Modding: July 2008 Archive Page

It was intersting to see online political discourse (with a case study on the Kerry-Edwards attempt to build a blog presence in 2004) and a history of the internet filtered through a folklorist's lens. I'm saving this in case I need ever need to update some of the insights found in the older, classic, historical studies of cyberculture (such as Buckles's dissertation on Adventure, or Levy's Hackers, or Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine).

While mass-mediated communication technologies have empowered the institutional, participatory media offer powerful new channels through which the vernacular can express its alterity. However, alternate voices do not emerge from these technologies untouched by their means of production. Instead, these communications are amalgamations of institutional and vernacular expression. In this situation, any human expressive behavior that deploys communication technologies suggests a necessary complicity. Insofar as individuals hope to participate in today's electronically mediated communities, they must deploy the communication technologies that have made those communities possible. In so doing, they participate in creating a telectronic world where mass culture may dominate, but an increasing prevalence of participatory media extends into growing webs of network-based folk culture. -- Robert Glenn Howard, Journal of American Folklore 121(480): 192-218 (PDF)

Via Psychemethadelica! (Metafilter)

If you want to label me retrofuturistic so I can fit into your compartmentalized worldview, that's fine. But look past my airplane goggles. This is my lifestyle. While many of my kind doubt there'll be a complete societal collapse in the future, a near-cataclysm is likely. In this scenario, I will be able to repair a generator, suture the wounded, and even train carrier pigeons. I'm learning valuable skills. --Marco Kay

A great introduction to some of the reasons why I love studying the English language. From John McIntyre's You Don't Say.

The malapropism: This venerable category of errors derives from the delicious and eponymous Mrs. Malaprop from Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals of 1775. Mrs. Malaprop (from the French mal a propos) pretentiously and unknowingly substitutes the wrong word for a similar-sounding correct one in her pronouncements, such as an allegory on the banks of the Nile. Or, more comprehensively: If I reprehend any thing in this world, it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs! (apprehend, vernacular, arrangement, epithets).

The Spoonerism: The Rev. Archibald Spooner, warden of New College, Oxford, has given his name to a tongue-twisted error in which portions of words are transposed in phrases to give new and incongruous meanings. May I sew you to a sheet? for show you to a seat and the toast To our queer old dean for dear old queen are representative examples. Though the Rev. Mr. Spooner was said to be given to this sort of thing, it appears that many Spoonerisms attributed to him are entirely apocryphal.

The mondegreen: In an 1954 essay Sylvia Wright gave this word its impetus by desribing how as a child she had understood a line in the ballad "The Bonnie Earl O'Murray," laid him on the green, as Lady Mondegreen. A mondegreen is a misunderstood rendering of the text of a songf or poem. The child's hearing the hymn "Gladly the Cross I'd Bear" as "Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear" is a famous mondegreen. Rock music, given the roaring instrumentation and slack articulation of the singers, is fertile soil for mondegreens.

The eggcorn: The linguist Geoffrey Pullum has given us this term for an erroneous transformation of a stock expression into a new one that only appears to make sense. Free reign, hone in and baited breath* are typical examples. They appear to rise typically from misunderstandings of spoken English as it is translated into the written version.

The Cupertino: Technology has given us a new class of error identified at Language Log as the Cupertino: an error induced by careless use of electronic spell-checking -- a form of cooperation transmuted into Cupertino. The Sun once presented a notable example in an article referring to Kunta Kinte, the protagonist of Alex Haley's Roots, as Chunter Knit. It should be superfluous to point out that only a fool sets a spell-check program to run automatically.

Threat Level has a story on the McCain campaign's tracking of the Obama website. Nothing really new about the practice, and nothing stunning about the revelation that the Obama camp sometimes updates its website (gasp!), but what's unusual is that instead of independent pundits doing this in their pajamas from their living rooms, this is now a tool being employed by the campaign itself.

The politicos' mutual stalking has reached unprecedented new levels this year: At least one side has started to spider the other's campaign website to track that campaign pages' precise word changes up to an hourly basis.

John McCain's campaign published a side-by-side comparison of Barack Obama's Iraq War policy web pages on Tuesday using a new automated online tracking service called Versionista.

If the following line doesn't get you reading The Steampunk Home, nothing will:

I can think of two steampunk references to octopodes.

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

From the New York Times blog, The Lede:

In the four-missile version of the image released Wednesday by Sepah News, the media arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, two major sections (encircled in red) appear to closely replicate other sections (encircled in orange). (Illustration by The New York Times; photo via Agence France-Presse)

Latest update at 3 p.m. Eastern Agence France-Presse has retracted the image as "apparently digitally altered." More developments at the bottom of the post.

As news spread across the world of Iran's provocative missile tests, so did an image of four missiles heading skyward in unison. Unfortunately, it appeared to contain one too many missiles, a point that had not emerged before the photo was used on the front pages of The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune and several other newspapers as well as on BBC News, MSNBC, Yahoo! News, NYTimes.com and many other major news Web sites.

This Wired article also mentions the Canadian Roberts variation. When I was living in Canada, I remember being annoyed at having to buy special screwdrivers for furniture that I bought there.  I actually came across a set of Roberts power tool heads that someone had thrown into a gutter. True story. 

The Phillips screw and screwdriver were patented this day in 1936.
Courtesy U.S Patent and Trademark Office

1936: Henry F. Phillips receives patents for a new kind of screw and the new screwdriver needed to make it work. It changes the worlds of mass production and machine repair, not to mention your home toolbox. (Randy Alfred, Wired)

Other, screw-related blog entries:

• Unscrewed: Finding Replacement Screws for Palm Tungsten T3
• What is Uni-Screw? - Jerz's Literacy Weblog
• The standardization of screws