Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

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

From the back cover:

Most of us have firm convictions about our language, as to what constitutes proper use and what is unacceptable abuse. As children we are taught a great deal about good and bad grammar, correct pronunciation and spelling, and the proper use of words. As adults we constantly encounter books, articles, and letters to newspapers opining about “proper English” and the sorry state of our language. Yet many statements we believe to be true about language are likely as not false. Much of what we have learnt about language is misdirected; little of it is useful and some may be harmful. Myths and misunderstandings are plentiful. Much that passes for insight and informed comment is palpably wrong. This books explores why it is we believe what we believe about language, and why we persist in handing down from generation to generation a rag bag collection of fact and fantasy about language. It offers a corrective to many of the unsupportable beliefs we hold about language in general and English in particular. It shows how these beliefs originated and offers suggestions for a more enlightened approach.

I picked this up based on a recommendation by Geoffery Pullum, over on Language Log. So far I’m only about one chapter in, but it’s holding my attention. If it can actually shed some useful light on the questions it raises, it should be quite good indeed.

update: Unfortunately, the link to the spiffy little picture of my Mazda 3 is broken… ah, well.

Editors’ Note - New York Times

The Op-Ed page in some copies yesterday carried an incorrect version of an article about military recruitment. The writer, an Army reserve officer, did not say, “Imagine my surprise the other day when I received orders to report to Fort Campbell, Ky., next Sunday,” nor did he characterize his recent call-up to active duty as the precursor to a “surprise tour of Iraq.” That language was added by an editor and was to have been removed before the article was published. Because of a production error, it was not. The Times regrets the error.

What the-? So the editors at the Times are in the habit of inserting make-believe quotes into pieces and marking them to be deleted in production?

hat tip: Instapundit

Not all the stuff that happened today was bad, however. I recently groused about the Muppets being basically unavailable on DVD, while complete and utter drek was getting the Season-by-Season boxed set treatment. Well, now the Muppets is, too! According to TV Guide, The Muppet Show Season One (1976-77) will be available starting 8/9, list price $39.99 ($28 as a pre-order from amazon).

I am SO there. Manahmanah!

update: I’ve removed the amazon link, since the server they use for the associates links seems to be broken at the moment

Twice in the past week when the subject of Red Dwarf has come up and I’ve sung part of the theme¹. Some of my friends, who are certainly familiar with the show, have expressed surprise at the lyrics, which apparently never registered with them. So here they are, courtesy of Classic cult television theme song lyrics

Red Dwarf, Theme Tune

It’s cold outside, there’s no kind of atmosphere,
I’m all alone, more or less,
Let me fly, far away from here,
Fun, fun, fun in the sun, sun, sun.

I want to lie shipwrecked and comatose,
Drinking fresh mango juice,
Goldfish shoals nibbling at my toes,
Fun, fun, fun in the sun, sun, sun
Fun, fun, fun in the sun, sun, sun.

PALGN 2005 :: PSP pornography is ‘utterly undesirable’

With the launch of the very first pornographic movies on the PSP’s UMD video format imminent, Sony have spoken out on the subject to the Japanese press, denouncing the releases as ‘utterly undesirable’. Yet despite their decidedly dim view on the arrival of PSP porn, the Japanese giant is unable to prevent the discs from being released, as the firm can only monitor the content of games. From a legal standpoint, Sony have very little control over the content of films released on the new UMD format.

I think Sony is missing a bet here. I mean, watching something like Spiderman 2 on a handheld always struck me as a dubious proposition–and at around $30 each the PSP movies are expensive for something you can’t also play on your television. But people are willing to pay big money for porn (even monkeys will apparently pay for monkey porn, but that’s a different post)–I could definitely see this eating into the market for hotel-room cable porn. Even more discreet for the business traveler, and, hey, you can hold it in one hand…

EFF: Legal Guide for Bloggers

Whether you’re a newly minted blogger or a relative old-timer, you’ve been seeing more and more stories pop up every day about bloggers getting in trouble for what they post.

Like all journalists and publishers, bloggers sometimes publish information that other people don’t want published. You might, for example, publish something that someone considers defamatory, republish an AP news story that’s under copyright, or write a lengthy piece detailing the alleged crimes of a candidate for public office.

The difference between you and the reporter at your local newspaper is that in many cases, you may not have the benefit of training or resources to help you determine whether what you’re doing is legal. And on top of that, sometimes knowing the law doesn’t help - in many cases it was written for traditional journalists, and the courts haven’t yet decided how it applies to bloggers.

And if you’re a blogger, you might consider joining the EFF.

Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”, are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside! program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in Search Inside. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.

SIPs are not necessarily improbable within a particular book, but they are improbable relative to all books in Search Inside. For example, most SIPs for a book on taxes are tax related. But because we display SIPs in order of their improbability score, the first SIPs will be on tax topics that this book mentions more often than other tax books. For works of fiction, SIPs tend to be distinctive word combinations that often hint at important plot elements.

For instance Handbook of the International Phonetic Association has the following SIPS: phonetic diphthongs, recorded passage, alveolar trill, transcribed passage, long counterparts, word final position, lexical stress, voiced obstruents, open syllables, stress placement, unstressed positions, nasalized vowels, educated speakers, velar nasal, front vowels, high vowels, vowel qualities, unstressed syllables

What puzzles me a little is that not all the books, even all the searchable books, have SIPS, and I’m not sure why.

Manahmahna

Which reminds me, why the hell is it that when every TV show under the sun is coming out in boxed sets (Hee-Haw, for crying out loud. Three’s Company. *Airwolf*), there’s still no season-by-season collections of the Muppet Show? There are a couple (four maybe?) DVD with some of the famous episodes, organized somewhat thematically (e.g. biggest name musical guests), but somebody somewhere is overlooking the opportunity to practically print money. Are the rights to the shows trapped in some legal Limbo?

hat tip Oxblog