The Internet B.G. (before Google)

Posted on August 23, 2010 by achouston

The line at the bottom says it all — “Achieve 100% pure surfing pleasure”  Can anyone imagine today in 2010 surfing the Internet from a printed book? I mean, you go to a page in a book, find the url to a site that’s described there and then diligently type it into a browser. The picture is the cover of a book published in 1996 – an eon ago when the expression ‘world wide web’ was still fresh and exotic, and people at cocktail parties actually debated the question of whether the web was maybe a passing fad — could it attain enough momentum to endure? Hard to believe it could have been so.

Perusing this volume of the then-top 1000 websites, a couple of language things jump out — the use of an apostrophe when referring to zines, i.e., ‘zines. It wasn’t quite its own word back then. And there’s the predominance of ‘e’ over ‘i’, as in eWorld,  an online service run by Apple from 1994 – 1996 that provided email, a bulletin board and news; Apple today must be the premier pusher of ‘i’ (iPod, iPhone, iPad, iWork, iWeb, etc.).  The ‘e’ referred to ‘electronic’ —  the catch-all adjective of early digital technology; as the Internet and perhaps interactive media grew in size and usage, i began to encroach on e’s turf and has pretty much obliterated it by now. Okay, there’s still ‘e-commerce’, but I’ve seen ‘i-commerce’, too.

So who made in into the Top 1000 list of websites in 1996?  Here is a sampling (with their original urls – interesting to follow some of these and see where they lead now)

  • Fried Society (a weekly Gen-Xer comic) http://www.catalogue.com/comix/fried_society
  • The Random Haiku Generator (name says it all) http://www.ip.net/Haiku/haiku.html
  • The FBI’s Current “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives” (still there, but the url is different) http://www.fbi.gov/toplist.htm
  • Culture Shock  (the book states “Culture Shock is a gang of young designers and Net experts who hope you’ll hire them to design your Web page….On past visits we wandered through a maze of nonsensical equations, dividing E=Mc-squared over Andy Warhol and ending up at the poetry of Robert Frost.”) http://www.cultureshock.com
  • Shoestring Travel E-Zine (Alternative and offbeat budget travel advice) http://metro.turnpike.net/eadler/shoe1.html
  • HotWired (the online version of Wired magazine)  http://www.hotwired.com
  • CyberTown (the book states “A huge shopping and services center…The creators hope that Cybertown will become a central point for Web access and a sort of self-contained virtual village.”) http://www.directnet.com/cybertown  (try http://www.cybertown.com)
  • OnSale (book states “a vibrant, photo-filled online auction in which you outbid other Web users for products ranging from digital cameras to fine wine to automobile radar jammers.” http://www.onsale.com
  • Internet Sleuth (the book states “This researcher’s fantasy-land is the best we’ve found of many sites that collect databases and let you search them from simple forms….Then you type in a few keywords and search each of them and gather your findings….you can peruse dozens of categories to find more than 200 databases. Instead of jumping across the Web to find just the right database, you can save a lot of time searching from here. Some of the commercial search sites may not be thrilled with this short-cut, but for now it’s a valuable service.” http://www.intbc.com/sleuth  (try http://www.internetsleuth.net)

We’ve come a looong way, baby. If you want the full set of ‘top 1000’ sites, you can still buy this volume at Amazon — at quite a bargain, I might note. 🙂

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Word Jumbles #5

Posted on August 20, 2010 by achouston

  • RECTEAR
  • AMELODEN
  • GENNOPAT
  • RAINECTS
  • TANROOD

Solutions posted tomorrow on Answers. Enjoy your weekend,  everyone!

