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Common Errors in English Usage
Wordnik is an on-line dictionary I haven't been able to stump. (It's disappointingly easy to stump most free on-line dictionaries. But Wiktionary is also hard to stump.)
Queen Elizabeth has 10 times the lifespan of workers and lays up to 2,000 eggs a day
The evolution of the US presidential campaign ad, 1952 to 1996
Running for Office: It’s Like A Flamewar with a Forum Troll, but with an Eventual Winner
Common Errors in English Usage
Wordnik is an on-line dictionary I haven't been able to stump. (It's disappointingly easy to stump most free on-line dictionaries. But Wiktionary is also hard to stump.)
It was just two months ago I was talking about how great the American Heritage dictionary at Bartleby.com was. No more.
Due to financial and usage considerations the reference works licensed from Columbia University Press and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt have been removed as of June 2009.
The consolation is that you can look up the notes indexes from the Internet Archive:
and then look those words up at dictionary.com whose results include the full American Heritage entries, including the notes.
There doesn't seem to be a way to get to the Indo-European roots appendix.
However, affixes.org, is a great consolation -- a guide to Greek and Latin roots, on online version of Ologies and Isms by the World Wide Word's Michael Quinion.
Wonder how obnoxious it would be to actually buy the electronic AHD.
James Patrick Kelly's Standing in Line with Mr. Jimmy is a story that has stuck with me. Our hero is a feckless youth on the dole. In the course of the story, he discovers that he's truly trapped -- an open secret that he and his friends hadn't been privy to is that once you've been on the dole, you become untouchable to employers. It was capricious, and cruel, and believeable.
Today, the LA Times has a story about a trend of people being denied jobs because they have bad credit.
With a policy like that being applied indiscriminately, once you're behind on your bills, how are you ever going to get out?
The Null Stern Hotel's a Swiss hotel whose name means zero-star hotel. According to Wikipedia, it's the only one.
I just read The Song Is You by Arthur Phillips, based on a recommendation on Ken Jennings' blog. A Jeopardy 5-time champion writes a novel that includes a Jeopardy champion? Yeah, I'm there.
It's a frustrating book. The prologue is a tremendous bit of writing. I read it aloud to Pocahontas. It makes me care more about whether a shouted audience request on a concert LP made it onto the CD re-release than most fiction ever makes me care about whether people live or die.
The prose sometimes hits the same heights as the prologue, but it's in service of a story that grows increasingly strained, culminating in the most contrived situation I've ever seen an author ask me to take seriously, bedroom farce played straight.
I did enjoy the Jeopardy champion, though. He's a minor character, our hero's brother, the kind of verging-on-Asperger's know-it-all I've encountered often in fandom and geekdom. (And, yes, the kind of verging-on-Asperger's know-it-all other people have encountered when they've met me.) I'm wishing now (as I often end up doing) that I hadn't been quite so prompt about returning it the book to the library, so I could share some choice passages about him, like how he'd argue contrarian positions until his victim capitulated, then he'd disprove whatever his assertion had been.
But, in conclusion, I'd advise reading the prologue and skipping the rest. But I thought enough of Phillips' writing that I plan to give The Egyptologist a try.
Pocahontas and I went to Monterey this weekend. Cannery Row is now tourist shops, with no signs of poverty allowed.
Local hotels sell 2-day passes to the Monterey Bay Aquarium for the same price the Aquarium sells a one-day pass. On Sunday, it seemed like we were violating some local custom by not having brought a double-wide child stroller, but Monday wasn't so crowded.
Besides the sea otters (there's supposed to be a webcam of them, but right now it's showing an exterior shot of Monterey Bay,) my favorite exhibits were the leafy sea dragon, and the ribbon pipehorse, two of the most incredible animal mimics I've ever seen, even trumping the leaf mimics I posted to the Free Range Memes sidebar.
Entry title courtesy of the Tick.
A new genetic study has determined that the ancient Egyptians were latecomers to cat domestication, which now looks like it began around ten thousand years ago in the Fertile Crescent.
