Evolving English

test

2009-01-19T05:57:13Z

test

On the move

2005-10-18T07:08:47Z

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

Get the message

2005-09-08T19:18:46Z

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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." (?)

Anything can be verb'd, asshat

2005-08-17T01:47:49Z

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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.

Our northern neighbor

2005-05-27T19:58:34Z

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[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.)

Like, cool

2005-05-26T15:51:20Z

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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?)

But first, a word from our sponsor

2005-05-20T11:39:53Z

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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

Give 'em a rest

2005-05-18T19:53:26Z

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Seth posts "Five Words Brought On By The New Job That The Mrs. Wishes I'd Stop Using", which is effectively a list of vocabulary that's au courant here at Giant World-Famous NW Software Company, Inc (a.k.a. "Ginrmous Software, Inc.", perhaps, har-har):

Architect, as a verb
Take-away(s), that do not involve food
Pivot, when not referring to sports or things mechanical (“I pivot on the small and mid-market.”)
Enterprise, when describing a business
Message, as a verb

He admits he was "inspired by" 5ives, which has this entry:

Five words Madeline would just as soon I stopped using for a while

orthogonal
notional
sciolist
functionality
janky

These are a few of our favorite words

2005-05-18T19:07:15Z

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Jeff Atwood sent me a link to this article, which starts off:

The response from the "vocabularians" was so "ginormous" that the lexicographers let out a "whoot."

"Confuzzled?" You must be a "lingweenie."

The editors of Merriam-Webster dictionaries got more than 3,000 entries when, in a lighthearted moment, they asked visitors to their Web site to submit their favorite words that aren't in the dictionary.

As Jeff noted in his email, the author of the article misspelled "woot," and moreover used it incorrectly -- it's an exclamation, not a noun.

The list of Favorite Words Not in the Dictionary is here. Here are the top five (of ten):

1. ginormous (adj): bigger than gigantic and bigger than enormous

2. confuzzled (adj): confused and puzzled at the same time

3. woot (interj): an exclamation of joy or excitement

4. chillax (v): chill out/relax, hang out with friends

5. cognitive displaysia (n): the feeling you have before you even leave the house that you are going to forget something and not remember it until you're on the highway.

As for "confuzzled," although the speculation is that it's confused+puzzled, I think we detect here also the influence of that most prolific of neologisticators, Snoop Dogg. :-) For fun, go here to translate Web pages into his, er, idiolect.

About about

2005-05-17T17:43:15Z

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From Jim G, who finds the following in an article about indexing, and who begins with an editorial comment:

I automatically love any article that includes the words "monolingual thesauri," especially when they're right next to each other. :o)

It's about aboutness
There is still a strong need to connect "aboutness metadata" to chunks of content. That aboutness metadata can be exposed, as in an index, or listed in a categories list, or hidden in fields and used by a fine-tuned search engine. Indexes may go away in the next version of Longhorn, but they will be back in other ways, because it still takes human analysis to provide oversight on "aboutness." Searching for content in the right context is a last frontier, and although we are on the edges of the frontier, we still don't have automated content retrieval completely solved. We get a lot of results that don't meet our needs at the time, or when we switch search modes. There's still a lot of unfindable information. metadata provides the contextual clues.

[Mike here: I'm not sure what to think about the fact that this all makes sense to me ...]

Bang-bang, pretend you're dead

2005-05-03T15:27:28Z

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From Michael B, who adds "And you thought only you guys create words," by which he meant computer people:

Pfc. Chorn Pen, 240th Quartermaster Battalion, provides cover for a fellow Soldier while damage assessment is conducted following his convoy's escape from a simulated ambush during simunition (paintball) convoy training at Fort Pickett, Va.

From an Army site.

"Simunition" is training ammunition used by the military and by police forces. It is the trademark of SNC Technologies, and of the 7,000 or so hits on Google for this word, most seem to relate directly to the company's products. Yet the word is used in an un-trademarked sense in the cite, and apparently not directly related to SNC Technologies products, so at least some people now think of it as a generic word.

Now sourcing

2005-04-26T18:39:32Z

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From an internal email today:

I am trying to source a programmer/writer, either internally or externally, to create an SDK docset.

Editorial ears pricked up at this one ("I guess hire is too 20th century."). One of our managers came up with the best explanation, though:

He’s just speaking recruiter. ;) When I was meeting with our recruiter, she kept asking if I wanted to do some "sourcing" with her and I kept staring at her blankly trying to figure out what the heck she was talking about.

