linguistics

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Fun With Signs: The Lowercase L

Bloggers love posting pictures of signs -- we've covered misspelled signs, weird signs, and (my personal favorite) signs featuring unnecessary quotation marks. Well, in further proof that there's a blog for literally everything, I've come across a blog documenting the use of the lowercase letter L among uppercase letters. Yes, this is real -- since 2005, blogger William Levin has been documenting signs in which the letter L is written in lowercase, while the other letters are uppercase. Each entry... READ ON

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Sorting Through the Words and Terms of '07

The SFGate recently crowned "subprime" the 2007 Word of the Year, over "surge" and the terms "carbon footprint" and "wide stance." Merriam-Webster, as we reported, picked the interjection "w00t" and the new Oxford American Dictionary chose "locavore." And on January 4th the American Dialect Society will vote for their pick of '07; among the finalists: "astronaut diaper," "bacn," "earmarxist" and "smeet." Also a bunch of other more sexist, racist, and otherwise offensive terms (though definitely circulating... READ ON

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Reading Levels of Popular Blogs

While doing some research on readability tests -- ways to analyze the readability or linguistic complexity of a body of text -- I came across The Blog Readability Test, an online tool that analyzes the readability level of blogs, expressed as an education level required to understand the blog. Although the site doesn't specify its mechanism, it is likely an implementation of the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Formula which focuses on number of syllables per word, as well as sentence length. Anyway, so I... READ ON

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From lynching to dunces: 10 Awful Words and the people they're named for

We're sifting through 6 years of print archives and give you a smattering of the best of the _floss. If you dig what you see, subscribe here. from lynching to chauvinism: 10 Awful Words and the People They're Named For by Mark Peters We all want to live forever. But, chances are, you'd rather forego a legacy altogether than have your name be synonymous with a goofy flub like a spoonerism or a dim-witted word like "dunce." For the following 10 eponyms, we ask: Did these... READ ON

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Spam As Art

Every time I check my spam folder, I'm amused by the subject lines. They seem to fall into two categories: first, there are human-edited lines that try to trick me into clicking; second, there are crazy nonsense subjects, presumably assembled through some algorithm (most appear to use Markov Chains). I can usually distinguish the randomized stuff from subjects written by a human -- today I received the clearly human subjects: "Customer Notification," "CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!," "talk to me," and so on.... READ ON

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Confessions of an imperfect vocabulary

Neuroscientists believe we have about 100 to 500 trillion individual synapses firing in our adult brains. So although our desire to continually stuff our minds may be earnest, brain capacity is finite--about one to ten terabytes, and it's estimated that the average person's vocabulary treads water well under 100,000 words. When I was growing up, road trips meant I was frequently captive audience to certain kinds of niche talk radio programs—which were bad enough without those commercial... READ ON

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The LOLCat Bible Translation Project

We've covered LOLCats before (including Miss C.'s hit LOLCat of Death post), but now things have gotten a little out of hand. The phenomenon of LOLCat Grammar has now matured enough to support a translation of the Bible into LOLCat language. Seriously. Check it out: LOLCat Bible Translation Project. The site is just getting started, but there's already plenty of material on there. And if you're into LOLCats (or Biblical translation), you can create an account and help with the translation! Note... READ ON

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R.I.P., Alex the African Grey Parrot

Alex, perhaps the best-known parrot in recent history, has died at the age of 31. The cause of death is still being determined (suspected to be aspergillosis, a fungal infection), and is expected to be announced sometime today at a press conference. Alex was the subject of ongoing research by Dr. Irene Pepperberg. The name is "Alex" is actually an acronym for "Avian Learning EXperiment," and he was noted for his apparent ability to communicate using spoken English, responding to questions and... READ ON

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The Gender Genie

Although it has existed since 2003, BookBlog's Gender Genie was news to me. Based on the research of Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, the Gender Genie implements an algorithm that (sometimes) predicts the sex of the author of a piece of text. I must say, this premise seemed odd to me. I don't tend to assume that there is some algorithmically determinable masculinity or femininity to any text, but of course, the first thing I tried was... READ ON

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The Yip Yips

I don't know how I managed to miss this as a child, but this video of the Sesame Street Yip Yips meeting a telephone has been stuck in my head for two weeks now: If you like that, check out Yip Yips Meet a Computer, Yip Yips Meet a Clock, and a fan tribute: dressing as Yip Yips for Halloween. You may also be interested in Wikipedia's explanation of the Yip Yips, the Yip Yip Fan Club, and Yip Yips on Flickr (see also: Yip Yip Cupcakes). This post has been brought you by the Letter... READ ON