the shrewdness of apes

lying in bed this morning staring at the map on the wall, i realized that Bahamas spelled backwards is Sam Ahab. after trying in vain to make a connection to Moby-Dick (is Samuel somehow the equivalent of Ishamel?), i decided to just type "Sam Ahab" into Google. as it turns out, the most prominent use of the name was in a deleted scene from the Beatles' movie Help!. filmed in the Bahamas, the scene has the boys hiding out at the "Sam Ahab School of Acting". i don't know what the significance of this is other than that someone working on that film had the same realization that I did and actually had a reason to use it. but as i've never seen the movie, maybe this is just a roundabout way of telling me i should put it in my Netflix queue.

Posted by Jamie at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

for the 2007 Name of the Year ballot. a full 64-name bracket chock full of the whimsical, the strange and the downright ridiculous. votes are due by March 31, so there's still plenty of time to pick your (Joe) Favorito.

Posted by Jamie at 01:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

a couple weeks ago, in an entry about the names of college basketball recruits, i was introduced to the Name of the Year site, and it's pretty fantastic. first of all it was started by a couple of guys in college, probably while drunk or otherwise altered. then they had the vision to keep it going, more or less, every year since, to the point where there are now about 20 Names of the Year that have been handed out.

we've all come across funny and/or ridiculous names, whether through sports, news, or anecdote. i remember Listmaker talking about some of the students in his mom's classes in her suburban Maryland school who had names like Fashion Dynasty, and a friend of South Asian descent who talked about family friends named Dikshit and who worked at a children's hospital in inner city Philly who came across kids named Scharles and such (i don't know why the extra S makes it so amusing, but it does). that said, the Names of the Year really are something special: Doby Crotchtangle, Excellent Raymond, Honka Monka, Jerome Fruithandler. i mean, wow. a few of the names have turned out to be fake, but for the most part, they're for real. there's even a "Hall of Name" and you can check out the full ballot for 2006 or make a submission for the 2007 ballot (coming in March). the whole thing reminds me of that Nicolas Cage skit on SNL where his character is named "Asswipe Johnson".

my favorite of all the names on the site is Tanqueray Beavers, the 2005 winner, because of the perfect combination of alcohol and juvenile sexual sniggering. and i couldn't resist Googling the name to make sure that s/he actually existed. as i found out, the past tense is accurate because "Tank" Beavers was tragically gunned down in Huntsville, Alabama back in December. that's kind of a buzzkill when you're simply looking for a laugh, but it makes you wonder how much of an effect a name has on a person. i mean, Tanqueray Beavers was never going to be the CEO of GM or anything, right? then again, there's the story of Winner and Loser Lane made famous in Freakonomics, so who really knows?

Posted by Jamie at 10:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

as another round of flakes trains its crosshairs on the eastern seaboard, the Mad Snow Scramble [tm] is already underway, leading me to a couple of questions:

why are we constantly being told that things are "more important than ever"? on the Weather Channel the other night, some woman intoned that preparing for winter storms (or possibly "Winter Storm Events" - see below) was more important than ever without producing any information to verify said claim. couldn't the case be made that it's actually less important in these days of thermostats, snow tires, insulation, and early alerts? with all the bluster produced by well-coifed and smooth-voiced anchorpeople on television and radio days ahead of any potential storm threat (they have to have time to come up with a catchy name for it after all - you think they can produce "The Blizzard of '96" or "Ice Storm '02" in just an hour or two?) only the truly hermitic are left unknowing of the need to rush to the closest store for milk, bread and toilet paper.

it's amazing to me to see - on TV or in person - the people flocking to the stores, stepping over each other, and waiting in Soviet-length lines to stock up on "the basics". certainly several million people aren't all getting caught with only some moldy Wonder bread in the pantry and a half-roll of Cottonelle on the dispenser. only a select few hard-core bachelor types would be caught without enough sustenance to get them through 72 hours and unless you're running a prison, why would the milk, bread, TP triumvirate be the top things on your shopping list? if you're going to be stuck in the house for a couple of days, live it up a little bit or spin the Big Wheel O' Chance with whatever is on hand. 20 years from now are you going to remember the storm when you made french toast and stayed regular or the one when you ate that questionable leftover casserole washed down with a pint of vermouth and hallucinated that you were a member of the Donner Party circa winter 1847?

to flog a different linguistic horse for a minute, why do the networks feel the need to advertise programs as being "a television event" (i know you can hear the voiceover in your head as you're reading that)? does "event" have some connotation beyond merely "something that happens" if it's read by a guy with a deep, vaguely menacing voice? is it related to the way hippies used to refer to things as a "happening"? what it seems to amount to is an attempt by the networks or whomever to hijack the process by which things are labeled as important, leaving us with a never-ending series of "Nissan Event Clearances", "Made-for TV Events" and "Year-end Sales Events". perhaps someone has done some market research that proves that people respond Pavlovianly to the intonation of the word, though i would have to speculate that anyone actually buying into it is also the type who responds to spam for university diplomas and considers H2s to be sensible purchases.