Sourcing = looking through their database for suitable candidates.

Beware geeks bearing "gifts"

2005-04-20T18:20:19Z

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I was reading a thing about hacking, and noticed that they used the term "Trojan" as a verb. The more usual usage is, I believe, as a qualifier, e.g. a "trojan horse program." I was able to find the term used in various ways conveniently on the Hackfix Web site:

Welcome to HackFix, the site that's dedicated to helping people stay informed about trojan horse programs, how to find out if you are infected, and how to remove these trojans safely from your system.

Using "to trojan" is unusual but not unheard of. The title of this forum thread is "Realnetworks is trojaning people...again!!!". The original cite I had (which I don't have to hand because it's in one of those, whaddya call 'em, books) carefully capitalized the term, thus "To Trojan." Seemed like an odd place to be fussy.

As a special bonus free gift at no cost to you, the HackFix site also gives us this:

If you wish to talk to a live person about anything on these pages, or trojans in general, stop by our IRC channel #HackFix and ask one of our oped or voiced users.

Label side up

2005-04-20T17:52:48Z

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John McPhee startled me twice in a single sentence in the latest New Yorker (April 18). He's writing about UPS, which he does in characteristic style by following along with a shipment of lobsters. At one point he says this about the UPS plant in Louisville:

Sortation used to require a more complex application of human thought, but in the development of the UPS air hub the intellectual role of the workers "out in the sort" underwent a process of "de-skilling." "When they made the hub, they de-skilled a lot of positions," a UPS manager explained to me. "Label side up. That's pretty much the extent of the training for these folks."

I stumbled first over "sortation." That sounded like an odd term -- what's wrong with "sorting"? -- but the New Yorker does not use unusual words casually. So a quick search, and sure enough, AHD, for one, lists it as its own word, defining it as "Sorting, especially when mechanized or automated." Still, I think it's clear that this is at least a recent term, yes?

But even the editors at the NYer are still quotation-marking "de-skill." WTF? (haha) Well, again to my surprise, again AHD lists the term with these definitions:

1. To eliminate the need for skilled labor in (an industry), especially by the introduction of high technology.
2. To downgrade (a job or occupation) from a skilled to a semiskilled or unskilled position.

Yup, that's it, all right. My Friend Google lists ~17,000 hits, with a variation "deskill," which looks a little odd. The fact that a relatively stodgy magazine still puts the term in quotation marks appears to mean that the word has not been entirely embraced yet, as does the ambiguity about the hyphen (meaning the spelling has not been formalized, I guess). But it's on its way. (Alas for those thusly affected.)

What the WTF?

2005-04-16T19:14:53Z

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This isn't a new thing, just a comment on seeing it appear more often in different contexts. An acronym that seems to have pervaded our culture fairly (?) recently is "WTF," for "What the fuck?" It's a nice, concise way of expressing puzzlement or occasionally resignation. If my instincts are correct, "WTF" seems to share with "snafu" and "fubar" a wider acceptance in casual speech (well, writing) than what its nominally vulgar origins might suggest. As in, where someone might use "WTF" in an email, say, I believe that they'd be less likely to use the spelled-out version.

Just looking through my own email and some blog posts, I come up with:

Email: "But will people see only two topics for DDL and say 'WTF?'"
Email: "Flipcharts at every table? WTF? That doesn't even make sense."
Blog post: "i shouldn't be posting this, wtf, i don't care."
From BoingBoing (courtesy Seth): "Did you know the British have a different numbering system than we do for numbers over a million? They have shit called Milliards, and Billiards! WTF?"

A sign of the prevalence of the acronym -- and a mark of how well-understood it is -- is that there are Web sites such as The Daily WTF, which displays examples of egregious programming badness. To have one's work appear on thedailywtf.com is a shame indeed. And not just tech. There are other, similar sites:

http://www.wtfpeople.com/ Submissions of strange or amusing stories.
http://www.wtf.com/ "WTF.com is a RANTING site for those who want to bitch and moan about anything on their mind."

In fact, Google gets 4,720,000 hits for "WTF", although I suppose some of those might be for the World Trade Federation or something like that.

I was put in mind of all this because Mark Liberman has a post today in the Language Log with this sentence: "Another, lighter linguistic WTF moment, thanks to a Democrat: the recent statement by State Sen. Ellen Karcher (D, New Jersey), who said of the tomato: 'Botanically it's a fruit, legally it's a vegetable'."

