Language: April 2006 Archive Page

She was supposed to slam the door, but Baldwin held the door so tight, she couldn't close it.

"He made a drastic change in the blocking," she said. "He was showing me the door, metaphorically. The stage management apologized to me about it later."

Baldwin said, "If, in one show out of the scores of shows we have done, I changed the blocking in some modest way that wasn't to Jan's liking, I sincerely apologize. But Jan never said the lines in the play as Orton wrote them, and it wasn't my inclination to tell The Post."

Maxwell insists she knew all her lines: "Did I ever make goofs onstage? Yes. Did Alec? Yes. That's just live theater." --Curtain-Razing Baldwin Blow-Up: Off B'Way Star Quits Over Tantrums (NY Post)

Oh, those crazy artistes.

I'm not blogging this because I care about the personal lives of the actors. Instead, I'm amused by the different spins the two parties put on a core of facts about which they agree.

This is unusual because it doesn't seem to be the reporter acting independently to put a scandalous spin on a routine event. Each of the two parties is trying to use their celebrity, and the reporter's desire for juicy quotes, in order to attack the other.

"We cannot determine whether the addition to the letter was made by someone within the office or by someone with access to the office, but it is on my letterhead and the responsibility for it lies with me. A valuable lesson has been learned and new procedures will be adopted as a result." --Lawmaker Puzzled by Obscenity in Letter (AP|Yahoo!)

Passive verbs are loved by people who are found (by someone) to have been involved in actions that are considered (by some) undesirable.

Emphasis was added (by me).

McClure said that some students seem to feel "that e-mail is a casual form of communication, where professional relationships somehow do not exist as they do in the classroom -- students feel comfortable saying things in an email that they would never say to you in person." --David Epstein --Be Polite, E-Polite (Inside Higher Ed)

Nothing terribly ground-breaking in this article, but I'm blogging it because the examples are all university-related, and it might make a good discussion starter in this fall's "Writing for the Internet class."

I called a disabled colleague a spaz after hearing he'd spilt coffee over yet another expensive bit of computer kit.... I use the term with irony as someone who was regularly called a "spaz" in the school playground, though I'm visually impaired and not what we once called "a spastic".

To confuse the issue, a non-disabled colleague had overheard and told me that she found that term offensive and thanked me not to use it in front of her. I was offended that she was offended because I didn't feel it was her place to be offended... after all, it's not her word and she wouldn't have been taunted with it. --Damon Rose --The s-word (BBC News)

Because I regularly teach Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and because this year I'm teaching a collection of Flannery O'Connor short stories, I've had plenty of class discussions about racially charged language.

Lately I've been spending time in each literature class introducing the concept of disability studies, in part because physical characteristics such as missing limbs or scars are often used by authors as a short of shortcut to characterization.

But hearing that a company recently marketed a wheelchair called the "Spazzo" makes me completely confused. Perhaps I shouldn't be.

At any rate, this article reminds me that language is power, and that terms used by mainstream society to label subgroups, and terms used by subgroups to refer to themselves are often points of conflict.

A merchant adressing a debtor
Remarked in the course of his lebtor
   That he chose to suppose
   A man knose what he ose;
And the sooner he pays it the bebtor. --Poems showing the absurdities of English spelling (The Simplified Spelling Society)

--Evolution of the Latin Alphabet (Evolution of Alphabets Page)

A very interesting animated GIF that shows how the Latin alphabet (which is basically the modern English alphabet) developed from the Phonecial alphabet.

All code operations, despite their metaphoric faculties such as "call" or "return", come down to absolutely local string manipulations and that is, I am afraid, to signifiers of voltage differences. Formalization in Hilbert's sense does away with theory itself, insofar as "the theory is no longer a system of meaningful propositions, but one of sentences as sequences of words, which are in turn sequences of letters. We can tell [say] by reference to the form alone which combinations of the words are sentences, which sentences are axioms, and which sentences follow as immediate consequences of others."

When meanings come down to sentences, sentences to words, and words to letters, there is no software at all. Rather, there would be no software if computer systems were not surrounded any longer by an environment of everyday languages. --Friedrich Kittler --There is No Software (CTheory.net)

Taking a mini-break from working on a proposal that's due tomorrow. This article is new to me.