Tag: language
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Thanking is an action applying to one visible thing
"Thanking is an action applying to one visible thing." is a literal line in the source code of one of my favourite video games, blackle mori observes.
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Things Champ'd Up thinks are uniquely American
When I play Jackbox Games with my friends, I enable the 'filter US-centric content'. But what does that actually do? Let's swiftly do a bit of easy reverse-engineering on one of my favourite games in the series, Champ'd Up, and find out... what the developer thinks "US-centric" means!
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Why I Stopped “Creating Content”
Michael Lynch uses a tongue-in-cheek metaphor as a vehicle through which to argue against the ubiquity of the term 'content', and I agree: we can do better with a richer and more-specific definition of our arts.
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'Simplified'
Well 'thanks' for the 'simplified' statement, I guess?
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You're Pronouncing JPEG Wrong
Fighting about the correct way to pronounce GIF is so last decade. Let's fight about how to pronounce JPEG.
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So Unbelievable it Sounds Like you Googled It
DeGoogling is so... 2010s. Let's make the 2020s the decade where we redefine Google as a verb. In the age of AI-first search, "to Google" now ought to give a nod to the accuracy and ethical issues posed by making AI into people's first experience of Web search.
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If the Romans played bingo, do you think the callers would have used 'bingo lingo'?
- Legs two
- Growing up the wall, four
- Seagull in flight, five
- Long-nosed dead man, nineteen
- Pornography, thirty
- Use your tongue, fifty-nine
- Smiling in a blindfold, a hundred and one
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An American-style bingo card with Roman numerals in place of the numbers and 'quadrum gratuitum' in place of the free space. Based on an original photo by Oeil De Vautour / Edwin Torres, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
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Rubberdogging
Rubberdogging, verb: attempting to invent a solution to a technical problem by explaining it out loud to a pet. From "rubberducking", the practice of doing so to an inanimate object, and "dog walking".
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How far back in time can you understand English?
Colin Gorrie wrote an excellent blog post last month, in the style of a travel blog but where every couple of paragraphs the blogger jumped back a hundred years in time, switching to an earlier dialect of English as they do so, until they become gradually unintelligible to most readers. Fascinating.
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Can it perhaps be time that we stop saying "ethical non-monogamy"?
Nobody feels the need to say "ethical monogamy"; monogamous folks are given the benefit of the doubt and assumed to be practicing a relationship ethically.
I feel like polyamory, open relationships, relationship anarchy and other forms of non-monogamy are now sufficiently accessible to popular culture that we can drop the word "ethical" and still be understood. (Ideally we do so before it starts to look like virtue-labelling.)
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Heterophonic Homonyms
On a car journey on which they'd otherwise have been fighting, the kids helped me start a collection of heterophonic homonyms - words that are spelled the same but have different pronunciations and meanings. I've got nine of them now in English, and maybe two in other languages... can you help me find some more?
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What's that, girl? Two children are lost somewhere in this bookshop?
Yeah, I should probably find them and take them home for lunch.
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Dan, in a bookshop, holds a book called How To Speak Dog, alongside a French Bulldog.
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My 8-year-old asked me "In Spanish, I need to use an upside-down interrobang at the start of the sentence‽" (I assume the answer is yes!)
A little while later, I thought to check whether Unicode defines a codepoint for an inverted interrobang. Yup: ‽ =
U+203D, ⸘ =U+2E18. Nice.(And yet we don't have codepoints to differentiate between single-bar and double-bar "cifrão" dollar signs...)
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Small-World Serendipity
We travelled 7,000km across the ocean only to find, by complete coincidence, that the Caribbean’s biggest cymruphile is the captain of a boat we chartered when we fancied a morning of reef-snorkelling and turtle-spotting.
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Came half way around the world to find a surprising boat with a non-English name I understand.
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Small six-seater day boat named 'Cariad', afloat. The letter I is dotted with a heart symbol.
("Cariad" is Welsh for "love")