25 May 2016
The Times Literary Supplement discusses how translating Catullus is fucking hard.
Cunk on Shakespeare
17 May 2016
Philomena Cunk examines the life and work of William Shakespeare:
Cunk, played by comedian Diane Morgan, has this to say about Richard III:
Shakespeare wrote loads of plays about royals, known as his history plays. It was his way of pleasing the king and queen by doing stuff about their families, a bit like when your mum buys the local paper because your brother’s court appearance is in it. Perhaps Shakespeare’s best history play is Richard Three, which is about this sort of elephant man king. He’d be done in computers now by Andy Serkis covered in balls, but in the original he was just a man with a pillow up his jumper. It’s quite modern because it’s a lead part for a disabled actor, provided they don’t mind being depicted as the most evil man ever. ["I am determined to prove a villain."] Richard Three is actually based on the real King Richard of Third, who was in the Wars of the Roses. ["A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse."] At the end he loses his horse and ends up wandering round a car park looking for it, where he eventually dies, because in those days you couldn’t find your horse just by beeping your keys at it and making its arse light up. It’s quite moving and human because we’ve all worried that we might die in a car park, if we like lose the ticket and can’t get the barrier up and just die in there. Shakespeare makes you think about those things.
Internet/Web vs. internet/web
5 April 2016
I like fivethirtyeight.com. Nate Silver and his crew have pioneered a new form of journalism, one based on data rather than punditry, but like anyone else, they get into trouble when they stray outside their wheelhouse. Most recently, a blog post on their website took on the announcement that the Associate Press (AP) has changed their stylebook to use lowercase letters when writing internet and web. Formerly, the news organization had advocated for Internet and Web. In so doing, they not only demonstrated a misunderstanding of how language works, but they also screwed up their analysis of the data.
This past week the AP announced that they will no longer be capitalizing internet or web. The change is significant because many journalistic organizations in the US follow the AP style.
But the AP is hardly on the leading edge of this trend. I discussed the capitalization of internet back in 2004 when Wired magazine made the switch. The fivethirtyeight.com blog post says the AP is a “cultural bellwether for writer types.” Yet as it is on most stylistic points, the AP style is inherently a conservative one, not one that rides the edge of linguistic change. Nor do most “writer-types” give a crap what the AP says. (In fact, AP style is something of a joke among most writer-types, or rather among writers who are aware that it exists at all.) Fivethirtyeight is viewing the situation from the perspective of a journalist, assuming that everyone else is a journalist too. They’ve moved from data analysis to punditry.
And what’s worse, the blog post misrepresents the data. Like any good fivethirtyeight.com story, it presents data, this time from Google Ngrams, but the words in the story don’t match what the data tells us. First, the data is from the wrong source for their purposes. It’s from Google Books. If you want to track journalistic style—this is an article about the AP stylebook after all—then Google Books is the wrong corpus to use. You want a corpus of news stories for that, not one that tracks usage in books.
The article does say that “we passed peak ‘Internet’ and ‘Web’ sometime around 2002.” That is correct, as far as it goes, but it ignores the fact that the capitalized Internet and Web are still far more common in Google Books than their lowercased counterparts. Internet and Web started their rise in the Google Books data around 1989 and 1991 respectively. Both rose at nearly exponential rates until 2002, when their usage declined, although as of 2008 (the latest available year in the data set) Web was over twice as popular as web and Internet some six times as popular as internet. The lower case forms showed growth over the same period, but at a much slower rate, and in 2004 web showed a decrease in usage as well, and internet slowed its steady growth. What the data shows, therefore, is not a switch from the uppercase to the lowercase forms, but rather that people were writing less about the internet and the web. What had happened was the dot-com crash and the switch from the internet being a trending topic of discussion to simply being part of the background noise of our lives. (Again, this is Google Books. Journalistic usage may show something entirely different.)
Twelve years ago I said, “the significance of the Wired News style change should not be underestimated. The practice of capitalizing [internet] is clearly on the way out.” While that statement was not wrong, it was overly optimistic about the pace of that change. The capitalized forms are still very much the preferred form. But it was Wired that was the “cultural bellwether,” not the AP, which is in the middle of the flock.
Etruscan Tablet Found
31 March 2016
Seventy letters and punctuation marks make this find one of the longest surviving examples of the Etruscan language. Little is known about the language, and every single find has the potential to vastly increase our knowledge about the language, the Etruscan people, and their culture. This particular find is not a gravestone, which makes it especially valuable since most of the other examples of the language that we have are from graves; it has the possibility of providing evidence about things other than the dead.
Etruscan is not related to any living language, or so most historical linguists believe.
Iffy Gifs
23 March 2016
One of the hot trends in academia is digital humanities. Like many trending topics it is ill defined, but it generally encompasses the study of “texts” in our digital age, as well as the use of digital tools to interrogate more traditional print and manuscript texts. Mark Liberman over at Language Log highlights one such text, a press release from the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, which uses animated gifs to express its points. A quote from the release:
Animated gif of Kristen Wiig saying “No Way”
“House Republicans have introduced a bill that prevents the President from unilaterally shutting down the enforcement of our immigration laws. It does so by allowing state and local governments to enforce federal immigration law.“
Using animated gifs to augment prose text is hardly new, but their use in a press release, especially a release from a government body, is highly unusual. I suppose such use of new media is inevitable, but one must question the wisdom of such use. The gifs certainly convey the conservative outrage at the alleged acts of the Obama administration, but their use also transforms the medium of press release from pronouncement from an august body worthy of journalistic coverage to that of a Facebook post by your crazy cousin Walter. It’s not just what you say, but how you say it that is important.
Liberman’s discussion of the gifs in the release also uses a word that is new to me when he writes, “seriously, this press release was no doubt put together by a couple of sub-millennial staffers.” Sub-millennial refers to those born after the year 2000. While I get his point, I seriously doubt that the committee actually employs teenagers on its staff. It’s more like the staffers were acting like sub-millennials. Or maybe Liberman is using the word to mean those born before the millennial generation, in other words, older people trying desperately to be hip and to rap with the youth today.
Anyhoo, I’ll leave you with this philosophical meditation on the new medium:
Non-animated image of René Magritte’s painting “The Treachery of Images” overlaid the the “gif” symbol with the caption “Ceci n’est pas un gif.”
