Language: March 2004 Archive Page

One problem with our effort to sanitize the language of all that might offend is that it leads to lunatic results. Just ask the music reviewer at the Los Angeles Times. Last month he reviewed an opera by Richard Strauss, which he described as "a glorious and goofy pro-life paean." A diligent copy editor replaced the controversial term "pro-life" with the inoffensive "anti-abortion." This resulted in not one but two embarrassing corrections explaining that the opera has nothing to do with abortion. --Margaret Wente --Call me nuts, but PC language cripples us (The Globe and Mail)

I remember reading of an incident in which all instances of the word "black" were changed to "Afr0-American." The result was that an article in the business section referred to a company's finances as being "in the Afro-American." (Thanks, Jim.)

"Mixed in with the usual stuff about CIA mind-control beams, talking dogs, and monkey-people, I heard him mention beta decay, instantons, density matrix, and subspaces of n-dimensional Riemannian manifolds," Willard said. "I'm not sure where he got it, but he definitely seems to have had extensive schooling in theoretical physics. Man, what could've happened to him?"

Stanford theoretical physicist Carl Lundergaard seconded Willard's theory on the loonball.

"He's definitely had some advanced training, though I'm not surprised that it went unnoticed for so long," Lundergaard said. "It's hard for the layperson to differentiate schizophrenic ramblings like 'Modernity chunk where the sink goes flying on the ping-pang' from legitimate terminology like 'Unstable equilibria lie on the nodal points of a separatrix in phase space.'" --Raving Lunatic Obviously Took Some Advanced Physics (Onion -- Will Expire)

Foreign Dispatches has archived a longer snippet.

This paper examines metablogging in terms of Dawkins's concept of the "meme" and Reddy's critique of the "conduit" metaphor for communication.... The language of metablogging uses metaphors that emphasize communality and proximity, and thus offers an alternative to the social risks Reddy associates with the conduit metaphor. --Dennis G. Jerz --(Meme)X Marks the Spot: Theorizing Metablogging via 'Meme' and 'Conduit' (BlogTalks)

Using voice-recognition middleware developed by ScanSoft, Lifeline can recognize over 5,000 words and 100,000 phrases. In practice, that means that the game's main character, Rio, will understand anything that's relevant to her predicament, as well as many things that aren't.

Lifeline is thus a unique step toward deeper player immersion in the game world, but not simply because of the technology. It's because although Rio is the main character, "you" are not Rio -- "you" are another survivor, trapped in the security room of the space station, who is watching Rio on the security monitors and giving her advice. --Talk Your Way Out of Trouble  (Wired)

>Crowther's text-parser reborn? This particular game doesn't interest me very much, but the technology seems promising.

"The Windmills of Your Mind" is too crazy to be anything but a piece of its crazy time, and it is almost airily psychotic: "Is the jingle in your pocket/Or is the jingle in your head?" A question like that made a lot of sense in 1968. --Mind the Windmills (http://boynton.ubersportingpundit.com)

Boynton has collected a few reviews and reflections on that odd "Windmils" song, which, if you know it, is now probably lodged firmly in your brain. (Sorry about that.)

I Want My Jerz.
Tough on Dirt, Gentle on Jerz.
Today's Jerz, Since 1903.
The Appliance of Jerz.
When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Jerz.
Hope It's Jerz, It's Jerz, We Hope It's Jerz...
Make Fun of Jerz. --The Advertising Slogan Generator (The Surrealist)

About that last one... Huh?

Last year I was previewing a textbook that I was about to use in a Human Development course I was teaching. The book was the usual flamboyant montage of facts, grids, and pictures, but then I suddenly ran across a most unusual sentence. It read, ?As a folksinger once sang, how many roads must an individual walk down before you can call them an adult.? I was stupefied. -- Bernard Chapin --The Language Police Live Inside of My Head (Strike the Root)

How many roads must a man walk down,
Before you can call him a man?
The question, my friends, offends tender minds.
The question offends tender minds.

You've probably seen, heard or even used the term "spamming" to refer to the act of sending unsolicited commercial email (UCE), or "spam" to refer to the UCE itself. Following is our position on the relationship between UCE and our trademark SPAM.... Let's face it. Today's teens and young adults are more computer savvy than ever, and the next generations will be even more so. Children will be exposed to the slang term "spam" to describe UCE well before being exposed to our famous product SPAM. Ultimately, we are trying to avoid the day when the consuming public asks, "Why would Hormel Foods name its product after junk e-mail?" --Spam and the Internet (Spam.com)

I can't say I'm alarmed by the notion that children will be exposed to e-spam before they taste SPAM, but this article is remarkably free of the administrative and legalistic bluster that one usually associates with companies offended by misuse of their trademarks. A tip of the hat to Hormel -- this article makes me more sympathetic to a different victim of the spam onslaught. (But the lounge-lizard music on the SPAM home page has got to go.) (Found via KairosNews.)

I reworked the draft, adding some charts and tables to demonstrate that the program wouldn't require any new dollars. But mostly I substituted abstract nouns for concrete ones, stuffed sentences with nominalizations, and replaced active verbs with passives, violating the rules of writing that students in the M.F.A. program would be expected to follow. --Dennis Baron --New Programs, New Problems (Chronicle)

Note: I added the above links.

I'm not part of Seton Hill's MFA program, but as the "new media journalism" specialist I was hired to take a leadership role in getting the NMJ program off the ground.

Planning for the program was well underway when I was hired, so my role was mostly writing up or otherwise wrangling together syllabi to flesh out the 8 or so new courses in the NMJ curriculum. Two of the courses hit administrative snags that John never fully explained to me, aside from glancing in the direction of the administration building and giving a sad little sigh every time I brought it up. For a sample syllabus on "New Media Aesthetics," I had offered a special topic course on "The Documentary Film" because I thought it would fit better in a journalism program, because I thought it would be easier to explain that course to non-experts, and because it's a genre that interests me; but cinema also fits in with art and communications, so the proposal set up a red flag.

John was very encouraging when I suggested that I supply a version of the syllabus that focused on digital culture instead.

He handled all the final paperwork details for the new slate of courses. As the deadline approached, I sent him an e-mail with about 12 files in different formats, and he filled out all the forms, checking the right boxes and, I presume, providing the right amount of administrativese.