How to write the next great alien language (io9.com on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Elvish and Marc Okrand’s Klingon)

Linguist Marc Okrand on how he used less common sounds/grammatical forms to make Star Trek’s Klingon language more alien:

Link to video

More resources:

• Mark Rosenfelder’s The Language Construction Kit (LCK)
• expanded book form of The Language Construction Kit (LCK)
• The Lingua Descriptive Studies Questionnaire
• Speculative Grammarian’s satirical look: A Primer in SF Xenolinguistics

I just got the new The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World (about half of which is online for free).

The first thing I wanted to check was the word usage section to see how things have changed since the most recent Microsoft style guide: Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications, Third Edition (2004). Below are some differences in the specific spelling of words (though Microsoft wouldn’t necessarily change these items in a future fourth edition of their guide).

I always thought the Web site/webmaster spelling contrast was a silly inconsistency; I’m glad Yahoo agrees.

In the following video from The Wall Street Journal‘s D: All Things Digital conference in June 2010, lexicographer and Wordnik CEO Erin McKean demonstrates how Smartwords allows someone to get lengthy definitions for technical terms, buy books on searched concepts, and get quizzed on words for the college entrance exam (hat tip to VentureBeat).

Link to video

The video below from O’Reilly’s TOC Conference (Tools of Change for Publishing Conference) in February 2010 is disappointingly vague, but the main point is that the Smartwords platform lets you learn (about words):

• where they are and
• where they came from
• when they are
• how they relate to other words
• who created them and
• who they’re with now

I take this to mean the contexts, connotations, collocations (words that co-occur), and other connections among words. I would dub this “Word Con 4,” but one is a col- and it might also sound like a word conference or a lexical DEFense CONdition for shooting language-maven missiles (after eating and before leaving) at people who misuse too many words.

Link to video

These are exciting times for how we access words and information. Once we reach the immersive hologram phase I suppose tagged words will have avatars to come by and explain themselves to us. “Wrestling with” a new concept could cause injuries without proper safety protocols, and “wrapping your head around” an idea might make for an unflattering online video of you.

Side note:

Erin McKean (her Twitter) uses delightful analogies. Below are two talks she has given about dictionaries.

2007 TED Talk on redefining the dictionary

Link to video

2007 talk at Google on what one should know about dictionaries (almost 55 minutes)

Link to video

[EDIT (6/7/10): I broke this long post up into two posts.]

This is Part 2 (Part 1) on finding early uses of American slang and colloquialisms from the television clips and episodes on Hulu‘s (language corpus of) shows from NBC Universal (NBC, USA Network, Bravo, Sci Fi, Sundance Channel, Oxygen) and News Corp. (Fox, FX, Fuel TV).

While searching in vain for the Steve Martin “NOT!” clip on Hulu for the Part 1 post, I found another “The Nerds” sketch from Saturday Night Live and stumbled on an old usage of yet another expression. This time it was post-adjective much? (e.g. “Awkward much?” for “You’re very awkward”).

I first noticed post-adjective much? in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer pilot, (“Welcome to the Hellmouth,” Season 1, Episode 1; first aired March 10, 1997). Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter) informs Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) that there has been a mysterious death at their high school. Buffy wants to find out if it was the work of a vampire without blowing her secret identity:

BUFFY: How did he die?

CORDELIA: I don’t know.

BUFFY: Well, were there any marks?

CORDELIA: Morbid much? I didn’t ask!

(Welcome to the Hellmouth, 15:37-15:43, hulu.com/watch/48/buffy-the-vampire-slayer-welcome-to-the-hellmouth [EDIT (6/7/10): no longer available])

The construction not surprisingly predates the show, but I was surprised to find it two decades earlier.

On SNL’s October 7, 1978, episode (Season 4, Episode 1), with The Rolling Stones as host, the teen nerds Lisa Loopner (Gilda Radner; Safire spelled it “Lupner”) and Todd (Bill Murray) are hanging out in Lisa’s kitchen:

TODD: I really need your help with my history homework.

LISA: Well, Todd, you know if you sincerely need my help, you can count on it.

TODD: Oh, good. Because I’m studying all about [grabs at Lisa's shirt neck and tries to peek down her shirt] underdeveloped nations!

LISA (shouting and smiling): Cut it out, Todd! Cut it out! [lightly swats him away] Stop it!

TODD (points at Lisa’s chest and mock laughs to a pretend audience): Underdeveloped much?

(Nerds Broken Fridge, 02:37-02:55)

The bit is quite crass, of course, but there’s the post-adjective much? construction way back in 1978.

