Archive for July, 2006

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Baseball announcer lingo

Thursday, July 20th, 2006

Here’s an article (http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/sports/baseball/mlb/san_francisco_giants/15062194.htm) [EDIT (3/26/2010): dead link] with some vocabulary used by San Francisco Giants’ commentator Mike Krukow.

I like Grab some pine (Go sit on the bench) and brain-dead heaver (“a pitcher without finesse”).

I’m not into sports myself, but I like the colorful language of baseball announcers. On those rare occasions I see some of a game that someone else is watching, I’ll start cracking up at some of the things the announcers say or I’ll ask “Did he just say X?” People actually into watching the game often don’t notice. John Madden doing American football announcing is great, too. He may have coined the term cankle (calf + ankle), describing players whose calves go right down to their ankles.

Posted in LANGUAGE, Words / Dictionaries | No Comments »

Wigan, U.K., embraces dialect, sells shirts

Saturday, July 15th, 2006

After being somewhat embarrassed in the past about their regional dialect, the town of Wigan, Greater Manchester, in northwest England will produce tourism merchandise that translates some expressions.

Wiganworld has even more Wigan words. Some of the expressions are rather forced. Owdonabit seems to just be “[H]old on a bit”; does it need to be translated into “Just a moment”? I could write “Jussuhsec” (Just a sec[ond]) and translate it as “One moment, please.”

I like how they still use thee (Wotthidooin looks like “What thee doin?”). Before Modern English, thou was the singular subject pronoun, thee was the singular object pronoun, ye was the plural subject pronoun, and you was the plural object pronoun for second person in standard writing. However, with time and the use of you as a polite singular/plural form, the words have collapsed into fewer forms but in different ways in different dialects. Standard British English and Standard American English use you for all four types (plus colloquial y’all, yous(e), etc.). Wigan dialect seems to be using thee as a subject pronoun (instead of as an object pronoun), but it could be just a contraction of thou.

I also like that “him” is yonmon (“yon man”). I wonder if that’s only for men who are a bit far off. English used to distinguish here (close), there (not so close), and yon[der] (far off). Would they use it for boys as well? I kind of like the sound of “yomboy.” What would her be, “yonwumon”?

Here’re some downloadable sound files of native speakers of Wigan and other dialects from the International Dialects of English Archive.

Study up. You don’t want to be called backerts (not bright); am I reet?

Posted in Dialects, LANGUAGE, Language-Sites, Linguistics, Words / Dictionaries | No Comments »

Multilingual texting (for disasters)

Friday, July 14th, 2006

Indian company Geneva Software Technologies has created software that can translate text from English into seventy-one other languages in various written character sets

and send a translation to any cellular phone or mobile device in the world, no matter what character set it’s programmed to use.

Soon we’ll all be connected. The picture-based messages get around the Unicode standard for encoding typed characters in any language (which some devices and older Internet browsers don’t support). I wonder if Unicode will become obsolete one day if even greater advances are made in transmitting pictures of written characters (plus optical character recognition and speech-to-text).

Posted in Foreign Languages, LANGUAGE, Language Technology | No Comments »

2006 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest winners

Wednesday, July 12th, 2006

Every year the English department of San Jose State University in California, USA, hosts a contest for delightfully bad opening sentences to possible novels.

To fully appreciate their “special qualities,” you have to read the entries slowly and think about what kind of novels would follow. Then be glad those novels will never be written (because it would be a hassle to round up enough pitchforks and torches for the ensuing unruly mobs).

Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest site

If you prefer shorter, snappier bad openings, there’s a contest for those as well: The Lyttle Lytton Contest.

Entries for both annual contests are due by April 15th (Pacific Daylight Time), but the “long” Lytton apparently can be later.

Posted in Comedy / Humor Media, HUMOR, Humor-Sites | 1 Comment »

The Iraqcomm

Tuesday, July 11th, 2006

Iraqcomm, developed by California’s Stanford Research Institute, is two-way translation software to help American soldiers/medics in Iraq communicate with Iraqis on some topics without human translators.

Accompanying podcast with translation sample

I hope it helps. On the news I’ve seen some strained “conversations” in the war zone with no translators around. But since the device converts the translations to speech, I worry that people will believe the translations are always correct. Given the convoluted, one-word-one-meaning machine translations that I’ve seen come out of AltaVista’s Babel Fish, such belief could be dangerous.

Posted in Foreign Languages, LANGUAGE, Language Technology | No Comments »

‘Office’ mates

Tuesday, July 11th, 2006

According to The Guardian, the success of America’s remake of The Office has led to deals for more remakes of British comedies: Saxondale, Nighty Night, and The Mighty Boosh, these latter from Baby Cow Productions (imdb.com listing).

Differences in humor/humour aside (we Americans getting by with just the one letter U), I wonder how the American series model of multiple years of 22-episode seasons will work for these shows that usually have a dozen episodes total. The article mentions that three Fawlty Towers remakes failed. I didn’t think John Cleese’s British version with twelve episodes worked well. It was just the same formulaic sketch each time: crisis, hide it from the wife, try to hold in panic, and treat staff and some guests horribly. Trying to do that for a hundred episodes seems like an obvious problem.

