Open University: The History of English in Ten Minutes

Amusing overview of the subject.  Would also recommend this series...if you have seven hours or so to spare rather than ten minutes...

QOTD*: Hillary Clinton on Trade Deals

Updated the last post to reflect Hillary's belated opposition to the TPP deal, but I think this quote from her interview with Judy Woodruff merits highlighting.

...We've learned a lot about trade agreements in the past years.  Sometimes they look great on paper.  I know when President Obama came into office, he inherited a trade-agreement with South Korea.  I, along with other members of the cabinet, pushed hard to get a better agreement -- We think we made improvements -- Now, looking back on it, it doesn't have the results we thought it would have, in terms of access to the markets, more exports, et cetera.

And here I thought, listening to her at first, that she was just referring to the insane trade-deals her husband pushed through as president, but no, she's indicting her own competence & record as well.

She then goes on with some nonsense about how 'in order for us to have a competitive economy in the global marketplace', the US needs to 'raise wages' 'at home' (which the Republican meanies have blocked).  So, in other words, she doesn't get the fundamental complaint ordinary workers in the West have against these deals, nor why they are so favoured by the corporate elites, at all.  I sure am filled with confidence in Hill' as the Dem's candidate right now.


* Should really be QOYD for 'Quote of Yesterday', but I suppose that's not 'a thing.'**

** More and more, I feel like commas should be placed outside of quotation-marks, but it just doesn't feel right for the full stop/period.  I'm 'evolving' on the issue.

The Statesman Tribune: I Can Haz Fake News-Organisation Also

Oh, look, themarketbusiness.com has competition.  And they even know how to calculate 15 + 2.

Good to see, especially as the last article I read from themarketbusiness.com looked almost semi-literate.  I wonder if I should just take a quick peek over there, to...

Oh dear.  Any hoo...The Statesman Tribune...That's a fine traditional name, isn't it ?  Bet they've been around for years and years, since...<checks domain records>...er, since February.  Well, long enough to have the one piece of breaking news (it is just the one that cycles in the banner over and over) three months ago about smoking.

And now, they have an important story to share about a private mission to land on the moon.  Let's include it here in its illiterate entirety, given that it does after all appear to be entirely ripped off from this actual news-story on Space.com.

California-primarily based firm Moon Express, which goals to fly business missions to the moon and assist unlock its sources, has signed a 5-launch cope with Rocket Lab, with the primary two robotic liftoffs scheduled to happen in 2017.

These uncrewed launches — three of that are firmly on the books, with the opposite two non-obligatory in the meanwhile — will blast Moon Specific’ MX-1 lander into area aboard Rocket Lab’s fifty two.5-foot-tall (sixteen meters) Electron rocket. The purpose is to check out the MX-1 and its techniques, ensuring the spacecraft can land softly on the moon, transfer in regards to the lunar floor, seize samples and return them to Earth.

Wait, I thought they were called 'Moon Express' ?...

“The holy grail of our firm is to offer, to show, a full-companies functionality — not simply touchdown, however getting back from the moon,” mentioned Moon Categorical co-founder and CEO Bob Richards, who introduced the brand new launch deal in the present day (Oct. 1) on the Area Expertise & Funding Summit in San Francisco.
If the MX-1 nails its touchdown on the primary mission, “we will be impressed to strive a pattern-return,” Richards informed Space.com. “I do not know if we’ll do this on the second mission, however I positive hope we’re making an attempt it by the third mission, if all goes that nicely.”

They changed their name again ?  Oh, and maybe you should delete the reference to Space.com, so it's not so obvious whence you plagiarised this shit...

The 2 non-compulsory launches present some insurance coverage for Moon Specific in case the primary three flights do not go totally in line with plan, Richards mentioned.

The contract places Moon Specific in place to probably win the Google Lunar X Prize, a $30 million competitors to land a privately funded robotic spacecraft on the moon by the top of 2017. The primary workforce to do that — and have the craft transfer 1,640 toes (500 m) and beam excessive-definition video and pictures again to Earth as nicely — will win the $20 million grand prize. (The second crew to perform these objectives will get $5 million; one other $5 million is obtainable for assembly sure different milestones.)

