Atlas

If you’re familiar with Greek myths, then you’ll immediately recognize the name of the Titan who was forced to hold up the heavens after angering the Olympians. Even if you didn’t recognize his name from myth though, you certainly recognized the modern use of the term for a group of maps. The connection is logical, but it wasn’t used in the cartography until the sixteenth century.

Image Via Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez [Wikipedia]

Chronological and Chronic

These words may not seem to have much in common definition-wise, but there is a good reason they start with the same root –they are both related to time. Chronology deals with the way events happened over the course of time and chronic describes something that takes place over a long period of time. Wondering where we got these words? Well, they are all related to Chronos, the god of time.

Image Via Jorbasa [Flickr]

Echo

This is one of the more famous Greek stories-turned-words. In the ancient tales, Echo was a mountain nymph who talks excessively with her gorgeous voice. Her voice was so lovely that she would often distract Zeus’ wife Hera with her long and entertaining stories while Zeus would sneak away and make love with the other mountain nymphs. When Hera found out about Echo’s role in her husband’s activities, she punished her by taking away her ability to speak, except in repetition of the words of others.

There are many differing ends to the story, but in all of them, Echo eventually dies in some heartbreaking manner, leaving her voice to haunt the earth, where it can still be heard to this day.

Erotic

This word comes from the Greek character Eros, but you probably know him as his more famous Roman name –Cupid. Eros was the god not only of love, but of sexual desire. As a result, his interventions often cause gods and men to fall in love, often when already married.

Image Via Eric Pouhier [Wikipedia]

Hypnosis

Ever been in a highly-suggestible sleep-like state? Well, you can thank Hypnos for your condition as he was the god of sleep who lived in a dark cave where the sun never penetrates. His home had no doors or gates lest he be awakened by creaking of hinges. Other words have been derived from his Roman name, Somnus, most notably, insomnia.

Image Via McMillan and Gage [Flickr]

Morphine

The famous drug that puts you in a dream-like state actually got its name from Hypnos’ brother, Morpheus (you know, like the guy in the Matrix). Morpheus was the god of dreams and actually had the ability to take human form and appear in people’s dreams.

Narcissism

This might just be the most famous of all the myths on this list. Narcissus was a gorgeous man, half-nymph and half-god, who was so proud of his own looks that he disdained all who dared love him. Eventually, Nemesis (our next word on the list) punished him by luring Narcissus to a pool of water where he could see his own reflection. At this point, there are two endings to the tale, neither of them particularly good. In one version, Narcissus realizes he could never find anyone as attractive as himself, so he finally gives up and kills himself. In the other, Narcissus doesn’t realize it is an image and falls in love with the reflection, refusing to leave its side until he eventually succumbs to hunger.

Nemesis

These days, a nemesis is a rival or enemy, but if Nemesis was against you in ancient Greece, you must have done something bad to anger her. That’s because Nemesis was the god who took revenge against those who showed arrogance before the gods. Long ago, the term was used to simply mean someone who distributed fortune as it was deserved, good or bad. It wasn’t until the 4^th century that the word started to mean someone who felt resentment towards another.

Tantalizing

Next time you’re tantalized by something you can’t have, just think of poor Tantalus and how miserable he must have been. Of course, he kind of brought his punishment upon himself.

Tantalus was a half-god and half-nymph who was invited to dine at Zeus’ table in Olympus. He then stole ambrosia and nectar along with other secrets of the gods and brought them to the mortals. Later on, he offered his own son as a sacrifice to the gods and served him at a banquet. The gods learned of his plan and rebuilt the boy and brought him back to life, disgusted by Tantalus’ plan.

As punishment for his misdeeds, Tantalus was forced to stand in a pool of water below a fruit tree with low-hanging branches. Whenever he would reach down to take a drink, the waters would recede and whenever he reached up to pluck some fruit, the branches would rise up out of his reach. Thus Tantalus spent the rest of eternity being tantalized by water and food that he could never have.

These are, of course, only a handful of the hundreds and hundreds of Greek myths, many of which have played a fascinating role in modern English words –and I didn’t even include any of the Roman versions that have entered our lexicon. Do you guys know of any other Greek or Roman tales that have inspired common English words?

Sources: Your Dictionary, Grose Educational Media, Wikipedia #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9

(YouTube Link)

This endearing little children’s book will bring out the Wookiee in your family tree, and comes complete with sound unit so you can hear the proper pronunciation of words in Wookinese Wookian Wookiee language.

Guaranteed to be hours of fun for you and/or your kid, unless the gutteral sounds of Wookiees gets on your nerves, in which case you will probably want to burn this book! Check out the advert videos and see for yourself if you can handle the process of learning to speak like a true Wookiee.

–via SuperPunch

The metaphors we use for the world of computers are kind of weird, as illustrated in ths video. The first word is the only part that might be NSFW. -via Buzzfeed

The Horn of Africa is without question the hotbed of piracy today. A quick glance at the International Maritime Bureau’s Piracy Reporting Centre Live Piracy Map shows a dense thicket of attacks, and even though some analysis indicates that the areas of attacks may be decreasing in size, and that the frequency of successful attacks is decreasing, the density of attack is increasing and the risk  of attacks remains high. And the focus of this activity remains Somalia.

What languages are these pirates saying? Based on the IMB’s reported risk zones, and country data for Somalia from the CIA’s World Factbook, they are probably speaking in Somali, Arabic (probably a Yemeni dialect), Italian (a vestige of Somalia’s colonial heritage) or English.

Wired’s Danger Room blog has a handy chart with common phrases you may need if you encounter these pirates, in English, Somali, and Yemeni. Link -via Boing Boing

Perhaps the most interesting effect of this is that in large Australian cities, the cockatoos keep their vocabulary sharp through frequent interactions with humans. As a result, apparently, if you say hello to a crowd of cockatoos, it’s not unlikely that you’ll get a relatively articulate answer.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’d love to have a conversation with a wild cockatoo, even if it is just a step away from taking over human civilization.