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Meaning in Motion

Posted on August 17, 2010 by achouston

The word ‘post’ as a vertical pole appears in a number of standard expressions in English:  lamp post, fence post, hitching post, goal post. Hitching posts for horses are pretty rare nowadays, but at one time they were quite common. Although fence posts are still common physical artifacts, the phrase has acquired a fairly recent metaphoric extension in the world of computer programming — a ‘fence post error’.  The beginning and end of an indexing routine or iteration can be thought of figuratively as ‘fence posts’, analogous to placing a physical post at the beginning and end of a stretch of fence that is being built. In the physical world, if you intend to place a fence post for every ten feet of horizontal fence being built, and place one of the posts nine or eleven feet from the previous one, you’ve committed a fence post ‘error’.  In a computer program, if you write a routine to copy all the characters of a word to another location, you can access the characters of the word by their position in the string, i.e, by their index. If your program assumes that the first location has index value ‘0’, then a five-letter word will be copied after you have accessed index position ‘4’ (0,1,2,3,4).  If your program assumes the first location has the index value ‘1’, a five-letter word will be copied after you have accessed index position ‘5’ (1,2,3,4,5).  Thus, in the case where indexing starts at ‘0’ and you iterate through ‘5’ for a five-letter word, a ‘fence post error’ has been committed — the endpoint is now beyond where it should properly be.

Goal post has also taken on a metaphoric meaning in recent times, as when people accuse their adversaries of ‘changing the goal posts’ in the context of debates on abstract topics, especially in regard to policies and agendas related to politics or business.

It’s a nifty cognitive strategy to take a concrete idea and employ it as a shorthand ‘hook’ for an abstract complex of activity (iterative indexing) or communication (debating tactics). We shouldn’t forget ‘signpost’ whose basic meaning refers to information displayed on a board held up on a pole — the metaphoric extension here is pretty obvious, and also quite broad — it refers to anything that provides guidance or clues with respect to unclear and complicated situations.

It would be fun to investigate figurative usage across English (or other languages) to see whether and what patterns emerge, e.g., which metaphoric extensions are narrow in scope  and which are broad, and what attributes of the basic, concrete sense of the word may influence the metaphoric utility of its meaning. I’d also like to figure out a way to measure the rate of increasing (or decreasing) abstractness of a language. As new meanings enter English, for example, and old ones fall out of usage, is the language retaining a fairly constant ratio of concrete/abstract senses, or is the language becoming increasingly abstract? Or increasingly concrete? An objective and quantifiable notion of what is meant by ‘abstract meaning’ in the lexicon would be required to track this, and such a metric may be difficult to define with precision and agreement across speakers of the language. Something worth pondering, though.

Posted in Meaning Change | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Recombinant Semantics

Posted on August 14, 2010 by achouston

Playing with words and sentences is good exercise for the mind. Besides, it’s fun. Recently BBear (a Jumbles enthusiast) explained his version of a semantic game: take a passage (any passage you choose) and, using only the inventory of the words in the passage, rearrange the words to make a new passage.  Thanks to BBear for providing the following illustration in which he reworked a Craigslist personal ad from a few years back. Enjoy! 🙂

Original Passage

i want to meet people who laugh a lot, who have something to say, who force me to throw my notions of social convention out the window of our beat up chevrolet as we fly down the highway at 90 mph. people who find inspiration in a flower creeping thru the crack’d concrete, regardless of how corny it may seem; who are unsatisfied with the banal colours of ordinary dreams or living, who are more interested in Life than longevity, who may go on & on & on & still know the soul of wit is brevity, who are unafraid of their kinks, or to use their capacity to feel, fall, or think, who seek not mere compatability, but the fit of a glove, as well as beauty, truth, freedom, and (above all) Love!

i want storytellers and scientists, shapeshifters and starshooters, and cool complicated confident, beautiful imaginative intelligent, freaky funky sexy people all around (over, under, in & on) me!!!

wanna get to know me? show me. send me a picture and your AIM.

Transformed Passage (BBear’s)

Longevity may go on and on
And force me to beat up scientists,
Throw a fit or laugh a lot.

The banal shapeshifters down
On the crack’d concrete of the highway
Who all have something corny to say,
Who are creeping unafraid
Thru your ordinary dreams
With the soul of a glove,
Who use their capacity to fall
Out the window and not in love.