There's no disputing of the Egyptians' pioneering contributions to cat worship, however.
Last Thursday, the 14th, I ordered Civilization IV: the Complete Edition, like I planned, from Amazon. It was eligible for Free Super Shipping Saving, which I chose. On Sunday, they emailed that it had shipped via USPS, and gave a tracking number. Of course, that just meant that they'd printed the label; they couldn't get it to the Post Office before Monday.
As of now, Wednesday morning, USPS still hasn't heard of it. Order tracking on Amazon describes it as having shipped on Sunday with the details "Shipment has left seller facility and is in transit."
Maybe the Amazon warehouse in New Castle, Delaware is really far from the Post Office. Maybe it's lost or there's been some other screw-up. Maybe it's even the case that every truck out of the warehouse in the past two days has been filled to capacity with higher-priority packages.
But it's seeming a little more likely that it's simply sitting, waiting to be shipped until I've been adequately punished for my cheapness.
Updated: In the comments, Doug G. points out that USPS' tracking isn't reliable enough to conclude that an item hasn't shipped. He's right, and I withdraw my speculation that Amazon was sitting on my package.
Civilization IV: the Complete Edition, -- Civ4 with all three supplements, including the recent Colonization, is finally out. It's all on a single DVD for $37 at Amazon, and with no DRM, which should make it a lot easier to get it to work under Wine. I'm not buying anything with DRM anymore (not counting functionally non-existent DRM like DVDs') so I'd figured I'd never see the two Civ4 supplements I don't have. Way to actually give people what they want, 2K Games.
I'm holding off on purchasing it, though, 'cause I don't want the time hit right now.
The Linux Hauppauge HVR-2250 driver looks to be in usable condition, so I should be able to disassemble the Rube Goldberg arrangement by which I have a device attached to my serial port that sends IR remote control signals to a digital TV converter box to change channels so I can record things on my analog TV tuner card. (Yeah, I'm amazed it works at all, too.) I'll be able to record in HD, too, for all the good it'll do me, what with still chugging along with a non-HD CRT TV and an original Xbox for an HTPC.
William Shatner was a (non-flying) Karamazov Brother.
Isaac Newton fought crime.
As warden of the Royal Mint, Newton estimated that 20% of the coins taken in during The Great Recoinage were counterfeit. Counterfeiting was high treason, punishable by being hanged, drawn and quartered. Despite this, convictions of the most flagrant criminals could be extremely difficult to achieve; however, Newton proved to be equal to the task. Disguised as an habitué of bars and taverns, he gathered much of that evidence himself. For all the barriers placed to prosecution, and separating the branches of government, English law still had ancient and formidable customs of authority. Newton was made a justice of the peace and between June 1698 and Christmas 1699 conducted some 200 cross-examinations of witnesses, informers and suspects. Newton won his convictions and in February 1699, he had ten prisoners waiting to be executed.
Zachary Taylor's adventures beyond the grave:
Shortly after breaking ground for the Washington Monument on July 4, 1850, President Zachary Taylor, a hero of the Mexican War, fell ill. When he died suddenly a few days later, the cause was listed as gastroenteritis--inflammation of the stomach and intestines. Some historians suspected that Taylor's death may have had other causes, and in 1991 one convinced Taylor's descendants that the president might have suffered arsenic poisoning. As a result, Taylor's remains were exhumed from a cemetery in Louisville and Kentucky's medical examiner brought samples of hair and fingernail tissue to Oak Ridge National Laboratory for study.
I've posted previously about the reference works available at Bartleby.com. I wanted to call attention to the links on the American Heritage dictionary page, which spotlight some special features:
From the last, I learned that pagoda, nebbish, porgy, and esophagus all stem from the same root.
