Protesting Proverbs

You know that proverb: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Is it though? When was the last hellish thing that started with good intentions? Sure, we can all come up with examples of trying to do something good and it went wrong. But the saying isn't, "The road to mild unpleasantness is paved with good intentions." — that's a statement I could get behind. No, it's the road to hell, where you're headed straight to Satan but you couldn't afford the same toll as AC/DC. How often do truly hellish things happen because of good intentions? There's a few, but probably not enough to act as a practical paving surface. 

The other problem with the saying is that it doesn't consider that the road to heaven is probably paved even more completely with good intentions. You know, not often that heavenly things begin with bad intentions. Okay, continuing the metaphor of second-rate versions of religious rock allegories, it would be the ladder to heaven because you couldn't find the stairway. See, even if good intentions sometimes result in a little satanic asphalt, it's far more likely to actually do some good.

Really, this saying just exists as an excuse to be an asshole. You know, i'd like to help, but this saying tells me that it would only result in our eternal damnation. Sorry, my hands are tied.

And good thing your hands are tied, because Idle Hands are the Devil's Plaything. Or the Devil’s Playground, though that sounds more like a documentary on pre-safety-code city parks. Either way, it’s another convenient-religious-excuse saying. First, have you seen idle hands? The fidgeting is annoying, but if that's what the devil is working on these days, then humanity has nothing to worry about. Secondly, if you have to keep your hands occupied to keep from doing evil, you're either in a really low-rent horror movie, or you're not that good to begin with. In that case I'd rather you stay idle. Just get yourself a nice fidget spinner.

Hey, You, Get On To My Cloud

I’ve noticed a problem creeping into technology: So often, we don’t know what to call things. It used to be simple: WordPerfect was a “program” or “application.” MySpace was a “website.” Angry Birds was an “app.”

But now those are blurred together. Facebook is a website that is a social network. But many people access it on an app. Instagram caught people’s attention as a photography app, but it also allows people to access a social network. And you can access that social network through a website.

Yes, I know, this isn’t exactly rocket science. But it starts to break down whenever you’re talking to people who don’t have the best knowledge of technology. People want to try to classify a thing, and that’s difficult when so much of today’s technology is really an abstract service that is available in a number of ways.

In their effort to try to understand things, a person with little acquaintance with technology will often hang on to a particular classification. Say, they first encountered Facebook on the web, so in their minds it is, and will always be, a web site. But they first use Twitter as an app, so it will always be an app. So this person thinks of these two things as apples and oranges, even though they do essentially the same thing. And this sometimes leads to people trying to make bizarre arguments, like that Facebook is less popular than Instagram because people prefer apps to websites.

That’s why the “cloud” analogy — annoying though it may be — is quite useful. The cloud concept may be poorly understood by much of the mainstream population, but in today’s world that may be helpful. A vaguely-defined amorphous concept is pretty useful for defining services that may manifest themselves in our lives in multiple ways.

Chuck Berry

You’ve probably heard that tomatoes are technically fruits. Perhaps you’ve also heard the saying that knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit, but wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad. And that brings up an important point: there’s a limitation to these technical classifications.

It gets much worse the more you look at these terms. Technically, a berry is “a fleshy fruit produced from a single ovary.” Yes, plants have ovaries, try not to think about that right now, there are bigger things to worry about. So the following are not berries:
Strawberries, raspberries, blackberries

...but the following are:
Oranges, tomatoes, bananas, eggplants, grapes, kiwis, avocados, pumpkins, watermelons

Vegetables are plants, and so are herbs. The only difference is that herbs are just to taste, rather than a main ingredient. But basil is usually a herb, but pesto isn’t pesto without basil, so does that make it a vegetable. Or a part-time vegetable?

This is turning into one of those pedantic, meaningless, non-trivia pieces of trivial information like the names of groups of animals. I (and others) argued that if no one uses the term, then the term doesn’t really have meaning.

I’m not one of those people who insists that scientific classifications have to conform to popular ideas. (Sorry Pluto, I’m with Neil Degrase Tyson on this one.) And it’s fine when we try to put some scientific rigour behind common definitions, only to find that there are exceptions we didn’t previously think of. I will still correct you if you try to call whales or dolphins, “fish.”