Link Via Geekosystem Image Via rggoldie [Flickr]

When we were very young, we learned how to place things in order: first second, third, fourth, fifth, etc. Some of us went on to decorate cakes that wished children a Happy Birthday with their age specified as an ordinal number. But occasionally, the numeric abbreviation for an ordinal gets messed up. Cake Wrecks has eight, count ‘em, eight cakes with the ordinals 1th, 2th, and 3th. Link

You may have heard of Pronunciation Book, a YouTube channel in which English words and names are pronounced for the purpose of helping non-English speakers. Videos have been added steadily for over a year. Pronunciation Manual, on the other hand, is a channel with ridiculously incorrect pronunciations that look just like the videos from Pronunciation Book. Woe to the English student who gets the two sources mixed up! Link -via Laughing Squid

Pony is an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher, and “A” is her student in Japan. They do lessons via Skype. As an exercise, Pony sends “A” strange found photos, and she writes a few sentences about each one. The result is a taste of Japanese humor rendered in intermediate English. Link -via Gorilla Mask

There are certain words that only exist in one language, evolved from one culture and do not translate into any other. Here is a list of some of the most interesting including my favorite, this Russian word:

Toska Russian – Vladmir Nabokov describes it best: “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”

Link

2. The next time someone tells you something is the “least worst option”, tell them that their most best option is learning grammar. Mike Ayres, Bodmin, Cornwall

40.I am increasingly hearing the phrase “that’ll learn you” – when the English (and more correct) version was always “that’ll teach you”. What a ridiculous phrase! Tabitha, London

41. I really hate the phrase: “Where’s it at?” This is not more efficient or informative than “where is it?” It just sounds grotesque and is immensely irritating. Adam, London

While others are purely cultural differences.

14. I caught myself saying “shopping cart” instead of shopping trolley today and was thoroughly disgusted with myself. I’ve never lived nor been to the US either. Graham Nicholson, Glasgow

18. Take-out rather than takeaway! Simon Ball, Worcester

29. I’m a Brit living in New York. The one that always gets me is the American need to use the word bi-weekly when fortnightly would suffice just fine. Ami Grewal, New York

36. Surely the most irritating is: “You do the Math.” Math? It’s MATHS. Michael Zealey, London

And a couple are just inexplicable.

20. “A half hour” instead of “half an hour”. EJB, Devon

44. My brother now uses the term “season” for a TV series. Hideous. D Henderson, Edinburgh

Do all these complaints make perfect sense on the eastern side of the pond? Read the rest at the followup article. Link -via J-Walk Blog

(Image credit: Flickr user Chris Turner)

To be or not to be ... is not a question in the invented language of E-Prime. TopTenz explains:

Another language constructed to make a philosophical point, E-Prime is simply a version of English that forbids all forms of the verb ‘to be’ (is, was, were, etc).

According to Alfred Korzybski, who promoted the language in his 1933 book Science and Sanity, E-Prime can be used to sharpen critical thinking and make ideas clearer. For example, in E-prime a person can’t say ‘This is an awful movie’: it must be rephrased as ‘I dislike this movie.’ ‘You’re wrong’ is also impossible: instead he must say ‘I disagree with you.’ Because of this, it’s easier for speakers and listeners distinguish fact from opinion.

On the other hand, following E-Prime to the letter becomes burdensome: ‘This is a flower’ must become something like ‘English speakers call this a flower.’ Today, E-Prime remains popular, but mostly just as an interesting thought exercise to improve clarity.

Read more about the Top 10 Invented Languages: Link

For years scientists have known that each parrot has a unique call that other birds use to address them, but now they’ve discovered that the parents of the species are responsible for naming their chicks. They observed the parent birds using a different call for each chick long before the babies can communicate.

Link Image via TJL23 [Fllickr]

Here is something that none of us probably think about. If the language you speak does not accommodate words for certain areas of human culture it may change the way you see the world. In one interesting example a language that had no number words made it hard for its speakers to count accurately.

Although number words and counting are a fixture of life in most cultures from the time we are old enough to play hide-and-go-seek, some languages have only a handful of number words. In a paper published in 2008, MIT cognitive neuroscientist Michael Frank and colleagues demonstrated that Pirahã, a language spoken by a small Amazonian community, has no number words at all. The research team simply asked Pirahã speakers to count different numbers of batteries, nuts and other common objects. Rather than having a word consistently used to describe “one X” a different word for “two Xs” and yet another word for “three Xs,” the Pirahã used hói to describe a small number of objects, hoí to describe a slightly larger number, and baágiso for an even larger number. Basically, these words mean “around one,” “some” and “many.”

Link

There are some words in foreign languages that just don’t have a direct translation to English. Here now is a list of twenty of them. Your failure to learn them will give me plenty of schadenfreude.

When linguists refer to “untranslatable” words, the idea is not that a word cannot somehow be explained in another language, but that part of the essence of the word is lost as it crosses from one language to another. This often is due to different social and cultural contexts that have shaped how the word is used.

Link

Morse Code used to be used (and to some extent still is) during war time to communicate in the field, in the air and to report that the Titanic was sinking. It used to be a highly specialized technical skill that took lots of training. Now however you can let everyone know the Germans are coming by typing your message into this handy text to Morse Code translator. Link

Alexia has been tri-lingual since birth as her mother, a teacher, is half French and half Spanish, while her father, Richard, is English.

She started talking and communicating in all three languages before she lost her sight but adapted quickly to her blindness. By the age of four, she was reading and writing in Braille.

When she was six, Alexia added Mandarin to her portfolio. She will soon be sitting a GCSE in the language having achieved an A* in French and Spanish last year. The girl is now learning German at school in Cambridge.

Alexia has wanted to be an interpreter since she was six and chose to go to the European Parliament as her prize when she won a young achiever of the year award.

Link -via Arbroath

(Image credit: Geoff Robinson)

By studying phonemes – the consonants, vowels and tonal elements of languages, biologist Quentin D. Atkinson has claimed to discover that human languages originated in Africa:

Dr. Atkinson, an expert at applying mathematical methods to linguistics, has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages spoken throughout the world: A language area uses fewer phonemes the farther that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it.

Some of the click-using languages of Africa have more than 100 phonemes, whereas Hawaiian, toward the far end of the human migration route out of Africa, has only 13. English has about 45 phonemes.

This pattern of decreasing diversity with distance, similar to the well-established decrease in genetic diversity with distance from Africa, implies that the origin of modern human language is in the region of southwestern Africa, Dr. Atkinson says in an article published on Thursday in the journal Science.

Link

YouTube link.

Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to determine what they are talking about.

The missing sock?  Or something more profound?

Via Reddit, where it is speculated that they are Italian (because of all the hand gestures).

The first use of the word “tsunami” in an English language publication was in the September 1896 issue of National Geographic Magazine. Eliza Ruhama Scidmore used the Japanese term to describe what we used to call a tidal wave or (more correctly) an earthquake wave.

Scidmore’s article in National Geographic gave the world a gripping insight into the horror of the 1896 tsunami. A few survivors, who saw it advancing in the darkness, reported its height as 80 to 100 feet, she wrote.

“With a difference of but thirty minutes in time between the southern and northern points, it struck the San-Riku coast and in a trice obliterated towns and villages.”

In what today looks like an eery precursor of the 2011 tsunami in the same part of Japan, the 1896 wave “washed away and wrecked 9,313 houses, stranded some larger craft–steamers, schooners, and junks–and crushed or carried away 10,000 fishing boats…Thousands of acres of arable land were turned to wastes, projecting rocks offshore were broken, overturned, or moved hundreds of yards, shallows and bars were formed, and in some localities the entire shoreline was changed,” Scidmore reported.

