The PowerSquid, one of the most clever products in history, is now available with a <1 nanosecond response-time, 540 joule surge suppressor.  List price is $34.95; the store Affordable Home Electronics has^* it for $9.44 and low shipping.

^* Happy, Dave?  I arranged the sentence so that I could use a singular verb.

Do you think we could ask Gmail to put a really unlikely names filter into their program?  I just don’t get legitimate email from anybody named Redler Sanbrough, Pinn Copping, Metter Vittetoe, or Britschgi Buren — not to mention Rainwaters Risby (if you’re writing a TV pilot, feel free to steal that one).  It’s obvious to me that the software is just picking a random first name and a random last name.  Why can’t it be obvious to Gmail?

(Because that essentially racist NLP, one of the relatively few things that you both can’t and shouldn’t do.  Dumbass.)

Reminds me of the hilarious joke (so many levels to the humor): If Muhammad is the most common first name in the world, and Chen is the most common family name, why do you meet so few people named Muhammad Chen?

Poor ain’t.  I’ve never said it but in jest.  Though it is thoroughly dialect-related, accepting dialects (with the possible exception of rock lyrics that need one syllable contractions) are dismissed as the rantings of the uneducated and poor.

We have spots for most negating contractions in our language.  Except the first person continuous of to be.  There, we would logically have amn’t.  But that’s really tough to say.  Ain’t could save the day[, as it was originally meant to] .

But ain’t doesn’t stop there.  It creeps into second person and third person formations, replacing the usable aren’t and isn’t.  Now, to be is a miserably irregular verb, and maybe it’s in some need of polishing.  And since in English, second person and third person are modified by names or pronouns (Joshua, you, he, she, it), there is no confusion.  “I ain’t who you think I am.”  “You ain’t who I thought you were.”  “He ain’t who he claims he is.”  No ambiguity.  Useful word.

But ain’t doesn’t stop there.  It, bizarrely, replaces hasn’t and haven’t?  No?  How about “He ain’t been here in three weeks?”  Right?  But try as I might, I have not been able to construct a sentence in which ain’t is ambiguous, even in this hugely expanded sense.  Ain’t in this case is always (as far as I can see) followed by a past participle, while the others are not.  I’d like to be proven wrong here.

But ain’t doesn’t stop there, either.  More to the point, ain’t don’t stop there neither.  It is almost always accompanied by a munged form of doesn’t (poor, sweet doesn’t, who never hurt anyone!) and a double-negative, which we all know don’t make no sense.

But is ain’t, properly used, salvageable?  Be my guest.  I cannot help, at this point, because it is unsalvageable while one is on the job market.  And that, socioeconomically, just about says it all.

Other uses of ain’t?  Other thoughts?

Chain Link 2.  You are reading this bottom-up, right?

This, too, was going to be one sentence in the following post, but it also grew out of hand.

It’s reasonable, I think, for people to be able to choose the words applied to them.

I grew up a gaijin.  That’s a Japanese derogatory racial epithet for foreigners.  What would I have preferred?  Well, I don’t really like American, as I don’t think one nation should get to claim the name of two continents containing 22 countries.  Westerner would have been OK.  Something descriptive, like he’s a U.S. Citizen would probably be best.

I weigh close to three bills.  That’s 21 stones if you’re British, 133 kilos if you’re from anywhere else, and two million grains if I’m fated to encounter an ungloved Midas.  Obese is unpleasant.  Morbidly obese especially so.  “Big Guy” is not a charming nickname (Bob Mike, do people call you “Slim”?  Do you like it?)  I prefer large.

I’m an atheist.  Calling me agnostic is likely to get you sneered at.  Calling me a Bright is liable to get you bitch-slapped.  Naturalist is comfortable.  Rationalist and Freethinker feel nice, but I imagine are offensive to many people, because they imply that if you rationally and freely thought about things you’d completely agree with me.  So I stick with atheist.

Now I’m venturing into unknown territory.  If I had very dark skin, I think I would still hate African-American.  It’s clunky.  It wrongfully suggests that all dark-skinned people are from Africa, which has to annoy Australians, yes?  And aren’t all Americans really, originally, African?  I think I’d like black, or even Negroe, with an e and capitalized.

I’m heterosexual.  That’s a fine term as far as I’m concerned.  I loathe straight (what’s the opposite of that?)  But if I were homosexual, I think I’d prefer gay (whether a man or woman.)  I know several practicing bisexuals, at least one of which self-describes as queer.  I think that’s mostly affect, but egads.  You’ve got to help me, people.  It this one of those rescued epithets, like nigger, that the “in” crowd is allowed to flaunt and outsiders can be murdered over?

But most sincerely — and this is my ultimate point — if I were significantly shorter in stature than the average person, I strongly believe I would like almost anything more than little person.  That sounds so bloody condescending to me.  Maybe not midget, but what — what? — is wrong with dwarf?