But if the scientific definition turns out to have nothing at all to do with the popular definition, then it’s time to admit that we need new words. How about we define "berry" as, "sort of fruit-like, but smaller." And then the scientific concept that they're calling "berry" — even though it isn't — can be something else; I don't know, name it after a great berry scientist or something.

Nevermore

I recently saw a trivia question asking what a group of ravens is called. You may already know that a group of crows is a "murder," which is one of the most famous of the oddball animal group names. But I hadn't heard of a group of ravens before, so I had to look it up. It turns out that a group of ravens is an "unkindness," or a "conspiracy." That's certainly better than my deduction that it's a "manslaughter" of ravens.

What's interesting is that my Google search also turned up this article from the Audubon Society, arguing that it is, in fact, a "group" of crows, ravens, and whatever, since that's what people actually call them. As a birder, he's never used or heard any of the obscure group names, so you can't really say that a group of ravens is called an unkindness, since people in real life call it "a group of ravens." At most, you're just saying that people centuries ago called it by the obscure word. He goes further and asks experts on various animals if they've ever used or heard the group names, and not one had.

Most interestingly, the wombat expert pointed out that wombats don't get into groups, thus begging the question of how anyone devised that they should be a "wisdom" of wombats. I would further point out that although these group names come from the middle ages, no English-speaker set eyes on a wombat until centuries later. So someone out there is just arbitrarily coming up with more of these names, and now has slipped up by including animals that don't group together.

But back to the original idea that these names aren't real. I hadn't really thought about it before, but he's got a point. I mean, here I am, a trivia fan, and yet I've never found the groups of animals interesting, or made much headway in remembering them. I guess that's why; trivia isn't just random info, it has to have at least some importance to be interesting, say, by linking to some other facts. I can remember that the Baltimore Ravens football club is named after the poem because it was written by local boy Edgar Allan Poe. But I'm never going to remember an unkindness of Ravens, even after writing this blog entry about it.

On a similar note, can we lay off the phobia name trivia? I hate it when people ask, "What is 'flentaphobia' a fear of?" I think what you mean is, theoretically, what would it be a fear of if it actually existed. Yes, that's what it theoretically would be called, but just because you can put some Latin roots together, doesn't mean it's an actual thing. I could just say that I have inaniaephobia, the fear of inanity.

Voices Carry

I was just reading a transcript of a speech by President Obama, and realized I was reading it in his voice.  I'm sure in not the only person who does this, especially for people with distinctive voices.  I first became conscious of the phenomena when I read something written by Stephen Hawking, and just couldn't get through it without hearing it in his computer synthesized voice.

In some cases, reading in another's voice is inevitable, if they have a distinctive way of putting words together. It's easier to read Donald Trump's words in his voice, because that's the way we're used to hearing those meandering parades of sentence fragments.

Surprisingly,  I don't often read tweets in other's voices,  though that's because of the strange fact that I have heard little if any spoken words from the folks I follow.  So many of them are people I've found on twitter or elsewhere on the Internet.  The one exception is sportscaster Vic Rauter who tweets in the same spurts of phrases that he talks in, so I find it impossible to read them any other way.

I've tried to think back to remember if I did this reading quotes in the past, but I don't think I did.  But it occurs to me that we didn't really read the words of others very often.  Books and newspaper articles were written by people we'd never heard the voices of. Famous people spoke on TV,  but we didn't really have the chance to read anything they wrote. The most was perhaps reading a quote,  say in a newspaper. But they were often edited for grammar, and weren't very long.  Actually reading things written by famous people is a unique feature of our age.

Any Portmanteau In A Storm

You know what's really depressing?  The word "edutainment" doesn't even sound weird to me anymore. How did that happen?  Is it a symptom of our modern world that we're making up more words now?  Or am I just old enough that I've finally experienced the complete creation of words from coining to acceptance.

It's not just that: I'm totally accepting when the weather forecast calls for "tornadic" activity. Tornadoes have been around for a while, surely we haven't just started to need that word. L. Frank Baum didn't need to describe Dorothy being taken to Oz by tornatic activity. Okay, it could be that global warming is shifting climate systems to the point that we need new words to talk about them.  After all, we should really come up with a name for one of those storms that dumps snow up the U.S. Eastern Seaboard while missing most of Canada. How about an "ironicane?"

