkozy should've said sorry'

Some years ago, we flew to Paris for a weekend break. Usually we take the Eurostar, which whisks you in to the Gare du Nord. Arrive at Charles de Gaulle airport and take a taxi or bus, and you see another Paris altogether. I wrote recently of how parts of Liverpool shocked me, but the great sink estates, the 'ghettoised banlieues', of Paris are something else again. Aulnay-sous-Bois is a pretty name but a place of severe contrasts, pretty only in part (BBC: 'just a mile or so from where the menacing, dilapidated tower blocks have seen nightly clashes between angry youths armed with petrol bombs and the police, is the Vieux Pays … district of Aulnay which has the feel of picture-postcard France'). My Paris photos from February of this year are here. As you can see, I didn't get out into the suburbs, but last week Jean-Claude Irvoas 'got out of his car in Epinay-sur-Seine to take a photograph. As his wife and daughter sat in the car, Irvoas was attacked by three men, said to be Arabs from a nearby housing estate, and savagely beaten. He died in hospital later that evening'.

We stayed within what I now know Parisians call Paris intra-muros, a term with, we'd like to think, a distinctively medieval ring to it — the civilised world within the stockade, a place apart behind the barbican. An historical term. Not us, not now.

In France, '28,000 cars have been burnt on housing estates this year alone' (Observer).

Literary critics have often delighted in discovering in the changing valencies over time of a word's meaning, and in its etymology, significant meaning for the present. From the OED's entries:

Enough ironies there for a Sunday morning in rural Wiltshire …

Getting it

Doc Searls:

It's interesting to think about the container transport concepts behind "getting" as a synonym for understanding. When you "get" what somebody says, you're saying a sum of knowledge has been delivered to you, in a form you can use. "I gather..." makes a similar assumption, through the same deep unconscious metaphor: knowledge is a substance, a commodity: something you can harvest and ship.

Doc quotes Terry Heaton's The Matter of "Getting It":

… one no longer needs to own the infrastructure in order to publish, distribute or broadcast content. This is turning the media world upside-down, and most of the traditional media response, I'm sorry, falls under the category of "they just don't get it."

Doc:

Terry goes on to give a lot of good advice. Meanwhile, however, I think we have a deeper problem, and that's with the concept of knowledge as a solid substance. Think how much of what we talk about here is provisional. It's not thought out all the way. Often (usually?) it can't be delivered as a finished product because it isn't finished, and won't be for a long time. Much of what we do is pass along interesting information about subjects we won't be done talking about for a long time.

Tyson to become a missionary

'Slut': the Danish Mac OS led us to realise that it must mean 'quit' …

Play and learning

I am gathering my thoughts about that York University research project into grammar teaching (reported on last week) and have things to say, in this connection, about Philip's Pullman's contention (last Saturday's Guardian) that we English teachers are wasting our time "teaching" grammar.

In the meantime, here's MacNeice's wonderful, play-full poem, 'Snow':

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was Spawning snow and pink roses against it Soundlessly collateral and incompatible: World is suddener than we fancy it. World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion A tangerine and spit the pips and feel The drunkenness of things being various. And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes — On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands — There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

Text-messaging glossaries

Lingo Dxnre, a dictionary (pdf) of text-messaging shorthands.

Also: 10meters.com and Environmental Studies.

Texting & Literacy

Guardian Unlimited:

A study comparing the punctuation and spelling of 11- and 12-year-olds who use mobile phone text messaging with another group of non-texters conducting the same written tests found no significant differences between the two.

Both groups made some grammatical and spelling errors, and "text-speak" abbreviations and symbols did not find their way into the written English of youngsters used to texting.

According to the author of the research, the speech and language therapist Veenal Raval, the findings reflect children's ability to "code switch", or move between modes of communication - a trend familiar to parents whose offspring slip effortlessly between playground slang and visit-the-grandparents politeness.

