dreamer_easy: (snow kate)
Stephen Fry explains what he would say if he was 'confronted by God' (The Independent, 31 January 2015). "Now, if I died and it was Pluto, Hades, and if it was the 12 Greek gods then I would have more truck with it, because the Greeks didn’t pretend to not be human in their appetites, in their capriciousness, and in their unreasonableness... they didn’t present themselves as being all-seeing, all-wise, all-kind, all-beneficent, because the god that created this universe, if it was created by god, is quite clearly a maniac."

Indigenous youths 24 times more likely to be in detention, Amnesty International report finds (ABC, 2 June 2015) | Fact Check: Amnesty International claim on 'shocking' Indigenous child incarceration rates checks out (ABC, 19 June 2015)

Australian prison population grows 20 per cent in last decade (SMH, 29 January 2016)

Children from Indigenous communities more likely to suffer unintentional injuries, study finds (ABC, 19 February 2016). "We're not sufficiently investing in appropriately targeted preventative programs for Indigenous children."

'Blackbirding' shame yet to be acknowledged in Australia (SMH, 3 June 2015). For most of my life I thought slavery was something that other countries had done. Only in recent years have I learned about the work we forcibly extracted from Indigenous Australians and South Sea Islanders.

White man in the photo is the 'third hero' that night in 1968 (San Francisco Globe, 9 June 2016). Australian Olympic athlete Peter Norman, his gesture of support for John Carlos and Tommie Smith as they made their Black Power salute, and what it cost him.

The McDonald's Hot Coffee Case (Consumer Attorneys of California Web site). "It is the case that gave rise to the attacks on 'frivolous lawsuits' in the United States. Almost everyone seems to know about it. And there's a good chance everything you know about it is wrong."

TSA's 95% failure rate shows airport security is a charade (Los Angeles Times, 5 June 2015). It's just for show.

A Social History of Jell-O Salad: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon (Serious Eats, 29 August 2015)

Are you a grammar pedant? This might be why (GA, 29 March 2016). "Introverts, it turns out, are more likely to get annoyed at both typos and grammos." Not this little black introverted duck. Mistakes happen. The nitpicking is far more irritating.

Finally, on violence.

If ya think that's all of the backed-up links, you are sorely mistaken. XD
dreamer_easy: (snow kate)
Implicit racism in academia (Mindhacks, 7 September 2016): "Implicit bias" exists "where there is a contradiction between people's egalitarian beliefs and their racist actions." The question is, how aware is each of us of our own biased behaviour?

Millennials Are Less Racially Tolerant Than You Think (New York Magazine, 8 January 2015): "The fact of the matter is that millennials who are white — that is, members of the group that has always had the most regressive racial beliefs, and who will constitute a majority of U.S. voters for at least another couple of decades — are, on key questions involving race, no more open-minded than their parents. The only real difference, in fact, is that they think they are."

What Goes Through Your Mind: On Nice Parties and Casual Racism (the-toast.net, 5 January 2016). "For the last time, I consider defending myself. Just giving voice to the confusion and anger and mortification I feel boiling in the pit of my stomach. But I know, in an instant that reminds me of countless others like it, that I'm not that person. The truth sinks in: I am the only one who can make sure that everybody keeps having a good time."

Lassana Bathily, Muslim Employee At Kosher Market, Saved Several People During Paris Hostage Situation (Huffington Post, 12 January 2015). "We are brothers. It's not a question of Jews, of Christians or of Muslims. We're all in the same boat, we have to help each other to get out of this crisis."

Some young Asian Australians seek tanned skin, risk skin cancer: sun habits study (ABC, 16 January 2016) As a Kpop fan I'm constantly reminded of how highly prized light skin is in Korea and China, so the fact that peer pressure is leading Asian Australians to tan was eye-opening. I think in the West a tan is high-status because it indicates plenty of time for outdoor leisure, so you're wealthy. In the East light skin is high-status because it indicates you don't have to work outdoors, so you're wealthy - but there's also the disturbing impact of colonialism; not just lighter skin, but more Western-looking features are valued.

Believing that life is fair might make you a terrible person (GA, 4 February 2015): "Faced with injustice, we'll try to alleviate it – but, if we can't, we'll do the next best thing, psychologically speaking: blame the victims of the injustice." ("I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all." - Ecclesiastes 9:11)

Brutal Reality: When police wear body cameras, citizens are much safer (Slate, 10 April 2014). "The presence of cameras induces an absence of violence." | Investigation of 5 cities finds body cameras usually help police (Fusion, 8 December 2014). "One key problem: officers control the record button." | Why American Cops Kill So Many Compared To European Cops (Huffington Post, 30 November 2015). In short: inferior training. (Though I also have another theory.)

Fact check: Does halal certification fund terrorism? (ABC, 21 April 2015). SPOILER: no.

Language more important to Australian national identity than birthplace, poll finds (ABC, 29 April 2016) "Overwhelmingly, Australians believe that the ability to speak English is important to being Australian; while 92 per cent agree that language is important, 65 per cent see it as being 'very important', with only 27 per cent responding 'fairly important'."(ABC, 29 April 2016) Why are Anglophones so obsessed with everyone being able to speak English? Is it because, unlike most of the world, we can only understand one language?

Bubble economy (medium.com, 13 July 2016). Negative gearing, play money, and slavery.

How to make sure your aid donations really help after a natural disaster (RN, 7 May 2015)

There was once a fifth suit of playing card (because winning with four wasn't hard enough) (shortlist.com, 4 March 2016) There's a mention of IIRC "the four of green eagles" in IIRC Joe Haldeman's Star Trek novel Planet of Judgment, which I had thought for decades was just a weird dream sequence thing until I stumbled across this article (the card, not the novel).

Turbulence: Everything You Need To Know (askthepilot.com). All is ease and comfort.