Read more about the 1896 disaster at NatGeo Newswatch. Link -Thanks, Marilyn!

On one hand, you have to feel for someone who is working in a language they don’t know. On the other hand, these are too funny to not pass along! In some cases, you kind of know what they are trying to say, but the writer just doesn’t quite get there. Others are totally off in the ozone. Link

by Susanne Fuchs1, Melanie Weirich1, Christian Kroos2, Natalie Fecher1, Daniel Pape3,
and Sabine Koppetsch4

If one walks through the first level of the main building at the Humboldt University in Berlin and looks at the portraits of the researchers who studied there, became professors, and in some cases won Nobel prizes, one may conclude that the most important visual signs of a famous person are being a man and having a beard.

Wearing a beard has a long socio-cultural tradition going at least back to the Pharaohs. The ancient Egyptians associated facial hair with the sexual, religious and social power of  the monarch. Indeed, Queen Hatshepsut wore a bodkin beard after her accession to the throne (Wietig, 2005). Lack of facial hair was long considered a sign of weakness
or divine punishment. The first recorded radical shavings were ordered by Alexander the Great to prevent Persians pulling his soldiers’ beards during hand-to-hand fighting. Another tradition relates beards with fertility.

Today, belief in bearded monarchs, male or female, has declined. The general acceptance of facial hair and specific styles of facial hair appears dependent on sex, culture, nation, and fashion. According to the American Mustache Institute, mustache acceptance is between 16 and 35% in  the U.S., though between 72 and 94% in Germany. This paper concerns the influence of facial hair on audio-visual speech intelligibility in noise. It is known that watching the speaker’s face increases the intelligibility of speech in noisy environments (Grant and Seitz, 2000). By observing the cyclical opening and closing of the visible jaw, an observer can identify the rhythmic structure of the spoken utterance or even the focus of a particular sequence (Dohen, Lœvenbruck, and  Hill, 2005).

Facial hair can cover parts of the face such as the upper lip, the teeth, and the larynx. This modifies the visible area of the open mouth, and hence facial hair is responsible for a kind of natural impoverishment of the visual speech signal. Under normal conditions such impoverishment may be marginal for the intelligibility of speech, since auditory information is fully available. However, under noisy conditions such as a cocktail party (in audiovisual speech research terms: multi-talker babble noise), visual cues may be crucial for increasing speech intelligibility (assuming that listeners want to understand their communicative partners). Based on these considerations, we hypothesize that:

(1) Facial hair hiding visible articulatory movements leads to lower speech intelligibility under noisy auditory conditions, longer reaction time, and lower confidence in recognizing the relevant target words.

(2) The shape and location of the beard is crucial for the reduced speech intelligibility in noise. A mustache hiding upper lip movement has a larger impact on visual speech intelligibility than a long chin beard, hiding the larynx only. So in terms of speech intelligibility, is it time for a shave?

Methods
Investigating the interference of facial hair with visual speech intelligibility poses the problem of accurately controlling the amount and shape of facial hair across several speakers while keeping the recording situation constant. Since it is difficult to find participants willing to grow and then cut their beards as needed, we decided to use artificial beards made from natural hair. Two different types were chosen: mustache and long chin beard.

Figure 1: Subjects 1, 2 and 3 without beard (left), with a mustache (middle), and with a long chin beard (right).

Stimuli: Video Recordings
Three male speakers in their mid-20s were recorded (see Figure 1). None had natural facial hair above 3mm at the time of the recording.

The speakers were selected according to their hair colour and texture, which had to fit the colour and texture of the attached facial hair. Two types of facial hair were obtained  in a specialist mask shop. They consisted of natural hair woven into a strip of gauze. The gauze strip was attached to the facial surface with glue (Mastix).

Each speaker read various target words embedded in carrier sentences in three conditions: no beard (beard0), mustache (beard1), and long chin beard (beard2).

Speech Material
Twenty nouns were selected as target words on the basis of their high frequency in the mental lexicon and their semantic content. Their meaning had to fit four carrier sentences without being predictable from the semantic context of the carrier sentence. We tried to make the corpus as phonetically balanced as possible. Only words consisting of two syllables were chosen.

Design
To avoid participants seeing the same speaker with different beards and hence becoming aware of the aim of the study, beard condition was made a between-subject factor while ‘speaker’ was kept within-subject. Thus, a participant would see all three speakers with the same beard type. The audio-only control condition (A) was designed to mirror the audio-visual (AV) condition. Commercial multi- speaker babble noise was added to the original sound track with its loudness set to result in a final signal-to-noise ratio of 3dB. For the audio-video condition (AV), the original video and the noisy audio signal were presented. Each target word plus carrier sentence was presented in six different versions (beard0-AV, beard1-AV, beard2-AV, beard0-A, beard1-A, beard2-A).

Procedures and Participants
The participants were seated approximately 50 cm away from the monitor on which the stimuli were presented and they listened to the stimuli via Sennheiser HD 201 headphones. They were instructed to type the target word on a computer keyboard as soon as they thought they had recognized it. They were told that their response times were measured by pressing the enter button after they typed in the perceived word. Subjects were subsequently prompted to rate their confidence in having correctly identified the target word by selecting a software button with the computer mouse. The test trials (20 target words * 6 conditions * 2 repetitions) were preceded by 5 practice trials. The experiment took approximately 30 minutes.

Forty-four participants took part in the experiment. The participants were randomly assigned to one of three stimuli groups (speakers without beard, speakers with mustache, speakers with long chin beard) though across groups the same gender ratio and a similar age range were maintained.

Results and Discussion
There is clear evidence that speech intelligibility increases when watching the speaker’s face (AV) in comparison to the audio-only (A) condition. This increase is on average 17% for no beard, 20% for moustache and 12% for long chin beard. Speakers with a moustache have in all cases the lowest speech intelligibility, but the improvement is the largest. Speakers with a long chin beard have similar or even better intelligibility in comparison to the others, but their improvement is the least.

Since reaction times were similar for the audio only and the audio-visual condition, all data were pooled together. However, results differ significantly with respect to the beard condition. Subjects showed significantly longer reaction times in the beard1 condition in comparison to beard0 (pMCMC=0.0042) and beard2 (pMCMC=0.0001).

Similar to intelligibility, subjects were most confident when they rated the AV data for the speakers with a long chin beard. The confidence level was significantly larger in the video condition than in the audio-only condition (pMCMC=0.0001) for all beard types.

