30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults in History

21 June 2011

These are definitely quite harsh, and I don’t agree with most of them. (Although Wilde was dead on when he said, “There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.")

One caveat: I am very skeptical of quotes found on the internet. They usually are found to have been invented after the fact. I haven’t verified any of these. (One good sign, though, is that all of them have dates attached, which hints that someone did actual research to verify them.) But even if some turn out to be fake, they’re still fun.

(Tip o’ the hat to AnotherPhD2B’s Twitter feed)

Dictionaries & SCOTUS

14 June 2011

The New York Times has an article on how the US Supreme Court is using dictionaries more than ever in formulating their decisions.

I’m not sure that I agree with Jesse Sheidlower’s nearly categorical assessment that this is a bad thing. While the trend is disturbing and the justices do not appear to have a good grasp on exactly what a dictionary can be reliably used for, there are situations where its use would be appropriate. I can envision instances where a judge might want to look to see if a common word had particular connotations or nuances that might impact the meaning, and there is the use of historical dictionaries to understand what previous generations may have been trying to say. Still, I heartily agree that the words in most pieces of legislation are not amenable to decoding using the dictionary.

Problems with Automatic Translation

13 June 2011

James Fallows has an interesting take on some of the problems that Google has run into with its automatic translation API. The problems aren’t linguistic, they’re economic. And ironically, as the API was used more, it “polluted” the data pool to such an extent that it became impossible to improve the system’s performance. Fallows concludes that, “for the foreseeable future, it’s still worth learning other languages.”