But the study did find that the pupils familiar with text messaging wrote significantly less when asked to describe a picture or an event than those who did not use mobiles, potentially fuelling concerns that the quality and expressiveness of children's writing could be at risk even if their spelling is not.

Thinking in the body

And as if that weren't enough excitement for one night, there's this from Anne Galloway:

If Derrida were a verb, then that's what happened to Webb the other night. Brilliant. And now he's got a question:

"The way Derrida operates inside language instead of over it, I want a philosophy (or rather, a way of doing philosophy) which is of embodiment (embodiment of all kinds, including the nonhuman) instead of happening over it. Where can I find that? What can I do? Where can I start?"

My quick answer? There's always The Phenomenology of Perception. But The Body in Pain really made me think about when language fails, and Dangerous Emotions is a hell of a read. And, really, to do philosophy is to live life.

Double-Tongued Word Wrester

Grant Barrett, Editor and Administrator of Double-Tongued Word Wrester, writes:

Double-Tongued Word Wrester records words as they enter and leave the English language. It focuses upon slang, jargon, and other niche categories which include new, foreign, hybrid, archaic, obsolete, and rare words. Special attention is paid to the lending and borrowing of words between the various Englishes and other languages, even where a word is not a fully naturalized citizen in its new language.

I am an American lexicographer for Oxford University Press in New York City. This site is not sponsored by, affiliated with, nor otherwise related to Oxford University Press, which does not necessarily endorse, validate, nor approve its contents. In my work for OUP, I am also the project editor for the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, and editor of Hatchet Jobs & Hardball: The Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang. I am also webmaster for the American Dialect Society.

Double-Tongued Word Wrester has its own RSS feed.

Inuit

I need more time to explore this, but I was intrigued by the BBC News report today that 'Inuktitut speakers will soon be able to have their say online as the Canadian aboriginal language goes on the web. Browser settings on normal computers have not supported the language to date, but attavik.net has changed that. ... The technology behind attavik.net can be used for other syllabic languages such as Cree, Oji-cree and Korean.'

The Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (which means 'Inuit are united in Canada') is 'the national Inuit organisation in Canada, representing the four Inuit regions – Nunatsiavut (Labrador), Nunavik (northern Quebec), Nunavut, and the Inuvialuit region in the Northwest Territories'.
Attavik develops and supports solutions for Inuktitut computing and specifically Inuktitut on the Web. It takes its name from "Inuktitut Qarasaujalirinirmut Attavik" or "setting a foundation for Inuktitut computing". The Pirurvik Centre 'exists to enhance vitality and wellbeing within the sphere of Inuit culture and language. It is a unique company combining social needs with the flexibility of a business approach'. Finally, there is the Office of the Languages Commissioner of Nunavut website, dedicated to seeing that 'Nunavut's official languages - Inuktitut, English and French - thrive and grow stronger in our new territory'.

Derrida: a modern Socrates?

Writing in the LRB, Judith Butler argues that Derrida, like Socrates, found 'the question (to be) the most honest and arduous form of thought'.

'How do you finally respond to your life and to your name?' … That he asks the question is exemplary, perhaps even foundational, since it keeps the final meaning of that life and that name open. It prescribes a ceaseless task of honouring what cannot be possessed through knowledge, what in a life exceeds our grasp.

"Coming to terms" with Derrida will not be easy: he has coloured and affected so much of what we perceive, focusing so many of our perceptions and intuitions, challenging these and always rendering us restless just when we might have been tempted to stop.

… his work fundamentally changed the way in which we think about language, philosophy, aesthetics, painting, literature, communication, ethics and politics. His early work criticised the structuralist presumption that language could be described as a static set of rules, and he showed how those rules admitted of contingency and were dependent on a temporality that could undermine their efficacy. He wrote against philosophical positions that uncritically subscribed to 'totality' or 'systematicity' as values, without first considering the alternatives that were ruled out by that pre-emptive valorisation. He insisted that the act of reading extends from literary texts to films, to works of art, to popular culture, to political scenarios, and to philosophy itself. This notion of 'reading' insists that our ability to understand relies on our capacity to interpret signs. It also presupposes that signs come to signify in ways that no particular author or speaker can constrain in advance through intention. This does not mean that language always confounds our intentions, but only that our intentions do not fully govern everything we end up meaning by what we say and write.