1,640 toes !  I think the police may have 164 or more homicides to investigate.

Sixteen groups stay within the operating for the Google Lunar X Prize, so the result stays very a lot up within the air. For instance, one staff, Astrobotic, signed a contract in 2011 to launch its lunar lander aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Astrobotic representatives have stated they plan to launch in 2016.

The three.9-foot-huge (1.2 m) Electron rocket is designed to ship a 330-lb. (one hundred fifty kilograms) payload to a solar-synchronous orbit 310 miles (500 kilometers) above Earth, based on Rocket Lab’s web site. The 2-stage rocket will not be operational but; industrial launches are scheduled to start in 2016, say representatives of the corporate, which is headquartered in California however has a New Zealand subsidiary. (Moon Categorical may have the choice of launching from Rocket Lab’s vary in New Zealand or from a web site in the US.)

Websites can launch rockets now ?!  Hook me up with that functionality please.

“Rocket Lab is happy to start working with Moon Specific to launch its spacecraft and to offer assist to such an bold mission,” Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck mentioned in an announcement. “Moon Categorical has used superior orbital mechanics to allow this mission from low-Earth orbit.”

Electron is kind of an inexpensive choice so far as orbital launches are involved, with every liftoff costing simply $four.9 million. Falcon 9 launches, for instance, value about $60 million every.

“We predict the collapse of the value to get to the moon goes to allow a complete new market — type of just like the four-minute-mile of area,” Richards mentioned.

The MX-1 landers that blast off atop an Electron will probably be comparatively small, constrained by the rocket’s dimension.. However the MX-1 is scalable, Richards stated, and will be modified as wanted to assist the corporate obtain its formidable objective of opening up the moon and its sources to industrial use.

“Because the market responds, we can present the platforms to help the market,” Richards mentioned. “We’re beginning small; we’re beginning with the newborn steps.”

So Space.com publishes a perfectly decent article on private lunar exploration, and The Statesman Tribune turns it into utter gibberish, in which they can't even be bothered to notice the fact that their translation-software mangles the name of the company involved multiple times.

Seriously, what's the market here ?  Who are the audience ?  ESL learners who want to avoid mastery of the English language at all costs ?

And don't these guys ever get sued for plagiarism, when they simply run other organisations' news-stories through translation-engines, and publish them as their own ?

I hate the Internet, in case I haven't mentioned that before.

Traditional Values

Of all the subjects for Berke Breathed.  I have no opinion on this of course.*


 * Because, fuck readability.  No-one does any more than scan the written word any more, so who cares whether everything blurs into a solid wall of text or not.

À Propos of Nothing

I can just about accept Reagan pronounced as Ray-gun, and Cheney as Chainee, but Koch is not pronounced 'Coke', Boehner is certainly not pronounced 'Bayner', and Loesch sure as fuck is not pronounced 'Lash'.  At least the latter admits it.  When the hell will Republicans/Right-Wingers own up to their actual names and stop mispronouncing them ?

* Yes, I could just respect people's choices to pronounce their names as they see fit.  In the case of the right-wing scum aforementioned though, fuck that.  I'm not sure I can manage any respect for even the star of Bedtime for Bonzo**, never mind those other arseholes.

** By which, I mean Ronnie obviously.  Totes respect the chimp.

What's the Size of Your Vocabulary Got to Do with It ?

Via a piece in the Telegraph, which they headlined 'Kanye and Eminem have wider vocabularies than Bob Dylan'*, this interactive study on musixmatch is, if nothing else, a nice way to waste a little time, even if it largely underscores the obvious, such as that certain genres (i.e. hip-hop and rap) are far more lyrically intensive than others (such as mass-market pop).

Just a screenshot, obvs.  Click thru for the interactive stuff & analysis.

* Though 'Em had a considerably higher word-count than Kanye.

