wordzguy

Hi, kids. As an experiment, I'm moving shop over to Blogger: http://evolvingenglish.blogspot.com/. There are some LJ things I find clunky (although admittedly it's gotten lots better). But still, I want to try A New Thing. So see y'all over there!

-- Mike

Contribute! | Policy | Philosophy

From an email at work:

This is an early preview release, and the first of many – people will understand that, because we will message it strongly that way.

Verbizing a noun ("messaging") is common enough, of course. But I liked it in combination with the adverb -- we will message it strongly. This could be diminishing returns, given that "to message strongly" could simply mean "to emphasize." (?)

Contribute! | Policy | Philosophy

Found on a blog:

Are you going to take the chance that the source code might get Half-Life 2'd or Windows 2000'd?

I don't know exactly what he means here, but I suspect it has something to do with an unwanted/illegal release of program source code. Whatever, they're verbs now! :-)

PS I note in this comment thread that a person is referred to as an "asshat." We did not use this word when I was a young'un, so therefore ergo ipso facto this must be a new term, haha. I am not alone in noticing the new-ecy of the term, tho: this site bills itself as "Asshat: the official site for the best word ever" and undertakes etymological research, perhaps, uh, not to the most rigorous standards. For the record, Google gets 173,000 hits for this term, but I did not scroll through all of them. Formal definition posited here.

Contribute! | Policy | Philosophy

I'm accompanying the school orchestra to Japan soon, and was asking friends for advice on various aspects of travel. I got this from one of them:

[...] I'm not sure if I have any other ideas. Percocet? I always like Percocet on the plane, but since you're ostensibly serving some kind of chaperoneurial function, that's probably not the best idea.

Contribute! | Policy | Philosophy

From a blog entry:

I'm a little groggy from a bad night of sleep, though, so I might just be spouting loonericities.

Contribute! | Policy | Philosophy

Seth sent me the following, which came from an email subject line on an internal discussion group at work:

Google tool to speed up indexation.

with the comment "Since the propeller-heads at Google are doing it, we've apparently gone far beyond mere 'indexing'." Interestingly, searching for "indexation" in Google (and screening only for English-language results) gets all sortsa hits (~431K), but the first page of results consists almost entirely of pages that deal with economics. So obviously the practicioners of the dismal science got here first.

Just recently we had "sortation" (cite), so "indexation" would seem to be part of a trend. (Well, a trend so far of two; shoot me, I'm not good at statistixation. Ha. Three.) If I were slightly less lazy at this exact second, I would hunt about for a) more such examples and b) a treatise that addresses this phenomenon of rejecting regular ol' gerunds (sorting, indexing) in favor of reconstructed neo-nouns. I would bet a nickel that some industrious linguist has dispatched the explanation of this particular trend long since. Still, one wants to keep an eye (ear) out for more ...

Contribute! | Policy | Philosophy

From field operative Leslie:

Mike,

Heard at a meeting yesterday: "We are going to onboard these people ..." Is this new?

Hearing this made my hair hurt.

Keep up the good work.

Welp, it's new to me, anyway. I can't think of a clever way at the moment to search for "to onboard" that doesn't turn up "to onboard [noun]", i.e., "onboard" is an adjective, not part of an infinitive.

Contribute! | Policy | Philosophy

[From Seth]

From a blog post about the egregious shipping charged by a bamboo fiber t-shirt maker on Preshrunk, the t-shirt blog:

I would like to point out that if one orders a Bamboo tee, the shipping to anywhere not in the US is about 35 dollars, more than three times the price of the tee. Perhaps if you live across the ocean in an isolated cardboard box in the district of Badgershire or something this might be acceptable, but I live in Canada, and have never seen shipping prices as high as 35 bucks to get packages across the nigh-unpassable 49th parallel. Just thought your Canuckistanian readers might like to know.

====

Mike here: we noted the increasing popularity of "-istan" back when Afghanistan was much in the news (entry here). I like Seth's find, though, because it combines several features: "Canuck" for our northerly neighbors (is this usage considered offensive/insulting, does anyone know?); the aforementioned "-istan"; and the adjectival particle "-ian". (Perhaps also "Canuckistan-esque"? Heh.)

Contribute! | Policy | Philosophy

Here at the EE blog we normally do our own (sometimes sloppy) research and draw our own (sometimes specious) conclusions -- note that this no fault of the field research done by our sharp-eyed contributors -- but here I'll just post a link to a post that has links to posts that ...

Anyway, Mark Liberman, like, summarizes the state of "like," which rolls up posts on both the Language Log and on other sites that, as he says, "summarize the epic panorama of that protean word's patterns of usage." (Could anyone possibly resist quoting something that good? Anyone could certainly not.)

(Did you also note how I managed to get both "which" and "that" in there?)

Contribute! | Policy | Philosophy

I just made a visit to parody newsmagazine The Onion and was presented with an animated ad that I sat through before being redirected to the main page. But it was worth it, because the folks at The Onion were good enough to label this delay a premercial. The LangMaker site has a definition:

Word premercial
Part of Speech n.
Etymology [< pre- + commercial.]
Definition A web advertisement that appears before the site's real home page is displayed. Example: "I hate that The Onion now has a premercial, but I've been reading the site for free for years; I guess even humorists have to pay the rent."
Submitted By Jeffrey Henning
Date Submitted Friday, July 30, 2004