Above all, I respond to what Judith Butler calls his insistence 'on the Other as one to whom an incalculable responsibility is owed, one who could never fully be 'captured' through social categories or designative names, one to whom a certain response is owed'.

This conception became the basis of his strenuous critique of apartheid in South Africa, his vigilant opposition to totalitarian regimes and forms of intellectual censorship, his theorisation of the nation-state beyond the hold of territoriality, his opposition to European racism, and his criticism of the discourse of 'terror' as it worked to increase governmental powers that undermine basic human rights. This political ethic can be seen at work in his defence of animal rights, in his opposition to the death penalty, and even in his queries about 'being' Jewish and what it means to offer hospitality to those of differing origins and language.

Derrida made clear in his short book on Walter Benjamin, The Force of Law (1994), that justice was a concept that was yet to come. This does not mean that we cannot expect instances of justice in this life, and it does not mean that justice will arrive for us only in another life. He was clear that there was no other life. It means only that, as an ideal, it is that towards which we strive, without end. Not to strive for justice because it cannot be fully realised would be as mistaken as believing that one has already arrived at justice and that the only task is to arm oneself adequately to fortify its regime. The first is a form of nihilism (which he opposed) and the second is dogmatism (which he opposed). Derrida kept us alive to the practice of criticism, understanding that social and political transformation was an incessant project, one that could not be relinquished, one that was coextensive with the becoming of life and the encounter with the Other, one that required a reading of the rules by means of which a polity constitutes itself through exclusion or effacement. How is justice done? What justice do we owe others? And what does it mean to act in the name of justice? These were questions that had to be asked regardless of the consequences, and this meant that they were often questions asked when established authorities wished that they were not.

I am also, though, moved by her opening paragraph on Derrida and mourning.

Rhetoric

This online rhetoric, provided by Dr. Gideon Burton of Brigham Young University, is a guide to the terms of classical and renaissance rhetoric. Sometimes it is difficult to see the forest (the big picture) of rhetoric because of the trees (the hundreds of Greek and Latin terms naming figures of speech, etc.) within rhetoric.

This site is intended to help beginners, as well as experts, make sense of rhetoric, both on the small scale (definitions and examples of specific terms) and on the large scale (the purposes of rhetoric, the patterns into which it has fallen historically as it has been taught and practiced for 2000+ years).

The Forest of Rhetoric (silva rhetoricae)

Jacques Derrida, 1930–2004

Jacques Derrida, father of Deconstructionism, has died (BBC News).

"Deconstruction" is the name given to a radical and wide-ranging development in the human sciences, especially philosophy and literary criticism, initiated by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in a series of highly influential books published in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including (in translation): Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena, Margins of Philosophy, and Dissemination. "Deconstruction," Derrida's coinage, has subsequently become synonymous with a particular method of textual analysis and philosophical argument involving the close reading of works of literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and anthropology to reveal logical or rhetorical incompatibilities between the explicit and implicit planes of discourse in a text and to demonstrate by means of a range of critical techniques how these incompatibilities are disguised and assimilated by the text. In one of its typical analytical procedures, a deconstructive reading focuses on binary oppositions within a text, first, to show how those oppositions are structured hierarchically; second, to overturn that hierarchy temporarily, as if to make the text say the opposite of what it appeared to say initially; and third, to displace and reassert both terms of the opposition within a nonhierarchical relationship of "difference." ...