Storytellers want sexy people around,
Starshooters want flower colours,
I find inspiration in our Chevrolet
And complicated notions of compatibility.
My Life is unsatisfied
Regardless of people who fly over me
At 90 mph but seek mere beauty.

I wanna get freedom as well,
And beautiful imaginative kinks,
Meet people who know me,
Who show me their funky brevity,
And who are more interested in
A picture of me than social convention.

Are we still confident
Of living the truth, to wit,
(As it may seem intelligent),
To know how or who
To send on and under?
Or who, all freaky
And of cool aim,
Think and feel
as above?

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Word Jumbles #4

Posted on August 13, 2010 by achouston

  • KINTCOGS
  • FACTRY
  • ALLSTER
  • ESLAWE
  • PEDELVORE

Solutions posted tomorrow under Answers.

Posted in Uncategorized, Word Puzzles | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Parts

Posted on August 12, 2010 by achouston

There’s a commonly deployed linguistic device with a fancy Greek name — metonymy.  Metonymy is using an attribute or a part of something to refer to the thing itself. Here are some examples:

  • All hands are to report to the bridge immediately.  (hands stands in for personnel)
  • She had his ear for fifteen minutes. (ear stands in for attention, implying the presence of a thinking person)
  • They’ve got boots on the ground.  (boots stands in for soldiers)
  • He doesn’t aspire to be a suit.  (suit stands in for business executive)
  • These lands were given to them by the Crown. (Crown stands in for a ruling monarch who would wear such an adornment)

In addition to body and clothing parts, locations are often used as stand-ins for the social institutions they are associated with:

  • He was obsessed with the stage. (stage stands in for the world of theater productions)
  • They lost a lot of money at the track.  (track stands in for the enterprise of horse racing)
  • The White House issued a statement. (White House stands in for the President of the United States and associates)
  • Rome was not pleased. (Rome stands in for the political ruling body dwelling there)

More examples related to communication and its attributes.

  • They did not understand his strange tongue. (tongue stands in for a human language)
  • She gave me her word. (word stands in for a promise, an act of communication)

Notice that all of the metonyms illustrated above stand in for humans, or human-related activities and institutions. I found reference to a phrase ‘sixty keels ploughing through the deep’, where ‘keels’ stands in for ‘sailing ships’.  Human activity is implied, just as it is when artifacts stand in for musicians: ‘the horns will stand behind the strings’.  In both cases humans are manipulating human-made artifacts, ships and musical instruments, even though in the first case the part stands in for a whole artifact and in the second case, an artifact stands in for a person controlling that artifact.

Is metonymy ever used to reference things and processes in the world that don’t relate to humans and human activities? Can you say ‘a lot of feathers in the sky today’ and people will know you mean ‘birds flying or migrating’?  Is ‘a lot of wings in the sky today’  any better?  We have the expression ‘the sticks’  meaning ‘the countryside’, but is that a metonymic relationship? It could be if  ‘stick’ is slang for ‘tree’.  But, what about ‘he moved back to the bricks’? Does that work?

Here are some basic categories of things. I’ve made a stab at metonymic relations for them. You be the judge. And, if you have some examples, please send them along. I’m currently of the opinion that we are using this device mostly in regards to people. It would be interesting to know how things work for other languages, such as Spanish, Russian or Chinese.

  • natural objects such as mountains, stars, planets, islands, oceans, rivers, canyons  (can ‘the peaks’ refer to whole mountains, or does it imply just the tops? If the latter, it’s not metonymic. What does ‘he spent years on the waves’ mean? Is it clearly a reference to ocean or sea?)
  • natural activities such as earthquakes, hurricanes, blizzards, fires, landslide  (We speak of ‘a blow’ which refers to wind, a component of a hurricane or other big storm. It can imply just wind without precipitation however.)
  • flora and fauna such as flowers, forests, fish, insects, dogs, cats, bacteria  (‘Her garden has a lot of petals’  ‘We caught some gills with bait’ ‘That hotel allows paws in the rooms’  Do the preceding sentences succeed in referring to ‘flowers’ ‘fish’ and ‘dogs’ (or ‘cats’)?
Posted in metonymy, word meaning | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Sportaholics and Sexavores