This will be relevant in Chain Link 3.

Um, wow?  Did Gmail just double its disk quota overnight?  It’s showing a 6341 MB, and I would have sworn it was about 2800 MB a few days ago.  I’m back down to 26% utilization, and hoping against hope that the quotas continue to grow faster than my email volume (I’ve already turned off every mailing list that’s being archived on a website, as that was quickly creeping up on the quota.)

Also, I’m very surprised that quotas is the plural of quota, and not quotae or something.

Encountered online.  It mostly sounds like English:

Reason for READ NFO is, during the feed there was a minor blimp.  IT is not a encoding glitch.  There is no reason for a proper over this, even tho we expect KYR or aAF will find a lame reason to proper 12 hrs from our pre time.

“Its translucent color so alluring and taste and aroma so gentle and mellow offer admiring feelings of a graceful lady.  Enjoy soft and juicy Kasugai Muscat Gummy.”

From a Snapfish email:

Add fun mystery text and a photo to a puzzle for you’re a loved one (will you marry me? and photo of a ring)

This does actually mean something.  At least if you insert a comma after ‘puzzle’.  And some quotation marks.  And maybe a colon.  Just nothing like what they intended.

It Figures, from In Praise of Argument.  Jay Heinrichs reveals rhetorical tricks and pitfalls in the news.  I guarantee you’ll love it.  (Quick: What technique is that?)

(This edit is to see whether Dave’s host does trackback verification on his posts.)

As usual, I will quote from Michael Quinion’s irreplaceable World Wide Words column, this time from issue 348 (Saturday 5 July 2003):

“English, whatever its other merits, has as many disparaging words
as one would possibly desire. The example that follows is from Sir
Thomas Urquhart’s 1653 translation of Rabelais’ work Gargantua and
Pantagruel, a translation that draws heavily on vocabulary used in
Scotland in his [Urquhart's] time:

“The bun-sellers or cake-makers were in nothing inclinable
to their request; but, which was worse, did injure them
most outrageously, called them prattling gabblers, lickorous
gluttons, freckled bittors, mangy rascals, shite-a-bed
scoundrels, drunken roysters, sly knaves, drowsy loiterers,
slapsauce fellows, slabberdegullion druggels, lubberly louts,
cozening foxes, ruffian rogues, paltry customers, sycophant-varlets, drawlatch hoydens, flouting milksops, jeering
companions, staring clowns, forlorn snakes, ninny lobcocks,
scurvy sneaksbies, fondling fops, base loons, saucy coxcombs,
idle lusks, scoffing braggarts, noddy meacocks, blockish
grutnols, doddipol-joltheads, jobbernol goosecaps, foolish
loggerheads, flutch calf-lollies, grouthead gnat-snappers,
lob-dotterels, gaping changelings, codshead loobies, woodcock
slangams, ninny-hammer flycatchers, noddypeak simpletons,
turdy gut, shitten shepherds, and other suchlike defamatory
epithets; saying further, that it was not for them to eat
of these dainty cakes, but might very well content themselves
with the coarse unranged bread, or to eat of the great brown
household loaf.”

Have fun working all of these into casual sentences, or just tracking down the meanings of all these insults.  I’ll get you started: a  sychophant-varlet is a servile, flattering servant or rascal.  A blockish grutnol is a dull, lazy person.&nbp; A woodcock slangam is a lanky person as dim-witted as a pheasant (Google for slangam and you encounter a fascinating academic paper entitled A cultural-linguistic study of English sound-symbolic pejorative lexemes beginning in sl- and du-.  As long as you have your dictionary out already, it’s worth a read: just look for definitions that begin ‘Ling. -‘.)  A doddipol-jolthead seems to be a blockhead-blockhead, which suggests that there has been a great deal of linguistic compression of various insults into fewer terms.  I have the misfortune of encountering quite a few drunken roysters (revelers), drowsy loiterers, and jeering companions, and I am commonly treated as a paltry customer, although less frequently since the local Wherehouse Music stores have closed.  I have been mostly able to avoid staring clowns and forlorn snakes.  Just apply some effort: I’m sure you can work shite-a-bed scoundrel into today’s conversations with minimal effort.

The source work for these words, Gargantua and Pantagruel, inspired the English word Gargantuan, which is defined by one source as “Characteristic of Gargantua, a gigantic, wonderful personage; enormous; prodigious; inordinate.”  The author, François Rabelais (1494-1553), has also given rise to an English word, Rabelaisian, used to describe wildly obscene humor (take, for instance, Gargantua’s discussion of how best to wipe one’s arse, the final decision being the neck of a live goose, leading me to wonder if a few centuries will turn South Park into fine literature.)  If this is intriguing to you, BookFinder lists a range of copies of Gargantua, from a $0.50 Penguin mass market paperback to a charming 1708 octavo edition, containing the translation above, in calfskin with gilt lettering for £1100 (about $1800.)  If you beat me to it you can have a $50 limited edition on hand-made paper; I’m checking to see if it contains Urquhart’s translation.

