A math joke involving Clinton
Steven Pinker, Listening Between the Lines:
In his grand jury testimony, Mr. Clinton expounded on the semantics of the present tense ("It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is") and of the words "alone," "cause" and, most notoriously, "sex."
Clinton's rebuttal to the Starr report:
Literally true statements cannot be the basis for a perjury prosecution, even if a witness intends to mislead the questioner. Likewise, answers to an inherently ambiguous question cannot constitute perjury.
A joke:
Have you ever touched Paula Jones or Monica Lewinsky?
It depends on your definition of "or".
Infix placement
Poll (pick one): Un-fucking-believable or Unbe-fucking-lievable?
Color-constancy illusion
Michelle, Lauren, and I stumbled on a strong illusion last night. It's similar to the checkerboard illusion but involves color rather than just shades of gray.
The "blue" tiles on top of the left cube and the "yellow" tiles on top of the right cube are actually the same shade of gray.
Articles that talk about this illusion: American Scientist: Why We See What We Do and Discover Magazine: Sensory Reflexes. (The authors of the American Scientist article wrote a book with the same name.)
Berkeley's dilemma (as described by the American Scientist article) reminds me of Quine's Gavagai problem in the acquisition of language. Berkeley's dilemma is that retinal images are inherently ambiguous -- for example, there's no difference in the retinal image created by a large object at medium distance and a small object at a large distance. In the Gavagai problem, an island native points to a rabbit and says "gavagai". Do you interpret "gavagai" as "rabbit", "there goes a rabbit", "white", "animal", "hopping", "it's a nice day", "cute", "lunch", or something else?
Both Berkeley's dilemma and the Gavagai problem are problems of infinite ambiguity. Humans have clever heuristics for dealing with both problems. Examples include color constancy and overestimation of acute angles in visual perception, and the whole-object, taxonomic, and mutual-exclusivity assumptions children use to interpret new nouns.
Protecting trademarks from language change
Proper use of the Photoshop trademark (via Alex Utter)
INCORRECT: The image was photoshopped.
CORRECT: The image was enhanced using Adobe® Photoshop® software.INCORRECT: A photoshopper sees his hobby as an art form.
CORRECT: Those who use Adobe® Photoshop® software to manipulate images as a hobby see their work as an art form.
There seems to be a continuum of how much meaning a trademark has lost in colloquial speech:
- Used only as an adjective or noun to refer to the correct product.
- "You should eat something healthier than Goldfish crackers and Oreos."
- Used in a non-traditional manner, but only when referring to the correct product.
- "I googled her".
- Used when it a competitor's product might be used instead.
- "It doesn't exist, it's photoshopped... Sorry."
- "Letters you send should be xeroxed after you sign them"
- "You should have some kleenex handy before loading this site."
- Used even when you know a competitor's product will be used.
- "Can you go downstairs and xerox this for me?"
- Used in the same sentence as a competitor's trademark.
- "my rollerblades: k2 backyard bobs"
- "I used the HP multifunction printer to xerox it."
- Used as a noun modified by a competitor's trademark. (At this point, you're screwed.)
Trademarks incorrectly used as verbs and trademarks incorrectly used as generic nouns can both lose their meaning over time. US trademark law is less friendly to trademarks that get used as verbs, but I don't know whether trademarks used as verbs naturally lose their meaning faster.
If Adobe isn't worried about its Photoshop trademark becoming more and more generic, it should continue doing the legal minimum to discourage its use as a verb, and the world will continue to make fun of Adobe. (After all, every "That image must have been photoshopped!" is free advertising.) But if Abode is worried about its trademark losing its meaning, it should start by rewriting its trademark-use guidelines to have better motivation and less awkward suggestions. For example:
The use of "photoshop" as a verb worries us because history has shown that verbed trademarks often lose their meaning over time. For example, "to xerox" was once fun shorthand for "to photocopy using a Xerox photocopier", but it has taken on a life of its own as a colloquial verb meaning simply "to photocopy", costing Xerox Corporation $... to protect its trademark and putting the company at risk of losing trademark protection.
When writing articles, always use a generic verb, such as "enhanced", "manipulated", "edited", or "altered", adding "using Adobe Photoshop" if appropriate. In informal speech, use the verb "to photoshop" only to mean "to alter using Adobe Photoshop", and consider saying "altered" or "shopped" rather than "photoshopped" when a competing product might have been used.
Our trademark lawyers think you should say "Adobe Photoshop software" rather than "Adobe Photoshop", but in the real world, most trademarks are nouns in addition to adjectives, so don't listen to them. But most trademarks are not used as verbs, and trademarks that are used as verbs are at high risk for losing their meaning.
(Disclaimer: I am neither an IP lawyer nor a linguist, so I don't know what I'm talking about.)
