John & Belle Have A Blog

Into the Woobs

Obviously all the X-Mas action is in my post over at CT. Free printables!

Still here?

OK, here's Mei Mei as the ghost of Christmas present:

And here's a story Zoë wrote:

And here's her latest art breakthrough. This work is entitled "Japanese Lady". She's eating sushi, as you can plainly see. The coloring was done in Photoshop. Daddy's job is to make the 'ants' appear so she can color between the lines perfectly.

Exams From Young

Zoë has taken the class "pet" Toffee home for two nights. Thrilling stuff. Here she and Violet are dreaming up adventures for Toffee with their friend Fope; Toffee comes with a blank book in which to record adventures, paste pictures, etc. While this was going on, I had a little discussion with a 9-year-old Singaporean girl who was interested in the whole thing and thought it was a cool project. She wanted to know where Zoë and Violet went to school and when Zoë would be taking her exams (!). I explained that since she would almost certainly be going to an international school she didn't have to take exams (I was thinking of having her sit the Ministry of Education exam so that she could apply to Singaporean schools, but the Singaporean schools are test-oriented in a way that I'm not crazy about). This girl was in week two of her exams, and had just had English (written) today. Last week she did English and Chinese oral comprehension. Crikey. Oh, and there are 40 children and one teacher in her class? This is just plain old local public school; there are semi-private but Singaporean schools I looked at for Zoë which have better teacher/student ratios. Zoë loves school but I feel a high-pressure system like that would just freak her right out. There is a new Chinese International School in town with instruction in Mandarin and English and I'm checking it out this week. I know if I could go back in time and give myself the ability to speak fluent Mandarin I would totally do it, so I may as well try to do it for Zoë. Violet can't start Mandarin class at her pre-K for six months or so.

Just Because You're Paranoid/Don't Mean They're Not After You

Ezra has a good point:

There needs to be some sort of rule for the Bush administration's tendency to eventually, inevitably justify the most intensely cynical interpretation of their actions. If Tappers want to propose names and formulations for the rule in the comments section, I'll pick the best one and use it. My nominee is Bush's Razor: Given a possible universe of explanations for a particular administration action, the most morally pessimistic and politically cynical will inevitably be proven correct.

Get out there with your winning suggestions, J&BB readers! This is what my mom thinks about everything and she's tediously right, all the time.

And Critias Was There, And You Were There, And You

I had a bad dream last night that I couldn't remember what the word "banausic" meant. As nightmares go it's pretty, um, run of the mill. Not exactly a noble nightmare, if you know what I mean.

Giovedi: Gnocca

This article made me want to go to Nice (I've never been anywhere in France but Paris, and that on bumped-from-the-plane stays en route to or from Italy). It also made me wonder what the hell the French name for gnocchi is:

But do not, under any circumstances, skip the classic niçois version of gnocchi (its name, even in French, cannot be printed here), made with Swiss chard and served with one of three sauces: gorgonzola, pistou or tomato.

Ummm. Even in Italian (in Rome, anyway), "gnocca" is slang for, shall we say, female genitalia? A friend of mine used to make me laugh with tales of his pal who, in the manner of local Roman restaurants, would announce a special of the day involving a stay at his gf's house: "Giovedi: gnocca." But, so, what the hell is the Niçoise that it's a) so offensive and b) so transparent to the average Times reader as to be unprintable? It can't merely strongly resemble a foul French word for ladybits, since that would presumably make it past the censor which caters to the monolingual (wait, that's starting to sound dirty too). What, they're called "les cunts"? I am really at a loss, and Google is either not helpful at all or helping me in ways I kind of don't want to be helped, if you know what I mean. Not by a robot, anyway. Wait, not by Google, I mean. Well-travelled JBB readers, enlighten me.

Virtue

This is a set of visual aids, to accompany a Valve post. Basically, the question is: when did 'virtue' retire to lady's bedrooms; when did it start being so silly?

Norriswatch!

"The Justice Riders realized that whatever they would do or become they would not tolerate evil, oppression, or injustice." (via Bookslut)

The book description is anaphorically unbuckled: "From the gold and silver mines of California and Nevada to the wide open plains of Texas, the American West was a wild frontier in the 1870s where dangerous outlaws pursued devilish dreams of fortune. But there were other men of simple faith, unsung Civil War heroes who adventured west to bring justice to places that had none. Those they called "The Justice Riders."

So they called the places 'the Justice Riders'?

Mixological Balderdash

Amusing New Yorker talk of the town about made-up words in the dictionary; semantic spring guns set against lexicographic poachers. Who knew the fields of our language need to be mined with whimsy, to ensure profit to those who enclose it and mark its borders for profit? (via Languagehat.) Oddly, no mention of the game, Balderdash.