And then there's this Winterish we've been experiencing in Southern Ontario.  We experienced a frigiweek (one week of genuine winter) but since then it's been subjectemps (temperatures that seem really warm, even though we'd find them frightfully cold if we experienced them in the fall.)

I Definitely Mean This

I'm really getting tried of the phrase, "_____ like you mean it."  It's no surprise for KFC to tell me to "Eat like you mean it." But when the CBC is telling me to "Holiday like you mean it," you know it's gone too far. Yes, it's an unfortunate aspect of pop culture that reckless aggressive entities get to use the memes when they're still cool, but the awkward ones that have trouble expressing themselves end up using them later, oblivious they've gone stale, and end up sounding like a dad trying to be cool.

But why is like-you-mean-it so annoying? Well, it's always frustrating when advertisers want us to believe that their product is the best way to express ourselves, like it's somehow a purer expression of our true spirit than everything else in this numbingly artificial world. One made numbingly artificial by all the mass produced products we're constantly being sold.

But in this case, we have an added dose of macho competitiveness. We're not just accusing you of living half-heartedly, we're making it sound like you're a wimp for not putting some effort into your life. Have some self-respect you wuss, and watch Frosty the Snowman.

So I am giving "_____ like you mean it" the "______ is the new black" award for phrases that have outstayed their welcome. Thus, I can now say, "Like you mean it is the new black." This causing the saying to disappear into the linguistic vortex in an implosion of cliche.

Blog, Dictionary, Person Speaking

You've probably seen how the Oxford Dictionaries named the "tears of joy" emoji as the "word" of the year. Of course, these dictionary word-of-the-year pronouncements are thinly-veiled attempts to get free publicity. But this year, that veil is thinner than ever. I suppose you can make the case that this symbol is being used for communication, so it is sort of like a word. But I have the feeling that this is the thin edge of the wedge, and a few years from now the word of the year will be the taste of cilantro.

BTW, this tablet's keyboard seems to be having a great deal of difficulty recognizing the word "dictionary." I think it could be jealous.

But who knows, maybe this is the beginning of emojis being accepted as words. I've seen the idea in science fiction that people in the future will only be able to "read" a set of universal symbols, like that you'd see in a multilingual instruction or warning label. Given that we've already standardized symbols for "pause" or "on/off" I wonder just how sophisticated symbols will become after a few decades of globalized technology.

Or, here's another way of blowing this out of proportion: perhaps this will lead to us creating a written language where each word gets its own symbol, like in Chinese. Centuries from now, the word "joy" might be written as a circle with teardrop shapes on either side of it.

!!!

It's National Punctuation Day!  Can you believe that‽ 

My apologies if the punctuation at the end of that last sentence didn't come through: it's an interrobang: a combination of the exclamation mark and the question mark that can be used to express incredulity. Sure, you could just type both an exclamation mark and a question mark, but who has time for that⸮  

And that sentence had an irony mark at the end.  It was proposed in the 16th century, though I've seen many people suggest that we need irony punctuation now in the internet era when irony is often misunderstood.

⁂

These and other obscure punctuation marks are described at Mental Floss magazine.

⁂

There are a couple of punctuation-related notions I'd like to mention. One is the question of how many spaces are after the period. I was always told to add two  spaces, but many people consider this to be a crime against humanity.  I don't have strong feelings either way, and I am pretty inconsistent about it.  So if you are offended by it, I'm sorry.  But you should really blame my Grade 9 typing teacher.

⁂

The other is to point out just how often punctuation in computer text goes wrong in today's world.  Just today I saw an item on the BBC World news scroll about the Pope’s trip to America. 

The typo is frustrating because, for one thing, I know what's going wrong.  As I mentioned recently, text files are just numbers representing letters (and punctuation marks.)  Unfortunately, there's more than one standard code for representing letters, and things go wrong when a program is expecting one way of representing characters, and it gets a different way.  Here's a page that explains it in more depth.