Newspapers have been having fun with the name of the Web site set
up by the British energy firm PowerGen, which is investing in Italy
and has created the wonderful www.powergenitalia.com (it is a real
Web site, I can confirm, though not always easy to access).  But you
might prefer instead www.crotch-partnership.co.uk, which isn’t what
you’re thinking it is, unless you know it’s a firm of solicitors in
Norwich.  Another odd one is http://www.whorepresents.com, at which
you can find an actor’s representative.

                                - Michael Quinion, World Wide Words, Issue 347 (Saturday 28 June 2003)

Note added 09 July 2003: Michael Quinion has issued a correction to this bulletin, as has a mcgees.org reader.  PowerGen has nothing to do with the powergenitalia site, which is rather associated with an Italian firm selling specialized battery products.  More information at Snopes.

According to the gigantic word list from Orchy and a Perl script I wrote, the following are the 48 letter pairs that never show up in English words:

bq, cj, cv, cx, fq, fv, fx, gq, gx, hx, jb, jf, jg, jh, jq, jt, jw, jx, jy, jz, kq, kz, px, qc, qf, qg, qh, qj, qk, qm, qn, qp, qq, qv, qx, qy, qz, vb, vj, vq, vw, vx, wq, xj, xk, xz, zf, zx

Note, however, that several of these are common abbreviations (CV for “Curriculum Vitae”, FX for “effects”, GQ for “Gentleman’s Quarterly”, VB for “Visual Basic”, VW for “Volkswagen”, etc.) and others show up in proper nouns and radio station callsigns.

The Harvard Dialect Survey is fascinating, even with the maps currently disabled.  The questions made me consider things that I have not previously, and I was unfamiliar with many of the choices provided.  The survey asks you to answer based on what you grew up with.  What is most interesting to me is that I have changed 15 percent of these (18 out of 122) as a teenager or adult, generally consciously.  Check it out.  (Note: Do not use a secure password, as your username and password are displayed in the address window.)

Bob’s Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots.

Many words have several different senses.  When a language loses certain senses of the word, the language can be left with mis-interpreted phrases.  Case in point: I was watching a television program the other day, in which the following exchange occurred:

“Fancy meeting you here.”

“It is, isn’t it?

The phrase fancy meeting you here obviously uses fancy as a synonym for imagine.  But somehow the screenwriter lost sense of this definition, and somehow thought the common sentence was referring to the occasion being highly decorated or intricate; that is, the adjectival usage, new enough that it does not even appear in the 1889 Century Dictionary.  You cannot very well imagine someone saying It’s intricate to meet you here or How highly decorated to meet you here!, but this apparently did not give pause to the screenwriter.

But I confess to perpetrating one of these myself, one which Geoff Nunberg calls attention to in his excellent book The Way We Talk Now.  The phrase in question is polite society, which apparently employs an obsolete definition of polite meaning well-bred.  And yet it my mind I have always pictured a society of people for which the entrance requirement is minding one’s manners.  Certainly this is a democratic and American read on the phrase, but one cannot easily alter one’s progenitors; therefore polite society is one that the mass of us have no chance of entering.  Fancy that.

Andrew Smith invents languages as a hobby.  His language Brithenig asks the question what would have happened if there had been sufficient Latin speakers to displace Old Celtic in Great Britain.  The result is a Romance language that underwent Welsh-style sound changes and borrowed more from Celtic languages than any other Romance language.  In Brithenig, the story of the Tower of Babel begins

Agur ill mun inteir afew yn llinghedig e yn cant comyn. Sig ill pobl sumodefant di’ll llewent, ys ligarent yn lluin in Senar e llâ si ysteblirent.
Ys ddisirent a sew alltr, “Gwath, gwan a ffager yn fric e gogher llo hinteirfent.” Ys hýsafant llo fric in ill llog di’ll pedr, e yn aerell per ill kelchin. Affos ys ddisirent, “Gwath, gwan a eddiffigar yn giwdad per nu, cun yn tyr ke dang a llo chel, ke nu ffagen yn n�n per nu e sun ysparied rhen syrs feig lla der inteir.”

Another of his languages, yet unnamed, is created out of the “special cases” of dozens of language books; irregular parts of speech, irregular patterns, special rules, and so forth.

Not content with creating languages, he has also created an ‘alternate-present’ church called the “Church of Christ in Aotearoa New Zealand” that envisions what might have happened in the church if certain decisions had gone another way.

Startlingly, “No, it never propagates if I set a gap or prevention” is a palindrome.  I could even see using that in conversation.