As if I couldn’t waste enough time watching comedy and other clips and episodes on Hulu, now I shudder to realize that there’s a corpus linguistics use as well. NOT! No, there truly is.

See also:
Gateway to Corpus Linguistics

Corpus.byu.edu (English, Spanish, and Portuguese online corpora)

Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon by Michael Adams (2004, Oxford University Press, ISBN13: 9780195175998)

Having trouble finding early uses of slang and colloquialisms? If you’re looking for instances of American (and possibly Canadian) ones, the television clips and episodes on Hulu from NBC Universal (NBC, USA Network, Bravo, Sci Fi, Sundance Channel, Oxygen) and News Corp. (Fox, FX, Fuel TV) are a useful language corpus.

I was sent an old clip of Saturday Night Live (SNL). The clip happened to contain a “Wayne’s World”-esque “NOT!” (e.g., “That sounds like fun—NOT!” for “That does not sound like fun”), but it’s thirteen years earlier.

I learned the post-clause NOT! expression from the “Wayne’s World” segments on SNL in early 1990. The sketches began at the beginning of the fifteenth season in Fall 1989, but I don’t think the post-clause NOT! appeared until the Tom Hanks-hosted February 17, 1990, episode (Season 15, Episode 13, video clip embedded below).

Tom Hanks plays Garth’s (Dana Carvey) cousin Barry, a roadie for Aerosmith. Barry has brought Aerosmith to appear on Wayne’s World, Wayne (Mike Myers) and Garth’s community-access cable show. After Barry demonstrates his roadie duties, comes:

WAYNE: Anyways, Barry, uh, that was really interesting. [mugging to camera] NOT!

(Waynes [sic] World with Aerosmith, 04:39-04:43)

With the movie Wayne’s World in 1992, the expression became even more popular. It even made the American Dialect Society’s 1992 Word of the Year. According to Sheidlower and Lighter (1993), however, the usage of post-clause NOT! is older than that:

The publicists for the movie Wayne’s World claim the construction was coined in the late 1970s by Steve Martin and Gilda Radner in “The Nerds,” an ongoing sketch on Saturday Night Live:

That’s a fabulous science fair project. . . . Not!

(Jesse T. Sheidlower and Jonathan E. Lighter (1993). A Recent Coinage (Not!). American Speech, 68(2) (Summer, 1993), 213-218 [first page].)

For the SNL quote, Sheidlower and Lighter cite a 1992 “On Language” column by William Safire. Safire calls it “belated negation” and gives the sketch as 1978.

(William Safire (1992). On Language; Not! New York Times Magazine. March 8, 1992, 20.)

That would be the April 22, 1978, episode (Season 3, Episode 18), with Steve Martin as host. That sketch doesn’t seem to be on Hulu. At any rate, at least my discovery is still a little older. The usage I stumbled on is from two years earlier.

In the very first season of SNL, the May 8, 1976, episode (Season 1, Episode 19) has Madeline Kahn as host. The show has a slumber party sketch about what a group of young girls think sex is:

MADELINE KAHN: That is why you should only do it after you are married. Because then you won’t be so embarrassed in front of your husband because you will [would?] be in the same family.

LARAINE NEWMAN (sarcastically, with only a slight pause): Oh, well. Now I really want to get married. Not!

(Slumber Party, 02:46-03:00.)

I can’t get too excited about this either, however. It turns out, according to Mark Israel (Postfix “not”), the construction is a lot older and goes back at least to 1905 with Ellis Parker Butler’s Irish English poem Pigs is Pigs (“. . . ‘Cert’nly, me dear frind Flannery. Delighted!’ Not!“).

Part 2:
Buffy (and SNL) ‘much’ much?: Slang research with Hulu.com, Part 2

See also:
Gateway to Corpus Linguistics

Corpus.byu.edu (English, Spanish, and Portuguese online corpora)

Straight Goods [EDIT (6/7/10): archive access requires free subscription] has a “definition list for new mothers,” with new meanings for familiar words. My favorites are:

• Family planning: The art of spacing your children the proper distance apart to keep you on the edge of financial disaster[.]
• Feedback: The inevitable result when the baby doesn’t appreciate the strained carrots.
• Puddle: A small body of water that draws other small bodies wearing dry shoes into it.
• Show off: A child who is more talented than yours.
• Sterilize: What you do to your first baby’s pacifier by boiling it and to your last baby’s pacifier by blowing on it.
• Storeroom: The distance required between the supermarket aisles so that children in shopping carts can’t quite reach anything.

Happy Mother’s Day to all who perform that vital role.