The comparison between no beard and mustache showed a trend in the expected direction: the mustache reduced intelligibility, lengthened reaction time, and listeners were less confident to perceive the relevant target word than in the no beard condition. However, the findings for the long chin beard went against our expectations. We found an effect of facial hair in the audio-only condition (long chin beard had the best intelligibility followed by no beard and finally the mustache), where no visual information is available. Two likely explanations for this finding can be put forward: First, since the A and AV conditions were presented randomly and the number of target words was limited, a strong learning effect could have taken place. Second, since we glued the beards onto the facial skin of the speakers, it may have caused some irritation, prompting our speakers to produce the relevant sentences in a different way. When all the A and AV data were pooled together, and recognition was split by beard condition and occurrence of the relevant target words from the first to the sixth trial, a clear learning effect was found for no beard and mustache.

However, long chin beard showed not only a learning effect, but results also differed from the no beard and the mustache conditions. We interpreted this as evidence that indeed our speakers used different articulatory strategies when wearing the long chin beard. It may be that the artificial beard impeded natural jaw movements by preventing the surface of the skin from stretching as much as it usually does. This might have caused a different speaking behaviour in our speakers (e.g., hyper-articulation). Results and interpretation would be in agreement with recent findings on the effects of skin stretching on speech production and perception by Ito and colleagues (Ito, Tiede & Ostry, 2009). Accordingly, if you wear a false long chin beard to stay incognito, be aware that your speech may be more recognisable than without the beard.

Conclusion
We have good news for those whose facial hair is longer than 3 mm: There is no need to shave! A trend towards reduced intelligibility was found in the beard1 condition (mustache), but this trend was not significantly different from the beard0 (no beard) condition. Moreover, the improvement from the audio-only to the audio-visual intelligibility is larger for beard1 (mustache) than beard0 (no beard). This can be explained with a greater attentiveness of the listeners in the beard1 condition. Listeners who were presented with an impoverished visual signal paid more attention to this visual information, thereby gaining increased intelligibility. The greater attentiveness may also be reflected in the significantly longer reaction time found for beard1. Thus, if you wear a mustache in a noisy auditory environment, please slow down your speaking rate and take a break from time to time, so listeners may process your speech. Moreover, be aware that people may be attracted by and focus on your beard (this might be particularly relevant for politicians).

Similar to the findings for intelligibility, listeners showed a non- significant trend towards greater confidence that they had perceived the target word correctly when they saw speakers without any facial hair. Again, politicians might be well advised to consider this, though we leave it to the reader to decide whether most politicians would prefer to be better or less well understood. Based on our data, we were not able to verify whether differences in the shape of the facial hair affect intelligibility. Such an investigation may be carried  out in the future with participants who do not mind shaving their facial hair, re-growing it, trimming it, shaving again, re-growing, trimming, and so on, in accordance with the wishes of a bunch of phoneticians interested in visual  speech intelligibility or—put more positively—in the name of science.

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Jörg Dreyer for technical support, all participants, Jim Scobbie for proposing this work for AIR, and Jean-Luc Schwartz for useful comments. This work was supported by a grant from the BMBF. It is dedicated to all men with facial hair and Dieter Fuchs.

References
AMI (American Mustache Institute) website, retrieved August 2, 2009.

Dohen, M., H. Loevenbruck, and H. Hill,”A Multi-measurement Approach to the Identification of the Audiovisual Facial Correlates of Contrastive Focus in French,” AVSP-2005 British Columbia, 2005, pp. 115–6.

Grant, K.W. and P.-F. Seitz, “The Use of Visible Speech Cues for Improving Auditory Detection of Spoken Sentences,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 108, no. 3, 2000, pp. 1197–1208.

Ito T., M. Tiede, and D.J. Ostry, “Somatosensory Function  in Speech Perception,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A., vol. 106, no. 4, 2009, pp. 1245–8.

Wietig, W. Der Bart. Zur Kulturgeschichte des Bartes von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. PhD dissertation at the University of Hamburg, 2005.

Note: An extended paper with the same title will be published in Curiosities and Regularities in Speech and Language, ed. by M Zygis, C. Mooshammer, P. Hoole, and
S. Fuchs.

Author Affiliations

1 Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, Germany
2 University of Western Sydney, Australia
3 Instituto de Engehnaria Electrónica e Telemática de Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal
4 IB-Hochschule, Berlin, Germany

Images, with the exception of Charles Darwin and Figure 1, are courtesy of the NeatoShop.

_____________________

This article is republished with permission from the January-February 2010 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!

Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.

It’s a simple quiz game. It gives you a word, and you decide whether it’s a cheese or  font. How hard could this be? After all, I buy cheese at the grocery store and I have many fonts on my computer. Surprise! There are way more of both in the world than I realized. Link -Thanks, Ginny Turner!

When you come across text you can’t read, can you at least identify the language? Maybe sometimes? In today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss, you’ll be given characters from languages not easily typed on your keyboard, and you match it to the language. It’s not easy -I only got three right. Surely you can beat that! Link

The Comedian of the Keyboard, also known as The Unmelancholy Dane, exited the earthly stage December 23rd, 2000. Victor Borge, the irrepressible musical humorist, didn’t quite make it into the true third millennium, but he lived almost 92 very full years and performed more than a 100 nights a year right up until the spotlight winked out.

Borge left the world a triple legacy. Born in Copenhagen to a family of musicians, Borge became a fine pianist and conductor. Too, he was that rare comedian who never used foul language and never made fun of anyone. “The smile is the shortest distance between two people,” he observed. Most astonishingly, he became a genius in his second language — English, which he learned by spending day after day in movie theaters.

Many years ago, Victor Borge created the game of inflationary language. Since prices keep going up, he reasoned, why shouldn’t language go up too? In English, there are words that contain the sounds of numbers, such as “wonder” (one), “before” (four) and “decorate” (eight). If we inflate each sound by one number, we come up with a string of puns — “twoder,” “befive” and “decornine.”

Here is a story based on Borge’s idea. This tale invites you to read and hear inflationary language in all its inflated wonder — oops, make that “twoder” and to remember the linguistically pyrotechnic genius of The Clown Prince of Denmark.

JACK AND THE TWODERFUL BEANS

Twice upon a time there lived a boy named Jack in the twoderful land of Califivenia. Two day Jack, a double-minded lad, decided three go fifth three seek his fivetune.

After making sure that Jack nine a sandwich and drank some Eight-Up, his mother elevenderly said, “Threedeloo, threedeloo. Try three be back by next Threesday.” Then she cheered, “Three, five, seven, nine. Who do we apprecinine? Jack, Jack, yay!”

Jack set fifth and soon met a man wearing a four-piece suit and a threepee. Fifthrightly Jack asked the man, “I’m a Califivenian. Are you two three?”

“Cerelevenly,” replied the man, offiving the high six. “Anytwo five elevennis?”

“Not threeday,” answered Jack inelevently. “But can you help me three locnine my fivetune?”

“Sure,” said the man. “Let me sell you these twoderful beans.”