The concept of difference is crucial to Derrida, who uses it to "deconstruct" Western philosophy, which he argues is founded on a theory of "presence," in which metaphysical notions such as truth, being, and reality are determined in their relation to an ontological center, essence, origin (archè), or end (telos) that represses absence and difference for the sake of metaphysical stability. The best-kept secret of Western metaphysics is thus the historical repression of difference through a philosophical vocabulary that favors presence in the form of voice, consciousness, and subjectivity. Derrida calls this philosophy "logocentrism" or "phonocentrism" in that it is based on a belief in a logos or phonè, a self-present word constituted not by difference but by presence (Writing and Difference 278-82). Logocentrism, for Derrida, represents Western culture's sentimental desire for a natural or Adamic language whose authority is guaranteed by a divine, transcendental signified. On the surface, language seems unwilling to face up to its human arbitrariness, yet on closer inspection it also appears to call attention to its differential structure: language at once posits and retracts its own desire for presence.

Derrida's deconstructive method proceeds by means of slow and ingeniously detailed close readings of texts, focusing on those points where a binary opposition (e.g., signifier/signified, presence/absence, nature/culture, literal/figural, outside/inside), a line of argument, or even a single word breaks down to reveal radical incongruities in the logic or rhetoric. Unlike ambiguity, irony, or paradox, these incompatibilities cannot be harmonized in the service of textual "unity" or "integrity," terms that for Derrida would be synonymous with "self-presence." Instead, the contradictions expose the text to the force of its own difference, its displacement from a univocal center of meaning. They show that what a text says and how it says it do not converge but simultaneously strive toward and defer convergence. Deconstruction always reveals difference within unity.

The John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism

English words and phrases

The 1500+ pages archived on this site have been written over the past eight years and several more are added every week. Most are about English words and phrases—what they mean, where they came from, how they have evolved, and the ways in which people sometimes misuse them. A few others concern issues of grammar, style and punctuation.

World Wide Words (link via 3quarksdaily)

English accents and dialects

Listen to the changing voice of England. Extracts from the Survey of English Dialects and the Millennium Memory Bank document how we spoke and lived in the 20th century.

British Library

History of the English Language

This site includes a list of links to on-line, worldwide resources for the study of the English language and its history. (Many of these links were discovered by others too numerous to list here! Thanks.) As well, my students are contributing to an anthology of historical texts representing different genres of English, and an encyclopedia on the cultural history of English.

Here, you can find links to other U of T enterprises. These include the Dictionary of Old English Project, Albert Masters' Medieval Manuscripts site, Ian Lancashire's electronic Renaissance Dictionaries, Jack Chambers' work on Canadian dialectology.

Old English Pages

Old English Pages is 'an encyclopedic compendium of resources for the study of Old English and Anglo-Saxon England. Part of ORB, the On-Line Reference Book for Medieval Studies.'

Moore's Law ... & palindromes

Peter Norvig, Director of Search Quality at Google, writes at Google Blog:

On the last palindromic date, 20:02 02/20 2002, I was, like any good computer geek, reminded of the palindrome that appears on page 170 of the computer manual Common Lisp, the Language (2nd ed):

A man, a plan, a canoe, pasta, heros, rajahs, a coloratura, maps, snipe, percale, macaroni, a gag, a banana bag, a tan, a tag, a banana bag again (or a camel), a crepe, pins, Spam, a rut, a Rolo, cash, a jar, sore hats, a peon, a canal -- Panama!

A quick search reminded me that the record for such a palindrome, established in 1984 by Dan Hoey, was only 543 words. I immediately thought I could (and therefore should) write a program to beat that. I wrote an algorithm that searches a dictionary and figured out how to put the words together in a sentence that starts with "A man, a plan" and ends with "a canal, Panama." It took me until 1:00 a.m. that night of 02/20 (and some minor bug-bashing the next day) to produce this result -- to my knowledge, still the longest palindromic sentence ever created.

