ratatosk_ljbackup | Entries tagged with language

A question arose in comments to a previous (friends-locked) post. I'm going to paraphrase it as asking which of these is standard Lolcat:

a. I R SRS [NP1], THIS R SRS [NP2]
b. I IZ SRS [NP1], THIS IZ SRS [NP2]

My instinct was to go for a., and

diatom was going for b. I realized this was empirically testable, because we have access to a massive Lolcat dataset (aka "Google"). Wondering is not a virtue in this situation! Here's what I found:

I R SRS	9550
I IZ SRS	6460
THIS R SRS	62100
THIS IZ SRS	9820

That's an R/IZ ration of 1.48 for the first pair, and 6.32 for the second.

At first glance, it looks like the 'R' variant is somewhat more common. However, the full Google search might not be a good test, since Google's advanced search doesn't let you restrict results to Lolcat. So some of these hits are probably English speakers borrowing what they think is a catchy Lolcat phrase, regardless of whether an actual L1 Lolcat speaker would ever utter it.

So I decided to not only deliberately restrict it to Lolcat, but to break it out by register. I think we can agree that cheezburger.com is a good source for Standard Lolcat — the written equivalent to the kind you'd hear on TV.

Here are the results after adding site:cheezburger.com to the search:

I R SRS	68
I IZ SRS	13
THIS R SRS	16
THIS IZ SRS	14

Those are dramatic results. Now we see an R/IZ value of 5.23 for the first pair and 1.14 for the second. Given the low N and small ratio, the "THIS" phrases seem like a statistical tie, and the first pair has the lopsided ratio here. The high ratio of "I R" to "THIS R" might suggest that the original example a. is a colloquial catchphrase or just isn't idiomatic in Standard Lolcat. I'm not sure how to analyze that — it would be nice to have a larger corpus here.

So, that's standard Lolcat. However, we also have a very nice corpus of Literary Lolcat in the form of the Lolcat Bible. If we restrict the search to lolcatbible.com, however, we get one instance only, in the sentence "i r srs huzband." from 1 Samuel 1:8.

Well, maybe this is unfair, since lot of the Bible is in the past tense. So if we search for the word "srs", do we get any other instances at all of the form "[Pronoun] [DO+TNS] SRS [NP]"? I would only judge Acts 25:7 to count ("Paul came n Joos from Jooroosulum were srs cat and charged Paul n sed he wuz bad."). Literary Lolcat seems to have much more varied syntax than Standard, and consequently it's harder to find multiple instances of any given n-gram in there. I think we'd need a larger corpus to draw any conclusions about Literary Lolcat.

Anyway, to repeat my disclaimer: THIS R NOT SRS BLOG. THIS R NOT SRS RESIRCH.

Specifically, this is "things I have learned about polyamory from a 'things I have learned about polyamory' article", which was a sort of review of Showtime's "Polyamory: Married and Dating". The article is in the form of a bulleted list, most of which are uninteresting. But these caught my eye:

- If you find yourself in any kind of group that refers to itself as a "pod" and isn't made up of whales, you might find yourself suddenly drawn to the "namaste" section at Pier 1 Imports. Don't fight it, and while you're there, we're running low on pillar candles and useless shit to tack to the walls.

- While engaging in coitus with your "pod" among your pillar candles and exotic sheets and useless wall shit, be sure to frequently verbally reaffirm the sexiness of the situation, lest the audience at home (understandably) get confused.

So, poly people who use the word "pod" also tend to shop at Pier 1. I feel like there is some sort of cool sociological discovery lurking in there, but I'm not sure how to get at it.

For maximum points, your comment should include the phrase "Tchotchke-Industrial Complex".

gee_tar and I found a soda machine offering us "Strawberry Passion Awareness". Yeah, yeah, this stuff has apparently been around since 1994, but neither of us had seen it before.

So, not only are the strawberries being passionate, but they want to make sure everyone knows about it?

So I ask whether, maybe, there is some group of people like furries, except with fruit, who like to dress up as strawberries or something, read graphic novels about anthropomorphized fruit, and go to cons to meet with like-minded people.

gee_tar, unsurprisingly, had no idea.

Now, we didn't think to try this at the time, but a Google search -- with quotes -- of the form "sexy ______ costume", where the _____ is some fruit or vegetable, appears to reliably turn up examples (I gave up after "broccoli"). But, at least to my untrained eye, none of those really have the feel of costumes you would wear to a con for people who are specifically interested in anthropomorphized fruits and vegetables.

In any case, my question sent

gee_tar on a wild goose chase across the Internet to discover what you called furries (or an analogue of them), who were interested in anthropomorphized fruit, or more generally just plants. This resulted in failure. My attempt to repeat the experiment likewise resulted in failure. But, but, this is the Internet, right? I'm just missing some obvious search term, right? It must exist, and there must be a widely-accepted word for it!