It's interesting to note that "WTF" can serve in different roles. As an interjection:

"But will people see only two topics for DDL and say "WTF?"

As an adjective, as used by Liberman ("Another, lighter linguistic WTF moment"). In fact, the folks on the Language Log have a category of posts that go under the rubric "WTF grammar," which I believe Liberman has defined as: "when you're taken grammatically aback by something you hear or read, and then try to figure out what the problem was."

Also, a noun: "Thanks to Tit Petric for sending in this WTF." [#]

I'll keep a lookout for it as an adverb as well.

The dynamic state

2005-03-31T17:36:50Z

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From a review comment in a topic I'm editing:

Page fragment caching caches parts of a page encapsulated in a user control with caching enabled (still caching the output of the user control) while maintaining the dynamicity of the rest of the page.

Of course, the sentence itself is a winner, but I'm focusing on just the interesting new word ...

That'll unlearn 'em

2005-03-17T16:52:39Z

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I was reading a blog entry and was slightly surprised to see "learn," or in this case "unlearn," used to mean "teach" ("unteach"):

At Nationwide, Ian has about 20 developers, and he had to unlearn them on bad traits they had learned.

The usage here is not exactly parallel with "teach"; that construction would be "unlearn them bad traits," no preposition, instead a direct object (traits) and an indirect one (them). I guess here "them" is the direct object, analogous with "teach them about grammar." Hmm ... I need a refresher here, obviously.

Anyway, getting back to usage, the Columbia Guide notes that "learn" once meant what "teach" does now, meaning that this usage is not an evolution (or devolution, as usage martinets would probably have it), but a surviving historical usage. In SWE we certainly never see this any more, although it still shows up in informal speech, often ironically in my experience. I'm not having a lot of luck in constructing a Google search that uncovers usages such as "to learn someone about something" at the moment, so I cannot otherwise comment on how widespread the use of "to learn" as "to teach" is in idiomatic English.

eRadio on demand

2005-03-17T15:21:03Z

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A new term that has spread quickly is podcast, defined here, for one:

The term "podcasting," combines the words "iPod" and "broadcasting." Despite its etymology, though, podcasting does not require an iPod — or any kind of portable MP3 player. Podcasts are essentially MP3 files posted to the web, done in the same way new blogs are posted. Your computer automatically checks the podcast sites to which you've "subscribed." When a new podcast is detected, your PC downloads it to your media player.

(Comma error left intact.) The guy obviously nails the etymology, making me wonder how soon we'll see "podcasted." Silly question, actually. A Google search turns up over a thousand instances already.

Anyway, the term is new enough that it might still be possible to isolate its origin to a particular time and person. This blog post includes some thoughts on where and when the term originated. (Alas, the post includes a huge amount of comment spam.)

An interesting wrinkle is that someone has applied for a trademark on the term. The Invent Blog (via Adam Gaffin) comments on this foolishness, with someone noting that with Google already counting over two million hits for the term, it's unlikely that someone can claim it now. But stranger things have happened.

Paste this ability

2005-03-10T21:15:16Z

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At a meeting the other day: "There's a lot of cut-and-pasteability there." Kudos for brevity, I guess.

Less-pseudo pseudocode

2005-03-02T07:03:28Z

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Warning: this is programmer-jaron-y.

Programmers talk about pseudocode, which is an abstract, non-progamming-language-specific way to describe an algorithm. Here's an example I borrowed that describes how to play Monopoly:

Main Procedure Monopoly_Game
   Hand out each player's initial money.
   Decide which player goes first.
   Repeat
      Call Procedure Monopoly_Move for next player.
      Decide if this player must drop out.
   Until all players except one have dropped out.
   Declare the surviving player to be the winner.

Procedure Monopoly_Move
    Begin one's move.
    Throw the dice.
    Move the number of spaces on the board shown on the dice.
    If the token landed on "Go to Jail,"
        then go there immediately.
    Else if the token landed on "Chance" or "Community Chest,"
        then draw a card and follow its instructions.
    Else
        follow the usual rules for the square (buying property,
        paying rent, collecting $200 for passing "Go", etc.).
    End one's move.

Or this famously infinite loop:

Shampoo
Rinse
Repeat

However, I digress. Brendan Tompkins evaluates a new term: air code. He describes it this way:

Air Code n. A bit of software code, written in a particular language, compiled using an imaginary compiler.