These are some things that have made me happy lately:
A hot topic in the blogosphere during the current 15 minutes is a young woman who was a minor league con artist. Here's Jezebel's take:
The fact that she's Korean-American is intriguing; as anyone who's been to a Williamsburg art opening knows, for a lot of these dudes, having an Asian girlfriend is some kind of weird fetish (to the point where one Chinese American friend of mine remarked once, "I can't go near those hipster neighborhoods. These guys just want to date an Asian, doesn't matter who, and it's racist and weird and really uncomfortable." Another friend adds, "It's obviously rooted in some racist stereotype of the 'exotic' or 'submissive' - I don't even want to know what.") Vice has never made any bones about its love of hot Asian women - see any "Dos" - so Farrell chose her targets well. One has to note that after writing a note to a stranger at a bar reading, "I want to give you a hand job with my mouth,"she signed it "Korean Abdul-Jabbar." [...]
Farrell is by no means emblematic of Asians, Asian women, women, Straight-Edge ex scenesters, adopted children, administrative assistants, or even other con artists: she's clearly a deeply disturbed person who, however immoral, was seeking love and attention. She wreaked havoc on a lot of lives and left a lot of people feeling not just hurt, but humiliated. She seemed so harmless! They all seem to suggest. And why would they think that? To quote Kim, "unlike any other racial group in America today, Asian women routinely are dehumanized in popular culture as sexualized, meek and voiceless objects." Surely Farrell knew this too?
The article rightly hastens to point out that she's not emblematic of women, or Asians, or Asian women. Funny, though, how the men she defrauded were all such... emblems.
Wikipedia has a fun entry on common misconceptions including:
Napoleon Bonaparte was not especially short. After his death in 1821, the French emperor's height was recorded as 5 feet 2 inches in French feet. This corresponds to 5 feet 6.5 inches in modern international feet, or 1.686 metres, making him slightly taller than an average Frenchman of the 19th century. The metric system was introduced during his lifetime, so it was natural that he would be measured in feet and inches for much of his life. His nickname was "le petit caporal." There are competing explanations for why he was called this, but few modern scholars believe it referred to his stature.
Via Lisa Gold's blog, I learned that Moby Lives lives again, and found these wonderful links to pictures of interesting bookstores, libraries, and more libraries.
I had always been under the impression that Canada was immensely larger than the U.S., but, according to the CIA World Factbook, Canada's total area is 9.98 million sq. km and the U.S.' is 9.83 million sq. km. If one goes strictly by land area, the U.S. is slightly ahead at 9.16 million sq. km to 9.09 million.
Of course, I have to wonder whether the CIA's measurements might differ from Canada's own, given the U.S.' predilection for sending submarines into water the U.S. calls international that Canada considers its territory.1
And I'm amused by the fact that the CIA uses encrypted communications for all of their web traffic, even to look at their home page.
1 This entry's title is just a Ramones reference for my own entertainment, not an assertion that the CIA is actually up to shenanigans with the Factbook.
Triskaidekaphobia only seemed like good sense last Friday, when I let the mememachinego.com domain name expire, and my registrar slapped up an ad page. I reactivated the name, and the correct value should have propagated everywhere by now.
For the past couple of months, most of my blogging energy has been going elsewhere. Since October, there have been a lot of articles on living cheaply. Jen and I couldn't help but notice that we were already doing pretty much everything being recommended. So we've jumped on that bandwagon. Frugal Culture: better living through economy is our frugality blog, with new articles every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Check it out.
In 1976, George Washington was granted the title General of the Armies of the United States, which has "rank and precedence over all other grades of the Army, past or present".
Like geeks everywhere, I was on a roller coaster. Whedon doing another regular series starring Dushku! Yay! On Fox, whose capricious ministrations have doomed shows like Wonderfalls and Whedon’s last, Firefly. But it was really going to happen! Yay! But Fox hated the pilot and the show was postponed and finally put on Fridays. Boo.
And then, worst, the pilot was bad. Blatantly manipulative, it puts a little girl in the worst sort of peril. And while it succeeded in making me care about the girl’s situtation, not so much about everyone else. And I especially didn’t care about Echo, who goes back to blank at the end of the episode, and I really, really wondered how Whedon was going to pull off a character arc for someone with no character. Surely he’s got a plan — it’s not like he could miss the corner this structure paints you into.