If you’ve been here to Language and Humor Blog before, you may have noticed a certain lack of roadway license. Er, street cred. That’s all about to change with this post about The Extensive Hip Hop Rhyming Dictionary (On-line Records, US$8.95) (on-linerecords.com/). [EDIT (6/7/10): dead link]

I’m not a fan of rap music or hip hop, but I find the phrasal rhymes very interesting. The book could be of use not only to rappers but also to song parodists (including science-fiction filkers), whose alternate lyrics often rhyme with those of the original song.

I notice that some of the examples in the book aren’t rhymes proper (same vowel sound and same final-consonant sound) but assonance (same vowel sound). For example, the phrase asthma attack rhymed with blast from the past has the “az-” of asthma and “(bl)ast” of blast. That’s assonance, but the consonant sounds are so close that it’s also an approximate rhyme. However, the “-(t)ak” of attack with the “(p)ast” of past is just assonance. With the unstressed schwa vowels, there’s also rhyme (“uh” of attack with “uh” of the), which keeps the rhythm/beat to STRESSED-unstressed-unstressed-STRESSED. The last set has the same schwa assonance as well as consonance (same consonant sound) of the initial “m” in asthma, “-muh,” and the final “m” in the word from, “(fr)um.” [EDIT (6/7/10): This paragraph edited for clarity.]

You might want this book if your level of “free flow” now is at “zero.”

See also:

Free Online Rhyming Dictionary
Rhyme with
WikiRhymer Rhyming Dictionary
Rhyme Generator

Once again, Lake Superior State University (Michigan, USA) has released its annual playful banishment list.

2008 list of banished words

Observations:

• Perfect storm (a synergy of bad luck/bad decisions): I like it, but it has been overused.
• Webinar (World Wide Web seminar): It’s inelegant. The only motivation for the blend is the same vowel sound in web and seminar. Can’t we just call it a seminar?
• Organic: Over the last couple years, I’ve noticed that seemingly all actors now describe their movies as “evolving organically.” How is this different from “evolving naturally”?
• Wordsmith and to Author: I like them, and they’ve been around since 1873 and 1596 (click on “2, transitive verb”), respectively. Write is better than author, but the latter gives you some variety.
• Random (as in “that’s so random”): This has been vogue slang among teens for a few years at least. It seems to just mean “that’s so odd” or “that’s out of left field” or “Where did THAT come from?!” We’ll see if it sticks around.

See also:
Making a meatball sundae of the grass station: The hip, overused and abused business buzzwords of 2007

And my post:
2007 ‘banished’ words

In addition to the already posted locavore from the New Oxford American Dictionary (Vote for Webster’s 2007 Word of the Year; Visual Dictionary) and w00t! from Merriam-Webster (Merriam-Webster’s 2007 Word of the Year), the latter from an online poll:

• Webster’s New World Dictionary named grass station and
• the American Dialect Society voted subprime as words of the year.

Grass station (a gas/petrol station for ethanol, perhaps made from switch grass) is clever, but I doubt it would ever be a serious word.

Subprime (as in “subprime mortgage”) has certainly been in the news a lot in the United States. I suppose it will be around a long time unless the laws change; has anyone had a need to say “junk bond” since the late 1980s?

Meanwhile, until January 31, 2008, you can vote for Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary 2007 word of the year.

I’d like to point out a couple of omissions in the Macquarie Dictionary entries.

Helengrad

noun NZ Colloquial (humorous) Wellington, seen as controlled by the government of Prime Minister Helen Clark. [Helen Clark + -grad common Russian ending meaning `town']

Helengrad isn’t just Helen + -grad; it’s clearly a blend of Helen and [Sta]lingrad and perhaps to a lesser extent of [Len]ingrad.

data smog

noun electronic information as by emails, internet searches, etc., which, by its volume, impairs performance and increases stress.

Data smog is most likely based on the accessible data cloud (popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4205068.html?page=2) [EDIT (6/7/10): revised content on linked page] of all your digital stuff (a different meaning at Wikipedia, a way of visually displaying data).

See also my posts:
Webster’s (and Webster’s) 2006 Word of the Year
American Dialect Society Word of 2006
Macquarie Dictionary 2006 Word of the Year, Australianisms surveys

As I mentioned in my previous post (Vote for Webster’s 2007 Word of the Year; Visual Dictionary) American dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster was taking a word poll.

The winner is w00t! (woot with zeros, à la leet [l33t] speak), like yay! But I’d say woo hoo!/woohoo! would be closer. Merriam-Webster also points out that it can be an acronym for “We Owned the Other Team.”

I’ve seen w00t a lot in Internet posts, so I’m not surprised it got the most votes.

Naturally, Google has a leet interface (as well as a Klingon interface).