Jack’s inthreeition told him that the man was a three-faced triple-crosser. Elevensely Jack shouted, “I’m not behind the nine ball. I’m a college gradunine, and I know what rights our fivefathers crenined in the Constithreetion. Now let’s get down three baseven about these beans.”

The man tripled over with laughter. “Now hold on a third,” he responded. “There’s no need three make such a three-do about these beans. If you twot, I’ll give them three you.”

Well, there’s no need three elabornine on the rest of the tale. Jack oned in on the giant and two the battle for the golden eggs. His mother and he lived happily fivever after — and so on, and so on, and so fifth.

(YouTube link)

© Copyright 2000 Annals of Improbable Research (AIR)

_____________________

This article is republished with permission from the Jan-Feb 2001 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!

Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.

Whaaat? You didn’t know that prairie dogs have their own language? (Cue Dramatic Prairie Dog clip)

Professor Con Slobodchikoff of Nothern Arizona University spent 30 years studying "prairiedogese" and cracked the secret of how prairie dogs communicate with each other:

During his analysis, Slobodchikoff noticed something: Even though the human call was consistently different from the other calls, there was still significant variation between the individual human calls. He began to wonder whether the little rodents could possibly be describing their predators — not just differentiating hawk from human, but actually saying something about the particular human or coyote or hawk that was approaching.

So he devised a test. He had four (human) volunteers walk through a prairie dog village, and he dressed all the humans exactly the same — except for their shirts. Each volunteer walked through the community four times: once in a blue shirt, once in a yellow, once in green and once in gray.

He found, to his delight, that the calls broke down into groups based on the color of the volunteer’s shirt. "I was astounded," says Slobodchikoff. But what astounded him even more, was that further analysis revealed that the calls also clustered based on other characteristics, like the height of the human. "Essentially they were saying, ‘Here comes the tall human in the blue,’ versus, ‘Here comes the short human in the yellow,’ " says Slobodchikoff.

Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich of NPR’s Morning Edition have the fascinating story, including a Flash feature where you can hear the different prairie dog calls: Link

As it happens, English color words may be especially difficult to learn, because in English we throw in a curve ball: we like to use color words “prenominally,” meaning before nouns. So, we’ll often say things like “the red balloon,” instead of using the postnominal construction, “the balloon is red.”

Why does this matter? It has to do with how attention works. In conversation, people have to track what’s being talked about, and they often do this visually. This is particularly so if they’re trying to make sense of whatever it is someone is going on about. Indeed, should I start blathering about “the old mumpsimus in the corner” you’re apt to begin discretely looking around for the mystery person or object.

Kids do the exact same thing, only more avidly, because they have much, much more to learn about. That means that when you stick the noun before the color word, you can successfully narrow their focus to whatever it is you’re talking about before you hit them with the color. Say “the balloon is red,” for example, and you will have helped to narrow “red-ness” to being an attribute of the balloon, and not some general property of the world at large. This helps kids discern what about the balloon makes it red.

When the researchers switched the color and noun, they found a significant improvement in performance over the children’s baseline performances, compared to the children who received prenominal training. Link -via TYWKIWBI

(Image credit: Flickr user wine me up)

This most peculiar script is written from right to left, and seems to mix up runes, straight and rounded characters in the style of Old Hungarian – but it defies all attempts at translation. This bamboozling manuscript was given to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences by Count Battyany in 1852, and is is believed to have been written in medieval times. Appearing to be hand-scripted, and illustrated with crude black and white sketches, the writing is simply not decipherable in any way. However, code-breakers have managed to at least ascertain that the language involved consists of 42 letters and over 200 different symbols, some non-alphabetic, as well as other symbols which see only occasional use.

The Rohonc Codex is just one of seven untranslated manuscripts in this list at Environmental Graffiti. Link -via the Presurfer

YouTube link.

Professors and students at Budapest’s ELTE-MTA Theoretical Linguistics Programme celebrate the 20th anniversary of their department with a cover of “We Are The World.”

There comes a time
When we heed a certain call,
When linguists must come together as one.
There are people speaking,
They bind and c-command;
It’s grammar, the greatest gift of all.

We can’t go on
Pretending day by day
That we know our language works in the brain.
We are all a part of
God’s linguist family,
And the truth, you know, grammar’s all we need.

The full lyrics are available in the YouTube pulldown box.  Via Language Log, where there is some relevant commentary.

The frogs’ calls have to compete with other animals’ loud signals. These calls are perceived as very loud to humans. However, there are frogs that communicate only through ultrasound. Their frequency is too high for the human ear to hear. The Huia cavitympanum species that lives in Borneo is the only species known to man that communicates only through high-pitched sounds.

Link

4) Cthulhu

Created by H.P. Lovecraft, Cthulhu is a humongous cosmic entity resembling a blend of an octopus, dragon and humanoid. Bordering on a ridiculous mishmash that would be found laughable in today’s horror scene, Cthulhu is still widely-known and loved amongst literature buffs and geeks the world over.

* The Mystery: Probably doesn’t need a list of common mispronunciations, but it’s safe to say every letter in the name other than the “l” can be pronounced one way or another.
* The Answer: Wikipedia says H.P. Lovecraft once transcribed the pronunciation as “Khlûl-hloo,” though didn’t pronounce it that way at other times. Now commonplace, the accepted pronunciation is “ka-thoo-loo;” that is, if you accept a pronunciation from a source other than the creator of the word. Lovecraft didn’t seem to have any consistent way of pronouncing it though, so we’re all better off settling on the common way described above.

You’ll also want to check out the best way to pronounce FAQ, Ubuntu, and meme, among others. Link

(Image credit: the NeatoShop)

What is it about the presumptuous use of we that inspires so much outrage, facetious or otherwise? The roots of these adverse reactions lie in the haughtiness of the majestic plural, or royal we, shared by languages of Western Europe since the days of ancient Roman emperors. British sovereigns have historically referred to themselves in the plural, but by the time of Queen Victoria, it was already a figure of fun. Victoria, of course, is remembered for the chilly line, “We are not amused” — her reaction, according to Sir Arthur Helps, the clerk of the privy council, to his telling of a joke to the ladies in waiting at a royal dinner party. Margaret Thatcher invited mocking Victorian comparisons when she announced in 1989, “We have become a grandmother.”

Nameless authors of editorials may find the pronoun we handy for representing the voice of collective wisdom, but their word choice opens them up to charges of gutlessness and self-importance. As the fiery preacher Thomas De Witt Talmage wrote in 1875: “They who go skulking about under the editorial ‘we,’ unwilling to acknowledge their identity, are more fit for Delaware whipping-posts than the position of public educators.”

I have to admit I have done this here at Neatorama, and I assure you that it is only in circumstances where I am speaking on behalf of the blog, meaning that Alex and I, and sometimes others as well, are in agreement. Forgive me? Link -via Carl Zimmer

EDITOR’S NOTE: The unusual format and to some degree the content of this article, including personal and even interpersonal commentary, reflects the persistent, entangled nature of the subject.