If asked to define 'esquivalience' - but no one ever asks me these things - it would have been more a mash-up of this and this. So 'esquivalience' would be something like a key technical term in a scientific theory of the basis of different reactions to space-age pop.

It's Saturday night, so here's a mixological balderdash variant. Zoë - in the course of telling me my bedtime story - invented a drink: the battleship swish. Some of the superheros in the story liked the drink, some didn't. Now what do you think the ingredients of a battleship swish must be? (Scott is obviously going to suggest: same as a zombie, with Jägermeister substituted for rum. Or something. Or maybe that would have to be a 'thanks but no thanks for not being a zombie'.)

There should also be a 'virgin battleship swish' for kids. That's only fair to the inventor.

I have no idea how Zoë figured out 'battleship swish' sounds vaguely like a mixed drink name. I drink beer, Belle drinks wine. Gee whiz, we don't take the kid to bars. Some sort of mixological deep grammar?

Punditocracy

From Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm:

As early as his 1922 book Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann had come to believe that the world was so complex that political decisions would best be left to a specialized class of experts. Three years later the Scopes "monkey trial" confirmed his conviction that a public uninstructed by expert opinion would succumb to the tyranny of the majority - the very worst tyranny of all. Ideologically, the columnist vacillated from decade to decade, sometimes coming out liberal in foreign affairs and conservative in domestic, sometimes vice versa. But always, always, his thinking betrayed a constant; that he and his fellow pundits - Hindi for "wise men," a title first given to him by an admiring Henry Luce - were the nation's best defense against the terror of the mob.

This page says 'pundit' entered English circulation circa. 1816. I never knew.

Thinks

Minor follow-up to think/thing kerfuffle. Somehow I forgot to adduce the best bit of literary evidence on behalf of the nominative basis of the former view.

You've got another thin* coming

Last night's post got everyone opinionated up. Let's try again. There are two kinds of people. People who think the phrase is "you've got another thing coming." As in the Judas Priest song. And people who think the phrase is "you've got another think coming." As in the Ross McDonald Novel, The Zebra Striped Hearse (p. 41 or so, if I recall.) People seem to divide pretty evenly in my experience. But googlefight gives it to 'thing'. Most of the top hits for 'think' are people denying that 'thing' is right. (I'm really not sure what's going on here, but clearly they support 'think'.)

I'm a 'think' man. Belle is a 'thing' lady.

Begging the Question

Fascinating study of blog ecology (PDF) via Kevin Drum. No thoughts, but here's a language nit: "The denser linking pattern of conservatives begged the question of whether the conservative bloggers had a more uniform voice than the liberal ones did." Philosophers are always bothered by this usage. We prefer to reserve 'beg the question' for venerable 'presuppose your conclusion'. But there is considerable pressure in favor of the shift. Not only is it clear how the phrase could mean what these authors mean by it, but 'x demands that we ask y' is just plain something you often want to say. And 'begs the question' is really better than 'x demands that we ask y'. "The denser linking pattern of conservatives demands that we ask whether the conservative bloggers had a more uniform voice than the liberal ones did." That makes it sound like I'm too worked up, like our little puzzle has just gotta vault to the front of the line. But why doesn't 'begging' sound irrelevantly fawning? Probably because logicians have pawed all the connotations off it. Now that it's worn smooth and servicable, all these folks want to take it from us, damnit. Should I give in? Worry about something important? What do you think?

No, More Annoying Than That

You know what's even more annoying? When you pedantically correct someone's grammar but you're totally wrong, and then someone else points that out?

THE EVEN MORE ANNOYING THING. Kieran Healy says here:

The odd part, though, is that the people who call me, whoever they are....

See, the really annoying part is us folks who scream "whomever"! Whomever! Learn English! It's not a secret! Whomever!

And that sort of thing.

Read The Rest Scale: whatever.

I expect to lose 500 readers or friends to one here. Pretty much no one knows from "whom" or "who" ever. English; it's an old hobby.

The relative pronoun takes its NUMBER from the antecedent and its CASE from its role in the subordinate clause. So, because "people" is plural "whoever" is plural (as can be seen from the plural verb "are"). BUT, because "whoever" is the subject of the verb in the subordinate clause it is in the subjective (or nominative) case, NOT the objective (or accusative).

Compare:
The people who called me, whom I had met before...

A good rule of thumb is to replace the relative clause with an ordinary sentence containing the third person pronoun; if you would say he or they, use who (-ever). If you would say him or them, use whom. Now, you may think that "whoever" in the clause "whoever they are" is the predicate, and that "they" is the subject. So what? It still shouldn't be in the objective case. Thus: "it was she" not "it was her."

Jello-Wrestling's Right Out, Then?