But it's doubly frustrating because no one seems to care.  The news scroll went by several times with the error, and I've seen similar problems several times before.  Newspapers puke meaningless characters all the time, reminding us just how few proofreaders they can afford.  You know, the ampersand (&) is a deformation of the handwritten Latin word et. Perhaps centuries from now, their apostrophe will be based on the ’ characters. 

Who knows what Victor Borge would do with that.

Hack Writer

It was only a few years ago that I was seeing people in the computer biz lamenting the loss of the word "hack" (and "hacking," "hacker," etc.)  Originally, a hacker was a person who used a computer a lot.  That is, a programmer was a type of hacker.

But all that changed when the media needed to talk about people who use computers maliciously.  They seized on the word "hacker" to describe these people. And this was at a time when the word was still only vaguely understood by the general public.  So the word that had been semi-affectionate term for people with a common interest became a scary and slanderous word only a few steps up from "terrorist."  Some computer fans tried to rescue "hacker" by promoting the made-up word "cracker" as a replacement for people who break in to systems.  That never got far.

But in the past few years, the positive connotations of hacking have made a comeback.  Websites like Lifehacker have promoted the word as a more general term for clever, non-standard action.  I'm seeing this new (old) use of "hack" in more and more places, so it's safe to say the public has bought in to the idea that hacking can mean positive things.

Out Of Time

Today I was checking the Best-Before date on my honey mustard, and it said, "BB/MA 2015 JN 17". So I thought, May 2015, that's this month, so it should be fine. But wait, June 17? Which is it? It seems to be saying, " Best Before May 2015 June 17. That doesn't make any sense.

But then it hit me: the "MA" isn't short for "May," it means "Meilleur Avant," French for, "Best Before." Hence the slash between BB and MA.

That's great, but now I'm paranoid about how many times I've misinterpreted these dates in the past. I know I checked the expiry on something recently and it was close but still okay. Maybe it actually said Meilleur Avant Novembre.

Shouldn't this be one of those things every Canadian must know? I can ask where the bathroom is in both official languages, but this seems more important. We need public service announcements about this. I'm sure the government would agree to it because they can phrase it as one of their pseudo campaign ads: "Your taxes are protecting you from expired bilingual mayonnaise."

Syntaxality!

I've seen an ad for the new Mortal Kombat game in which it says the game is "available digitally and in stores." We sometimes talk about digital downloads of movies, so it took second to remember that we're talking about a video game here. And that's when it hit me: available digitally and in stores. Does that mean that if I buy it in stores, I get an analog version?

Apparently they have decided that because the word "digitally" is applied to downloads, so the word will now be used to mean "downloaded with no physical copy." This, even though all copies of the game are, like all software today, digital.

It's sort of like how we in Canada refer to the electricity supply as "hydro" because we started with the term “hydroelectric” and generalized the wrong part of the word. Or it’s like “film” in reference to a feature-length movie. The word “film” originally meant the celluloid the movie was recorded on, but it is now used to refer to movies that go from studio to audience without using any film or tape.

In contrast, sound recorded on grooved vinyl was called a “record” because it was a recording. Yet somehow, we came to think of “record” as meaning the physical thing itself, so no one would call a collection of audio computer files as a “record,” even though it’s still a recording. I don’t know how society decides on these things. Why is this thing I’m writing called a “blog” and not a “glorified diary shoved in the public’s face”?

It's All Hindi To Me

Sometimes learning requires effort.  Of course, that's how our schooling works.  But as adults, we realize that some learning works best without pressure.  It's better to allow learning to be more organic.  For instance, they say the best way to learn a language is not to take lessons, but to go to a place where the language is spoken, and immersing yourself in it.  Of course, that requires a fair amount of effort, but the point is that you're not being "taught" the language; instead you're absorbing it from around you.

So I've always wondered how long it would take to learn a language spoken around you if you weren't really trying.  It's not quite the same thing, but at the University of Waterloo, you overhear conversations in other languages frequently throughout the day.  I was disappointed that I didn't subconsciously pick up any knowledge.  I'd like to think that if humanity conquers all disease and greatly extends lifespans, that accidental learning will just be a part of life.  You'll be in your second century of university, picking up degree number fifty, when you suddenly realize you can speak Mandarin.