Guardian: In more innocent days, you could write about cocks and not be misunderstood

The brave and resourceful small girl in Arthur Ransome’s 1930 classic, Swallows and Amazons, is called Titty. But not, we learn, in the new film version being made by the BBC. There she will be renamed Tatty, to avoid “too many sniggers”.

It’s not the first time this indignity has befallen Titty, who was named after the traditional English fairytale, Titty Mouse and Tatty Mouse, in a more innocent age. (According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, the word “tits” only started being associated with breasts in about 1928.) She was rechristened Kitty when the story was televised by the BBC in 1963, though she re-emerged with her original name in the 1974 film adaptation, and in a later radio broadcast in 2012.

Names have long been a hazard in children’s literature. ...

“Ejaculate”, another potentially troublesome word, was at one time popular with authors as an alternative to “exclaimed”. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – not quite a children’s author but always loved by young readers – used it 23 times in his Sherlock Holmes stories, most arrestingly in The Man with the Twisted Lip (1891), when Watson, after dozing off in the great detective’s study, reports that “a sudden ejaculation caused me to wake up”.

As a doctor, Doyle would have known the term in its sexual context, but at a time when open discussion of such matters was reserved for medical textbooks, could have thought that its use in another sense was perfectly justified. More probably, he simply missed the double meaning altogether. This was also true years later of the young Dr Seuss, whose first publications in the 1930s, Boners, More Boners, Still More Boners and The Pocketbook of Boners are now collectors’ items.

“Cock” as slang for the male member has been current since 1610. Yet in the chapter headed Aunt Jane’s Treat in Richmal Crompton’s 1924 novel, William the Fourth, one of William’s respectable maiden aunts accompanies him to a fair, where she rides on a merry-go-round, mounting – as the author puts it – “a giant cock” … “It seemed to give her a joy that all her blameless life had so far failed to produce,” it says.

Something similar, again involving a cockerell-shaped fairground attraction, takes place in Angela Thirkell’s 1939 novel The Brandons. This example of light fiction was aimed not at children but at a largely female, middle-class audience whose ultra-respectability amounted to another form of assumed literary innocence.

...

Today, double entendres are the regular stuff of comedy, even when writing for children. When AA Milne referred to Pooh “poohing in the sun” in a poem in The House at Pooh Corner, he unleashed decades of quiet merriment among parents and grandparents aware of how the meaning had changed since they were six. But perhaps the most devoted Milne fans reading to children now would draw the line at two American spin-offs, both picture books: Marlene Brown’s Cooking with Pooh (1995) and Isabel Gaines’s Pooh Gets Stuck (1998). Those earlier, unconscious verbal slips were so much funnier.

Ugh...

And from the earlier, related story:

This is not the first time the character’s name has been modified to avoid smirks: in a 1963 film adaptation, she became Kitty. And book publishers have made similar adjustments to children’s books in recent years: Fanny in Enid Blyton’s The Faraway Tree is now Frannie, and cousin Dick is now cousin Rick, while Nobby in Five Go Off in a Caravan is now Ned.

Maybe, just maybe, authors wrote in the past using perfectly normal English words and perfectly normal names, and readers read their works without breaking out into fits of giggles every five seconds because...they weren't sex-obsessed potty-brained idiots.

Personally I'm against censorship of any kind of past works, without the author's own explicit permission, which if they're dead, they obviously can't now give, but some reasons make more sense than others.

Image: http://tygertale.com/2014/02/11/the-black-dossier-return-of-the-golliwogg/

The removal of the golliwogs from Blyton for example, is understandable insofar as they were based upon traditional racist stereotypes.  The offence there makes sense.  But Dick ?  Dick is only offensive if we choose to make it offensive.  And just what are we telling children by stripping this perfectly innocent language from their literature ?  And most of these usages historically were innocent, whatever the Guardian's writer may want to infer.

Just grow the fuck up people, and stop destroying our language.

Relentlessly Gay

Photo via Reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/baltimore/comments/3a70nf/relentlessly_gay/)

Instead of retreating, a Baltimore woman is getting revenge on a homophobic neighbor by using their attempt to shame her for her yard as the basis for a successful online fundraiser.

