Tenser, said the Tensor

LSA 2009

I'll be attending the LSA 2009 meeting in San Francisco next weekend, and as in previous years, I think we should get together for drinks or food or something.  Now, if you read those posts about our previous gatherings, you'll find the following, which I still believe to be true this year:

1. Some of us may not have arrived on Thursday
2. Friday evening is the grad student mixer, which some of us will want to attend
3. Saturday Friday evening is the ADS Word of the Year event

Given this, the last couple of years we haven't tried to organize a single event, but instead have designated a corner of the hotel lounge as the spot to hang out, if you're so inclined, after the day's activities wind down.  I plan to reconnoiter the hotel to find a good spot and announce it here Thursday evening—and unlike previous years, I'm just going to update this post rather than adding additional posts, so watch this space.  I see the Hilton has a place called the Urban Tavern, but it apparently closes at 10:30 every night, which is...disappointing.  I'll let you know what I find out.

Did you notice the antecedentless "we" in the first sentence of this post?  Who, you may ask, are "we"?  "We" are a loosely-defined set of linguistics bloggers, language bloggers, and blog readers, along with our colleagues, friends, and others (signifcant and otherwise).  Basically, if you're reading this, you're invited.  There's no minimum unique-visits-per-week or posts-per-month requirements.  (Whew!) 

Thanks to Claire and Russell for reminding me about this, and my apologies for taking so long to get around to it.  I've been busy, I swear!

[UPDATE:  Fritinancy points out that the ADS Word of the Year event is actually on Friday this year.  That makes Saturday evening more open than in previous years—maybe we should consider going to dinner after all?]

[UPDATE:  Well, I explored a bit.  The Urban Tavern is nice, but the tables do seem to be under hostess control, so we can't just wander in and stake one out.  The only other alternative I can see is the "lounge" area near the registration desk.  It gets of lot of traffic and is kind of noisy, but at least it has wireless.  What do you think?  Tavern or lounge?

Friday evening is going to be busy: in addition to the ADS WOTY vote, they're apparently giving an award to Language Log at the LSA business meeting.  Afterward, I'm planning to attend the computational linguistics session, possibly followed by the grad student mixer (because I'm frankly feeling a little old for grad student mixers).  I suggest we focus on a plan for Saturday.  Is there any good Chinese food within walking distance?

Oh, and did I see Semantic Compositions wandering around earlier?]

It's Like Christmas in X

A couple of days ago I said, "It's like Christmas in September," then later in the same day a friend who wasn't around when I said it said the same thing.  Today, I read "It's like Christmas in October" somewhere (that's a blog citation, BTW).  Synchronicity gets me curious, and curiosity leads to blog posting, so I fired up snowclone.pl (even though this isn't really a snowclone) to find out how frequently each month occurs as a filler in it's like Christmas in X.

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Green Smurf and Smurf Green

"In Schtroumpf vert et vert Schtroumpf, published in Belgium in 1972, it was revealed that the village was divided between North and South, and that the Smurfs on either side had different ideas as to whether the term smurf should be used as a verb or as a noun: for instance, the Northern Smurfs call a certain object a bottle smurfer, while the Southern Smurfs call it a smurf opener."  (from here)

Has anybody read this story?  I wonder if the two smurfalects also differed in other ways.  Did the position of nominal modifiers vary, as the title seems to imply?  And what's the structure of the title—is schtroumpf vert a variety of smurf and vert schtroumpf a shade of green?  Is either of the diasmurfs consistently smurf-initial or smurf-final, or do they have relatively free smurf-ordering?

Weygand or de Gaulle?

Over at Byzantium's Shores, blogger Jaquandor recently brought to my attention an apparently long-running controversy  about a line in Casablanca.  In the film, Ugarte (Peter Lorre) tells Rick (Humphrey Bogart) that he has letters of transit signed by General...somebody.  Opinions differ about which general it is that Lorre mentions.  Some hear de Gaulle, which would be a mistake on the part of the filmmakers, since Charles de Gaulle was the leader of the Free French forces, and his signature would be less than worthless in Vichy France.  Others hear Weygand, which makes more sense—Maxime Weygand was an official in the Vichy government and for a time was in charge of the North African colonies.

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Postalveolars According to a Three-year-old

A few weeks ago, a staggeringly cute YouTube video made the rounds of the usual web sites.  It shows a three-year-old girl describing Star Wars.  Here it is, for those of you who somehow missed it:

If you're a Star Wars geek like me, you thought this was very cool and made you want to have kids like right now.  (My favorite comment on the MetaFilter thread about the video was "made me ovulate".)  If you're a linguistics geek like me, though, I'll bet you had a different reaction: "Hmm, what's going on with her postalveolar consonants?"

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Died in a[n] X Accident

Having gotten snowclone.pl working again, it's time to put it to work.  A few weeks ago, the webcomic xkcd ran a strip consisting of a chart of the number of Google hits for variations on the pattern died in a[n] X accident.  I'm resisting the urge to explain the joke, because that's never a good idea, but it's worth noticing that this looks kind of like a snowclone (though it's not, about which more below). You're in my territory now, xkcd!

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Throttling snowclone.pl

As I occasionally do, I recently ran snowclone.pl on a phrasal template to see what sorts of fillers could be found out on the 'net.   To my surprise, I got back zero results, which didn't seem right.  Some investigation revealed that Google has introduced a CAPTCHA to prevent automated queries with wildcards (the * operator), which is just how snowclone.pl works.  Oops!

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Joe Job

Today in a thread on Ask MetaFilter, I learned a new word (well, lexical item): joe job.  That's when someone sends out spam with the return address of another person they want to make look bad.  The AskMeFi poster actually uses it in a slightly broader sense that lacks the malicious intent.

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This I Believe #29

"I have come," [Frodo] said.  "But I do not choose now to do what I came to do.  I will not do this deed.  The Ring is mine!"

EPIC FAIL

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Word Czar for a Day!

This week my local NPR station broadcast a call-in show inspired by Lake Superior State University's annual list of banned words.  The host, Ross Reynolds, opened the show by asking:

Are there certain words or phrases that you hate?  Are there cliches that make you grind your teeth?  Common misusage that sends you around the bend?  If you had the power, what words or phrases would you ban?  On the other hand, what are the new words or phrases or slang you adore?  Words that are perfectly descriptive or just fun to say?

To my utter lack of surprise, and in spite of Reynolds's persistent attempts to poke fun at the concept of an all-powerful "word czar" and to steer his listeners back to talking about their favorite words, the great majority of calls and emails were from frowny-voiced would-be language purifiers.  Quite of few of them used the word hate to describe their feelings about (what they perceive to be) non-standard English usage.  Really?  Hate?

Continue reading "Word Czar for a Day!"