But American television could use some good comedies now. Perhaps the U.K. will give us a chance, in the words of John Cleese’s other show, Monty Python, “for something completely different.” (However, the U.K. might prefer doing so with a full stop outside single quotation marks instead of a period inside double. I’m not sure if the “period inside double” happens in baseball, or in cricket.)

See also my earlier post: BBC comedies going to film.

Posted in Comedy / Humor Media, HUMOR | No Comments »

Oldest Scottish joke

Sunday, July 9th, 2006

Sean Connery has co-authored a forthcoming book about Scotland and his life: Connery’s Scotland [EDIT (3/26/2010): Now Being a Scot]. It has a chapter on the history of Scottish comedy, including a 9th-century Scottish joke about an actual Scottish priest and the king of France sitting across a table from each other drinking wine and eating:

Offended by the priest’s loutish, drunken behaviour, the monarch asked rhetorically: “What separates a Sot [drunk] from a Scot?” Quick as a flash, the priest replied: “Only a table.”

(How do you play “ba dum bum” on the bagpipes?)

Posted in Comedy / Humor Media, HUMOR | 1 Comment »

Mobile words

Saturday, July 8th, 2006

You can now get free audio phrase books for your iPod from Coolgorilla (so far German, French, and Greek, with Spanish coming soon).

I expect to see tourists in foreign marketplaces frantically pushing buttons on tiny devices the way they used to frantically flip through paper phase books (though I guess they already do that with electronic dictionaries). But this way you don’t mispronounce something and call the seller’s mother an “ugly warthog” (when you actually wanted to call her a “coolgorilla”).

EDIT (July 5, 2007):
These are now free with a purchase of something from travel/tourism site lastminute.com.

For closer to home, if your home is in a major Chinese city, you can search for local information [EDIT (3/26/10): Now only for Shanghai Daily subscribers] about restaurants, hotels, weather, etc. via your cellphone/mobile phone in English, Mandarin, and pinyin (romanized Mandarin) thanks to mInfo Inc.It’s interesting that the advertisers supporting this service are not only restaurants and hotels but also “agencies promoting English learning.” Is the goal to have Chinese people search for information in English for the heck of it? The future’s fully integrated cellphone-iPod (or CellPod), will probably include a Star Trek Universal Translator that can hear a dozen words in an unknown language and then magically translate the other hundreds of millions.

Posted in English as a Second / Foreign Language, Foreign Languages, LANGUAGE, Language Technology, Words / Dictionaries | 1 Comment »

BBC comedies going to film

Friday, July 7th, 2006

The BBC network has announced that some of their comedies will be turned into films by BBC Films. They don’t mention any specific shows, but this Reuters/Hollywood Reporter article (http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=entertainmentNews&storyID=2006-07-06T021158Z_01_N05319404_RTRUKOC_0_UK-BBC.xml) [EDIT (2/21/2010): dead link] mentions The Office, Extras, and Little Britain as contenders.

I’ve been watching and enjoying the original The Office, as well as Coupling, Absolute Power and People Like Us, on the PBS network in America. If they could make the movie versions of shows accessible to newcomers, they could sure sell a lot more DVDs of the shows.

Posted in Comedy / Humor Media, HUMOR | 1 Comment »

New dictionary words (first post)

Friday, July 7th, 2006

American dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster (THE “Webster’s” before the trademark was lost) announced some new words for the 2006 update of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Editon. They don’t mention this there, but an Associated Press article says that the verb to google has also been added.

Observations

  • I’m glad spyware and ringtone are finally making it in, but it’s hard to imagine I’ll get much use out of labelmate (a singer/musician on the same record label as another singer/musician). This is the first I’ve heard of it.
  • I didn’t recognize the word coqui, but I’ve heard of the tiny yet very noisy frogs. The “introduced into” in the definition downplays that the frogs are talked about because they’re an invasive species. Hawaii is trying to fight back. (You can keep up with such things on the Invasive Species Weblog.)
  • It’s interesting that in English, manga (Japanese characters: 漫画 ) are comic books/graphic novels whereas in Japanese (as shown in the etymology) the word could also refer to an uncollected cartoon or comic strip. A secondary Japanese definition is “political cartoon” or “satirical cartoon.”

Related News

  • It’s also the 200th anniversary of Noah Webster’s first dictionary, so Merriam-Webster has a list of words and definitions first appearing in his American 1806 A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, including debit, slang, psychology, immigrant, and nutrient.
  • Both Merriam-Webster and the U.K.’s Collins dictionaries have a submit-your-own-new-word feature. [Edit 2/21/10: Collins one seems to be gone.]

Posted in Dialects, Foreign Languages, LANGUAGE, Language-Sites, Words / Dictionaries | 1 Comment »

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