Language: May 2005 Archive Page

Microsoft shouldn't be hard to understand
taking a cold, risky plunge for a taste of abalone
many of the thousands of demonstrators in the city square cried - it was their first public forum in years
behind failed Abu Ghraib plea
internet attack is called broad and long-lasting
a high-ranking Uzbek official said on condition he not be named
men and women took the podium and shared their anger about
a party last weekend in Virginia Beach
a hyper-realistic visual impact rarely encountered in the medium of watercolor
neutralizes
don't confuse a respirator with a working brain
a late HIV diagnosis
lies in its ability to concretize the most fundamental human emotions
an Italian man who didn't tell his bride he was impotent
is back on the radar screens of intelligence agencies --Microsoft shouldn't be hard to understand (Newspoetry)

A poem, auto-generated from news sources.

If you find one you like, post it on your own blog, or here in the comments.

Via Scott Rettberg.

--Top 100 Speeches (American Rhetoric)

Full-text of all, and audio versions of most. Part of a good collection of rhetoric links on Metafilter.

An English teacher's heart will go pitter-pat whenever he or she sees close engagement with the language of the text.

That means reading every word: it's not enough to have a vague sense of the plot. Maybe that sounds obvious, but few people pay serious attention to the words that make up every work of literature. Remember, English papers aren't about the real world; they're about representations of the world in language. Words are all we have to work with, and you have to pay attention to them.

The problem's most acute in poetry. Here, for instance, is the opening of Gray's famous "Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard":

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

The surface-level meaning is something like this: "At evening, when the curfew bell rings, the cows and the plowman go home and leave me in the dark." Many students read passages like this, "decode" them into something they can understand, and then ask, "Why didn't he just say that?"

That's usually a dismissive rhetorical question, with the implication, "Why is that nasty old author making my life difficult when he could have said it simply?" But in fact "Why didn't he just say that?" can be a great question, and you should learn to take it seriously. Why did he say it in the denser way? Answer that, and you're on your way to a good thesis. (Hint: with good writers, the answer is almost never "Because he had to rhyme" or "Because he couldn't do it any better.")--Jack Lynch --Close Reading (Getting an A on an English Paper)

It's really little wonder that college students want to talk about "the real world," since their high school English teachers often rewarded them for being able to apply a literary work to their own life. Thus, when reading a poem that invokes fear, students were encouraged to talk about times that they felt afraid. This is fine if it's presented as a way to get into the text, or if it is part of an informal response journal. But students who can't get beyond their vague impressions (perhaps because they didn't actually do the readings) can distract and stifle a classroom discussion.

Few things give me "that sinking feeling" more sharply than when, during a rickety class discussion, where a few students who haven't done the readings are still trying to fake me out by asking clarifying questions, and the students who have done the reading aren't ready to take a stand, someone makes a reference to a movie or TV show they just watched, and then hands suddenly shoot up all over the room, and I ask, "Can we relate Desperate Houswives to Arthur Miller?" and the hands go back down.

To assure its continued success, Gemini has further increased it's [sic] exposure to retailers and consumers alike with innovative marketing and a successful brand[-]building strategy. The For Dummies brand was recently added to Gemini's stable of product lines. With it's [sic] recognizable brand name, For Dummies compliments [sic] the current Gemini brand profile that includes such strong brand names as Philips, Magnavox, Philips Magnavox, Zenith, and Southwestern Bell Freedom Phone. The company's multi-tiered brand strategy is an affirmation of Gemini's commitment to maintain it's [sic] leadership position. --Gemini: Marketers of Brand Name Accessories -- About Us (www.gemini-usa.com)

Here's the e-mail I just sent to technical support:

I am unable to install the Gemini Recoil PC gamepad (GGE908) on my Dell Inspiron 700m.

When I first plug it in, I get "USB Device Not Recognized". When I follow the Windows dialog boxes, Windows can't find any drivers on the CD included with your product.

When I run the "setup.exe" program on the CD, it runs through a wizard and adds a folder to my Start menu, but the only thing in that folder is "uninstall".

I checked http://www.gemini-usa.com/gemini/support.asp and found a driver to download, but the zipped file on that site is password protected.

I've gone through the Windows troubleshooting guides several times, with no help.

I have restarted my computer and rerun "setup.exe" several times.

A few seconds after I pushed "send," the following appeared in my inbox:

: 216.182.17.254 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 550 5.7.1 Unable to relay for techsupport@gemini-usa.com
Giving up on 216.182.17.254.

Time to get the receipt and send that sad puppy back to Wal*Mart.

My Scrabble© Score is: 46. What is your score? Get it here.

--Pholph's Scrabble Generator (Solfire.com)

Cool fun, via MGK.

Tolkien, earthed in Old English, had a head start that led him straight to the flinty perfection of Mordor and Orc. Here, by contrast, are some Lucas inventions: Palpatine. Sidious. Mace Windu. (Isn’t that something you spray on colicky babies?) Bail Organa. And Sith.

[..]

What can you say about a civilization where people zip from one solar system to the next as if they were changing their socks but where a woman fails to register for an ultrasound, and thus to realize that she is carrying twins until she is about to give birth?

[...]

Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you [Yoda] still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. “I hope right you are.” Break me a f*cking give.--Anthony Lane --Space Case (New Yorker)

The asterisk is my addition.

There's plenty more ranting in this article.

An analysis of the language used in real estate ads shows that certain words are powerfully correlated with the final sale price of a house. This doesn't necessarily mean that labeling a house "well maintained" causes it to sell for less than an equivalent house. It does, however, indicate that when an agent labels a house "well maintained," she is subtly encouraging a buyer to bid low.

So consider the terms in the box on the previous page: A "fantastic" house is surely fantastic enough to warrant a high price, right? What about a "charming" and "spacious" home in a "great neighborhood!"? No, no, no, no, and no.

In fact, the terms that correlate with a higher sales price are physical descriptions of the home itself: granite, Corian, and maple. As information goes, such terms are specific and straightforward - and therefore pretty useful. If you like granite, you might like the house; but even if you don't, "granite" certainly doesn't connote a fixer-upper. Nor does "gourmet" or "state-of-the-art," both of which seem to tell a buyer that a house is, on some level, fantastic.

"Fantastic," meanwhile, is a dangerously ambiguous adjective, as is "charming." These words, it turns out, are real estate agent code for a house that doesn't have many specific attributes worth describing. "Spacious" homes, meanwhile, are often decrepit or impractical. "Great neighborhood" signals to a buyer that, well, this house isn't very nice but others nearby may be. And an exclamation point in a real estate ad is bad news for sure, a bid to paper over real shortcomings with false enthusiasm.

If you study an ad for a real estate agent's own home, meanwhile, you see that she emphasizes descriptive terms (especially "new," "granite," "maple," and "move-in condition") and avoids empty adjectives (including "wonderful," "immaculate," and the telltale "!"). She patiently waits for the best buyer to come along. She might tell this buyer about a house nearby that just sold for $25,000 above the asking price, or another house that is the subject of a bidding war. She is careful to exercise every advantage of the information asymmetry she enjoys. -- Levitt and Dubner --Cracking the Real Estate Code (Wired)