I'm trying this on much smaller scale, by watching coverage of the Cricket World Cup.  I'm hoping that just casual viewing will permit me to eventually understand what is going on.  I'm not totally clueless on the sport; I understand the basic concepts.  But I'd like to understand something of the strategy, not to mention understanding the stats.  Most sports have, you know, a score.  But with one team batting at a time, they rarely give you any idea how the teams are doing.  I'm pretty sure this "run rate" thing can be used figure that out.  But I still don't know what is high or low in that field.  It would be nice if the commentators would throw us a bone now and then.  You know, "blah blah blah blah blah... and that's good."

Red China, Blue Planet

I was surprised to hear a TV commercial bragging of "Red China's Best Country Radio."  I didn't know country was big in China.  And I don't know why you'd be advertising it here.  Or in English.  But I quickly realized that it was actually "Regina's Best Country Radio."  See, I was watching one of the Sportsnet channels, and when they're all showing the same thing, I don't bother tuning in to the one intended for Ontario.  So I often end up watching refreshing new ads for local products and services in places far from here.

I'd never really noticed that similarity in pronunciation before.  Probably because Regina has another, far more famous similarity to an English word.  So I'm wondering: do people from Regina purposely pronounce their city name so that it won't be mistaken for "vagina?"  I'm thinking that different cadence was what made me think it was "Red China."

Hopefully we can learn from Reginans (Reginians?  Reginites?) and avoid other embarrassing puns and misunderstandings.  For instance, whenever I have to mention the name of the seventh planet, I try to put the emphasis on the first syllable (UR-in-us) to avoid that stale juvenile pun.  But it's not really catching on.  Maybe we'll have to wait until people live there, and they can change the pronunciation out of embarrassment.

My Word

It's that time of year again.  Time for dictionaries to get free publicity by declaring a word of the year, or a selection of words that will be added to their books.  I was going to rant about these choices, but it seems I've done that before.  More than once.  But the fact is, sometimes these words aren't really deserving of their accolades; I'm still waiting to hear anyone use the word "infosnacking" after it was declared 2005 word of the year by Webster's New World College Dictionary.

So I have a proposition.  This is for any dictionaries or linguistic societies out there that have put off finding a word of the year for 2014, and are now scrambling to find a new word they can use to get those cheap mentions from the world's news providers. A few weeks ago, I used the word "Googlespace" to describe the proportion of relevant results a word or phrase gets.  For instance, if I Google "jaguar", most of the results are for the car company, rather than the cat or the football team.  So the company occupies more "Googlespace" than the other uses of the word.
You'll note that I used the word without explanation, as though I'm assuming that my hip, fashionable readers on the bleeding-edge of technology would already know what it means, so you can reasonably claim that the word is already used and about to hit the mainstream.

I assure you that my royalty demands will be reasonable.  But if you don't want to use my word, you can always make up a word for a manufactured news item used to get free publicity.

(Dis)Unity

I've been experimenting with the Unity game engine. It's pretty impressive, but there's a problem, and that is the name. Any programming tool you use is going to occasionally leave you with questions, so googling for answers is a constant activity for the modern programmer. That's fine if you're working with software that has a unique name. If you consult Google on "jmonkey file opening procedure" there's nothing else you could be looking for.

But "unity" is a pretty common word. And worse, it's used on another piece of software: the controversial user interface for Ubuntu Linux. So if I Google "unity tutorial" I could get an introduction to either one.

And now it's just getting worse: the latest game in the Assassin's Creed series is coming out soon, and it has the subtitle "Unity". So now we'll have three different pieces of software competing for Googlespace.

Worse still is that I'm working with a programming language called, "Boo". There are lots of languages that are named after an English word, but languages like Java and Python have more web pages dedicated to them (at least in English) than the other things they share their names with. So you can Google "python guide" knowing that you won't get an introduction to snake grooming. But Boo is a fairly new, and not widely used yet, so there aren't many web pages about it yet. So if you Google "boo guide" you'll probably find a bunch of episode guides to Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.

So I've tried to make my search terms as specific as possible. For instance, it helps to use "boo language" instead of just "boo". Although that doesn't always work either, as it may just lead to pages offering to translate the language spoken by Honey Boo Boo and family.

