Some of these really tickle my fancy bone.
That’s the icing on the iceberg
You let the horse out of the cart
What planet are you living under?
That opens a whole other kettle of fish
The cat’s out of the barn
Patience comes to those who wait
That’s right up my cup of tea
A fascinating look at an attempt to redefine the taxonomy of online porn.
Porn is part of the ecosystem that tells us what sex and sexuality are. Porn terms are, to use Foucault’s language, part of a network of technologies creating truths about our sexuality.
Reminds of the heady days of 2005, when it was all about tagging and folksonomies.
The project, at its most ambitious, seeks to create a new feedback loop of porn watched and made, unmoored from the vagaries of old, bad, lazy categories.
This is truly a book apart.
A fascinating look into the challenges encountered translating Anne Leckie’s excellent Radchaai novels into Bulgarian, German, Hebrew, Japanese, and Hungarian.
What is clear in all of these responses is that by examining the notions of ‘neutral’ and ‘feminine’ in grammar and gender through the lens of translation, we reveal their complexity – and some of their possible futures in languages, in both literature and speech.
I love the thinking behind this plugin that highlights the weasel words that politicians are so found of.
This is called expletive infixation.
I’ll always remember the “Phila-fucking-delphia” example from Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct:
If you said “Philadel-fucking-phia”, you’d be laughed out of the pool hall.
I bet you’re going to just keep clicking and clicking and clicking…
Cennydd uses the word “select” as an input-neutral term for what we might be tempted to call clicks or taps. Personally, I like the term “choose”, although that word might have too much intent bundled with it.
A beautiful short film about The Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Project.
Richard gives the lowdown on the new translate attribute in HTML.
Linguistics and programming collide in this paper from the 18th Workshop of the Psychology of Programming Interest Group, University of Sussex, September 2006: Lakoffian analysis of the mental models of Java programmers.
Spizzle up your tizzle.
Some of the best neologisms in programming, many of them to do with bug-fixing.
Coping mechanisms for grammar pedants. I can see myself using this alot.
The nerdgasmic result of a collision between linguistics and Star Wars.
Collective nouns, collected.
Because the internet needs prophylactics for memetically transmitted diseases.
A detailed look at the troubled history of George Lakoff, the father of conceptual metaphor.
The Sapir WIMP hypothesis: "The more easily you can talk about a user interface, the more easily you can understand how to manipulate it."
I saw Steven Pinker give a talk recently and he spent a fair amount of time talking about swearing. He has written up that part of the talk into an article for the New Republic.