I was looking at domain names using Instant Domain Search, and I tried some domains consisting of words (or noises) that are commonly repeated over and over. Or rather, if you hear a repeated word or noise, chances are good that the word or noise is one of these words. My findings are presented below. Each item in the list is a word followed by the smallest number of repetitions of that word that is still available as a domain name (.com). I call this number the word’s Available Domain Echo Number (AEDN). For instance, “me” has an AEDN of 8, meaning that the shortest available domain name consisting of repeated “me”s is “memememememememe.com”. Interestingly, the URLs consisting of 9 and 10 “me”s are taken. Here is the list:
- Me: 8
- Now: 4
- Shit: 5
- Fuck: 7
- Ha: 15
- No: 9
- Yes: 6
- More: 6
- Oh: 5
- Badger: 6
- Spam: 5
- Echo: 4
As a control group, here are some words that are not commonly repeated, and their associated AEDNs:
- With: 4
- Spoon: 3
- Grim: 2
- Cheek: 3
This proves conclusively that the items in the first list have longer AEDNs than the items in the second list, as of this writing.
I found this in Lawrence Lessig’s column in this month’s Wired:
Good journalism likes two sides to every story. Lazy journalism fails to distinguish between objective sources and interested parties – and this issue has interested parties aplenty, from industry-funded think tanks to hired PR firms, feeding the press the disinformation it needs to make the story sound balanced. This is the media’s own inconvenient truth – that the institution charged with reporting the facts is so easily manipulated by those whose “salary depends upon [our] not understanding” the facts (to reuse Gore’s favorite Upton Sinclair quote). The result is the perfect storm for obfuscation. You can’t buy the story outright, but you can twist it enough that the truth is no longer recognizable.
It reminded me of a recent Rockridge article, Occupation: The Inconvenient Truth About Iraq:
It is time to tell an inconvenient truth about Iraq: it is an occupation, not a war. In wars, armies fight to dominate land. The US won the war three years ago when Bush said, “Mission Accomplished”. Then the occupation started, and our troops were not trained or equipped for an occupation under predictably hostile circumstances. Finally getting the courage to tell the truth that the US is an occupying force drastically changes the picture in Iraq. You cannot “win” an occupation. “Cut and run” does not apply to an occupation.
Regardless of the effect Gore’s movie has on the global warming debate, it looks like he’s definitely given liberals a new frame. When he titled his movie, he had to pick one aspect of his global warming spiel to stand for the whole thing. He chose to focus on the idea that global warming is a fact that no one wants to acknowledge. Now it looks like people are taking that frame and running with it, painting every liberal position as a brave stand by the reality-based community. I googled the phrase “another inconvenient truth” and got 47,000 hits. People are labeling all sorts of things as inconvenient truths: discarded electronics flood landfills with toxic components, urban gridlock is insoluble, dangerous chemicals are making kids sick. It’s a crowded bandwagon.
It waters down Gore’s message a bit, but if the folks working for universal health-care, election reform and civil liberties (etc.) can take advantage of his traction in the media, maybe they can get some rhetorical unity and finally get taken seriously as reality’s standard-bearers. I mean, when people talk about getting new frames into public debate, this is what they mean: the perfect storm of a compelling idea, a catchy name for it, and famous people to disseminate it.
I wanted to say that it’s a phrase best suited to liberal usage — that we own the phrase. However, googling the phrase “real inconvenient truth” results in 42,000 hits, most of which seem to be right-wing rebuttals along the lines of “You think that’s an inconvenient truth? The real inconvenient truth is X”. Funny thing is, most of the X’s are something like “global warming is a hoax”, which would not be inconvenient at all if it were true. So maybe we do own it after all.
Just thought it was interesting.
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Pam on Big Brass Blog took a look at some of the Free Republic reactions to a story about public breastfeeding. It’s pretty amazing. There needs to be a word for those times when you know damn well that some awful thing/idea is out there in the world, and yet you gawk with fascination when a specific example of that awful thing/idea is put in front of you. Intellectually, I know that somewhere in this wide nation of diverse opinions, there are people who are not merely discomfited by the sight of a woman breastfeeding in public, but are actively and vocally replused by it. But it’s still jarring to see that faraway, abstract stupidity manifest itself onto my computer screen in a specific stupid string of stupid words:
“These arrogant, brazen displays have brought this outcry on themselves. The public is tired of seeing Mother’s with babies hanging off of them everywhere. What? Is it some badge of courage, for a woman to nurse in public and then DARE someone to say something?”
Is there a vocabulary to describe the fact that I react just as strongly to this stuff as if I didn’t know it was already out there? The knowledge that Freeper opinions like these represent a tiny, tiny minority of people doesn’t quell it either.
Anyway. Further down, Pam MST3K’s one of the Freeper comments thusly:
“Nursing a child in public is not the same thing as peeing in public and don’t you think the gawkers will be more interested in the cheerleaders shaking their enhanced mammaries on field than some kid having lunch? [LOLOLOLOLOLOL]” (red emphasis in original. By which I mean, Pam’s post, not the original Freeper comment she is commenting on.)