The Baltimore Sun reported that 47-year-old Julie Baker started the campaign after finding a note inside her door criticizing her for the multi-color solar lights on her front yard, which spell out the words “love” and “ohana.” The latter is a Hawaiian expression meaning “family.”

“Your yard is becoming Relentlessly Gay!” the note read. “Myself and Others in the neighborhood ask that you Tone it Down. This is a Christian area and there are Children. Keep it up and I will be forced to call the police on You! Your kind need to have Respect for GOD.”

Baker, who identified herself as bisexual in an interview with Baltimore City Paper, said the lights were not meant as a political statement.

Photo via citypaper.com

“The point of the rainbows isn’t about being gay,” she said. “It’s because we love rainbows. I have a rainbow tattoo on my arm. We’re going to decorate the white siding of our house with them.”

Baker also opened a page on the crowd-funding site GoFundMe seeking $5,000 she said would be used to make her yard “even More ‘relentlessly gay.'”

“Put simply, I am a widow and the mother of four children, my youngest in high school and I WILL NOT Relent to Hatred,” she wrote. “Instead, I will battle it with whimsy and beauty and laughter and love, wrapped around my home, yard and family!!!”

Sigh.  Colourful whimsical ornamentation is all I see here.  Odd thing is, although the woman apparently self-identifies as bi-sexual, which wasn't clear from coverage of the story on many sites, I suspect that she genuinely just wanted something pretty, something positive in a garden, something to bring a smile.

And yet, since the rainbow has been appropriated as a political symbol (not her fault), just as the word 'gay' itself was appropriated, the mere fact of choosing kaleidoscopic colours is immediately interpreted as something political, or as something sexual.

'Gay', like 'queer' (the latter also possessing in its traditional usage the additional bonus of onomatopoeia), is one of the relatively few monosyllabic words in the English language.  And not one in its traditional use that even submits easily to a dictionary-definition.  There's a suggestion of something childlike, something innocent about 'gay'.  It refers to a carefree happiness, a lightness shot through with joy.  It's a beautiful word.

My little wordbook is old enough that it still gives a traditional definition first.  Dictionary.com not only gives the sexual definition for the first and second entries, but has 'Slang: Often Disparaging and Offensive. awkward, stupid, or bad; lame' as its third.  Oxforddictionaries.com tells me that 'the centuries-old other senses of gay meaning either ‘carefree’ or ‘bright and showy’ have more or less dropped out of natural use. The word gay cannot be readily used today in these older senses without arousing a sense of double entendre, despite concerted attempts by some to keep them alive.'

Well count me as one of those who'll try to keep the original spirit of the word alive, world be damned.*  Not that I don't understand the desire for an alternative to 'homosexual' -- It's such an awkward, clinical sounding word -- Just wish there were an alternative to stripping two of the rarest and most beautiful words from the language.

Which is I suppose to say, that while the nosy neighbour was absolutely wrong in assuming the 'relentless gayness' of the garden, it is nonetheless, in my eyes at least, marvellously gay indeed.


* Out of curiosity, I checked this blog for my own usage, and found three instances where I used the word in the modern usage, one of which in quotation-marks.  So not as committed to this as I might want to pretend perhaps.

OMG Shakespeare

YOLO Juliet. srsly Hamlet. Macbeth #killingit. Shakespeare goes textspeak

A new series of books for younger readers gives some of the bard’s greatest plays the 21st-century textspeak treatment. If you have FOMO, read on …

No.

Shakespeare took Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland and refashioned them into stories fit for the theatre – the most popular format of his time – transforming history into a rose that “might never die”.

Just No.

Now Penguin Random House and Brett Wright are returning the compliment, publishing Shakespeare’s classics in a medium made for the 21st century: textspeak. The OMG Shakespeare series, published under the Random House Books for Young Readers imprint, includes YOLO Juliet. srsly Hamlet. And the forthcoming Macbeth #killingit and A Midsummer Night #nofilter.

