Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

Tenser, said the Tensor: Take on Me

Does this post have a “Linguistics” tag on it? I guess I should add some linguistic content. When I saw the words printed out on the screen, it struck me for the first time that the title of the song isn’t a very natural-sounding English sentence. Here’s what I mean. English phrasal verbs that take direct objects like take on have the property that the object can appear either before or after the particle. That means the following are both good sentences:

(1) We’ll take some new employees on

(2) We’ll take on some new employees

It’s a little bit different with pronouns, though—if a phrasal verb has a pronoun as its direct object, the pronoun must come before the particle. Otherwise it sounds wrong (to my ear):

(3) We’ll take them on

(4) * We’ll take on them

My two cents on this is that I recall hearing several J-Pop songs that incorporate “Take on me” as an untranslated bit of English, which is quite common in J-Pop. A quick Google turns up i ~crossin’ the star~, and CHUUZU MII (themselves bits of untranslated English), as well as a cover by Utada Hikaru. I assume that wherever it turns up it’s a quote of the a-ha song, since as the Tensor points out it’s not natural-sounding English, but I wonder if the Japanese lyricists understand that it’s odd. I have the (probably incorrect) impression that it’s being used as if it meant something like “Stop and look at me”, though I can’t point out a specific song, just a vague recollection of some anime theme.

I’ve upgraded to the latest WordPress, and things seem to have gone smoothly (moment of panic when I wasn’t sure I had backed up the configs before deleting, but I had). Now I just have to reinstall a bunch of anti-spam plugins….

update: or maybe not, since the new version comes with a plugin for spam fighting already, so I’ll try that for a while…

I haven’t updated in a while, but I thought I’d point out an interesting medievalist blog Unlocked Wordhoard which I’ve been reading regularly, but hadn’t blogrolled until now when I was prodded to do so by this post in which Dr. Nokes rants about how medievalists don’t link their blogs to each other. I’m not a medievalist, but since I do read his blog and recommend it to others, I really ought to do my small bit to increase its visibility to Google.

Google’s new toolbar for IE and Firefox has a spell-check feature that lets you spell-check form submission boxes. So you can spell-check your blog entries and comments you leave. Very spiffy, with a nice drop-down suggestion list.

But if somebody who sells a Strunk & White Revelations T-Shirt
can’t get the apostrophe right, then…

Websnark.com: Philosophical Snarks Archives

Hurricane Rita has, as of this writing, just been upgraded to Category 5. It’s barometric pressure is worse than Katrina’s was at Katrina’s height.

I do echo his wish that everybody in the path of the storm will be safe.

528 books cataloged, 4 bookcases complete, 17 bookcases to go. Several of them are full of manga and comic collections, though, so that might wait til a second pass…

I’m discovering books that I had forgotten I owned, or had thought I lost. Would I have bought that hardcover Ultimate Hitchhikers Guide if I had known that I still had all three of the original paperbacks, scattered about? Well, possibly, since it was on sale for only $16 dollars, but still. It doesn’t help that I have most of my paperbacks doubled up on the shelves (with paperbacks that I doubt I’ll ever reread on their sides beneath the back row so that I can at least glimpse the spines of the back row). I’m thinking that once I finish cataloging, if I pack away most of the trashiest of the paperbacks and the things that I can’t imagine ever looking at (am I ever going to consult the Handbook of Employee Benefits again? I don’t think so. Ditto for Patterns in Java, Volume 2) I might be able to free up an entire bookshelf. Bliss.

I was up past midnight last night cataloging, and I’ve gotten 237 books done. That’s approximately the builtin bookcase next to the fireplace, plus the top two shelves of the bookcase next to the computer (which are stacked two deep w/paperbacks). I’m trying to be methodical about it, otherwise I know I’ll end up skipping bunches, so I’m going shelf-by-shelf, doing the complete shelf even if it means entering the book manually (mostly the older paperbacks, that don’t have a Library of Congress listing or an ISBN number). I’m skipping the manga for now. I’m thinking of reshelving them, or storing them some other way anyway, and I’ve already discovered that works in multiple volumes appear in LibraryThing as duplicated (my lovely four-volume set of A Dance to the Music of Time revealed this to me), so I don’t know whether I’m going to bother to catalog the manga. If I do I may just do one volume per series, and use the notes to indicate the volumes I have. I’m also trying not to get to compulsive about exactly which edition I have; most of the genre paperbacks are found on Amazon instead of in the Library of Congress, and Amazon tends to list only the most recent printing unless somebody is selling a used copy through zShops. I try to make sure that it’s at least the right publisher, but even then I think there are some slip-ups.

I’ve added a widget in the sidebar that displays random books from my library, via LibraryThing Cool, ne? Hacking the WordPress template wasn’t hard, but figuring out exactly where to hack was a pain in the tuchis.

Qu�dam cuiusdam is a blog about library tech. Well, somedbody’s got to blog about it, right?