Comedy and wordplay

So many great plays on words in this clip:

The Linguists!

Do yourself a favor - go to thelinguists.com and watch the trailer!

Never mind that the percentage of linguists that do anything resembling field work is exceedingly small. Let the glory of documenting near-extinct languages wash over you!

Sadly, I had no idea about this film and missed the one Chicago screening of it, I'll have to wait til February to see it.

Natural speakers, new words

I heard a new word yesterday! Well, not exactly. The thing is, I've heard it before several times throughout my lifetime, but the frequency was spaced so far apart that I never devoted the memory resources to cataloging it away in the mental archives. Oh, brain, you're such a fickle organ.

However, I heard it twice last night. The first time it was mentioned, my mind became vaguely aware of its general meaning. The context wasn't robust enough to give me confidence enough to use it myself. Still, I subconsciously filed it away for future reference.

If it had been like so many of those other times when a word is heard once, then not heard again for months, it might have been completely lost; but randomness intervened, and gave it to me once again, hours later. Again, the word was used in context that by itself would not have been enough information about the definition to use. But my subconscious intervened and put the two contexts together, forming a rugged outline of a definition that I would be comfortable using, and inserted the word into my mental dictionary, hopefully for some time to come.

That my definition of the word may actually be slightly, or largely different from the users I've heard use the word is another topic...

Word frequency: debate edition

Mark Liberman over at Language Log put up a great word frequency comparison for the Presidential debates, and I won't rehash the story too much, here is the part I found particularly interesting...

Here's some more data — a comparison of counts across all three debates for if (at least according to the CNN transcripts):

(if)	Obama	McCain
Debate 1	20	19
Debate 2	37	22
Debate 3	44	14

And for some:

(some)	Obama	McCain
Debate 1	25	6
Debate 2	22	20
Debate 3	34	11

Given a set of observations like this, we could come to several different sorts of conclusions.

Maybe it's a meaningless, random statistical fluctuation. After all, there are lots of words, and people vary randomly in how often they choose different words on different occasions, and the way I've gone about this analysis is likely to turn up some differences that arise purely by chance.

Then again, maybe the difference (between individuals or across occasions) is real, but reflects a stylistic difference in the way messages are framed (e.g. "If we want to do X, we need Y" versus "In order to do X, we need Y"), rather than a difference in the underlying distribution of messages. If the difference is a stylistic one, it might be a stable feature of the different individuals involved, or it might reflect a more temporary priming effect, whether lexical or semantic or rhetorical.

Or perhaps the observation reflects a genuine difference in the kinds of ideas that the two candidates are presenting, or at least the spin they want to put on these ideas.

Certainly the first solution, statistical fluctuation is a probability, and I don't have the tools to rule it out. I do think stylistic differences contribute to this though. McCain wants his campaign to appear to take a hard line on some issues - first one that comes to mind might be the issue of talking to Iran only with preconditions:

McCain - "We will only talk with Iran with preconditions in place."
Obama - "If the situation warrants it, we may have to talk with Iran without preconditions."

(note that I have no idea if this is exactly what was said, but just providing an example of what I think they might be saying)

But I think the kind of ideas they're presenting bleeds into the stylistic issue. I don't think these two solutions are greatly seperated - if the Obama is the kind of person that will review all of the information time and time again to make a good decision on an issue, he might like to qualify it by using "if" conditions and the like. McCain may be close to the hotheaded candidate that the left is trying to portray him as, and he may be sure enough of himself to make those snap decisions, and is happy to portray himself as overly assertive. After all, quite a few Americans will find that a strength, rather than a weakness, and that's a discomforting thought.

LOLcats and Memes

I was reading an article on MSN today about the LOLcats phenomenon, and Internet Memes in general. Here's the full story.

"At this point you may be wondering what memes mean and what purpose they serve the user. After deep consideration and analysis, we’ve arrived at this conclusion: very, very little. At best they provide some fodder for a slack-time surf on the Web when everyone thinks you’re getting some work done. Memes are made by people who have lots of time to kill, for other people who don’t."

I don't think they did very much deep consideration and analysis. The author had gone so far as to define a meme in the article by bringing up how Richard Dawkins coined the word for The Selfish Gene, yet understanding that, they ascribe little or no 'meaning' or 'purpose' (his words) that these memes have to the user.

I'd have to emphatically disagree - Memes make up every bit of cultural information there ever was. They make up business, politics, comedy, religion, and the list goes on.

We're seeing these memes penetrate culture, just as the story of Buddha, or Jesus, or Calvin and Hobbes once did. Rickrolls have inundated the Internet, and from there, real life. I've heard of two friends rickrolling their own weddings, and (I think) it was the Yankees that had their game Rickrolled on a giant screen. Rickroll, or Rickrolling, is now a part of speech, just as "to Google" became a part of speech years ago. I talked in a previous post about how LOLcat speech has started to become a part of language as well, rare as it may be.

These memes may not be physically in print, but they're just as real as the memes that can birth new systems of thought - at the most basic level, what's the difference between linking a LOLcat around and proclaiming to your friends that Scientology is real? Both should get a great laugh, but in the end, the users of the memes decide whether they have meaning and purpose. If you measure in terms of mass propogation, it seems like LOLcats and Rickrolls are quite meaningful.

Acronyms

I have this little cutout posted in my cubicle of a gas price sign (the type you'd normally see outside of a gas station). It looks a little like this:

(picture to come later)

Gas
Unleaded
LOL 9/10
Plus
OMG 9/10
Premium
WTF 9/10

When describing the sign in conversation, I noticed that I had a tendency to say OMG and LOL as the letters, what WTF I tend to speak the phrase it stands for. I wonder if my mind has seperated OMG and LOL into seperate morphemes, but hasn't done the same with WTF?

"That I is."

I overheard this in conversation at a Gamestop today. No joke.

It was a transformation of the phrase "That I am," a phrase which although not heard too much these days, isn't that uncommon, either.

I can't believe I didn't take the opportunity to ask him why he used "is" there. It felt like something straight out of I Can Has Cheezburger, and I can't help but think it was a reference to a meme.

It's fascinating how the internet memes are helping to evolve our everyday English. Yes, "That I is" sounds terrible to today's English speakers - but what about the coming generation? Will they chuckle the first few times they hear it, and then gradually get accustomed to the meme talk of their interwebs?

See what I did thar?