But episode two rocked.
Italy struggles to deal with the secret documents of the army brigade that never existed.
[(Via Sore Eyes)]
I am very distressed to encounter the assertion that Zed is a trendy hipster name.
[A baby-naming website] gave me results approved by my demographic, which we learned by the site's suggestions of Axel, Jett, Laszlo and Zed is that of pretentious, self-important yuppie hipsters.
=v= As a blue-collar latchkey kid growing up in the "do your own thing"/"greed is good" era, I had no formal training in manners. Significant others have tried to school me in the ways of Emily Post, but this was often thwarted by my class consciousness (Who's going to wash all these butter knives and ancillary plates, the servants?) and ecological concerns (Why are we wasting butter on all these knives and plates, just so the servants can do twice as much washing?) Miss Manners has made snobbery humorous, but the bottom line is still very 1980s Republican (and Spy did it so much better anyway).
Fortunately we still have George Washington's Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation to guide the way. "Every Action done in Company, ought to be with Some Sign of Respect, to those that are Present" is at the top of the list, and rightly so. These two rules follow:
2nd When in Company, put not your Hands to any Part of the Body, not usually Discovered.
3rd Show Nothing to your Friend that may affright him.
Washington adapted these rules from those set down by French Jesuits in 1595, who must have thrown some pretty wild parties. One of my fellows of the secretive Muted Horn was quite taken with rule the 13th, which covers the disposal of fleas, ticks, filth, and spittle, but I'm more concerned with rule the 18th:
18th Read no Letters, Books, or Papers in Company but when there is a Necessity for the doing of it you must ask leave ...
Surely this can be extended to the practice of texting while operating Carriages, so as not to crowd Velocipedes from the public Way? Other Rules can be adapted to online Discourse, with great Effect. Check 'em out!
(Via the Muted Horn)
A new fossil discovery shows that whales' ancestors came onto land to give birth.
Updated 2009-02-09: I feel remiss in not having noted that the originator of "Clams got legs!" doubtlessly would have disapproved of the scientists' conclusions. Whether he'd have personally advanced this account, I don't know.
For the first couple of pages, I was frustrated with this article on the past and future of e-books. It begins by complaining about consumers' failures of imaginations, and I kept thinking "Yeah, I've heard those attitudes expressed, but that's not the real issue." Then the author said something much like "while all these attitudes do exist, they're not the real issue," and I began agreeing with him wholeheartedly.
E-books' prices are too high, and seem motivated chiefly by publishers' desire to not cut into physical book sales. And, despite e-books' advantages in a couple of realms, I'm really disinterested in increasing the publishers' profit margins for a copy of a text I can do less with.
And the biggest reason I can do less with them is the publishers' continued commitment to DRM. I don't have a high expectation that the DRM-ed texts people are buying for their Kindles will be readable in twenty years.
Despite truly heroic stubbornness and denial for a decade, the music industry has finally taken some steps indicating they're getting that their behavior vis-a-vis DRM and intellectual property has been costing them more than it profits them. Publishers are continuing to stick their fingers in their ears and going "la la la la la."
When I can get a decent e-ink device for under $100, I'll get it just to read public domain and other freely available material. When publishers offer new e-books at a reasonable price without DRM, I'll buy my new books that way.
But, today, I'm sticking mostly with physical books, and the occasional free e-book read on my n800.
When I first read Nancy Kress' Spillage, I was struck by the unusual premise -- it's told from the point of view of a rat transformed into one of Cinderella's coachmen.
Recently, I found that there's a novel called The Coachman Rat (first published in '89; Kress' story first appeared in '88; it seems like the odds of influence either way are low.) And a children's book called Cinderella's Rat And another children's book called If the Shoe Fits: Voices from Cinderella at least touches on the rat's story.
That rat gets around.
A logic bomb allegedly planted by a former engineer at mortgage finance company Fannie Mae last fall would have decimated all 4,000 servers at the company, causing millions of dollars in damage and shutting down Fannie Mae for a least a week, prosecutors say.