So what, you may ask? Good question. I readily admit that my accomplishment has no practical social purpose or business application. But as a story that spans 18 years from Hoey's palindrome to mine, it has a moral about how it is becoming easier to do big things. Hoey is an excellent computer scientist, but he said he spent days writing a disk-based B-tree package for his program. I was saved all this, because a dictionary now fits in main memory and I could use straightforward binary search. Thank you, Moore's Law.

Also, I was saved from having to fiddle with the dictionary because of the public domain Moby dictionary. Thank you, Internet (and Grady Ward). The advances over the years let me combine a 100,000-word dictionary and a year-old laptop to break an 18-year old record. If you're a programmer, you could do it too: beat my record, or invent something new -- for example, can you invent a double-entendre law firm that is longer than Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe? With the resources available to you, you can accomplish a lot. Let me know what you come up with.

Common Errors in English Usage

Paul Brians' Common Errors in English Usage is available in book form but also online.

Ethnologue: languages of the world

Ethnologue.com is a place where you can conveniently find many resources to help you with your research of the world's languages. Ethnologue.com is owned by SIL International, a service organization that works with people who speak the world’s lesser-known languages.

Ethnologue language data: the language data you will find on this site came from the Ethnologue database. Once every four years we take a "snapshot" of the contents of the database and publish it along with language maps for many of the countries of the world. The most recently published edition of the Ethnologue database is Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 14th Edition. The language data from the fourteenth edition is presented in this searchable web version.

The Ethnologue database has been an active research project for more than fifty years. It is probably the most comprehensive listing of information about the currently known languages of the world. Thousands of linguists and other researchers all over the world rely on and have contributed to the Ethnologue database.

Europe's oldest language?

via Metafilter: 'Kalevi Wiik makes the argument that most of Europe may have spoken a proto Finno-Ugric language before the appearance of Indo-European speakers in the region. It's still controversial a few years after the paper was published (and likely always will be).'

Finnish is related only to Estonian, Hungarian and some minority languages whose speakers are scattered across the north of Russia. But, Kalevi Wiik argues, Finno-Ugrian languages may originally have been spoken by the whole of northern Europe.

The International House of Logorrhea

Welcome to the Phrontistery! Since 1996, I have compiled word lists on various topics in order to spread the joy of the English language. If you're looking for an online dictionary, a word list on a given topic, or the definitions to rare and unusual words, the Phrontistery is for you. Here, you will find my 14000-word dictionary of obscure and rare words, the International House of Logorrhea, as well as many topical word lists and other English language resources. I'm not affiliated with any dictionary company, nor do I have any professional training in lexicology or etymology. I'm just a man with an endless love of unusual words - the rarer, the better. If you're a regular visitor, click here for new and updated material.

Google calculator

Google is now offering so many services, it's hard to keep up. Here's one I've seen no-one at Radley using, the Google calculator:

To use Google's built-in calculator function, simply enter the calculation you'd like done into the search box and hit the Enter key or click on the Google Search button. The calculator can solve math problems involving basic arithmetic, more complicated math, units of measure and conversions, and physical constants. Try one of the sample expressions below, or refer to our complete instructions for help in building your own.

And for the non-mathematician (as well as the mathematician), there's always Google definitions:

To see a definition for a word or phrase, simply type the word "define," then a space, and then the word(s) you want defined. If Google has seen a definition for the word or phrase on the Web, it will retrieve that information and display it at the top of your search results.

Noam Chomsky

via Anil Dash, Noam Chomsky has started a weblog:

This blog will include brief comments on diverse topics of concern in our time. They will sometimes come from the ZNet sustainer forum system where Noam interacts through a forum of his own, sometimes from direct submissions, sometimes culled from mail and other outlets -- always from Noam Chomsky. (25.3.2004)

'Noam Chomsky is one of America's most prominent political dissidents. A renowned professor of linguistics at MIT, he has authored over 30 political books dissecting such issues as U.S. interventionism in the developing world, the political economy of human rights and the propaganda role of corporate media.' Here's a taste (also posted today) of what we can expect from his blog:

I spoke at a demo of about 20,000 people in Vancouver, very enthusiastic and engaged, and as far as I could tell, inspired to go on. Also to audiences of several thousands, which seemed the same. The pre-war demonstrations were without historical precedent, and surely important. The anniversary demos were also without precedent, and again surely will have an impact. Obviously no one expects the same turnout in a mass effort to prevent a war and in a later mass effort to compel the occupiers to grant Iraqis authentic sovereignty, along with a host of other highly significant concerns.

