Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

The Morning News - Camille Paglia, by Robert Birnbaum

Interesting interview, well worth the time to read, even if Birnbaum comes across as a bit of a twit. I might have to pick up her new book, Break, Blow, Burn.

hat tip: Tightly Wound

Poet: Ogden Nash - All poems of Ogden Nash

Sweet. I have a whacking great book with 650 of Ogden Nash’s poems, so it’s not that so much as poemhunter.com itself. I love sites like this. Ooooh, and you can comment on the poems if you wish.

Tip of the hat to languagehat

and writes a long, but interesting and amusing piece on it in Poetry, but misses the perfect chance to use the word materteral.

Ah, hell, I’m getting tired of coming up with new ways of mocking the NYT’s arrogance.

languagehat is tearing his hair out over the paper of record’s refusal to consult a dictionary before offering its pronunciation advice:

I had just started the article “Those Ancient Incan Knots? Tax Accounting, Researchers Suggest” by Nicholas Wade in today’s NY Times when I had occasion to grind my teeth: “They believe they may have decoded the first word - a place name - to be found in a quipu (pronounced KWEE-poo)…” What the hell? Is the Times too proud to actually consult a dictionary? Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, for instance, which says “Pronunciation: ‘kE-(”)p{u”}” …

In Dynamist Blog: Incomprehensible Headline, Virginia Postrel writes:

Bush’s Aid Cuts on Court Issue Roil Neighbors

Unless you click to the story, you’ll never figure out what it means. Or at least I couldn’t.

Well, it is headline-ese ( Aid Cuts instead of Cuts in Aid) does have an unusual number of words that can be either a noun or a verb ( Aid, Cuts, Court, Issue, and Roil ) , but it seems to me that there’s only one valid way to parse it:

[Bush's [[Aid Cuts] [on Court Issue]]] [Roil [Neighbors]]

I’m still working my way through Huddleston’s and Pullum’s A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar, but I believe this should be analyzed as:

This is a simple Subject-Predicate construction

Cuts is the head noun of a NP that forms the subject, and is modified by both Bush’s and Aid, and complemented by the PP on Court Issue

Roil is the head verb of a VP that forms the predicate, with the complement NP Neighbors as the direct object.

So basically it boils down to: Cuts Roil Neighbors.

And following the link, that appears to be the case. Cuts in aid that the US has made to countries over a dispute about the International Criminal Court have upset those neighboring countries.

update: Thinking about it some more, what’s probably confusing about this is that it’s a “garden path” sentence: it starts out with a plausible parse that suddenly hits a word that can’t fit and forces you to backtrack. Bush’s Aid looks completely natural as an NP with Aid as the head, then Cuts heads a VP…On Court Issue starts to stretch it as a complement. Cuts doesn’t seem to license on, but maybe it means something like cuts class. Then you hit Roil and the whole thing falls apart.

Foreword: A Book Design Blog. This looks like it might be interesting.

hat tip: Language Hat

Grammatical Terminology

Q: So, what exactly is a noun?

A: Noun comes from the Latin word for “name.” Nouns name what you’re talking about. For example, if I had to name what you’re doing, I’d say you’re interviewing me. So to interview is a noun.

It goes on from there, and gets sillier.

Hat tip to the incredibly-niftily-named Hapax Legomena

This looks interesting. Too bad I don’t have Microsoft Office 2003, and have no intention of getting it.

Translit - Russian, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic Transliteration

Hate receiving emails from your friends written in Latin alphabet? Bored searching for a good translit engine? Not anymore!

Transliterating (decoding) email messages and text from English to Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, and other non-Latin alphabets is now as easy as ABC!

Seriously. The OED software gives a word of the day when you start it up. Today’s word is *inconsciently*, which the OED defines as unknowningly. I’m pretty sure from the context sentences that should read unknowingly. Just in case, I looked up unknowningly, and as I expected, there wasn’t any listing for it.

OUP: The Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition) on CD-ROM version 3.1

The full content of the Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition), the three Additions volumes, and now almost 2,000 new words and phrases from the OED’s ongoing research programme.

This just arrived today, and I couldn’t be happier. Yeah, it don’t take much, do it?

Unfortunately, it’s not available for the Mac, so I had to install it on my Windows box, even though I do almost all my writing on my cute little Powerbook. I plannned for this eventuality, though, and last week I installed some remote desktop software on my Windows system so that I could control it and use my lovely new dictionary from afar. I just tested that, and it works perfectly.

Also unfortunate is that, although you can load the whole dictionary onto your hard drive (requires 1.7 gigs free), their software protection scheme requires that you reinstall the software every 90 days. That’s what it says anyway, although I’m hoping they mean you have to demonstrate that you still have the install disk every 90 days, not that you have to go through the whole installation process. I mean, granted that the Oxford University Press probably has good reason to suspect that their primary customers, mostly academics I imagine, can’t be trusted, what about us honest blokes who just happen to like a good dictionary now and then?

Update: After about the third 90-day reinstall, the damn thing just stopped working and no amount of uninstalling, scrubbing the registry, and reinstalling managed to fix it.  I do not recommend this product, not matter how nifty it would be if it worked.