Someone (okay, okay, it was Bill Poser) let stodgy prescriptivism out into Language Log:

Capitalization is part of the social convention for writing English. Like the alphabet, it isn't something that the writing system makes available for manipulation by individual users.

Ah, uh, er? I manipulate standard capitalization ALL THE TIME. Alphåbets, too, but that's only to be silly; nonstandard capitalization serves a variety of legitimate purposes. If it's not YELLING or Sniffing Distinction, it's a sort of facetious code-switching into sCriPt KiDd1e or eXtreme Marketing iDroid. Decry Apple's branding strategy all you want, it should be clear that capitalization is mutable in a way that alphabets and word order are not.

Responding to, say, bell hooks's argument against the orthographic standard with a snippy insistence that individuals simply must adhere to the conventions... isn't that a breach of a linguist's professional ethics? In any case, Wolfangel is quite right, it's a discourtesy.

And for the record: Here on the Internets I usually sign my name in lowercase out of pure typographical whimsy. I certainly don't care if you wish to capitalize it.

The Whisper of Elitist Whorfianism Is an Awful Sound, particularly when the "original" meaning you defend is incorrect; particularly particularly when the incorrect meaning you're defending as the Last Noble Carrier of Such Meaning in Human Thought is already covered by another, equally apt phrase; particularly particularly particularly when your Chicken Little language schtick has been so overdone that you must defend yourself against strawmen springing up from its corpse.

The L.A. Times needs some funnier commentators, stat.

Also, the first person to develop a convincing folk etymology that relates bunyips
to Paul Bunyan wins a prize!

Here's something I wish my boss would read. Our corporate house style is incredibly un-stylish.

Sometimes I rebel by putting internal documents in Helvetica instead of Arial.

[thanks to G for the link]

I have in front of me a Map of Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas and it's Subdivisions and Improvements - emphasis mine, but the apostrophe belongs to A.C. Pillsbury, civil engineer, August 2020.

Historical perspective for my your next apostrophe rant, free of charge.

Was Congress really expecting a serious court challenge based on the distinction between "ass hole" the two-word phrase, and "asshole" the compound word? They're given distinct entries in the
list of words you can't broadcast. I'm surprised the bill didn't also address the smart-alecky use of indifferently enunciated arse-based equivalents. Some Representative's aide is clearly shirking his or her thesaurus-work.

Swear-list compiler, have you no patriotism?

(props to G, who also has a nice picture of a monkey for us)

The title of this post comes from my anthropology reading (Harvard has conveniently put it online) as an example of English syntactical ambiguity. The authors claim it has "at least three" meanings, and translate two of them into Italian... the third is left as an exercise to the reader.

Perhaps I've been addled by a thick stack of absurd people claiming differences in color-processing among blue-eyed vs. brown-eyed Missouri freshmen, or perhaps I'm a closet Italian, but I can't find the third meaning. Help?

It's interesting that examples of ambiguity in these sorts of papers are often drawn from newspaper headlines. After all, the headline is a young thing, barely as old as the printing press, and subject to constraints no sensible English speaker would obey in other circumstances. Judging English from headlines is equivalent to feeding Chinese speakers a poorly-translated story and concluding that Chinese can't handle counterfactual reasoning (which happened elsewhere in the reading packet).

But enough of that, I've finished the readings, so I've got a midterm to take. Cheerio.

Between a Canadian flatmate, a South African study partner and a Canadian professor who talks about Z transforms three hours a week, I've been beaten. Outstubborned. De-vernacularized. I've started calling zee zed.

It may seem trivial—even mildly advantageous, given that problems with Cs and Zs can get confusing late at night—but it's a bitter defeat. I have long defended the American use of "zee" based primarily on the fact that "zed" ruins the Alphabet Song, and secondarily on the fact that in principle, all language standards should come from the mouths of giant yellow bird-puppets. If we erode Big Bird's alphabet hegemony, what's stopping us from giving complete control over standard English usage to Elmo, or even the meep-meep muppets?

The E-Prime kidz might be happy - neither Elmo nor meep-meep muppets make much use of "to be". But Yami sad! Yami like zee! Yami go do physics. Meep meep, meep, meep meep.

Write a sentence, read a blog. Write two sentences, delete one of them, isca. Write half a sentence, stare at my outline while thinking about noodles for a few moments, send a message to the scrolling led screen in the courtyard of my pseudo-frat where nobody's awake. Go to the bathroom and admire the posters along the way. Rinse, lather, repeat. I'm glad I brought provisions for an evening snack, it's going to be a long afternoon.

In the spirit of procrastination, here are some of my favorite geology words. Remember that these are all technical terms.

• clayey - this is used interchangeably with its less childish form, "argillaceous".
• friable
• oolitic - there's a town called Oolitic, Indiana. Holy shit.
• radiolarian ooze
• ultramafic - dictionary.com is unhelpful here. Mafic rocks contain lots of magnesium (ma) and iron (fe). Ultramafic rocks are just really really mafic.
• vuggy - the cool thing about this word is that it's derived from Cornish.

I've lost something called Red Pop. I remember being fabulously excited, back in high school, because there was a product that was pop, and that was red, and so they had just called it Red Pop, and they sold it at Hy-Vee. I didn't really bother buying any for myself, of course, since I'm not a big fan of the "red" flavor - I prefer clear, purple or brown pops. But, it came up in conversation (the pop-vs.-soda debate again) and when I went to look for a bottle, it was gone. Vanished, and not even a memorial web page. I'm beginning to think I completely made it up. But I *swear* an acquaintance of mine had scanned in the logo... Mike Campbell, are you out there? Bueller?

Anyway. It strikes me that the pop-vs-soda thing is really my token effort at resisting California idiom. I make a point of using "pop" more often than I ever did when I lived in Iowa, but the rest of my midwestern twang is softening just a little, I think. My friends here have commented on my excessive use of the word "dude" and I've even caught myself calling something "rad" without thinking about it... yikes! My project for tomorrow, while I'm cleaning ovens, is to pay particular attention to the quality of my vowels, and see if I notice anything interesting about them. Round about 3 in the afternoon, I'll start wishing I had some formal linguistic/phonological training, and piss the hell out of all my coworkers somehow whining about how Caltech doesn't offer any interesting hum classes. Or else I'll be gritting my teeth wishing Phil would shut up. I went to high school with Phil. He's one of those congenial, congenitally annoying people, who speak loudly and often, and are nice enough that you feel guilty for disliking them. But most of the time he'll be vacuuming things, and that vacuum cleaner is blessedly loud.

And I read straight through a good book today - The Fishermen by Hans Kirk. It follows a group of super-pious fishermen who move to the other side of Jutland, where the fishing is better but the people aren't nearly so puritanical, and the subsequent culture clash. It was an actual, compelling, and subtle portrayal of fundamentalists, which is rare in most of what I read. Plus, he used a rather interesting stylistic device, by doing away with quotation marks. Dialogue was just stuck into the flow of the text, supposedly to "facilitate transitions between characters' thoughts and speech and to increase the distance between author and reader by creating a type of objectivity in which the narrator disappears behind the characters and their collective group," according to the translator's introduction. I'm still trying to figure out what the last part of that actually means, but the trick did seem to put the characters' speech on the same level as their actions, somehow reminding me of an old man wagging his finger and saying "do as I say, not as I do." Which of course was a constant thread throughout the book. I'm glad I don't have to write a paper on it, though.