Now do you suppose it would have reduced the quantity of servers to 3600, or reduced each server to nine tenths of its former self?
Jeopardy’s on-line auditions for contestants will occur Tuesday through Thursday nigths. Register in advance to participate.
If you score well enough on the test, then you may be called on at some point in the next 18 months to audition in person. If you pass that, you may or may not be selected for the show before your eligibility expires and you have to start all over.
I’ve already been disappointed by some of Obama’s positions; I don’t doubt that list will grow longer. But we’ve got a president who’s willing to refer positively to data, statistics, and science, who’s willing to acknowledge that America includes atheiests, and who can do so while speaking in complete sentences.
I’ll take it.
Meanwhile, the next to top story at the moment on Google News is about Michelle Obama’s dress, with a link to 870 articles. Way to remind little girls that a woman’s appearance is the most important thing about her, media.
According to 23% of Americans in a CNN poll, Cheney is the worst vice-president ever leaving me to wonder: what percentage of Americans could name ten vice-presidents?
=v= Throwing shoes at George W. Bush might be a guilty pleasure (replete with Sock and Awe video game), but I have to admit that I've got a peacenik, Quakerly side that compels me suggest a gentler alternative:
Tempting though it may be to suggest that Dubya's next overseas visit should be to a certain well-stocked Footwear Museum, we should stick with our finer instincts, and that includes not lapsing into bad jokes. Like for example, the one about how he's a lame duck, but not a lame ducker. Or the observation that, of course he was able to dodge the shoes, he was at a press conference and thought they were questions. Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week. Tip your waitrons and try the Veat®.
In Florida, a teacher has accused a 9-year-old girl of selling drugs for accepting money for giving her friends Hall’s Defense Vitamin C cough drops. These are mostly sugar, and are basically candy. The active ingredient is 60 mg of Vitamin C (less than that in a typical orange) in the form of sodium ascorbate and ascorbic acid. These are widely included in food products, without fanfare, as a preservative. It’s water soluble, with a short biological halflife. Its LD50 (median lethal dose — the dose tested to kill half the test population) has been measured in rats as 11.9 grams per kilogram of body weight. We don’t know what it is for humans, but if it’s comparable to that for rats, then for median weight 9-year-old girls of about 30 kg, that’d be 357g, or the amount of Vitamin C in 5950 cough drops.
This kind of zero-tolerance, what lesson will it teach this girl? a) dealing drugs is bad, or b) that her teacher and principal are idiots?
In 2000, a Zapotec woman performed a C-section on herself.
EDAR stands for Everyone Deserves a Roof. It’s a cart that unfolds into a cot covered with a tent, giving homeless people a step up from sleeping in a cardboard box or on the ground.
But it’s not without its critics.
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Irvine School of Law, said police fear the units could constitute dwellings where inhabitants would have a reasonable expectation of privacy. In that scenario, police would need warrants to search EDARs
Oh noes! One minute they have some semblance of shelter; next minute they might start imagining they have some semblance of civil rights, too!
Merill Lynch's CEO reportedly suggested a $10 million bonus for himself.
Thain has said he deserves a bonus because he helped avert what could have been a much larger crisis at the firm, people familiar with his thinking told the WSJ.
"I deserve a huge bonus, because I could have done a much worse job."
(Subsequent to this report and the ensuing outcry, he announced he wouldn't take a bonus. It pays to be prompt with your snark.)
When Charles Schulz integrated the schools in Peanuts, it was a sufficiently radical move that he had to take a stand.
Another editor protested once when Franklin was sitting in the same row of school desks with Peppermint Patty, and said, "We have enough trouble here in the South without you showing the kids together in school." But I never paid any attention to those things, and I remember telling Larry at the time about Franklin—he wanted me to change it, and we talked about it for a long while on the phone, and I finally sighed and said, "Well, Larry, let’s put it this way: Either you print it just the way I draw it or I quit. How’s that?" So that’s the way that ended.
