A-Z of Unusual Words

Ireland-based graphic designers The Project Twins have created a great set of images illustrating 26 very unusual English words, one for each letter of the alphabet. Pictured above is cacodemonomania, or the pathological belief that one is inhabited by an evil spirit. Below is the German-looking zugzwang, which is a position in which any decision or move will result in problems.

A-Z of Unusual Words   [The Project Twins]

David Foster Wallace’s Dictionary

The Telegraph has a great selection of notes on words by David Foster Wallace. I seem to recall hearing once that these were left as margin notes in his personal dictionary, but I’m not sure if all of these were or not. Here’s his take on the word, ‘Unique’:

This is one of a class of adjectives, sometimes called “uncomparables”, that can be a little tricky. Among other uncomparables are precise, exact, correct, entire, accurate, preferable, inevitable, possible, false; there are probably two dozen in all. These adjectives all describe absolute, non-negotiable states: something is either false or it’s not; something is either inevitable or it’s not. Many writers get careless and try to modify uncomparables with comparatives like more and less or intensives like very. But if you really think about them, the core assertions in sentences like “War is becoming increasingly inevitable as Middle East tensions rise”; “Their cost estimate was more accurate than the other firms’”; and “As a mortician, he has a very unique attitude” are nonsense. If something is inevitable, it is bound to happen; it cannot be bound to happen and then somehow even more bound to happen. Unique already means one-of-a-kind, so the adj. phrase very unique is at best redundant and at worst stupid, like “audible to the ear” or “rectangular in shape”. You can blame the culture of marketing for some of this difficulty. As the number and rhetorical volume of US ads increase, we become inured to hyperbolic language, which then forces marketers to load superlatives and uncomparables with high-octane modifiers (special – very special – Super-special! – Mega-Special!!), and so on. A deeper issue implicit in the problem of uncomparables is the dissimilarities between Standard Written English and the language of advertising. Advertising English, which probably deserves to be studied as its own dialect, operates under different syntactic rules than SWE, mainly because AE’s goals and assumptions are different. Sentences like “We offer a totally unique dining experience”; “Come on down and receive your free gift”; and “Save up to 50 per cent… and more!” are perfectly OK in Advertising English — but this is because Advertising English is aimed at people who are not paying close attention. If your audience is by definition involuntary, distracted and numbed, then free gift and totally unique stand a better chance of penetrating — and simple penetration is what AE is all about. One axiom of Standard Written English is that your reader is paying close attention and expects you to have done the same.

What Words Really Mean: David Foster Wallace’s Dictionary   [The Telegraph]

Up Goer Five

I love this xkcd cartoon: an explanation of the Saturn V rocket using only words which are among the 1000 most commonly-used in the English language. I often feel like I sound like this in foreign languages…

[click to embiggen]

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RACTER

In 1982, William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter programmed a computer in BASIC to write English. They did this by programming in specific grammatical rules and structures. The point of the experiment was to give the impression of communication – what was said was secondary to the fact that it was saying it correctly. While most of it was nonsense, it created (by chance) some surprisingly lucid prose:

More than iron, more than lead, more than gold I need electricity. I need it more than I need lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber. I need it for my dreams.

Bill sings to Sarah. Sarah sings to Bill. Perhaps they will do other dangerous things together. They may eat lamb or stroke each other. They may chant of their difficulties and their happiness. They have love but they also have typewriters. That is interesting.

A crow is a bird, an eagle is a bird, a dove is a bird. They all fly in the night and in the day. They fly when the sky is red and when the heaven is blue. They fly through the atmosphere. We cannot fly. We are not like a crow or an eagle or a dove. We are not birds. But we can dream about them. You can.

A tree or shrub can grow and bloom. I am always the same. But I am clever.

Some of the program’s work was actually published in OMNI magazine. It concluded with some rambling about eating a leotard which was produced by a horde of commissioners, and went on to conclude: “Is that thought understandable to you? … I wonder. Yet a leotard, a commissioner, a single horde, all are understandable in their own fashion. In that concept lies the appalling truth.”

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The Stroop Test

Look at the image. Now try to say aloud the colours of the letters that spell out each word. The second set of words should be a lot more difficult for you (assuming that you speak English). This test was actually used by the CIA during the Cold War with the names of the colours in Russian to check if someone who claims not to speak any Russian is really telling the truth.

