Ode to a Four-Letter Word

From the New York Magazine site: Ode to a Four-Letter Word. Starts with F, rhymes with duck.

That word—which appears, like a crude jack-in-the-box, in the last line of every stanza—is why the book works, both creatively and commercially. Yet this popularity was not a foregone conclusion. Like sex, alcohol, nudity, and drugs, swearing sets off the great American seesaw of schoolmarmish horror and schoolyardish glee, and it can be hard to predict whether a writer who curses will wind up exalted or excoriated.

That just seemed like such an apt description. Anyway, food for thought regarding the use of language and the appropriateness of a good cuss word now and again. Words are meant to express concepts, yes?

The Rosetta Disk

The Rosetta Disk is the physical companion of the Rosetta Digital Language Archive, and a prototype of one facet of The Long Now Foundation's 10,000-Year Library. The Rosetta Disk is intended to be a durable archive of human languages, as well as an aesthetic object that suggests a journey of the imagination across culture and history. We have attempted to create a unique physical artifact which evokes the great diversity of human experience as well as the incredible variety of symbolic systems we have constructed to understand and communicate that experience.

News from the Rosetta Project of interest to archivists and others! I like how it's not platform-dependent.

For the extreme longevity version of the Rosetta database, we have selected a new high density analog storage device as an alternative to the quick obsolescence and fast material decay rate of typical digital storage systems. This technology, developed by Los Alamos Laboratories and Norsam Technologies, can be thought of as a kind of next generation microfiche. However, as an analog storage system, it is far superior. A 2.8 inch diameter nickel disk can be etched at densities of 200,000 page images per disk, and the result is immune to water damage, able to withstand high temperatures, and unaffected by electromagnetic radiation. This makes it an ideal backup for a long-term text image archive. Also, since the encoding is a physical image (no 1's or 0's), there is no platform or format dependency, guaranteeing readability despite changes in digital operating systems, applications, and compression algorithms.

Also, it looks really cool.

The Adventures of Huck Fixed

It is not often I get to steal an entire post from a webcomic, but here it is:

so in case you haven’t heard, there’s a new edition of the adventures of huckleberry finn that removes the n-word and the word “injun” and replaces them with “slave” and “indigenous, valuable american we will always honor” respectively

a lot of people are mad that this totally guts a lot of the punch of the original; after all that’s what the language was and it’s a painful reminder of how we used to think about other cultures

but what does mark twain care, he’s dead and no longer with us, his opinion has every little impact on today’s america oh wait what’s this

Publisher's Weekly also has an article. Them and just about every other book-related site out there.

Ancient Tweets Were Made in Stone and Clay

Time to play some catchup after Thanksgiving!

Let's make science interesting by comparing it to Twitter!

It was interesting anyway!

When ancient scribes invented the world's first systems of writing by cutting symbols into stone and clay, they unleashed an anxiety the Facebook generation can relate to: worry about how the new technology might upend their culture.

As the technology caught on in Egypt and Mesopotamia, ancient writers recorded the anxiety of some in Pharaonic Egypt that the written word would impair memory and turn humans into ignorant fools.

Maybe Amun had something, though:

...Amun predicted trouble for readers and writers.

He said it would cause forgetfulness in writers because they would not use their memory. Moreover, he predicted, readers would give only the appearance of knowing things while remaining "ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise but only appear wise."

Merriam-Webster's Top 10 Words from Trademarks

Just a little article about word origins. Heroin: it used to be a trademarked name.

The product was marketed as a cough remedy made from a supposedly non-addictive morphine derivative. It was also used as a cure for morphine addiction – which unfortunately caused large numbers of users to become heroin addicts.

There are nine more amusing words! Go look!

Literacy On It's Way Out

Hey look, more doomsaying. This time it's Ben Bova, an author, commenting on how with voice recognition software and audiobooks the need to be able to read and write is slowly being phased out. Then he rags on graphic novels.

Take the idea of graphic novels. Essentially, these are comic books for adults. Some of the works are quite striking and even powerful. But War and Peace they’re not. They’re not even Valley of the Dolls.

It’s impossible to reproduce a novel’s deep characterizations and nuances of plot development in a comic book format. I’ve had a couple of my short stories done in graphic style and, while I’m pleased with the results, I don’t see how a novel could be done that way — except by boiling down the novel to a few incidents and characters and tossing away almost all of the depth and plot development.

 There's room for all of it. Voice recognition software and audiobooks help facilitate communication and storytelling for people who would otherwise have a hard time. And again, not everyone can afford the technology. Maybe one day that'll happen. Like Star Trek! But it's not in any danger of happening soon.

The National Braille Challenge

June 26th was the day of The National Braille Challenge, a competition where the best blind students in the US and Canada compete for prizes and savings bonds. They are tested in areas like reading comprehension, braille spelling, chart and graph reading, proofreading and braille speed and accuracy.

"This competition is unique in that it tests a very specific skill. The great thing about The Braille Challenge, is that it gives us the opportunity to celebrate braille literacy and bring this issue to the attention of the public,” said Nancy Niebrugge, director of The Braille Challenge. “Most of the participants who make it to the national competition are the only blind students in their school. They go through their entire lives being the exception. This competition gives them the opportunity to build camaraderie among kids who have shared similar life experiences."

Very cool! And hopefully another reason to fight the decline of learning Braille.

Twitter Spelling Police

You will take your 140 characters and you will punctuate, capitalize, and spell properly! While I like proper English (or at least mostly proper English) on sites, I don't think I'd go as far as to join the Twitter police. Not that that's a term or anything. You do have to make allowances for posting via phone, even if it hurts a little on the inside. Sigh.

An Endangered Language: Braille

In the 1950s, half of blind of Americans read Braille. Now, fewer than ten per cent know the language, most relying on audio materials. Not a big deal?

...There was a really interesting study of two groups of blind children. One group had grown up learning Braille and the other group had grown up using audio technology. And the authors of that study said that there was a significant difference in not just the way that they wrote but the way that they seemed to think. And they referenced theorist Walter Ong, who writes that the act of seeing our own words and then tweaking them and rewriting them, and in that process, rethinking, really creates a new kind of cognitive style.

So they said that the students who didn't learn Braille, it was as if they had shaken up their ideas in a container and then thrown them out on a piece of paper, and that there was really no clear organization, and it lacked the kind of complexity that they saw in the students who had learned Braille.

People who don't know Braille can't really take notes, can't edit your own writing, and you can't edit your own thoughts, and that’s a really significant part of the way that people learn to think.

That's true of visual readers and non-readers too, though, isn't it?

Pictish Art Might Be a Written Language

The ancestors of modern Scottish people left behind mysterious, carved stones that new research has just determined contain the written language of the Picts, an Iron Age society that existed in Scotland from 300 to 843.

The highly stylized rock engravings, found on what are known as the Pictish Stones, had once been thought to be rock art or tied to heraldry. The new study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A, instead concludes that the engravings represent the long lost language of the Picts, a confederation of Celtic tribes that lived in modern-day eastern and northern Scotland.

Researchers Rob Lee, Philip Jonathan, and Pauline Ziman analyzed the engravings found on a few hundred Pictish stones. They used a mathematical process known as Shannon entropy and determined it is likely Pictish engravings were a form of written language.