the mamas and the papas

comic and article related to the words for “mother” and “father”…

Quotes

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
— Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)

Quotes

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. -Marcus Aurelius, philosopher and writer (121-180)

(from today’s AWAD)

you’ve got a small lexicon

I attended a lecture tonight that I thought was bit outdated in terms of vocabulary and language learning, but I did learn something interesting: that an educated human has about 100,000 words in her lexicon, but basically only about 2,000 of those are put to use. I posted on my frustration with conventional language in Slang –hyperlink needed– and this attests to the fact that maybe while I’m uniquely bothered by it, it’s not a phenomenon unique to my social life… unimaginative hackneyed language is a fact of life.

more on dictionaries…

Julia Angwin in her WSJ article suggests maybe Google is our best modern dictionary. Brilliant! Her test was to research a word in online and conventional dictionaries. Why didn’t I think of that? Eventually she came to Wordnik, which I mentioned in my icktionaries entry. I couldn’t put my finger on why I was not fully convinced of its merit. I thought it might not suit my simple needs, but perhaps I wasn’t asking the right questions of it.

One merit I did find was “the safety of expert opinions… experts do the finalizing on Wordnik.” and this need I share with Julia, who wrote, “And although Google is doing a pretty good job aggregating meanings, I would prefer some human experts to give authority and heft to a new database of meaning. The idea of Google as our modern dictionary has lit a bulb for me. Julia leaves us with this sentiment that I’d like to think on, “I am still hoping for a dictionary that will leave Google in the dust.“

EFL Customer Review?

Since next to no one reads my class blog “at school” (I have to quote it because school is on the computer) I thought I’d re-post this tidbit (sans formatting).

Bf and I thought this was adorably funny and we both wonder if this Andy person is an EFL leaner…. What do you think?

ASICS Gel-Velocity® SKU #7282712 ( View on Zappos.com Classic)

Write a Review of This Product
Recent Customer Reviews – 5 Reviews Total
Posted: Jan 12, 2009
Reviewer: from Los Angeles
Overall: (2 Stars) Comfort: (1 Stars) Style: (5 Stars)
Andy – These shoes look nice but not comfortable. If you walking all day, your feet would get hurt. It is very tight at the foot fingers. My right foot thumb got injured because the shoes are too tight. You should buy a half size bigger.

Spanish, You Got Served (Almost)

Hello! Been busy, previously with intense amounts of professional work and now with intense amounts of academic work (since starting grad school!). Here’s a link to an NYT article I found to be muy interesante.

The new tennis champ almost was prohibited from speaking his native language. What do you think? Fair/Unfair? Announcer’s own xenophobia? A microcosmic example of the materialism plaguing the U.S.?

icktionaries

I’ve been thinking about the lexical charting we call dictionaries since I discovered the wiktionary. That’s a little lie, I watched Erin McKean’s TED Talk last year and regretted my life choices that didn’t include working towards a lexicography career, which has been a dream of mine since, say, 11 or 12. Also, her blog is way cooler than mine (though less updated, given the CEO-ing and all)! Check it out! I digress.
I just checked my blogroll; it didn’t include Wordnik, the modern dictionary concept she spoke of at TED. I swiftly took care of that. And since it’s so new, I’d like to look into Wordnik. I didn’t need a word, only wanted, so based on a song I was listening to, I looked up “silent”. An amusement park opened on my screen. Synonyms, antonyms, usage graphs — by decade or how often to expect to hear the word! — examples, anagrams, flickr photos?, just about everything to track a word… and that was under the “summary” tab. Talk about comprehensive! And in true democratic fashion, we the people can log in a leave notes. Wiktionary may allow for more than just notes, but it’s not nearly as fun or expansive. Plus, I need the safety of expert opinions, and from what I gather, experts do the finalizing on Wordnik.

My concern is that I’m not sure if the site will suit my needs when I need simply the definition of a word. If all I need to complete my night’s reading is the def. of “parsimonious”, why would I go through the hee haw of wordnik for a simple few lines of expert-verified OED officiality? I suppose I could just ignore the tweets and pics and go straight for the list of old-skool dictionary entries. Not bad, McKean and co.

Full disclosure, I can’t stop looking up words on Wordnik, like hee haw, which does not exist there yet. Is it part of my civic duty to submit it?
And I started this off hoping to drop the sex-lexicon link. There’s no opportunity; I went so off-track I’m on a different line altogether. I’ll just addendum it here. It’s something Zap Brannigan would think up and I love it. You can browse it! My 12-year-old self is very happy. But what would happen if sex-lexis moved into the Wordnik arena…. ay gevalt!

pictures as stories

This blog was born of my love of words and the sentences and ideas they make, and I do not disqualify words when they are packaged with pictures. It’s all good to me. Pictures For Sad Children is making me happy today, so this post is about comics. I have a penchant for turning fun things into academics so…
What is a comic? Is anything with pictures and a blurb a comic? Are panels and strips required? What about narrative storytelling? I should say now that I don’t make a distinction between graphic novels and comics. Is that wrong?

Some musings:
PFSC goes non-linear in pretty much every strip… so it’s not a strip per say, and it’s easy to get confused about which panel to read next. I hate reading out-of-order. Why would the author/artist try to trick me like that? I just want to follow the story!
I was wondering, if I read xkcd from beginning to end, will I have read a graphic novel?
What do you think about this one, from a guest-artist at Tiny Kitten Teeth? The panels are unrelated. Wth? As a side-note, the last one is the absolute Louis CK definition of hilarious!
And here’s an Internet comic that keeps the same picture panels, and changes only the dialogue with each update. That’s like eating tofu for dinner every night, and just changing the marinade. What I mean to say is, delicious!

I probably wouldn’t think so much about comics if it weren’t for the fact that a)I like comics and b)I read some of Scott McCloud’s ‘Understanding Comics: Invisible Art’ in an English class at Rutgers. Of course my brain has never been the same, but I actually don’t remember much of what I read, so it’s on my wishlist. So is Ten Cent Plague, which gives a history of comics under the premise that comics is more rock-n-roll than rock-n-roll. I dig it. On a similar note, probably the most bad-ass rock-n-roll Bible you’ll ever read is this one.

Scattered, but there are my musings. This works best when you respond to the questions I asked, or ask some of your own. Thanks for participating.

P.S. Maybe I’ll update this post if I ever figure out why comics in the old newspapers were called “funnies” and then talk about why that could never work today (see The Manga Bible above and Mom’s Cancer).

finished-ish

-ish is so juvenile. From now on it’s -esque all the way. Because I’m a lady, and ladyies speak with sophistication and class. No more baby stuff.
examples:
“What time is it?” “Eh, 6-esque.”
“Can you give me a synonym for juvenile?” “… child-esque”

Beautiful!