Notes Of A Humble Grail Watcher Regarding New Hope On The Horizon, by Steve Nadis (“SN”)

For the past 15 years, I’ve been tilting at windmills bearing the name “Holy Grail”—words that are all too familiar in the scientific literature and other realms of hyperbolic prose. I have made it my life’s work to scour scientific periodicals for references to said term in order to show the extent to which it has been misused, overused, and abused, with the ultimate hope being that scientists and science journalists alike will show more restraint in the future when describing “revolutionary new breakthroughs” or lofty, elusive goals not yet attained.

This is not a field for those eager to get rich quick. There’s not much money to be had in the grail-hunting enterprise, nor much glory to be found either—except in extremely rarified circles among those in the know. Indeed, most civilians fail to recognize the value of my preoccupation, nor do they consider it a valid occupation or even an avocation.

For most of this time, it has been a solitary pursuit laced with private curses, ad hominem remarks (at my own expense), and self-congratulatory chuckles. I even dislocated my shoulder once patting myself on the back. Putting it in literary terms, I have been Don Quixote without Sancho Panza. In dance terms, I have been Fred Astaire without Ginger Rogers. And in terms of refreshing alcoholic beverages that are perfect for the casual get-together or formal office party, I have been Martini without Rossi. (Or Rowan without Martin, or Martin without Lewis, or Lewis without Clark).

But slowly things have been changing for the better, perhaps a result of frequent announcements regarding the grail in this very journal, the Annals itself.¹ They say it takes a village, and although a village is not taking shape here, a community is. In the past couple of years, it seems that some people are finally “getting it”—people like Charles Petit, who wrote in the Knight Science Journalism Tracker in 2007: “What is it with any and all holy grails as ever-potent catnip for metaphor-hungry science and medical writers? How is it that French poetry, British Arthurian literature, and the romance of knights off on quests—one that not even Monty Python’s satire could cure—took such deep root in the imaginations of some writers in their youths (and of their sources)?”

Petit’s tirade was spurred by a BBC news story that described the development of artificial blood vessels as “one of the holy grails of regenerative medicine.” Is it, Petit asked, “just one of several such grails? And this in just one subspecialty? Well, one takes one’s holy grails where one finds them. Somebody should do a survey. There must be scads of them. How many holy grails does it take to make them, you know, plain old grails?”²

In 2008, Guardian columnist Tim Radford wrote: “British journalists have invoked the holy grail more than 1,000 times in the last 12 months. I have, almost certainly, evoked the same divinely-touched chalice, rightly celebrated in Arthurian legend, in some inappropriate context. We are all guilty… Grail imagery occurs with astonishing frequency in the scholarly press. Somewhere in the medical literature, I suspect, lurks a paper about the holy grail of hip replacement.”³ (And, yes, Mr. Radford, you are correct. But there is not one paper about the holy grail of hip replacement, my cher comrade in arms. There are many.)

Which brings us to 2009 and Bethany Halford’s rousing call to arms, “A Crusade Against Holy Grails,”⁴ which I consider to be the Common Sense of the grail-bashing genre and a signal that the world is finally waking up to this long-overlooked issue, the proverbial elephant in the room. Halford’s piece will be summarized shortly, but before getting to that I’d like to say how gratifying it is for me to find someone else taking up what I call “the crusade against the crusade” or, alternatively, “the quest against the quest.”

Halford’s research has focused on the chemical literature, particularly the publications of the American Chemical Society (ACS). Her essay appears in Chemical and Engineering News, the glossy ACS magazine for which she works—a publication, I might add, that has taken the extraordinary measure of banishing the term “holy grail” from its pages since 2003, when the editor-in-chief at that time put her foot down and said (in so many words): “Enough.”⁵

That was a courageous step and one that should be emulated by other journals. In other fields. In other places of the world. But before I dislocate my other shoulder again by attempting to pat myself on the back too forcefully, I should point out that there’s still a long way to go.

Idly grabbing papers on my desk, I come across phrases such as the following:

• “the Holy Grail of lasers” and “the ‘Holy Grail’ of energy weapons”⁶

• “the holy grail for a rocket enthusiast without much money”⁷

• “the Holy Grail of fisheries management”⁸

• “a Holy Grail of hot dogs in Boston”⁹

• “The holy grail is that it would be like getting a root canal…you can go to work the next day.”¹⁰

I must say, reading lines like these, tossed out so cavalierly, makes me feel like I’ve just had a root canal. It hurts me. And if it hurts you too, I feel your pain. I honestly believe that our society needs some respite, and healing, from the constant barrage of grail attacks. Fortunately, inspirational treatises like Halford’s just may show the way.

A Crusade Against Holy Grails (abridged version), by Bethany Halford (“BH”)

Lab coat, goggles, gloves—this is the equipment I expect a chemist to wear while embarking on a scientific quest. But I’m beginning to wonder whether more of us ought to be sporting swords, shields, and chain mail, what with the alarming proliferation of “holy grails” in the chemistry literature.

To see what set me off on this track, one need look no further than a stack of 2008 ACS journals, where the casual reader will be besieged by phrases such as: “the holy grail of photoelectrochemistry,” “the holy grail in small molecule-RNA binding,” and “the holy grail of room temperature Ullmann condensation reactions.”

It started innocently enough, in a 1968 edition of the ACS journal, Industrial & Engineering Chemistry, when Associate Editor D. H. Michael Bowen penned an editorial that described the excitement he felt upon following the adventures of a professor in his “pursuit of research’s Holy Grail.” To Bowen’s mind, this pursuit was even more exciting than memorizing dull facts—if you can believe that—though he had no idea of the literary tsunami he was about to unleash. (Note: Might “tsunami” become the next “holy grail”?)

Ten years later, Stephen J. Lippard, then at Columbia University but currently at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, put the first holy grail into a research article in an ACS journal when he wrote a paper on how platinum antitumor complexes interact with polynucleotides and kill cancer cells. “As with the Holy Grail of medieval legend, the joy thus far has been in the searching,” Lippard wrote.¹¹

Since then, holy grails in chemical research have been steadily on the rise. Including Lippard’s, three holy grails appeared in ACS journals in the 1970s, and five could be found in the 1980s. During the 1990s, 39 research articles in ACS journals made mention of a holy grail, and since 2000, 169 research articles invoked the sacred goblet. A SciFinder search shows this trend of chemists gravitating toward grails holds true for non-ACS journals as well.

Now, I was always under the impression that there was only one Holy Grail—the legendary vessel used by Jesus at the Last Supper that was later sought by Arthurian knights. But the multiplicity of holy grails in the chemistry literature suggests that they are about as common as plastic beer cups at Sci-Mix. And am I the only one to think it’s strange to equate a scientific endeavor with an object of religious mysticism?