Posted on August 10, 2010 by achouston

Just back from travels, so a short post today. There is a nice case of a newly productive suffix in English worth noting: –vore.  In the past there was a limited set that includes the well-known carnivore, herbivore, omnivore.  Recently the term locavore has come into being – people who seek to buy and consume food that is grown and produced locally, not shipped in from afar. The suffix is from the Latin verb vorare (to devour) and is related to modern-day voracious. What meaning does the suffix –vore convey to modern English speakers, perhaps ‘one who consumes’?  Today I read online a reference to infovore — a person who avidly scans and consumes digital information on the Internet and elsewhere. At this point the suffix has jumped the strict ‘consume food’ boundary implied in the preceding examples and extended its domain to encompass a more abstract, metaphoric sense of ‘consume’.  Languages do this sort of thing all the time, but it’s nice to catch a snapshot of the process in motion. Hoe productive will –vore become?  Are speakers now ready to further enrich the newly coined terms to include their related adjective forms — we easily refer to ‘omnivorous animals’, but what about ‘locavorous eaters’? ‘Infovorous readers’? Could the following pairs of terms exist, and if so, do they mean different things?

  • shopaholics/shopavores
  • locaholics/locavores
  • infoholics/infovores
  • alchoholics/alchovores
  • sexaholics/sexavores
  • sportaholics/sportavores

Update: I heard a new instance of the -holic pattern yesterday — ‘a recovering apocaholic’ — refers to one recovering from a tendency to believe the world is headed for doom. Note the extension to include ‘recovery’, parallel to how alcoholics shake their habit.

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Word Jumbles #3

Posted on August 5, 2010 by achouston

  • ETRAIN
  • STELKLI
  • DARTDENS
  • NELLIT
  • INCREDORA

Note: Solutions will be posted tomorrow on the new Answers page. This way newcomers can still work the old jumbles without seeing the solutions right away.

Posted in Word Puzzles | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Among and Amongst

Posted on August 4, 2010 by achouston

English usage seems to be getting hipper and leaner.  We’ve nearly lost our subjunctive mood (how many American English speakers even recognize this construction on the printed page?)  and whom should certainly be on the List of Endangered Words. (Is there such a list?)  So, it’s pretty amazing to see instances of amongst popping up like dandelions across the digital landscape; it’s showing up in comments to posts on various blogs and websites, tweets and the like. I have the feeling it’s mostly men using this form, too.  In modern English, there is no meaning difference between the two sentences

  • He must decide amongst the various options available to him.
  • He must decide among the various options available to him.

Middle English had a widely used adverbial genitive form, of which ‘amongst’ is a relic. Modern English has shed almost its entire legacy of case endings that were part of Old English grammar, and modern speakers of English probably don’t have much of an intuitive grasp of the form and sense of adverbial genitives.  An echo of this form occurs in expressions such as

  • She is performing evenings and weekends at the new beach resort.

Although we interpret ‘evenings’ and ‘weekends’ as plural nouns, the ‘s’ in this case (pun intended) is historically derived from the earlier genitive/instrumental ‘s’.  A paraphrase reveals that ‘evenings’ and ‘weekends’ are not the object of the verb ‘perform’, but are really condensed adverbial expressions.

  • She is performing during the evening and on the weekend at the new beach resort.

Other examples of an adverbial genitive today, using the more familiar genitive form ‘of’ would be the artsy-sounding

  • Of a morning she would walk the dog along the river.

Note the paraphrases.

  • Mornings she would walk the dog along the river.
  • In the morning she would often walk the dog along the river.

Back to amongst.  From Old English angemang ( in + gemang ‘assemblage, mingling’) Middle English had the form among + s, the ‘s’ indicating genitive case.  The final ‘t’ is probably without etymological significance (another claim is that the ‘t’ was influenced by the superlative suffix ‘-st’). Amongst is attested first in the 16th century mostly in the south (not the north) of England. Other English words also acquired the final ‘t’ on their adverbial genitive endings: whilst, against, amidst and even betwixt (Old English betweox ‘between, among’).