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Why Some Languages Sound Faster than Others

Researchers from the Université de Lyon have discovered that, while some languages are spoken at more words-per-minute than others, they all tend do communicate the same amount of information in the same amount of time:

The investigators next counted all of the syllables in each of the recordings and further analyzed how much meaning was packed into each of those syllables. A single-syllable word like bliss, for example, is rich with meaning — signifying not ordinary happiness but a particularly serene and rapturous kind. The single-syllable word to is less information-dense. And a single syllable like the short i sound, as in the word jubilee, has no independent meaning at all.

With this raw data in hand, the investigators crunched the numbers together to arrive at two critical values for each language: the average information density for each of its syllables and the average number of syllables spoken per second in ordinary speech. Vietnamese was used as a reference language for the other seven, with its syllables (which are considered by linguists to be very information-dense) given an arbitrary value of 1.

For all of the other languages, the researchers discovered, the more data-dense the average syllable was, the fewer of those syllables had to be spoken per second — and thus the slower the speech. English, with a high information density of .91, was spoken at an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second. Mandarin, which topped the density list at .94, was the spoken slowpoke at 5.18 syllables per second. Spanish, with a low-density .63, ripped along at a syllable-per-second velocity of 7.82. The true speed demon of the group, however, was Japanese, which edged past Spanish at 7.84, thanks to its low density of .49. Despite those differences, at the end of, say, a minute of speech, all of the languages would have conveyed more or less identical amounts of information.

Why Some Languages Sound Faster than Others   [TIME]

The Musalman

The Musalman is a small Urdu-language daily newspaper based in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. What makes it so special? It’s the world’s last hand-written daily paper.

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Geometry Skills are Innate

Research on an Amazonian tribe called the Mundurucu has shown that, despite having no formalized concept of Euclidean geometry, they still have an equivalent or greater understanding of the concepts than American and French schoolchildren.

The Mundurucu people’s responses to the questions were roughly as accurate as those of the French and US respondents; they seemed to have an intuition about lines and geometric shapes without formal education or even the relevant words.

“The question is to what extent knowledge – in this case, of geometry – is dependent on language,” Dr Pica explained.

“There doesn’t seem to be a causal relation: you have a knowledge of geometry and it’s not because it’s expressed in the language.”

Geometry Skills are Innate, Amazon Tribe Study Suggests   [BBC]

How the King James Bible Changed the Way We Speak

Stephen Tomkins set out to find out just how many phrases ended up in the English language as a result of the King James Bible. His answer? 257:

The Sun says Aston Villa “refused to give up the ghost”. Wendy Richard calls her EastEnders character Pauline Fowler “the salt of the earth”. The England cricket coach tells reporters, “You can’t put words in my mouth.” Daily Mirror fashion pages call Tilda Swinton “a law unto herself”.

Though each of those phrases was begotten of the loins of the English Bible, it’s safe to say that none of those speakers was deliberately quoting the Bible to people they expected to be familiar with its contents.

And while a 2009 survey by Durham University found that only 38% of us know the parable of prodigal son, a recent book by the linguist David Crystal, appropriately called Begat: The King James Bible and the English language, counts 257 phrases from the King James Bible in contemporary English idiom.

King James Bible: How it Changed the Way We Speak [BBC]

Shakespeare in the Original Pronunciation

I never knew this, but apparently there is a fair understanding of the pronunciation of English back in Shakespeare’s time. Now, a University of Kansas professor and his students are putting on Shakespeare’s plays using the original pronunciation for which they were written.

“American audiences will hear an accent and style surprisingly like their own in its informality and strong r-colored vowels,” Meier said. “The original pronunciation performance strongly contrasts with the notions of precise and polished delivery created by John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and their colleagues from the 20th century British theater.”

Meier said audiences will hear word play and rhymes that “haven’t worked for several hundred years (love/prove, eyes/qualities, etc.) magically restored, as Bottom, Puck and company wind the language clock back to 1595.”

“The audience will hear rough and surprisingly vernacular diction, they will hear echoes of Irish, New England and Cockney that survive to this day as ‘dialect fossils.’ And they will be delighted by how very understandable the language is, despite the intervening centuries.”

Professor’s Research Allows Audience to Hear Shakespeare’s Words in His Own Accent [Physorg]