language

Article

George Orwell: Politics and the English Language

In 1946, George Orwell published an essay in the British literary magazine Horizon, arguing against poor usage of English by modern writers. In the essay, Orwell cited five examples of "the English language as it is now habitually written." The examples are almost hilariously hard to follow. The first is obfuscated by a series of negatives: "I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience... READ ON

Article

Why Do We Capitalize the Word "I"?

Caroline Winter (sitting in for William Safire) tackles the issue of the English capitalized "I" in her column My, Myself and I in yesterday's Times Magazine. It's an interesting read (okay, and deliciously nerdy), touching on the use of personal pronouns in various languages, and tracing the peculiar history of this particular one-letter English word. (Also, big bonus points for using the word majuscule in the opening paragraph!) Here's a sample: "Graphically, single letters are a problem," says... READ ON

Article

How To Get a Word into the Oxford English Dictionary

The short process is: meet someone who works at the OED evaluating new words for inclusion. The slightly longer process involves plying him or her with drink. The most complete answer is contained in Lyza Danger Gardner's blog entry How I Got a Word into the Oxford English Dictionary. (And yes, it includes both of the aforementioned steps.) As Erin McKean pointed out in her Ten Things You Should Know About the Dictionary, it helps to have identified a lexical gap first -- a place in the language where... READ ON

Article

Absurd Entries in the OED

Ammon Shea spent a year working his way through the Oxford English Dictionary. The result is his book Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. But in the run-up to his book's publication, Shea shared many of his most bizarre finds in an Oxford University Press blog. Here's an intro: Absurd Entries is the name that I gave to a certain class of definition that I would come across every so often when reading the OED. They are rarer than the mistakes, and considerably more fun to read. These... READ ON

Article

Chomskybot: Almost Intelligible Gibberish

Chomskybot is a web-hosted program that generates text which appears similar to (and based on) the famously hard-to-follow linguistic work of Noam Chomsky. But unlike Chomsky's actual work, Chomskybot's text is devoid of meaning. Circling back on itself, piling modifiers on terms, and stretching the limits of human attention, Chomskybot generates a stream of text that's almost meaningful -- and by doing so, it's actually kind of fun to read...until it drives you nuts. For example, try to make sense of... READ ON

Article

Ten Things You Should Know About the Dictionary

Erin McKean is an editor and lexicographer for the New Oxford American Dictionary. She's a dictionary expert, and even a dictionary evangelist -- she has a lot to say about what dictionaries are good for, and she has practical advice about dictionary use in the modern world. In 2006, McKean spoke to the good people of Google about the ten things she wishes people knew about dictionaries. She discusses "how people go about making new words, and how lexicographers use Google." She also reveals that her... READ ON

Article

Why reCAPTCHA is Good for Humanity

Last week we talked about KittenAuth, a novel CAPTCHA system used to differentiate between humans and spambots -- by using pictures of kittens. Today let's take a look at reCAPTCHA, the system in use by this very blog. What does it do, and why is it good for humanity? What's a CAPTCHA? First let's review the term CAPTCHA. It's a loose acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart." The idea is to force humans to do a (relatively) simple task like read a... READ ON

Article

4 Must-Read Books for Aspiring Writers

If there's one thing writers love talking (and complaining) about, it's writing. Lots of authors have put out books about their writing processes -- some better than others. Here are four of my favorites. (And please use the comments to suggest more books on writing that deserve to be featured!) 1. Telling Lies for Fun &... READ ON

Article

ELIZA: Free Compu-Therapy...Sort Of

Computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum died earlier this month, reminding us that his most famous creation, the computer program ELIZA, lives on. Weizenbaum created ELIZA in the mid 1960's as a model of "natural language" interaction between a human subject and a computer. ELIZA mimics a talk therapist, rephrasing statements made by the user as open-ended questions, encouraging further discussion. Weizenbaum named his program after Eliza Doolittle, the famous subject of Henry Higgins's tutelage in the... READ ON

Article

Naming Conventions

Yesterday I pointed to a list of IKEA Naming Conventions, revealing the logic behind how they've named their products. In my life, the main families of items I see named are computers (generally, servers). At my office, we name the servers after sushi -- so you have otoro, hamachi, maguro, and so on. At web hosting company Pair, servers are named for the phonetic spelling of alphabet letters (including common alphabets like Greek and obscure stuff like Ogham -- shown in the photo to the right) -- so you... READ ON