It's less pseudo than real pseudocode in that it intended to look like code in an actual progamming language. However, it isn't guaranteed to be right -- the point is only to show the basic idea. As he says: "The point of Air Code isn't to write code that you expect will actually compile – it's useful when you want to communicate how to do something in a particular language, but don't want to worry too much about syntax."

He asks the question "How is Air Code different from pseudocode?" but doesn't really answer it. But perhaps you get the idea.

Parental advisory, kewl

2005-02-23T04:53:32Z

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Last week Seth pointed me to the Microsoft article "A parent's primer to computer slang," which has the subtitle "Understand how your kids communicate online to help protect them." Ok.

But I like that they publish a kind of morphology and protocol of l33t, like this (examples edited out):

Numbers are often used as letters.
Non-alphabet characters can be used to replace the letters they resemble.
Letters can be substituted for other letters that may sound alike.
Rules of grammar are rarely obeyed.
Non-alphanumeric characters may be combined to form letters.

What I'm curious about is what kid is going let his parents watch over his shoulder as he IMs with his friends. I suppose that's not a linguistic issue.

PS If it seems a little weird to have an article like that on the Microsoft web site, consider that tech support published a KnowledgeBase article that explains what "Lorem ipsum" is. I guess they got enough questions about it ...

My blog comment is "you're fired"

2005-02-22T17:24:29Z

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In blogging circles, Heather Armstrong has some notoriety not just for her, er, bracing writing about mommyhood and recovering Mormonism and, you know, sex, but for being the prototype of the person fired from her job for what she said in her blog. And she coined a word for this: dooced, as explained in her About page.

The word has been picked up, tentatively:

Google search yields about 21,000 hits.
Macmillan English Dictionary "Word of the Week"
Urban Dictionary
MSNBC article (Via the Washington Post), in which the term is still in quotes.

It's "weblog," moron

2005-02-22T16:01:29Z

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Here's a guy (kottke.org) who has a strong opinion about whether the root of "blog" is "weblog" or "web log":

Dear New Yorker, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post and others,

Please stop using the term "web log" to refer to a chronologically-ordered frequently-updated website. The correct term is "weblog". Furthermore, "blog" is not short for "web log", it is short for "weblog".

[...]

And so on for a while, with details and links to sites that support his thesis. Ok, then. Nice to know people can get so het up about etymology, sort of.

To chav or chav not

2005-01-04T18:47:50Z

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[From Seth]

Heard about this? Her Grey Eminence on chavs, a new youth subculture in the UK:

"Chav" -- the champion buzzword of 2004 in Britain, according to one language maven there -- refers to something between a subculture and a social class. Experts disagree about the slang term's origins, but the unofficial definition sounds rather condescending or even cruel: a clueless suburbanite with appalling taste and a tendency toward track suits and loud jewelry. Still, as with "redneck" in America, a term that is imposed as a marker of scorn can be embraced as a marker of pride; at the very least, a certain humor and irony lace many of the discussions about chavs on Web sites and in books like "Chav! A User's Guide to Britain's New Ruling Class."

Of or pertaining to nerds

2004-12-15T00:30:11Z

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What's a smooth way to render "nerd-like"? kuro5hin coins one way. I quote the first paragraph of his post in its entirety, because I believe that the message and its expression converge here.

Most attempts to teach Japanese to foreigners start off with long lists of words to learn and endless drills practicing how to say things like "Suzuki-san, konnichi-wa." But with an appropriately nerdular mind, none of this is necessary. The nerd can simply study the formal Backus-Naur definition of the language, and then treat all the individual words to be learned the same way he would learn a long list of manifest constants #define'd in some C library. This article is a pioneering attempt to provide that Backus-Naur definition.

Evolving English

test

On the move

Get the message

Anything can be verb'd, asshat

Our northern neighbor

Like, cool

But first, a word from our sponsor

Give 'em a rest

These are a few of our favorite words

About about

Bang-bang, pretend you're dead

Now sourcing

Beware geeks bearing "gifts"

Label side up

What the WTF?

The dynamic state

That'll unlearn 'em

eRadio on demand

Paste *this* ability

Less-pseudo pseudocode

Parental advisory, kewl

My blog comment is "you're fired"

It's "weblog," moron

To chav or chav not

Of or pertaining to nerds

Paste this ability