And the folks at Morgan Stanley? They’re planning to pay themselves $10.7 billion this year, much of it in bonuses — almost exactly the amount they are receiving in the first phase of the bailout. “You can imagine the devilish grins on the faces of Morgan Stanley employees,” writes Bloomberg columnist Jonathan Weil. “Not only did we, the taxpayers, save their company…we funded their 2008 bonus pool.”
I must say I find myself disappointed by this uncharacteristically naked theft by the kleptocracy. It just smacks of… unprofessionalism.
=v= I mentioned Joe Sixpack (and his, um, close friend Joe the Plumber) in my last entry. Sarah Palin suggested that hucky moms should hook up with Mr. Sixpack and tell those subprime lenders they won't get fooled again. Which, I'm sure, is exactly what Pete Townshend had in mind.
All this reminds me of the Bailey/Burns gubernatorial race of 1992, when name + occupational monikers were used as terms of derision. In those days things didn't get leaked onto YouTube -- but these days you can find old footage (though not on YouTube) of this derisive on-air gaffe:
By the time this paid political announcement is done, every Johnny Lunchpail in this whole stupid state will be eating out of my hands.
Team Burns referred to Joe Sixpack by name in their first strategy meeting, and Burns was heard muttering similar non-endearments: Joe Meatball, Sally Housecoat, and Eddie Punchclock. This sort of thing, arguably, cost Burns the election. Yet John McCain and Sarah Palin are somehow laboring under illusion that this will make them seem more in touch Joe/Jane the Common Voter.
I must say I’ve been an exceptional blogger, of late. Meaning, of course, that it’s very much been the exception that I post anything.
This guy loves apostrophes almost as much as he loves Jesus
Brits hate queue jumpers.
Regarding the nutcases planning to mass-murder black people and then assassinate Obama, one MeFite notes:
how is it that most people concerned about maintaining the purity and superiority of the “White Race” also happen to be the fugliest troglodytes out there?
Man, if that’s racial purity, water that #$@ down (I’m not volunteering to help, though).
The etymology of short shrift:
The English phrase “short shrift,” meaning the indifferent brushing aside of someone’s concerns, originally signified an abrupt, hasty confession, usually before death. “To shrive” meant to confess one’s sins, perform penance, and ask for absolution. This is the sense of the phrase as found in Shakespeare’s Richard III (the first recorded use in English): Richard Ratcliffe says to Hastings, “Make a short shrift; he longs to see your head.” In other words, make it snappy, because you’re about to meet your maker.
=v= Apparently Joe the Plumber, the star of last night's Presidential debate, isn't actually licensed to plumb. Also, his first name is Samuel, not Joe. (His last name is Wurzelbacher, which may well be German for Roto-Rooter.)
I fear that in the next news cycle we'll discover that Joe Sixpack is actually a teetotaler named Irving.
Here’s another quote that isn’t — “When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross,” attributed to Sinclair Lewis.
An thorough history of the evolution of the phrase and its attribution traces the original to Professor Halford E. Luccock of Yale Divinity School, quoted in a September 12, 1938 New York Times article.
When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled “made in Germany”; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, “Americanism.”
Speaking of John Kessel, a fun throw-away line in his first novel, Good News from Outer Space was:
Dadaist punks had broken into his car and installed an expensive stereo.
Meanwhile, in Rockridge (a neighborhood in north Oakland):
Is it a twisted Rockridge Robin Hood, a bizarre new brand of treasure hunt, or slightly meshuga malfeasance? One resident reported to her neighborhood-group on August 11 that whoever had rifled through her husband’s car the night before “took some $1.50 in loose parking change, and they made an exchange — they took his flashlight, and they left a different flashlight. The flashlight they left is smaller, but is waterproof, so we may even be ahead on the swap.” A neighbor responds that her car too was rifled through, and oddly enough “they took a small flashlight from the glove compartment and left us a bigger, maybe better, one. They also left us a very nice 7-disc CD set: How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, 3rd Edition. We certainly have a lot more we could learn about classical music, and the course looks interesting.”
For the record, I wouldn’t mind finding the odd Teaching Company course in my car.
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