It took me four or five tries to successfully parse the article title Landmine claims dog UK arms firm.   Three words could be nouns or adjectives, one could be a noun or a verb, and two could be nouns, adjectives, or verbs.

Hello.  I am the Nielsen ratings.  A couple years ago I was Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, if you remember.  I am now other low banalities.

“Zarusoba: Ochazuke has you have paste and hail and tea with the paddle rice which there was.”

I started thinking about the class of English nouns with definitions of the form “set of n members”, where n is a cardinal number.  The list below represents the words that occurred to me with a few minutes’ thinking, with the requirement that the word must be in general circulation (defined for these purposes as “appearing at least 10,000 times in the Google index.”)  Please send me omissions and I will update this list.

Exhibit A, from an ad at Yahoo!, highlighting the importance of quotation marks to disambiguate passages:

Get Well – Spoil Her Spa Package                     $99.99

The author of a certain gardening book wrote that even if home buyers are gardeners, they rarely check the quality of the soil in houses they tour.  The implication is that, though soil quality is important to them, it does not enter their collective radar screens as an appropriate criterion for home selection.  This observation has stuck with me, and I think it may extend to another domain: street names.

A great street name, in my opinion, meets three criteria:

1. It sounds pleasant,
2. people on the telephone already know how to spell it, and
3. it is under 20 characters long.

Let’s start with point 3.  Take the USPS Postal Store.  As they are, after all, the postal service, it is important to them to be on the cutting edge of street address technology.  To wit, when you enter a street address into their text field, their program does not blindly accept it.  The USPS Postal Store checks to make sure that the street you name exists in your town.  Reasonable, in principle.  But the text field is set to a maximum length of thirty characters.  My private mail box is on “Avenida de los Arboles”; with the numerical portion prepended and my mailbox number appended, this does not fit in the field.  I cannot leave off either numerical portion, of course.  And I cannot shorten the street name to “Ave. Arboles”, for instance, because I will be told that this street does not exist.  This is not the only online store at which this has occurred.  My solution has been to save a local copy of the web page, fix the script address in the <FORM> tag to point at a fully-qualified URL rather than a relative URL, and submit from this page.  I am not sure how many customers of the Postal Store could do this.  So, “Avenida de los Arboles” is out as a good street name.

Now for point 2: Prior to my current residence I lived on “Calle Quebracho” (my bastardized American pronunciation rendered this as KIE-aye keh-BRAH-cho.)  I never found someone on the other end of the telephone who knew how to spell this without instruction.  And a significant subset proceeded to ask me, “OK, is it ’street’, ‘road’, or ‘avenue’?”  Even my current street, the somewhat pompously-named “White Ridge Place”, causes its share of confusion.  If I pronounce ‘white’ with a proper, aspirated, unvoiced ‘wh’, Americans inevitably hear “light”.  This happens to my wife as well.  I know that if I were to pronounce ‘white’ as WYE-it, with an appropriate drawl, they would understand what I was saying, but I am not going to do this (just like I will not say kwuh-BEK and chwenty to appease the IBM ViaVoice engine at work.)  This might be foolish; refusing to bow to this is certainly not the most efficient way of doing things.  But even if I communicate “white”, there is no way to tell over the telephone whether the street is “White Ridge Place” or “Whiteridge Place”.

Point 1 is the least tangible.  In my area, there are many streets with names that I like: “Chaucer”, “Shakespeare”, “Lost Hills”, “Whim”, and “Falling Star”, to name a few.  But how do they fare against the other two points?  “Whim” is definitely out; it causes the “White Ridge” problems, just at a greater magnitude.  “Chaucer” is likewise out because I doubt many American telephone operators could spell it (I know this might sound patronizing and elitist, but I’m pretty sure it’s true.  My faith in their abilities has been weakened by, among other things, the number of ways they have discovered to misspell ‘Joshua’.)  “Shakespeare” might be almost as bad.  Here is a quick look at word frequencies in the AltaVista index:

• shakespeare: 2,691,612
• shakespear: 39,172
• shakespere: 19,674
• shakspeare: 8,800
• shakspere: 3,688
• shaksper: 2,953
• shakspear: 879
• shakesper: 105
• shakespeer: 82
• shakspier: 35
• shakespier: 26
• shakspeer: 17

To be honest, this is better than what I expected it to be, but it is still around three percent.  Compare that to the one percent error rate in this list, which I consider to be a very frequently misspelt word:

• massachusetts: 8,710,938
• massachussetts: 42,614
• massachussets: 26,398
• massachusets: 13,691
• masachusetts: 6,363
• masachussetts: 270
• masachussets: 192
• masachusets: 167

At least states get two-letter abbreviations.

In any case, if anyone wants to send me mail, the street is “Avenida de los Arboles”.  You can get the details from my online resumé.