If you would like to satisfy my curiosity while wasting an awful lot of time learning things you maybe did not want to know, your mission is clear -- go find that word!

In the case of fruit, my first idea would be "drupeys"[*], but that would require too much explaining and is also underinclusive.

This article about the Iowa caucuses turned up in my Google news "Elections" section. Normally I would not have clicked on it, save for the headline:

"Two Iowa conservative leaders pick Rick Santorum, ask other candidates to merge"

The "other candidates", in this case, are Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann. If you are like me, you will have two reactions to this, in quick succession:

"Wait, you mean form up like Voltron?", and
"OMG Santorum/Perry/Bachmann 3-way fanfic OMG!"

No?

Bonus grammatically-odd Santorum quote, in response to the endorsements the article refers to:

"I think it shows that we’re the candidate right now that has the momentum, that has the message that’s resonating to the people of Iowa."

I realize many candidates refer to themselves as "we" to make themselves seem like part of a movement that is sweeping them along or something -- Bachmann does the same thing in a quote later in that article, even. I just think Santorum managed to produce a particularly twitch-inducing line there.

From this National Review article:

"Indeed, it’s doubtful that any further sliding down the slippery slope would be necessary to get to polyamory: unlike the novelty of same-sex marriage, the polygamous version of polyamory has been widely practiced throughout history (and is therefore arguably up the slope from same-sex marriage)."

This isn't a slippery slope argument. Is there a name for it?

UPDATE, taken from comments:

In comments,

docstrange gives the not-colorful but helpfully clear answer of calling it "a non-sequitur with an unstated (and false) premise." He goes on:

"Sort of thus: Since poly marriage is historically non-novel, any progress that takes us to historically-novel forms of marriage would necessitate it.

(Unstated premise: historically novel forms of a social institution will include any historically non-novel forms)."

That looks like exactly the right answer from a logic standpoint.

I still want a nice metaphorical name, though.

Restated metaphorically, it's not about how slippery the slope is, but what slope, if any, we are on at all. So, how about "Phantasmal Slope"? Landscape metaphors seem idiomatic, but "Imaginary Landscape" won't do, since that's the one where gay marriage leads to poly people all owning lots of record players.

Two news items using the word 'polyamory' hit my Google news alert within a day of each other. In both cases, the point of sharing them is to show how mainstream the word is getting.

One is about an event about animal sex at the Kansas City Zoo, triggered by "Explaining mammalian polyamory to the kids is your job, not the zoo's." I'm not solid on why that's so, but what you are seeing there, I think, is 'polyamory' displacing 'polygamy', albeit humorously, in a place where the latter word would seem to be strongly entrenched.

The second is an article about emoticons, briefly describing the writer's attempt to go a year without using them, and resolving to now go a year using them whenever possible. The use on that one requires a slightly longer quote to make sense:

"Facebook and Twitter, and the emoticoning they encourage, do not prohibit me from crafting e-correspondences that take my readers on long-winded walks through the wilds of wit and promenades through pages of proper prose; they are just a bit more flirty. And since communicative promiscuity leaves only my computer in danger of acquiring a social virus, I see no reason why I shouldn't indulge in a bit of genre polyamory, now and again, if only to get a :D."

The article on writing, incidentally, asserts that it "isn't that Johnny can't write; it's that Johnny writes with symbols just as effectively as words now and the majority of his readers are growing dependent on them." I happen to agree -- I think emoticons are very similar to determinatives, except operating at the sentence or paragraph level instead of individual words (the link is specifically to the use of determinatives in Egyptian, since I think the main Wikipedia article on determinatives is bad). I have spent some time processing year of chat transcripts to see how people use emoticons; some day I will write up the (very limited) results.

Google news alerts sent me a link to this blog entry on Psychology Today's website, which is in turn basically a review of an article in Psychotherapy Networker. That is, an article in a blog run by a popular magazine talking about an article in a professional one. (Does it link to the original source? No, of course not!)

The longer article is a therapist discussing the fact that so many of her clients do not wind up following traditional models of monogamy. A few quotes [heavily edited for length]:

"If couples are becoming more flexible in the way they define monogamy, it could be partly because people live longer than in previous centuries.... There's no precedent in any culture for staying married and passionate about the same person for that amount of time.

Monogamy is a conscious choice made by human beings, .... If monogamy is not natural to humans but a choice that we make and negotiate every day, then it becomes an opportunity to protect our most intimate bonds while continuing to grow as individuals."