Reagan getting shot was an Event. OJ on the freeway was an Event. the Super Bowl is a captial "e" Event because it has ascended to the level of a virtual holiday with its own traditions and rituals and we know it will be the highest rated program of the entire year. however, a mid-season episode of "Alias" or "24" can not be conferred with event status except by popular opinion, i don’t care who the guest star is or which main character will be held at gunpoint for 45 minutes only to escape in time for next week’s installment.

Posted by Jamie at 01:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

(apologies to Richard Thompson)

in light of recent world events, i began wondering why anyone uses the term "tidal wave" when it has nothing at all to do with tides? normal waves are tidal waves, but large destructive waves are something else entirely. even my dictionary calls "tidal wave" a non-technical term for a tsunami "not actually related to the tides". fortunately, the internet knows all:

Sometime in the 1800s (see 1878 quote), ‘tidal wave’ became confused with what now might properly be called a ‘seismic sea wave’ or ‘tsunami’ (Japanese, from ‘tsu,’ port, harbor + ‘nami’ wave, first appearing in English print in 1897). The original misuse of ‘tidal wave’ was probably a result of the fact that there was no proper generally recognized word for the phenomenon at the time and it, more or less, filled the void.

recently the Discovery Channel seriously amped up its tsunami-related program schedule. one of the most interesting things i saw was a feature about the largest tsunami ever recorded - a 1958 wave in Lituya Bay, Alaska caused by a landslide that reached a height of 1,700 feet at it's most massive.

Posted by Jamie at 03:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

any football fan with a rudimentary understanding of the English language would often be a bit flummoxed by the grammatical gymnastics and gyrations flooding the airwaves on autumn Saturdays and Sundays. but one word in particular has been boiling my blood - "unanswered". used as an adjective, a typical example would be "and the Altoona Miners have run up 23 unanswered points on the Reading Riveters to takea 23-21 lead". except that very often, the announcers use this word, even though the points have been "answered" and they should instead be using the word "consecutive". take yesterday's Bears-Giants game for example. the Giants led 14-0, but the Bears charged back to a 28-14 advantage. when the Giants then scored again later, i heard "the Bears scored 28 unanswered points, but now the Giants have scored to get back within 7". that score was the answer. unanswered points can only occur if they are consecutive and if they are the final points of the game (or the most recent points scored at the time the statement is made). any other usage is incorrect and highly annoying. thank you, i feel better.

*UPDATE* - check out this CSTB post for the correct application of the word.

Posted by Jamie at 02:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

having never come across this particular mangling of phrase before, today i see it twice. both the transcript of Jon Stewart's appearance on the O'Reilly factor and Eric Neel's Page 2 All-Star team use the phrase "je ne sai qua". unfortunately, running it through a translator does not produce anything humorous, so i'll just have to settle for marveling at the coincidence.

Posted by Jamie at 04:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

picking up a bit of a thread from Whiksey Drinker, some choice lines from a very long 1993 interview with David Foster Wallace:

"Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?"

"…the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you’re in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party…. For a while it’s great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown…. but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it’s 3:00 a.m. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody’s thrown up in the umbrella stand and we’re wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders’ patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We’re kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we’re uneasy about the fact that we wish they’d come back…. Is there something about authorities and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually realizing that parents in fact aren’t ever coming back — which means we’re going to have to be the parents."

Posted by Jamie at 04:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

part linguistic study, part statistical enterprise, WordCount is an interesting project that ranks 86800 words in the english language, from the most used to the least. not surprisingly, "the" takes the top spot, while "conquistador" comes in at 86800. there are lots of proper names and places in there as well, so you can find, for instance that "jamie" sits at 7133, while "crispin" lags behind at 28840 (still higher than i would have expected!). wife is 566, while husband is 899 and sits in a string that reads "numbers claim specific rose played husband basic relations potential dr". i don't know what that means, but for someone with my statistical inclinations, this thing is a gold mine of time-killing fun.

link via the morning news

Posted by Jamie at 02:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

baseball announcers had me seething over the weekend with their misuse of the english language ("see how quick he gets rid of the ball here..."), so i figured it was time to uncover the answer to a question Dan and i had been having trouble with:

4. FURTHER vs. FARTHER

Use farther when referring to distance. Use further to indicate a continuation or extension in terms of time, degree, or anything else other than distance.

of course this couldn't be that easy. Merriam-Webster disagrees:

Farther and further have been used more or less interchangeably throughout most of their history, but currently they are showing signs of diverging. As adverbs they continue to be used interchangeably whenever spatial, temporal, or metaphorical distance is involved. But where there is no notion of distance, further is used . Further is also used as a sentence modifier , but farther is not. A polarizing process appears to be taking place in their adjective use. Farther is taking over the meaning of distance and further the meaning of addition .

basically, as long as you're not using "further" to describe distance, you're fine.

