Forsooth

Verily, xkcd.

Literally

I literally love this comic.

Tautology

xkcd is xkcd.

Familiarity

On the other hand, familiarity also breeds contempt. Which I suppose means that acceptance and contempt must be cousins.

Supreme

I love this video. I love the song too, but I prefer the French version. "Si les plus belles sont déjà prises / Si les plus beaux sont comme ils disent / Que deviens-tu?"

Glourious

I watched Inglourious Basterds a couple weeks back, and spent great parts of the movie laughing at the over-the-top... accents. (You thought I was going to say "over-the-top violence" there, dintcha?) A recent New Yorker magazine had a brilliant article about Tim Monich, the dialogue coach who taught Brad Pitt his hee-larious Aldo Raine accent. Great article (sadly not available online in full). Great movie.

Rights/Duties

I got this link from (strangely enough) a Republican friend from Colorado. It's a speech by PJ O'Rourke at the opening of the Cato Institute's headquarters in 1993. As a fan of great speeches (I've plundered the bank at American Rhetoric), I'm loving this one.

There are so many quotable nuggets here, I don't know where to start. But I reckon I'll go with this:

"There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences."

Golf clap.

Müller Möller Miller

Soccernet are running another instant classic by German soccer writer Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger (soon to be Uli Hesse, as the story reveals), where he looks at the origins of German soccer players' names. You'll never look at Franz Beckenbauer the same way again...

Two Cultures

In my online wanderings I stubbed my toe on a 1984 (the year, not the book) (maybe) essay by Thomas Pynchon called Is It OK To Be A Luddite?. It's a belated response/timely reassessment of CP Snowe's lecture, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, which was (quoting PYnchon now) "notable for its warning that intellectual life in the West was becoming polarized into "literary" and "scientific" factions, each doomed not to understand or appreciate the other."

Snowe's theory was eventually hit over the fence by Stephen Jay Gould, but Pynchon's essay is still well worth a read.

In typical style, he name-checks literary characters like Frankenstein and Brainy Smurf and funny-named real people like Ned Lud and Arnold Toynbee, talks (a lot) about the sciences, and then (even more) about the arts, and goes on long, rambling tangents where those two cultures don't just meet - they run away together for a dirty weekend in Mexico.

Eleven Wise

Mental Floss has a list up detailing the origins of all 30 NHL team names. You've got to love the story behind the Pittsburgh Penguins:

"The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette sponsored a name-the-team contest, but Carol McGregor, the wife of one of the franchise’s part owners, Jack McGregor, was the one responsible for the nickname. In his book, Pittsburgh Penguins: The Official History of the First 30 Years, Bob Grove describes how Carol McGregor came up with the name. “I was thinking of something with a P. And I said to Jack, ‘What do they call the Civic Arena?’ And he said, ‘The Big Igloo.’ So I thought, ice... Pittsburgh... Penguins.” More than 700 of the 26,000 contest entries were for Penguins."

Now all I need is someone to explain the stories behind some of West Africa's soccer teams. The Ghanaian Premier League includes teams like Hearts of Oak and the brilliantly-named Eleven Wise, while Nigeria's Premier League includes teams like Kano Pillars, Ranchers Bees and the famous Wikki Tourists.

Makes English football pioneer Sheffield Wednesday (so named because that's the day they used to play cricket) sound boring by comparison.

Benëath

I'm trying to pre-empt the effects of this graph.

Or preempt.

Or preëmpt.

Dammit.

I'm trying to forestall the effects of this graph.

Title

I've finished reading Umberto Eco's classic The Name Of The Rose, and there was something in the author's notes at the end of the book that got me to thinking...

While talking about the title of the novel, Eco says that "a title should muddle the reader's thoughts; not regiment them". So a title that gives the entire plot away (like, say, Dick And Jane Get A New Puppy) isn't doing its job as well as one that confuses the daylights out of you.

Like, say, Chinatown.

Or Reservoir Dogs.

Bad Command Or File Name

A recent New York Times On Language column spoke about how the word "FAIL" has crept into the vernacular (or the parlance of our times, or whatever linguists call it). Somebody then wrote a letter claiming that its modern origins come from the old DOS command "Abort, Retry, Fail?", which I remember as being "Abort, Retry, Ignore?".

I was thinking that my memory was doing an Epic Fail, until I discovered "Ignore" was the old-old system. Which is, I guess, a Minor Scale Fail.

Block

I love today's Non Sequitur. It reminds me of this old Calvin & Hobbes classic, which I think every writer has saved somewhere on their computer (if not pasted up on their fridge)...

(s)he?

Here's the final (yeah, right) word in the he/she Caster Semenya gender debate: Slate's latest Hang Up And Listen podcast reveals that

CASTER SEMENYA

is an anagram of

YES A SECRET MAN.

Chinglish

Tragic news from the BBC: "The authorities in the Chinese city of Shanghai are starting a campaign to try to spot and correct badly phrased English on signs in public places."

I'm outraged. I have long time made love for the strange phrasings of Engrish and its variant forms. Now the Chinese Secret Police want to shut me down.

Luckily for us all, one brave man is leading the backlash against the backlash against Chinglish.

Go check out his site.

Five zombies. Four bullets. Two zombies.

Ernest Hemingway once wrote an entire story in just six words: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." He called it his best work (and it's hard to disagree). To celebrate artistic brevity, Wired magazine ran a collection of six-word stories in late 2006, featuring minor classics like

Kirby had never eaten toes before.
– Kevin Smith

Nevertheless, he tried a third time.
– James P. Blaylock

There were only six words left.
– Gregory Maguire

... and my favourite

Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time
– Alan Moore

There's an ever-expanding collection up at SixWordStories.net.

Go there. Waste time. Enjoy yourself.

Wackford Squeers

It's not often that a book review is more fun to read than the book, but this might be one of those rare occasions. New York magazine's Sam Anderson has written a scathing – but beautifully written – review of Thomas Pynchon's new novel, Inherent Vice.

Sample sentence: "Every time he turns around he runs into a key player with a silly name (Japonica Fenway, Trillium Fortnight, Fritz Drybeam, Sauncho Smilax), who proceeds to do a cartoonish turn, dump some helpful exposition, and pass the quirk baton to the next silly name, who repeats the cycle."

Me? I don't so much mind the silly names. When Charles Dickens did silly names, it worked... and the world would be an emptier place without the likes of Ebenezer Scrooge, Bob Cratchit, Oliver Twist, Samuel Pickwick, Wackford Squeers, Martin Chuzzlewit and Uriah Heep.

@

It could be a zoo. Instead, the dog (Russian), snail (Italian), mouse (Taiwan Chinese), monkey (Croatian), spider-monkey (German), duckling (Greek) and worm (Hungarian) are just international names for the humble @ sign.

That's better than the « » signs (called angle quotes by some, chevrons by others). In French, those are called "Little Williams".

Fingerspitzengefühl

True story: I just came out of a casting session for handsome male models.
Full disclosure: I was on the editorial selection panel, and was not one of the models.
Why I'm telling you this: Because it reminded me of the German word Backpfeifengesicht, which is included in an amusing/educational story on Cracked.com, called The 10 Coolest Foreign Words The English Language Needs.
It's up there with 8 Racist Words You Use Every Day...

PS. I've always liked Fingerspitzengefühl.