Oh, Capitaine Crouche!

Today I heard a DJ say that French music always sounds sexy.  That surprised me.  A few francophone musicians have made headway in English Canada, and it's always seemed to me that they don't fit any linguistic stereotypes, and are no sexier than your average anglophone indie musicians.

But I've always thought that the inherent sensuality of the French language was a pretty silly concept. For one thing, I thought that in today's more open world, we're surely more sophisticated about the vast amounts and variations of things people find arousing. "French is sexy" seems like rather childish once you've seen the full extent of Rule 34.

But there's also the worldliness of today's society. French people aren't just a caricature; they're actual people we can learn a lot about. They aren't always sexy.  The whole world has watched the people of France blocking highways with tractors to protest government cuts, patronizing Eurodisney, or voting for racists. Really they're just as unsexy as the rest of us. And after their apoplectic anti-gay-marriage protests in recent years, surely they've dropped right off the list of sexiest countries. For any thinking person Germany, with their rough language but permissive attitudes, has actually become sexier.

But what really surprised me about this is that it's coming here in Canada. Usually, we're free of other countries' French stereotypes because French is so ordinary for us. You can't get romantic every time you happen to see the other side of the cereal box.

What Else Do You Speak?

Recently there was a map making the rounds of the Internet showing the most popular second and third languages in each state in the U.S.  Spanish is usually second, but a variety of languages are the third most popular language in a state.  Who would have though German is so popular in so much of the country?

Of course, I wanted to do a Canadian version.  Here are the most popular mother-tongues in each province, other than English and French, based on census data from 2011:

• The asterisk indicates languages that also beat one of the official languages.
• Inuktitut is first overall in Nunavut.
• Yes, I know "Chinese" is a family of languages, but not everyone specifies which variation on the census
• Cree is barely behind German in Saskatchewan, and they both beat French.

Across all of Canada, Chinese is third.  The numbers are: English, 18,858,975; French, 7,054,970; Chinese 1,072,555.  After that, Punjabi, Spanish, German and Italian all have numbers in the low 400,000s.

Mediterranean Blues

There's a Spanish island in the Mediterranean called Ibiza.  I always thought it was pronounced "ib-ee-tha." But now that there's a contest to win a trip there, the ads keep pronouncing it as it's spelled, "ib-ee-za."  At first, I thought it was just local talking heads who didn't know any better.  But now even better-produced ads are pronouncing it the later way too.

So I did what I always do when confused: I consulted Wikipedia.  It says that the "th" pronunciation is "British English" (and close to the actual Spanish) while the "z" pronunciation is "American English," which in turn makes it the "zee" pronunciation.  Ibiza is known for its Electronic Music scene, so I had heard of it through association with British people, and had thus adopted their pronunciation.  But most people just say it the way it's written, and those people seem to be taking over.

I bring this up because:

• Apparently the Ibiza scene is over.  DJs, it's time to move on to Majorca.
• I never realized the irony here.  English speakers are often unaware of how rare the "th" sound is among the world's languages, and are only dimly aware of how much trouble it causes people around the world that we put it in several of our most frequently used words.  That's why people speaking English as a second language often turn it into a "z" sound.  But in Ibiza, we English speakers are turning a "th" into a "z."

Bossyrants

There's a movement afoot among many women to ban the word "bossy." The reasoning is that the word only gets used to describe women, and primarily for behaviour that would hardly be noticed coming from men. Women have long complained of subtle double-standards in how we perceive behaviour.

I can understand where they're coming from. We shouldn't have double standards, in language or elsewhere. But there's one aspect of this that I don't think they've considered: they've assumed that because the behaviour is acceptable in men, that it should be acceptable in women. But couldn't it also be the other way around: behaviour unacceptable from women shouldn't be acceptable from men? Perhaps no one should act in a way that could be considered bossy.

So I propose that instead of banning the word "bossy," let's expand its use to include men. That co-worker who tells you how to do your job? Call him bossy. The politician who tries to micromanage the entire government? Write a letter to the editor calling him bossy. The coach who bad-mouths one of his players in the press? Phone in to sports radio and call him bossy.