The author of the Psychotherapy Networker article is basically positive about humanity, says nothing I find really remarkable, and doesn't really say anything I object much to, either. The blogger would agree with me: "One might think her points are obvious, and to most people identifying as polyamorous, they are hardly earthshaking, but in the world of mononormativity, these are radical notions." Wait, back up. Psychology Today is pretty mainstream (unrelatedly, my mother also subscribes to it), but it has, at least in blogs, mentioned polyamory a lot more than I expected. Huh. More examples of the strange credibility of polyamory.

Except, the article uses the term "The New Monogamy". Apparently the blogger contacted the article author and asked her about this, and the author insisted she was talking about monogamy, and that polyamory was something different. Does anyone care what you call it? Why does it matter? How much time will be wasted arguing over this on the Internet? I have no idea -- that's not what I actually wanted out to write about -- this was all a set-up.

If you are like me, you hear the phrase "New Monogamy" and think of "New Math". No, wait, keep reading... When I went searching for the journal article, I (mistakenly) tried Google Scholar first. From my top hit on there, here's the text blurb with my search term:

"In this Letter, based on the new monogamy equation we find a surprising fact that the tripartite W type entanglement of a (2 circle times operator 2 circle times operator n)-dimensional quantum pure state can be characterized by the difference between concurrence and ... "

I read this after reading the first three words of its title, "Monogamy and entanglement in tripartite quantum states".

World, I'm sorry! I knew sometimes my friends had complicated relationships, and yes, we were even trying to encourage long-term changes in our culture, but I had no idea it had come to this!

What have we done?

[Inspired by XKCD's Color Name Survey]

What are some everyday objects that are reliably colored something most monitors can't display (i.e. are outside of their gamut)?

Satisfy my curiosity:

[Poll #1561477]

From a description of an old bird guide from a booksellers' newsletter [via a comment on Language Log]:

"In [William Yarrell’s A History of British Birds] we find various parts of the Bee-Eater described as verditer blue, saffron-yellow, chestnut, duck-green, verdigris-green, buff, greyish-brown and fawn colour. The Roller as berlin-blue, brownish-yellow, coppery-purple and light cinnamon. The Spotted Eagle as chocolate-brown, pale wood-brown and reddish liver-brown. The Golden Oriole had lead-colour toes, other parts oil-green, brocoli-brown and wine-yellow. The Cuneate-Tailed Gull was smoke-brown and pearl-grey, the Turnstone had ferruginus portions, the Little Auk was livid-brown and sooty-brown, while the American Bittern was leaden-brown."

Remember, all that was supposed to be helpful! My reaction would be panic. Well, almost.

I can't help but wonder what "brocoli-brown" might mean. Here are some pictures of golden orioles from Wikimedia, and some more from elsewhere that show the female better. I think maybe Yarrell meant that the female was the color of broccoli that had gone bad. I would not want to be described by that comparison -- poor bird! I'll give a pass to the lead-colour toes, I have no idea what oil-green is, and wine is usually not bright yellow (incidentally a color monitors are sometimes bad at). Check out the bee-eater, too.

[Edit:

oonh points out that mantis shrimp are dodecachromats. Scary.]

...which describes the sleep schedules of some people I know, and also I think the cat I live with. Useful!

This is a follow-up to this post and this one.[1] Here's the original anecdote they were about (the rest was just polls):

I recently attended a handfasting that involved a lot of boffer fighting. (Yes, I realize both of these things are kind of subculture-specific, but I'm not sure what difference that makes.) Anyway, at the point where the ceremony and the photography were over, but the food had not yet started, there was a big sort of chaotic boffer-fight going on in the front yard / street. When it was time to eat, someone (female) said something like "Should we call the boys in?"

( More details, and follow-up thoughts )

Kind of a neat sentence, found via Google news alerts:

"For the past several years, the European Union (EU) has tried to seduce the Western Balkans to join its polyamory."

The article goes on to offer relationship advice to the EU.

This title promises far more entertainment than the article actually delivers:
Domestic Disturbances: The Rising Polyamorous Culture Is Out to Get Your Children

I was hoping it would get into detail, but the note at the end says it's adapted from a talk -- I guess The Rising Powerpoint Culture Is Out to Get Your Substantive Content. In the article that should have been written, each bullet point would be developed into the fascinating little trainwreck it cries out to become.

Edits follow:

- The lack of details makes me think this is what it's like when you have to argue with creationists -- it's a struggle to figure out what you are arguing against, and you're probably going to wind up making better arguments for their side than they are, just as a side-effect of trying to make sense of what they're saying. Now I want a relationship status on Facebook that says "It's Irreducibly Complicated".

- Well, I suppose we can still salvage some humor out of this -- let's play complete the sentence!

The rising polyamorous culture is ____________

Found via Google news alerts. Tagged "language" for the article's novel and bizarre use of "polyamory".