It's generally better not to wander off into definitional thickets by trying to determine what things are games and what sports. (I seem to recall some bloggers such as Matthew Yglesias and Will Baude were musing on this recently, perhaps on the old chestnut, is chess a game? Or a sort of mathematico-logical puzzle to which we have not found the solution? But I'm too lazy to look it up.) It's much more advisable to gesture broadly in some late-Wittgenstein, vague hand-waving way at some disjunct class of things. This will protect you from ever getting yourself into the position Dan Drezner has here, in which he commits himself to the claim that a hot-dog eating contest is a sport, while boxing is not. You see, the former has an undisputed winner, based on solid, numerical facts about hot dogs consumed. The latter is tainted by an unacceptably large admixture of judging. I judge this result an unpromising advertisement for a theory of sports.

Terra incognita

I'm not usually the sensitive one, but - following up Belle's post - isn't this sort of funny?

Sometime toward the middle of your pregnancy (or even earlier), you may notice the muscles of your uterus tightening for anywhere from 30 to 60 seconds. Not all women feel these random, usually painless contractions, which get their quirky name from John Braxton Hicks, an English doctor who first described them in 1872.

What are the odds that an extremely noticeable phenomenon - something that (oh, let's say) half of all women who have reached childbearing age have felt - was first described by some English guy in 1872? Yes, no doubt medically valuable for someone to get it down in writing at long last. But surely you don't get to name such a thing after yourself - as its discoverer - if you are that lucky guy who had a pen handy. (What are the odds that Hicks didn't have a wife who beat him to at least a couple descriptive syllables?)

By the by, I actually let Columbus clean off the hook on the old 'Indians there first, so he didn't discover' charge. Clear enough to me you can discover without actually being first to know. (Even possible to be last to know. I can discover that everyone is engaging in an elaborate plot to kill me, when I notice the knife in my chest.) But I don't think it is at all likely that Hicks was the first to describe the entities more primordially denoted as the 'it's coming, it's coming, wait it's not' contractions, familiar to midwives around the globe since time immemorial.

OK, so Columbus got to name large parts of it after himself, even though millions got there first. But that's just politics. The body should be different. What's the name for the space between your big and second toes? Doesn't have one, does it? I am first to describe the (ahem) Holbonic greater interpedodigital cavity (or region, if you prefer).

Re-Inventing the Wheel

Interesting article today in the NYT Science section about new attempts to use mathematical tools developed for biology to do comparative linguistics. The authors of the new study have come up with a very early date for PIE (that's proto-Indo-European, to you and me): 8,700 years ago. Traditional dates based on older methods agree on about 5,500 years ago. Linguists are skeptical after failed attempts at "glottochronology", which involves comparing how many cognates languages share from a core group of words. This objection also seems pretty telling:

The earliest wheels appear in the archaeological record around 5,500 years ago. So the proto-Indo-European language could not have started to split into its daughter tongues much before that date, some linguists argue [because they all have cognates for "wheel" which are descended from a comon source word]. If the wheel was invented after the split, each language would have a different or borrowed word for it.

Still, it could be true. Dr. Gray (one of the authors) argues that each language could have independently derived their word for wheel from the PIE root for "to roll." I'm not sure how plausible that is, but it's not obviously crazy. Anyway, it's food for thought.

It's also cool that scientists have found a new planetoid, or Kuiper Belt object, or maybe even wandering Oort Cloud object. But Sedna? What's with abandoning Latin and Greek mythology for some native American name? I like a little onomastic consistency in my solar system, thank you very much. How about Dis or something? Orcus? Aidoneus? Minthe, even? (She was a concubine of Hades' whom Persephone turned into a mint plant. The things you had to watch out for in ancient Greece, I'm telling you. She's probably no good because "Sedna" is bright red.) I don't think we've seen any features on Pluto, so it can't be we've used up the whole cast of the underworld on craters and suchlike. C'mon, science guys! Don't go all Kwakiutl on us, there's no sense in it.

Can I Borrow That?

Fontana Labs' students think he looks dumb.

...one of my students thinks, well, maybe he won't notice if I paste whole paragraphs from the Stanford Encyclopedia into my essay. He won't get the least bit suspicious when a first-year college student quotes from the original latin. I'm sure he doesn't know how to use Google.

This reminds me of a case John had once. One of his students plagiarized something from a website so sloppily that the cut-and-pasted sections were actually in a different color and font from the rest of the text. Plagiarism so extreme that it approaches citation!

Back in the day, when I was at Columbia, one of my profs had a frat boy student plagiarize from some Edwardian English author, with the result that the paper included an extended cricket metaphor. My prof didn't know the source (and this was when students had to go to the library to find things to steal; paradoxically a more secure undertaking), so he just called the student in and asked him to explain the rules of cricket. A full, Perry Mason-style confession ensued.