- Media Literacy Review: Trademark Battles
- Techwr-l: Trademarks as adjectives vs trademarks as nouns
- Xerox's ad in Writer's Digest (also on Techwr-l)
- Slashdot: Verbing Weirds Google
- Berkeley Intellectual Property Weblog: Google is Sending C&D Letters About Saying "To Google"
Spellcheck and strife
Asa, it looks like your spell-checker replaced all instances of the word "gonna" with "gonad".
-- Joe's comment on Asa's blog.
(Microsoft Word corrects "gonna" to "going to". ispell corrects it to "Donna". I don't know what spell-checker Asa uses.)
Fun with the English language
- Wouldn't the sentence "I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign" have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips? (Via Schmack.)
- Can you parse this English sentence? Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo. The answer. (Via Stephanie Harves.)
- "You shanked my jengaship!" I think it's interesting that "shank", a mispronounciation of the past tense of "sink", gained an extra past-tense marker to become "shanked".
- Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. (Via Schmack.)
- Actual newspaper headlines (collected from several sources)
- Capitol Steps: Al-Jazeera [Alouette?]
- Capitol Steps: Look Away (Rush Limbaugh's statement) [Dixie]
- Capitol Steps: Lirty Dies: Kobe Bryant (spoonerisms)
- Mountain Liquor?! I hardly know 'er!
Usage Nazi
Health Education Outreach flyer on tables at Platt dining hall:
Try this exercise to explore your relationships and how they are effected by alcohol.
At least it didn't go into detail about how alcohol effects babies.
Why study acquisition of language?
I'm taking a Pomona class called Acquisition of Language. Here are some notes from the first day:
Why study acquisition of language?
- Lets you see mechanisms behind language.
- You can see dramatic changes over short periods of time. For example, most kids start having real conversations around 3 and a half.
- Kids are cute.
I like this class.
Typo patterns
Most of my "typos" add extra words:
mozilla crashes at with the instruction pointer at an address not in its address space. [bug 157845]
my high school has a comedy sportz team. the team and an informal club that exists around it, and my brother is part of that.
I think my typo pattern has to do with my typing style. I don't compose entire sentences in my head before I start typing them, and I edit heavily. I edit sentences as I type them. For example, a few sentences ago, I typed "before typing them[Ctrl+Left][Ctrl+Left][Ctrl+Shift+Right]starting to type [End]". Later I changed "starting to type" to "I start typing".
I also move information between sentences in order to keep any sentence from being too complicated and to eliminate parenthetical phrases. When I'm done typing a paragraph, there are often lots of unnecessary parentheses around sentences, which I remove. Sometimes I spend more keypresses editing than typing new sentences.
In the first example, I probably typed "mozilla crashes at an address not in its address space" at first, and then realized I should make it clear that the instruction pointer was what was at an address not in Mozilla's address space. In the second example, I remember that the two sentences used to be one sentence, but I don't know how to explain the error.
Erika Rice also makes strange typos:
After about an hour we got bored (or, in my Case, started to get headaches) so we grabbed some other people and went and watched "Office Space" in the lack.
(Case is a dorm at Mudd and the LAC is the Linde Activities Center.)
"Anything but", "All but"
The idioms "anything but" and "all but" have confused me as long as I can remember. Now I know why: they have nearly opposite meanings.
- Cambridge ALD definitions for all but, anything but
- Bruce Todd tries to explain the idioms
- An English test for Japanese students (charset: Shift_JIS):
13. That boy is ( ) a great trouble to his parents.
A. all but B. anything but C. not but D. nothing but - An English test for Chinese students:
27. It was such a dangerous scene: the boy was ____ drowned in the river just now.
A. nothing but B. all but C. anything but D. but that
Google searches used: "anything but" "all but" idioms (lots of results, mostly noise), "all but * anything but" (only 16 results, but some were relevent).
These idioms do not appear in any of the idiom dictionaries I have:
- NTC's American Idioms Dictionary
- NTC's Slang American Style (generally the most useful of the three)
- Betty Kirkpatrick's Clichés
Motherese
I learned a cool word in my Acquisition of Language class this week: motherese, speech that is high-pitched, repetitive, simple, and typically directed at young children.
I found a message from Steven Pinker about the term (and 8 synonyms or related terms). He also talks about an early version of the American Heritage Dictionary's definition for "child-directed speech".
Pinker prefers the term "child-directed speech", saying it is the most transparent. I prefer "motherese" because it is clearly a term and therefore must refer to some phenomenon worth naming. "Child-directed speech" could be mistaken to mean "any speech directed at a child". "Child-directed speech" tries to be more inclusive, but still misses the fact that people also use it when talking to cats. I also prefer "motherese" because it's short, easy to remember, and slightly silly.