Those who participate should understand that demos are doubly significant: first as a message to the rulers, but more important, as one step in the far more important process of popular mobilization and activism that goes on day after day. No one expects a few dramatic mass actions to stop a juggernaut. But they do throw a wrench in the works, raising the costs of the next move. And if they continue and grow, they can halt its course, reverse the course, and dismantle it. But only if they serve the primary function of popular mobilization, bringing people together, energizing them, increasing their commitment to engage in the constant hard work of education and organizing, and undertaking appropriate actions that range from very local to international in scope.

AskOxford.com

Passionate about Language: ask the experts, better writing, world of words, games ...

Word Spy

'This Web site is devoted to lexpionage, the sleuthing of new words and phrases. These aren't "stunt words" or "sniglets," but new terms that have appeared multiple times in newspapers, magazines, books, Web sites and other recorded sources.'

frienemy (FREN.uh.mee) n. A friend who acts like an enemy; a fair-weather or untrustworthy friend.

wrap rage n. Extreme anger caused by product packaging that is difficult to open or manipulate. Also: wrapping rage.

latte factor (LAT.ay fak.tur) n. Seemingly insignificant daily purchases that add up to a significant amount of money over time.

lad lit n. A literary genre that features books written by men and focusing on young, male characters, particularly those who are selfish, insensitive, and afraid of commitment. Also: lad literature. —lad-lit adj.

retrosexual (ret.roh.SEK.shoo.ul) n. A man with an undeveloped aesthetic sense who spends as little time and money as possible on his appearance and lifestyle. Also: retro-sexual. —retrosexuality n.

Link via MobileWhack

'blog'

OED Word of the Day (12.2.2004)

intr. To write or maintain a weblog. Also: to read or browse through weblogs, esp. habitually.

1999 TBTF for 1999-08-30: Aibo Rampant in cistron.lists (Usenet newsgroup) 30 Aug., Blog..to run a Web log. 2000 Whole Earth Winter 54/1 To blog is to be part of a community of smart, tech-savvy people who want to be on the forefront of a new literary undertaking. 2001 Washington Post (Electronic ed.) 17 May, Journalist Jim Romenesko's clearinghouse for media gossip..showed how a personal blog could go pro when the Poynter Institute hired him..to blog full time.

Scripting News

Languages and the way we see the world

'Imagine how different politics would be if debates were conducted in Tariana, an Amazonian language in which it is a grammatical error to report something without saying how you found it out — as Alexandra Aikhenvald tells us its speakers tell her. Tariana is in danger of dying. With each such disappearance we risk losing insights into different ways of thinking.'

Why is it important to preserve these languages? First, to learn about how people communicate and how the human mind works. What are the categories that are important enough for people to express them in their languages? If these so-called "exotic" languages die, we'll be left with just one world view. This won't be very interesting, and we'll have lost a vast amount of information about human nature and how people perceive the world. Second, without their language and its structure, people are rootless. In recording it you are also getting down the stories and folklore. If those are lost a huge part of a people's history goes. These stories often have a common root that speaks of a real event, not just a myth. For example, every Amazonian society ever studied has a legend about a great flood.
What's your favourite example of a big difference between languages? In English I can tell my son: "Today I talked to Adrian", and he won't ask: "How do you know you talked to Adrian?" But in some languages, including Tariana, you always have to put a little suffix onto your verb saying how you know something — we call it "evidentiality". I would have to say: "I talked to Adrian, non-visual," if we had talked on the phone. And if my son told someone else, he would say: "She talked to Adrian, visual, reported." In that language, if you don't say how you know things, they think you are a liar. This is a very nice and useful tool. Imagine if, in the argument about weapons of mass destruction, people had had to say how they knew about whatever they said. That would have saved us quite a lot of breath.