Posted by Jamie at 04:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

while perusing some information on Occam's Razor, i came across a not dissimilar companion called Hanlon's Razor, which states:

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

then the beauty of the internet kicked in and within 10 minutes i knew that: some people attribute the phrase to Robert Heinlein (corrupted to become Hanlon) while others claim that a Robert J. Hanlon coined it and still more trace it back to Napoleon or Goethe. numerous hackers have glommed onto this principle (as it "probably reflects the hacker's daily experience of environments created by well-intentioned but short-sighted people"), while others would use it as a military principle.

perhaps it's a little 1998 to be raving about the internet with slack-jawed wonderment, but it was pretty sweet to find something interesting and immediately be able to find out enough about it to write a short research paper had i somehow transported myself back to English 236 or something. now, having said that, i'm a little sick of the subject.

Posted by Jamie at 04:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

in a potentially recurring feature, we'll pit two words against one another and see which one lives to populate another sentence based on our arbitrary and ephemeral whims.

today's battle: 'forfend' vs. 'slather'

a couple of action verbs go toe-to-toe. the archaic forfend - meaning to avert, forbid and/or protect - evokes the haughtiness of formal British society while slather - to use large amounts or spread thickly - conjures visions of joe six-pack with ketchup dribbling down his chin. not to promote classism, but this is no contest. also, forfend is a lot more fun and dramatic to say. victory!

on a somewhat related subject, why do journalists, et. al. simply append "-gate" onto the end of every scandal (Ms. Jackson's "Nipplegate" being the latest example)? "gate" is not a Latin root for "miasma" or "of dubious morality". i know it comes from the Watergate scandal originally, but since then it's been lazily applied to any whiff of impropriety. whatever happened to the days of "the Teapot Dome Scandal" or "the Red Scare"? those sound like a lot more fun to learn about than "Travelgate".

Posted by Jamie at 02:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

t.s.o.a.'s new pet project for self/world improvement is to bring the phrase "you're welcome" back into regular use. we fix a lot of problems for people at work and have found ourselves lapsing into lazy and undignified responses when people offer their thanks for our help. "no problem", "you got it", "don't worry about it" and "that's OK" are all to often traipsing out of our mouths when a simple "you're welcome" would work perfectly. a cursory survey of other people found a similar pattern of language being used. especially horrific is the following of "thank you" with an emphatic "thank *you*" which is just completely undecorous. who's with us?

Posted by Jamie at 02:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)

when was it decided that "addy" was an acceptable abbreviation of "address"? who in their right mind uses that? it looks and sounds horrible, and when i read it, it ends up rattling around my brain until i can feel it piercing the gray matter. it's the linguistic equivalent of a fanny pack. it's even worse than calling pizza "za" which was once the undisupted and unchallenged holder of the "world's worst abbreviation" crown. at least there you're saving a syllable. when you type "addy" you're not even saving yourself much time. look at the keyboard. unless you're using a dvorak model, the 'r' 'e' and 's' are all adjacent to the 'd' making it easy, even for those of us who can't quite manage to get our pinkies involved in the typing process. please cease and desist from any and all uses of the term.

coming in a distant second on the list of grievances is the misuse of the terms "less" and "fewer," which is reaching epidemic proportions. "less" is for concepts and measurements (i.e. time, money, rainfall), "fewer" is for individual objects (dimes, shoes, zits). less patience, fewer patients. also, "less ripe apples" means that the apples in question are not as ripe, while "fewer ripe apples" indicates the relative number of apples involved.

the wife has an interesting linguistic quirk in which she will often say things like "the closet needs cleaned," leaving out the "to be" (or just refusing to use the gerund). the official position on this for now is that it's endearing, but given 10 or 15 years it could easily devolve into a hidden source of tension until one day someone has a reference copy of the Book of English Usage flying at their unsuspecting head.

Posted by Jamie at 05:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

the following series of words appeared in a piece of spam received offering "Free Cable*TV", which is if course completely legal i'm sure.

"snazzy calendrical herodotus eyebright ameliorate southwest kiva digram mixture dietician biaxial jigsaw idaho wigwam hutchinson tripod diplomatic polysaccharide bald concubine collaborate swag depredate fell bunsen diagonal companion smyrna melinda bedtime betoken basin technetium alhambra wash
petal cosy meritorious sonorous extramarital inhere gillette altair ny pip barnet phalarope rout choctaw streak stuyvesant biaxial afield intolerant jacqueline yosemite tearful wiggly escherichia dally lehigh"

anyone know how to crack this code? there's probably a great poem here just waiting to be written.

Posted by Jamie at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)