Officially, the phrase is banned here at C&EN (although holy grails have a funny way of insinuating themselves into science writers’ copy regardless of such bans). Were I to tell my colleagues that we should be writing about a research finding because it is a holy grail of something or other, the response would likely be something impolite that I cannot print or, if put more charitably, something like this: “A holy grail? Why? Did someone find another one?”

In the course of my grail hunting for this story, I contacted several prominent chemists who’d referred to a “holy grail” in a publication at some point in their careers. I asked whether they now felt guilty about it and thought, as I do, that the phrase is a bit, shall we say, overworked. Knowing what they know now, would they have done the same thing all over again?

The most interesting response came from Harvard University’s George M. Whitesides, who was coeditor of a special “Holy Grails in Chemistry” issue of Accounts of Chemical Research¹². “If one is into semantics or semiotics, there is no excuse for using ‘holy grail’ in chemistry,” Whitesides says. “There are fields that have single, unified objectives, which, if reached, would revolutionize the field. I don’t think that there is a single thing that would turn all of chemistry on its ear, since one of chemistry’s strengths is its diversity.”

But I must begrudgingly admit that Whitesides also made a good case for not discarding holy grails entirely. “’Holy grail’ has come to mean ‘solution to a really big problem.’ The idea that one size fits all is, I think, unfair to the range of opportunities in chemistry, but it is at least clear what the phrase means,” he points out. “If two words give a sense of expansiveness and ambition and centrality, why not use them? ‘Holy grail’ means something to every chemist and to most others. It may mean something different to every chemist, but there are worse confusions. Better multiple grails than none.”

Commentary (by SN): Perhaps it comes as no surprise that I like all aspects of the article (with the possible exception of the last sentence, which I don’t quite understand¹³). I especially like the part (not contained in the abridged version) that refers to yours truly as “the chief grail hunter in all of science.”

Rejoinder (by BH): I had no idea grail bashing could be so fun. I can’t wait to tell the gals in my knitting circle, who are always looking for a new hobby.

² Charles Petit, “BBC: Artificial Blood Vessels Coming Along, ‘a Holy Grail of Regenerative Medicine,’” Knight Science Journalism Tracker, http://ksjtracker.mit.edu/?m=200712, December 26, 2007.

³ Tim Radford, “Prosaic Postcards from the Edgy,” Education Guardian, March 5, 2008.

⁴ Bethany Halford, “A Crusade Against Holy Grails,” Chemical & Engineering News, vol. 87, no. 13, March 30, 2009.

⁵ I have uttered that word too, but my saying it wasn’t enough.

⁶ Noah Schachtman. “Navy Pushing Laser ‘Holy Grail’ to Weapons Grade.” Danger Room, Wired Blog Network, http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/03/battlefield-str.html, March 26, 2008.

⁷ John Johnson Jr., “Rocket Scientists, Car Customizers Flock to Buy Used NASA parts,” Boston Sunday Globe, April 8, 2007, p. A28.

⁸ “Study Looks at Ways to Sustain Lobster Fishery,” Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution press release, July 5, 2006.

⁹ Jenn Abelson, “Winning Season and Seasoning…,” Boston Globe, April 1, 2009, p. 1.

¹⁰ Mary Carmichael, “Scar-free Surgery.” Boston Globe, January 7, 2008, p. C1.

¹¹ Stephen J. Lippard, Accounts of Chemical Research, vol. 11, no. 211, 1978.

¹² George Whitesides. Accounts of Chemical Research, vol. 28, no. 91, 1995.

¹³ Perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but I sometimes wonder whether that single sentence undermines everything that we’re trying to do here, everything I stand for, as well as everything we’ve accomplished so far. Despite that minor reservation, I wouldn’t change a word.

_____________________

The article above is from the May-June 2009 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!

Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.

Ever since “Ms.” emerged as a marriage-neutral alternative to “Miss” and “Mrs.” in the 1970s, linguists have been trying to trace the origins of this new honorific. It turns out that “Ms.” is not so new after all. The form goes back at least to the 1760s, when it served as an abbreviation for “Mistress” (remember Shakespeare’s Mistress Quickly?) and for “Miss,” already a shortened form of “Mistress,” which was also sometimes spelled “Mis.” The few early instances of “Ms.” carried no particular information about matrimonial status (it was used for single or for married women) and no political statement about gender equality. Eventually “Miss” and “Mrs.” emerged as the standard honorifics for women, just as “Mr.” was used for men (“Master,” from which “Mr.” derives, was often used for boys, though it’s not common today). While “Miss” was often prefixed to the names of unmarried women or used for young women or girls, it could also refer to married women. And “Mrs.,” typically reserved for married women, did not always signal marital status (for example, widows and divorced women often continued to use “Mrs.”). The spread of “Ms.” over the past forty years both simplifies and complicates the title paradigm.

But the term goes back even further, as Ms. was used on a tombstone in 1767 for Ms. Sarah Spooner, which may be a case of saving room. Link -via TYWKIWDBI

Every time we blog about an octopus, or rather, more than one octopus, we can count on a debate in the comments about the proper plural form for the animal. Here’s the real scoop from Kory Stamper, who is an Associate Editor at Merriam-Webster, the dictionary company. -via Holy Kaw!

Pretentious pronunciation surely exists — I sympathize with McIntyre’s aversion to “Bach uttered as if the announcer suffered from catarrh, or a Spanish name pronounced as if the studio were in the foothills of Andaluthia.” But I think that in general, we’re much too eager to label people dimwits or social climbers on the basis of pronunciations they probably acquired in the usual way — by imitating the people they talk to.

More at the delightfully-named blog Throw Grammar From The Train. Link -via TYWKIWDBI

Many words are born from the name of the person associated with what that word means. An eponym is a word derived from a person’s name, whether real or fictional. In this Lunchtime Quiz from mental_floss, you’ll be given a word definition and a clue about the person, and you figure out what what the word is. Simple? Not exactly! I scored 70%, which would have been 80% if I could spell correctly. Link

undermine: If your colleagues constantly undermine you, just be glad they aren’t doing so in the traditional sense. Undermine, a word that dates back to the 14th century, was once a military term for digging a clandestine passage under a building to sneak up on the enemy. The term quickly turned metaphorical, but in Shakespeare’s day, its literal meaning was still commonly known. He even playe with it in All’s Well That Ends Well , when the maiden Helena asks a soldier if there’s a way to safeguard her virginity. He replies, “There is none: man, sitting down before you, will undermine you, and blow you up.”

fleabag: Starting in the 1830s, a fleabag was a soldier’s bed. Although the word fleabag now seems wedded to hotel, it can be applied more broadly, as in the 1958 example for the Oxford English Dictionary, “God, how I hated Paris! Paris was one big flea-bag.”

basket case: Today, a basket case is simply a neurotic person, but during WWII, it meant a living soldier who had lost all his limbs and was brought home in a basket. The United States military denies that real baskets were ever used to carry soldiers. Regardless, the original meaning of the word is still gruesome.