New Scientist (Link via Boing Boing)

Strong prose, great style

'I'm afraid sheer opinionated and passionate prose, backed up by knowledge of the world, unorthodox views and uplifting prose that is simultaneously workmanlike and deliciously readable is a thing of the past in American journalism. Sameness, political correctness and sensitivity have all had their deleterious, neutering effect. Are there any exceptions?' Thus writes Miguel Cardoso in MetaFilter. Who are the great American prose stylists (judged by Cardoso's criteria)? He lists AJ Liebling, HL Mencken and EB White from the past, and can only suggest one name from today — Gore Vidal. An introduction to the latter can be found here and an article from The Washington Post on Liebling's The Earl of Louisiana here.

Some Gore Vidal-isms:

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
There is not one human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.

'I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse' (attributed to Charles V)

From The Old New Thing:

Some commenters deplored the inflectional complexity of the German language. I find the complexity reassuring rather than offputting, because it means that you always know where to find the functional parts of the sentence.
The lack of inflectional complexity in English is made up for by its much more complicated structural form. English word order is nuts:

"I rarely go."
"I don't go often."
"I don't usually go."

Why does the temporal adverb go in front of the verb in one case, but after it in another? And it comes in the middle of the verb in a third case!

(Okay, technically you can put the adverb in any of those places, but it sounds stilted or changes the meaning of the sentence subtly. Try explaining that to a student of English and they will merely shake their head in frustration.)

Or consider the placement of the verb particle in English (which corresponds to the German separable prefix):

"I picked it up."
"I picked up the ball."
"I picked the ball up."
but not "I picked up it."

Now put these two rules together and you find that seemingly minor changes to a sentence (changing one temporal adverb for another, replacing a noun with a pronoun) has a radical effect upon sentence structure.

"I rarely pick up the ball."
"I don't pick it up often."

The sentence structure goes from "subject-frequency-verb-particle-object" to "subject-verb-object-particle-frequency". How is anybody expected to learn this?

In German, the word order is predictable. All of these sentences would be structured as "subject-verb-object-frequency-prefix".

For added fun, add "carefully" to the sentence and watch everything moves around again: "I don't often pick it up carefully."

I find it ironic that when a Germanic language discards inflectional complexity (making it harder to see the relationship among the words in a sentence), it compounds the difficulty by adding greater structural complexity (making it even harder still to see the relationship among the words in a sentence).

Twain complained about all the exceptions. Actually I find that German is comparatively lacking in exceptions; the rules tend to be followed fairly uniformly. Twain complains about "parentheticals", but it is the parentheticals that make English so crazy. In German, the rule is very simple: "The adjective comes before the noun". Even if the adjective happens to be complicated. "The to-its-winter-home-flying goose."

Whereas in English, the rule is "The adjective comes before the noun, unless the adjective would sound better if it came after the noun." "The goose flying to its winter home" but "The slowly-flying goose". Try explaining that to your dad.

English, now that's where all the crazy exceptions hang out.

For example, the adverb can be moved to the front for emphasis:

"Sometimes I go."
"Usually I don't go."
but not: "Rarely I don't go."
but not: "Always I don't go."

"Rarely" is one of those exceptions that require inverted word order:

"Rarely do I go."

And "always" is an even weirder exception: You can't start a declarative sentence with it at all! (Though you can start imperatives with it. Go figure.)

Swedish used to be a more heavily inflected language, but it has been shedding its inflectional complexity over the centuries. (The number of genders reduced from three to two; special inflective forms for plurals