In the last post I asked a set of poll questions with the intent of having a more complicated follow-up. Please go there before clicking on the cut; I'm not going to rot13 a poll to make people read things in the order I want. :P

( Follow-up poll )

People in my immediate social circles do not, on the whole, make gendered comments of the form "boys do blah blah blah / girls do blah blah blah". They are likely to scrupulously say "people I date" rather than "girls/boys I date". I'm sufficiently used to this that it's jarring to talk to people from the rest of the world. here's an anecdote for you:

I recently attended a handfasting that involved a lot of boffer fighting. (Yes, I realize both of these things are kind of subculture-specific, but I'm not sure what difference that makes.) Anyway, at the point where the ceremony and the photography were over, but the food had not yet started, there was a big sort of chaotic boffer-fight going on in the front yard / street. When it was time to eat, someone (female) said something like "Should we call the boys in?"

Given that scenario:

[Poll #1492430]

Arguing that Apple should ditch its exclusive deal with AT&T: "Analyst Favors iPhone Carrier Polyamory"

Once is clever wordplay, but it would be interesting if that usage got picked up more broadly.

[I have Google News set to email me every time it picks up an occurance of "polyamory".]

[stickies == Mac OS app to keep persistent notes on your desktop]

Thematically, this could be a follow-up to item 2 of this post, but I don't have any memory of what it was I was trying to prove here:

Bad Google research

get into his pants 11300
get in his pants  896
inside 3230

get into her pants 31100
get in her pants 31500
inside 1590

get into their pants 993
get in their pants 9760
inside 23

get into my pants 65400
get in my pants 74800
inside 6910

This month a lot of blogs, facing financial difficulty, had to cut costs, usually by laying off staff.[*] For this blog, though, that's not an option, as I'm all of my own staff. I know many of you thought my trial of that duplicator ray was a good plan for improving this situation, and I'm thankful for how much support I got from you all, but actually it didn't work out as I was hoping.

It was, in fact, fairly good at producing twins, so originally it was looking promising. And, I know at that point I was thinking I couldn't do much of anything right away. Looking back, though, I don't know why I thought it was a good plan to "loan out" what I had as a way to pay back "favors" (no, I'm not going to discuss that in a public post, sorry). I'm not doing that again -- as it turns out, nobody's giving anything back, and I'm not having any luck contacting anybody about it. It's as if all of you abruptly got awfully busy...

I don't know what's up with you all, but my suspicion is that you probably work too hard. You should think about, you know, occasionally having fun or going outdoors and stuff.

Anyway, all our lights go dim if I run my duplicator ray for too long, and our landlord isn't willing to pay for any sort of work on our wiring. So, I'm having to omit from my posts '', '', '', '', and '', which, in sum, account for a big portion of my blogging costs.[*] It's frustrating, but this should also shrink my word count down so that it stays within limits. I'm hoping this won't disappoint you too much, but if nobody's looking at my writing anyway, I can say anything I want with impunity... which, now that I think of it, is probably right.

[Poll #1381440]

[background]

There are linguists with very complicated theories about English adjective classes. I'm not sure what kind of empirical evidence they have, though, and I consider native speaker intuition to be definitive (where by "definitive" I mean "good enough for the Int0rnet"... I'm also assuming you can elicit what you want properly instead of botching your research). The issue presented in the poll actually arose in a conversation with

corpsefairy just now, and we both kept changing which sounded right to us. Thus, it was Time to Ask LiveJournal.

A conversation recently came around to the topic of using "males" and "females" to refer to humans. That is, "males/females" as opposed to "men/women/girls/guys", avoiding gendered language, or contriving not to need those nouns, and humans as opposed to, say, fruit flies or ginkgo trees.

This turned out to be a mildly controversial issue, so I decided I should do a reality-check on my own (biased) opinions. This means an LJ poll.

( cut because polls take up more than their fair share of space per word )

What words make you happy enough that you've wanted to work them into conversation, but never found a way?

[If it helps, think of it like a song stuck in your head, but with a word. People go around with the weirdest stuff running through their heads. What's in yours?]

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Page generated Apr. 23rd, 2025 02:38 pm

This tardiest explorer

driving hard across the plain

Entries tagged with language

Large corpus Lolcat research

Things I have learned

Anthopomorphizing Fruit

Form up like one of those robot things

Name that metaphor

Uses of 'Polyamory'

A couple articles about non-monogamy, or something like that

Colors, miscellaneous

A word I had not seen before...

Follow-up to gendered language posts from long ago

Unusual use of the word "polamory"

Subtitle of the Day

Follow-up poll (gendered language)

Gendered comments

Neat headline

Contents of forgotten stickies

Cutting down on blogging costs

Talking about squid

People who talk about "males" and "females" to refer to humans

Words