Lots and lots more of this sort of thing hanging around in my bookmarks. But now it is time for Animaniacs and bed.
dreamer_easy: (snow kate)
Wikipedia: "Mirotic" is a newly coined term... that combines the Korean miro (미로), meaning "maze", and the English suffix "-tic".

Oh my gawd - it means "labyrinthine"! With cheeky echoes of the English "erotic", of course. A sexeh title for a sexeh song. (So sexeh, in fact, that it famously earned the ire of the South Korean censors.)



Fairly basic video. Plenty of of boys being tied up and tormented, though, if you like that sort of thing. (The band is DBSK, or TVXQ!, or Tohoshinki, depending on where you are and which language you're using. Apparently they could've instead been called "The Whale That Eats Legends" or "The Five Viscerae", so I think they lucked out there.)

ETA: "Labyrinthine" is a great word, and so is "mazy". Somewhere in a Tanith Lee novel she uses "styxy" instead of the more usual "Stygian", getting in connotations of "sexy" and perhaps "stinky" the same way "mirotic" hints at "erotic". Try this at home, kids.
dreamer_easy: (snow kate)
Britishisms and the Britishisation of American English. Looks like objections to "Britishisms" are based on their higher status (and thus pretentiousness) and not their lower status, as with Americanisms.

In the absence of proper language study I continue to squee at puzzling small things out - for example, the relationship between the Korean jjang, "boss, best" and the Mandarin Dui Zhang "leader". (The Duizhang himself, Kris from Exo-M, reportedly talks in his sleep in three languages. How cool is that?!) Speaking of Exo-M, they were amongst several Kpop bands who recently performed in Jakarta. The press call was a tasty salad of languages, including Korean, English, and Bahasa - you can hear Kris speaking a little of the last two here, much to the delight of the crowd (and the commenters on YouTube :).

ETA much later: the slang 짱 jjang may come from 장, as in 사장 "boss", and 장 in turn comes from the Chinese 長 zhǎng "chief".

Moar stuff:

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/light-is-fading-for-indigenous-languages-20120922-26dik.html
http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2010/04/14/the-big-bang-theory-sheldons-chinese
http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/mobiles/braille-app-frees-keyboard-slaves-20120222-1tmnz.html
http://catb.org/jargon/html/index.html (The Jargon File)
http://www.mandarintools.com/pyconverter_old.html (Chinese Romanization Converter)
dreamer_easy: (books 2)
These darn things fascinate me:



Obviously it's useful for advertisers to make their slogans etc as punchy as possible, for example doing away with awkward auxiliary verbs ("Grow your knowledge", suggests Oxford University Press) and curtailing adverbs ("Shop Smart").

Now, if you're a hardline grammarian all this may make your skin crawl. But I can't help feeling that, say, Apple's "Think Different" actually conveys a different shade of meaning to "think differently" - not just "think in a different way" but something more like "make difference your goal". In which case, "different" would be an adjective, not an uninflected adverb.

But what part of speech is the "fresh" in "eat fresh"? It's a brilliant slogan, two equally stressed syllables with similar vowels, which instantly convey what Subway is offering, ie, salad. Surely it can't be a Manx version of "eat freshly" - that doesn't make any sense. Is it a sort of abbreviation of "eat fresh food" or even a poetic "eat freshness"? Or perhaps an unpunctuated "Eat. Fresh." This is language that works; it's not wrong. But how does it work?

QES my ASS

Jul. 3rd, 2010 01:45 pm
dreamer_easy: (*gender)
I rather hope the Queen's English Society does form an Academy of English, just so I can break their rules. Especially after reading this:

"So why has it become politically correct of recent years to interchange the words ["sex" and "gender"]? This is not a matter of linguistics... This has emerged from the womens'-lib movement in the USA... that movement created an utterly artificial concept of human gender. No such thing had ever existed before and, despite all their efforts, it still does not exist as humans remain unavoidably defined by their sex as indicated above. These deluded women have not enhanced their status by rejecting their sexual identity in favour of an inappropriate gender identity... By what right do they consider that they can redefine the language? It is not theirs to play with; it belongs to all of us, men and women alike."
Yup, sure is. Feminists and others distinguish gender from sex because cultural stuff, like whether you can be a fire fighter or the President or wear a skirt or cry, gets confused with physical stuff, like whether you have tits. And also because, for a noteable chunk of the population, the two don't match, and no dictionary definition is going to change that fact. On which subject, the QES has this to say:

"There is a school of thought that now maintains that as homosexuality is becoming ever more widely socially acceptable and that a given individual, although endowed at birth with the sexual configuration of one sex, psychologically identifies with the other, it is less constraining to use the word 'gender' than 'sex'. This is perfectly ridiculous because it would be neither legally nor socially acceptable if someone applying for a job or to renew a passport were to enter the other sex on the application form just because he or she was psychologically attuned to that other sex."
This is not a concern for language. It's a demonstration of the power of language to define the world and the people in it - an attempt to appropriate the idea of clear communication to legitimise a particular social viewpoint.

What's more, it's based on bullshit. The rants about "political correctness" give zero examples1, and even include serious criticism of joke terms like "vertically challenged", for which there would be no examples. The rants don't discuss etymology or usage2, let alone science or psychology. They just assert - with no more authority than anyone else with a Web page and an axe to grind.

Or, to put it another way: This has nothing to do with linguistics. By what right do they consider that they can redefine the language? It is not theirs to play with; it belongs to all of us, men and women alike.

__

1 Actually, there is a single example given of "gender" being used in a 1987 legal finding in the US.
2 We are informed that the word "queer" with the meaning "homosexual" has "slipped into oblivion". The Times has used it twice in the last week with this meaning (three times if you include a mention of Queer As Folk.)

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