I’ve seen the online expression “LOLOLOL” to express lots of laughter before, but it never struck me how strange it is. Like, it seems that “LOL” has to go through some complex linguistic/semantic origami before it can become “LOLOLOL”. I don’t remember the jargon for most of these transformations, but in essence, it’s a very strange way to play with an acronym.
Consider: “LOL” stands for something, but it’s used so frequently that it no longer needs to be unpacked by readers; I read “LOL” and I no longer think of it as standing for “Laughing Out Loud”. It’s just this word that means laughter, just like the word “laughter” does. It has become a real word in the minds of the digitally literate (much like “ATM” or “VCR”). The story of Pinocchio comes to mind for reasons I can’t quite articulate.
But then what must have happened (I think) is that even though no one ever says “LOL” aloud, they see the similarities in rhythm between the sound “ell-oh-ell” and the more traditional onomatopoeiac “ha-ha-ha”. The term “LOL” is associated not just with the idea of laughter, but with the sound of laughter. So then it follows “logically” that if you want to express more laughter with “LOL”, you add more syllables on just like you would if you were using “ha ha ha”. That’s my first guess, anyway.
My linguist colleagues remind me that the term for this is reduplication — where a syllable is repeated for emphasis or to otherwise change the meaning of the word. Doesn’t happen too much in English as far as I know, but it’d be like if I said, “my computer is the shiznit” and you said, “well my computer is the shiziznit.”
So it seems like “LOL” braves the gauntlet of idiomatization, onomatopoeia and reduplication to become “LOLOLOL”. When it’s not idiomatized — when the original meaning of the acronym remains intact — that’s when we get “ROFLMAO“, which is derived from the unpacked words of “LOL” and not from “LOL” itself. I’m realizing it’s also harder to type and is therefore maybe not long for this world.
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The Language Log’s discussion of umami got me thinking about Berlin and Kay’s research on basic color terms. An explanatory quote from their post:
[H]ere’s a quote from I.E.T. de Araujo, M. L. Kringelbach, E. T. Rolls, and P. Hobden, Representation of Umami Taste in the Human Brain, J Neurophysiol 90: 313-319, 2003:
Recently, the taste referred to by the Japanese word umami has come to be recognized as a “fifth taste” … (after sweet, salt, bitter, and sour; umami captures what is sometimes described as the taste of protein). In fact, multidimensional scaling methods in humans … have shown that the taste of glutamate [as its sodium salt monosodium glutamate (MSG)] cannot be reduced to any of the other four basic tastes. Specific receptors for glutamate in lingual tissue with taste buds have been also recently found. Umami taste is found in a diversity of foods like fish, meats, milk, tomatoes, and some vegetables, and is produced by the glutamate ion and also by some ribonucleotides (including inosine and guanosine nucleotides), which are present in these foods.
So Japanese has a word for a whole dimension of taste that goes almost unrecognized in English. This is a great example of cultural relativity, which would claim that the categories by which we define tastes are different because we’re lacking a word for a certain basic taste.
One could make the same argument about colors. English speakers have a set of basic colors like red, yellow, blue and orange. All other colors seem to come from those colors: teal is a “type of” blue. Who’s to say that another culture can’t have teal as one of its basic colors, and that the color we call blue is, for them, a type of teal? To put it another way:
“There is a continuous gradation of color from one end of the [color] spectrum to another. Yet an American describing it will list the hues such as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple–or something of the kind. There is nothing either in the spectrum or human perception of it which would compel its division in this way.” (Gleason, 1961, from Palmer, 1999)
In the same way, there’s nothing in the “spectrum” of flavors that would incline a language to divide it up into the sweet/bitter/salty/sour classification we’ve got in English.
Or is there?!?!
Well, the cultural relativity of color took a beating from Berlin and Kay, who basically discovered that every culture has approximately the same set of basic colors. There’s no culture that teaches its kids about fuschia and ochre before it teaches them about red and blue. Red and blue are universally important. This discovery about categorization has a basis in the structure of our visual hardware. If we have neurons in our retinas that respond to red, yellow, green and blue (which it looks like we do), that would explain why those colors are so salient for us. In other words, it seems like our retinal receptors do much of the categorization for us, and so our basic color categories are determined by the fact that we’re human, not by the fact that we speak English.
But the same setup has been found in the biology of taste, and yet taste words don’t exhibit the same phenomena. There are receptors for five types of taste, so every language should have around 5 basic flavor words. What gives?
There are essential differences between sight and taste. Flavor has always been a bit trickier to describe than color. Colors can be arranged on a spectrum, tastes cannot. Still, it’s hard to see how these differences account for the difference in categorization.
Another possibility: Berlin and Kay talked about languages that gain new color terms as the language develops. Perhaps the addition of “savory” to our taste lexicon is a step in the evolution of English, or something. Again, that sounds iffy.
It’s terribly inconsistent and I demand to know who is responsible.
Update: I must be new at this. (Palmer, 1999) is Vision Science by Stephen Palmer (MIT Press). Encyclopedic textbook of all things vision-related (”visionary”?).