(Image credit: Flickr user drakegoodman)

flak:Celebrities catch a lot of flak for idiotic behavior, but contemporary flak isn’t what it used to be. When the term originated in the 1930s, it was short for fliegerabwehrkanone, the German word for anti-aircraft guns. After a generation, the meaning shifted so that catching flak now means absorbing criticism instead of cannonfire.

gung ho: You may be gung ho about collecting stamps, playing solitaire, or other individual pursuits, but originally the term was more applicable to teams. The U.S. Marines first used it a as a slogan during World War II, after general Evans Carlson adapted the Chinese kung ho, which means “work in harmony”. While the teamwork element of the definition has faded, the enthusiasm bit has certainly remained.

fobbit, hillbilly armor, and IED: The war in Iraq is contributing its own expressions. A popular word on the rise is fobbit, a term that combines FOB (forward operating base) with hobbit. The word is a derogatory term for soldiers who stay too close to base and help themselves to three square meals a day. Another expression gaining steam is hillbilly armor, a term for scraps used to bulletproof vehicles.

Some words have already entered civilian life. IEDS, or improvised explosive devices, refer to the homemade bombs created by terrorists and insurgents. A recent GQ article about inappropriate office-party behavior uses it like this: “The workplace minefield is hard enough to negotiate without planting your own IEDs.” So, what are the chances any of these new words will stick around? Who knows? The only thing that’s certain is that as long as there are new wars, new words will crop up, too.

___________________________

How Violence Increases Our Vocabulary was written by Mark Peters. It is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the May/June 2008 issue of mental_floss magazine.

Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!

Cake Wrecks has a roundup of tragic cakes specifically for school events: back to school, the last day of school, graduation, teacher training, or in the case of the cake pictured, a special lesson in history (I think). Did I spell all those words right? I wouldn’t want these cakes to rub off on me! Link

Allie notices bad grammar and lazy typing. One common mistake we see a lot is to make the words “a lot” into one word, but Allie takes this particular mistake in stride. So that we may all enjoy the joke, she illustrated the Alot.

The Alot is an imaginary creature that I made up to help me deal with my compulsive need to correct other people’s grammar.  It kind of looks like a cross between a bear, a yak and a pug, and it has provided hours of entertainment for me in a situation where I’d normally be left feeling angry and disillusioned with the world.

See the Alot in many different situations at Hyperbole and a Half. Link -via Buzzfeed

Check out some clever words to describe the way kids exasperate their parents. My kids have outgrown most of these phases, but I remember them well! Link

The Art of Manliness has a glossary of manly terms used over 100 years ago. Some terms survived well into the 20th century; I’ve used “a month of Sundays” myself. Others are strange but maybe you can guess the meanings, as in “Shut your bone box, you saucebox, or my bunch of fives will give you a fizzing blinker!” Link -via Boing Boing

I don’t understand much Japanese, but part of this conversation is in cat language. -via Arbroath

For years, there was no good name for these double-take headlines. Last August, however, one emerged in the Testy Copy Editors online discussion forum. Mike O’Connell, an American editor based in Sapporo, Japan, spotted the headline “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms” and wondered, “What’s a crash blossom?” (The article, from the newspaper Japan Today, described the successful musical career of Diana Yukawa, whose father died in a 1985 Japan Airlines plane crash.) Another participant in the forum, Dan Bloom, suggested that “crash blossoms” could be used as a label for such infelicitous headlines that encourage alternate readings, and news of the neologism quickly spread.

My favorite example from the article is “British Left Waffles on Falklands.” Link

Crash Blossoms is a blog that collects these headlines for your amusement. Link -via Metafilter

Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,

I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;

Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.

Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!

The poem is now 274 lines long, meant to be read out loud. How much of it can you manage before mispronouncing something? Link -via Geeks Are Sexy

“95% to 98% of people choose kiki for the angular shape and bouba for the rounded one… Even 2.5 year-old children (too young to read) show this effect.”

“Ramachandran and Hubbard suggest the kiki/bouba effect has implications for the evolution of language, because the naming of objects is not completely arbitrary. The rounded shape may intuitively be named bouba because the mouth makes a more rounded shape to produce that sound, while a more taut, angular mouth shape is needed to articulate kiki. The sound of K is also harder and more forceful than that of B. Such “synesthesia-like mappings” suggest that this effect might be the neurological basis for sound symbolism, in which sounds are non-arbitrarily mapped to objects and actions in the world.”

Link.

The professors digitized 14 Christie novels (and included two more available in the Gutenberg online text archive), and then, with the aid of textual-analysis software, analyzed them for “vocabulary size and richness,” an increase in repeated phrases (like “all sorts of”) and an uptick in indefinite words (“anything,” “something”) — linguistic indicators of the cognitive deficits typical of Alzheimer’s disease. The results were statistically significant; Christie’s lexicon decreased with age, while both the number of vague words she employed and phrases she repeated increased.

Further studies are planned for the works of P.D. James and Ross Macdonald.

Link, via Language Log, where there is an informed comment thread.

With no danger in sight, males make three call sequences. The first – a pair of booms – is made when the monkey is far away from the group and can’t see them. It’s a summons that draws the rest of the group towards him. Adding a krak-oo to the end of the boom pair changes its meaning. Rather than “Come here”, the signal now means “Watch out for that branch”. Whenever the males cried “Boom-boom-krak-oo”, other monkeys knew that there were falling trees or branches around (or fighting monkeys overhead that could easily lead to falling vegetation).

Interspersing the booms and krak-oos with some hok-oos changes the meaning yet again. This call means “Prepare for battle”, and it’s used when rival groups or strange males have showed up. In line with this translation, the hok-oo calls are used far more often towards the edge of the monkeys’ territories than they are in the centre. The most important thing about this is that hok-oo is essentially meaningless. The monkeys never say it in isolation – they only use it to change the meaning of another call.

As complex as their language is, Campbell’s monkeys can only communicate things that they see or experience in the present. Link

The researchers found that if there was no air puff, participants misheard “pa” for “ba” and “ta” for “da” 30 to 40 percent of the time. The accuracy improved 10 to 20 percent when an air puff over the hand or neck accompanied “pa” and “ta.” No improvement occurred, however, if an air puff was sent through the tube in the ear, suggesting that the participants were not simply hearing the airflow.

The opposite effect was observed when the participants received an air puff with the inappropriate sounds— “ba” and “da.” While subjects correctly identified these sounds in about 80 percent of cases when played without the release of air, the accuracy decreased by about 10 percent if the sounds were accompanied by puffs of air.

Most of the volunteers were not consciously aware of the puffs of air. Link