Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

Here’s the result of a poll I took on one of the boards I frequent (a board for a group of City of Heroes players). Comments on the poll were disallowed, to try to prevent people from influencing each other’s views, though many eagerly shared their opinions with me via private message. It’s interesting how well this matches up to the 146,000 vs. 49, 300 Google Hits observed on Language Log.

You’ve got another X coming
Which sounds right? >You’ve got another thing coming [ 37 ] [78.72%] >You’ve got another think coming [ 8 ] [17.02%] >Both sound right to me [ 2 ] [4.26%]
Total Votes: 47

Language Log: Another thing coming

Google has 146,000 hits for “another thing coming”, most of which are not the Judas Priest song, vs. 49,300 for “another think coming”, which I’m pretty sure is the original expression. (Arnold Zwicky observed thing’s internet victory back in June of 2004 — though the totals were much smaller then, 21,400 to 5,830.)

This came up the other day in the car, when we were listening to the Judas Priest song, and it turns out that neither my fiancée nor my old college friend recall having ever even heard it as “you’ve got another think coming.” Moreover both were convinced, at least initially, that “another thing” just made more sense than “another think.”

Main Page - NLTK

NLTK — the Natural Language Toolkit — is a suite of open source Python modules, data and documentation for research and development in natural language processing. NLTK contains Code supporting dozens of NLP tasks, along with 30 popular Corpora and extensive Documentation including a 360-page online Book. Distributions for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux are available.

I ran across this the other day, and I was just blown away by it. I’m a big fan of Python (and use it whenever I get a chance professionally) as well as being interested in linguistics, so being able to write Python code to manipulate this stuff was just…so…cool. It’s startling how much time I can waste just counting things in the provided corpora. I’m really looking forward to playing with it more, and using it to teach myself about Natural Language Processing as well as new bits of Python that I haven’t fully come to grips with yet (e.g. the generator functions). It really pushes all my ooooh! Shiny! buttons.

I’ve successfully installed it and got it to run some of the examples (including the graphing demo) on my Windows box and my Mac OS X laptop. As is unfortunately typical, although it seems to run better on the Mac, installing it on Windows was actually a quite a bit easier. Yeah, yeah, pre-compiled binaries are the work of the devil, but for Joe end-user–even for a relatively sophisticated Joe end-user–it’s a pain to get partway through, realize that it won’t compile because it’s missing some compilers, have to go get the developer toolkit and install that, and then get back to building the thing you were trying to get to work in the first place. I didn’t have any particular problems, other than the time it took to download 183 mb of stuff that I’ll probably barely use, but it was pretty painful compared to double-clicking on an exe and then clicking a couple of buttons. I’m sure hard-core Mac users are so used to the pain that they don’t even perceive it as pain, and I’m certainly not saying that the developers of the NLTK ought to devote any time at all to improving the installation, but if you’re thinking of playing with this and you aren’t a hard-core Mac user, I’d suggest that if you have access to both kinds of system, at least to get your feet wet you should try it in Windows first. You’ll be messing around with the actual NLTK code a lot faster.

I guess, though my accent is definitely rhotic (I pronounce the r’s as written) and completely lacks the intrusive r (idea(r), saw(r)) that makes someone sound like a Kennedy, something the quiz isn’t designed to pick up on.

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.

Language Log: Recursive titles:

Yesterday I posted something on Joshua Macy’s review of The Language Instinct. Since Macy called his piece “So what’s wrong with The Language Instinct?”, I considered titling mine “So what’s wrong with ‘So what’s wrong with The Language Instinct?’?”, so that he could respond “So what’s wrong with ‘So what’s wrong with “So what’s wrong with The Language Instinct?”?’?”, and so on.

Since I wrote a term paper in college titled “The Meaning of ‘The Meaning of Meaning’” ¹ I’m sure that I wouldn’t have been able to resist.

1. About Hilary Putnam’s famous paper “The Meaning of Meaning.” As best I recall, I thought the fact that people happily use jade to refer to two distinct substances, jadeite and nephrite, posed a problem for his theory that for us water means H2O even if we’re not aware of the chemical composition.