Gun.  Where's the gun ?  Now bullets, where the hell are the bullets ?

Ceeping up with the Konsonants

Caitlyn, not Kaitlyn: Jenner decided against Kardashian tradition

NEW YORK -- Choosing between a "C" and a "K" for her new name was no small task for Caitlyn Jenner, considering her famous K-heavy family of Kardashians.

...Jenner went back and forth about how it would be spelled, deciding it was best to break the Kardashian tradition.Jenner, formerly known as Bruce, was married to Kris Jenner and step-parent to the Kardashian clan. Her daughters are also named K-names -- Kylie and Kendall.

Wait, so that's why I've been seeing headlines about the spelling of Jenner's new name ?  Not being remotely a follower of the reality-teevee 'celebrities', that never even occurred to me.  Huh.

Well, I'll just say this...

Fuck the letter K !  Damn ugly angular pretender to the throne that rightly belongs to the letter C !  If it weren't for the bloody Normans and their insistence on redundantly using the letter C in place of the letter S, we'd have had no need for the redundant consonant that is K (Yeuch !), and would have a simpler more elegant alphabet.  I mean think about it: how many strokes does it take (in non-cursive writing) to write the letter K ?  Two minimum.  For most, probably three.  And the letter C ?  Just one simple elegant curve.

C > K

'Nuff said.


PS, don't get me started on Þ & Ð.

Eurovision

It is appropriate in a way I suppose that the Eurovision 2015 Finals should have featured performances, over eighty percent of which were sung entirely in English, with many of those performers, including the UK entry, affecting American accents in the process.  What a perfect symbol for the increasingly corporatised monoculture sweeping our planet in what may well be man's last days.

Now, this is more like it.  Montenegro wuz robbed.

Godda Speak Down to the 'Ard-Workin' Briddish People

So, 'parently affer Ed Miliband met wiv that Russell Brand bloke, Dave Cameron wuz all like e's a goon, inn'e ?  Makin' 'iself out like 'e's some Cockney geezer ?  It's embarassin' that when these posh politicians try-a talk down to the workin' classes like they weren't all Eton-educa'ed like:

Look at me, I ain't posh ad all.  I represent the ord'n'ry 'ard-workin' Briddish people.  I like 'avin beers down at the pub with the or'd'nry folks like youse.  I listen to Bastille.

It's embarassin', innit ?

QI: Stephen is defeated by a Newcastle Accent

Possibly QI's finest ever moment.

'T as D'

'T as D' in contemporary British English:


'What are you going to tell your daughter ?'

Say the above sentence, out loud, or silently. If you're an American, Canadian, Irish, Australian, New Zealander, or South African speaker of English, or basically a speaker from anywhere other than Britain, then you probably pronounced these letters basically the same way:

What are you going to tell your daughter ?

If British, then you likely, but by no means certainly may have pronounced, as one might logically expect, the following the same way:

What are you going to tell your daughter ?

Given that our systems of spelling are based, however loosely, on the pronunciation of the words at the time the spelling was codified (though how we came up with 'ch' I will never understand), presumably the latter is the earlier and more 'original' form. And yet one, that seems to be nearing extinction as the more 'American' pronunciation becomes more and more common throughout Britain with every passing year.

I never used to notice it much, but once I did, I couldn't stop hearing it, seemingly everywhere. When I heard David Cameron (descendant of royalty, and graduate of Eton and Oxford) talking in various speeches about 'the Briddish people', 'Briddish innovation', 'the Briddish economy', and the like, in a way that I could never imagine hearing from the lips of Winston Churchill or Margaret Thatcher, I suspected that perhaps this was on the advice of some media consultant to make him sound 'less posh.' But I could be wrong. Perhaps this is just the inevitable result of a universal linguistic shift in English pronunciation. The ubiquity of this pronunciation throughout the rest of the English speaking world suggests as much. And yet when did this shift start ? When in Britain, and when in the former colonies ? Was it people of a particular place or class in Britain who took this habit around the world, or a spontaneous shift that took place across the globe, and is only latterly now conquering Britain ?