I’ve seen whilst showing up in the same digital venues cited for amongst, again compare the usages for yourself:

  • They get to reap the benefits whilst others are paying the bills.
  • They get to reap the benefits while others are paying the bills.

Are whilst and amongst used to add a touch of eloquence, to appear more knightly in one’s verbal demeanor? They are a tiny shade archaic in feel — don’t these users know English has no real case endings anymore?  🙂  They are probably not on anyone’s Top Ten Hip Words List (god, I do hope there is not such a list), they carry themselves with a little more decorum than while and among. This doesn’t seem true for betwixt which really does have an anachronistic ring to it. Whilst and amongst at least convey an ersatz learnedness, but not betwixt. But, I’ll keep watch on these words whilst I read content in the blogosphere, just in case we are unknowingly bringing case endings back into English. 🙂

Posted in history of language, language change, social context of language | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

FTW or WTF?

Posted on August 3, 2010 by achouston

We’ve all gotten used to abbreviations in email, text messages and Twitter. Today at Silicon Alley Insider a list of such abbreviations was compiled and presented. The list is obviously not complete and was not offered as such, and commentators provided additional examples. Three things are interesting to think about wrt (with respect to 🙂 ) these abbreviations:

  • they represent an area of our linguistic usage that is extremely fluid and undergoing change and expansion right now
  • although these forms are dynamic, speakers (er, I should say ‘texters’ I guess) adopt them quickly — their meanings are being disseminated rapidly and enabling communication, not impeding it.  (There are misfires – a reported case of someone wanting to send emotional support to a friend about a grievous event and signing off with LOL intending ‘lots of love’. when most people have learned that this abbreviation means ‘laughing out loud’.)
  • the abbreviations refer to whole phrases, not nouns or verbs – their meta-function is to pack in information within the constraints of the message format.

Here is a sampling of abbreviations and their meanings currently in use. And yes, four-letter-words are now embedded as single letters into these forms, with a notable prominence of the letter ‘F’.  The abbreviations are often capitalized, but I’ve noticed a growing trend to not do so. In any case, the use of uppercase or lowercase letters does not appear to change meaning.

  • BTW  – by the way
  • QOTD – quote of the day
  • HT – hat tip  (gives credit to another for a post or twitter)
  • FIFY – fixed it for you
  • OMG – Oh my gosh/god
  • FWIW – for what it’s worth
  • OH – overheard
  • IMHO/IMO – in my (humble) opinion
  • NSFW – not safe for work (referring to content or link associated with message)
  • AFAIK – as far as I know
  • IRL – in real life
  • NFW – no f—ing way
  • STFU – shut the f— up  (the ruder side of social media)
  • BFN – by for now
  • FTW – for the win
  • WTF – worse than failure OR what the f—?

And maybe my favorite so far 🙂

  • IANAL – I am not a lawyer

There are also some two-letter abbreviations specific to Twitter operations.

  • RT – retweet (implies the message (tweet) with this abbreviation is forwarded by another user/sender)
  • MT – modified tweet (signals the message is a paraphrase of an earlier tweet, not the exact original)
  • PRT – partial tweet  (signals the message is a truncated version of an original tweet)
  • DM – direct message (a message only shared between the sender and a specific recipient)

One basic rule for the above set of abbreviations appears to be that each word in the compressed phrase gets assigned one letter, and no words are dropped. How large an inventory of these can be evolved without increasing their ambiguity?  For a given tweet, constrained to 140 characters, the low-information content seems ripest for the compression into abbreviations — the names of users don’t get abbreviated because the full correct name is the unique ID of a given user. For high-information content words in tweets, e.g., technology products, social events, news items, opinions, etc., how compressed do users go?  It would be interesting to know.

Posted in Abbreviations, social context of language, syntax and new media | Tagged , , | Leave a comment