Yesterday the Times ran an interview with a young woman (Jasmine Long) from Jersey City who was training an actress to play her in a movie. Here is how the interview ended:
Long: "We smoke black dust. That’s embalming fluid. So you drink milk with it ’cause, you know, later, for your stomach."
Right. We all know what smoking embalming fluid does to you stomach. And if you don’t know how milk will clear that right up, you don’t deserve to be reading the Times.
So I went to the huge San Diego County Fair on Saturday. Several notable sights.
Near Kiddieland I discovered Bible Story Castle sitting next to an Army recruitment station. Of course I made a snotty comment to my friend about locating Brain Wash Central. That’s when I noticed several Army personnel doing recruitment of a different sort. Yep, three soldiers engaging two Hooters girls right in front of the Bible Story Castle. Unfortunately none of my pics captured big Mr. Beret there actually FLEXING HIS MUSCLES for the young lasses. My Lord.
I also saw two of the nine surviving Munchkins from "The Wizard of Oz": Margaret Pellegrini and Clarence Swensen. (The picture deceives because they’re standing next to other short people.) Swenson failed to use his soldier uniform to the same effect as the gents noted above.
Next we watched the monster truck show, which improbably featured the 2005 Freestyle World Champion "Bounty Hunter" in the same competition as a 15-year old kid. Outside I discovered a display monster truck sponsored by Ecology Auto Parts that had appropriately, and likely without ironic intent, been named "Ecology’s Eliminator."
Then I married a robotic chick.
Finally, getting on the Ferris wheel, I spotted an odd sticker. Powered by NASA technology? No wonder the ride was so frickin’ expensive.
I love it when language wonks crunch numbers.
Last week I was describing to my sister a job offer. She replied, via IM: "It doesn’t seem like that painful of work for $50/hour." The sentence caught my ear, and I wondered whether it would be acceptable outside of casual conversation. My curiosity compelled me to email linguist Mark Liberman about it. He also found it interesting and wrote a post about it on Language Log.
Highlights:
Matt’s sister is blazing new linguistic trails here.
It’s not surprising that the sentence triggered enough of a WTF reaction in Matt to motivate him to ask about it.
Conclusion:
I’m happy to be able to tell Matt that I estimate his sister’s sentence to be 424.7 times less grammatically correct than "It doesn’t seem like that painful of a job for $50/hour" is.
Emily, don’t take this the wrong way. Everyone else, Emily is a great writer, and no I’m not a prick who enforces correct grammar in IM. I am merely a dork amused by anomalous usage wherever it pops up.
Yet I still feel like a cruel hidden camera TV show host preying on private behavior. "Surprise, Emily! You’ve been Language Logged!"
For years I’ve had a recurring dream in which, outlandish as it sounds, Matt Lauer and Tom Cruise debate the finer points of neuropharmacology on national television. Crazy stuff, fodder for a Spielberg movie, I know. But today my odd dreams retroactively became premonitions.
Okay, there are a few differences. Replace "finer points" with "coarser points." Replace Cruise in a flight suit with Cruise in a creepy stupor, sporting bags under his eyes and a cult-addled stare. And replace Lauer dressed as a court jester with Lauer as my new Hero. [Also, remove the weird sex stuff.] There you have what transpired this morning on "Today."
Scientologists notoriously hate psychiatry. Lauer breaches the topic and eggs Cruise on, revealing Cruise to be pedantic, myopic, and apparently illiterate. I’m still not sure how a man who says "you have to evaluate and read the research papers on how they came up with these theories, Matt, okay? That’s what I’ve done" in the same conversation as "there is no such thing as a chemical imbalance" can figure out which tube is for food and which tube is for air.
So I’m reading a National Geographic booklet aimed at elementary school students, called Looking at Cells by Rebecca L Johnson. In a spread called "Thinking Like a Scientist" that explains how to measure small things in micrographs, I see a picture of a paramecium, labeled "Paramecium x110". Next to it there’s the following chunk of text:
Check It Out
Suppose you have permission to photocopy the picture of theParamecium, and you enlarge it to twice its size. Would the magnification of x110 still be correct? Explain.
Note how it says, "suppose you have permission to photocopy the picture," instead of, "suppose you photocopy the picture," or even, "photocopy the picture."
Derrrrrr. Somehow the issue of copyright infringement has made its way explicitly and incongruously into a children’s science booklet.
(The inside cover lists the picture credit as "page 27 (middle) ® M. Abbey/Visuals Unlimited".)
I imagine the writer put it more simply before a lawyer or editor touched it up. Because we wouldn’t want 4th graders running around with enlarged b&w photocopies of a paramecium taken from Visuals Unlimited. Knowing kids, they might digitize the photocopies and post them on the internets, or store them on their iPods. How would VU make money THEN?
I also imagine copyright-conscious kiddies, attentive to the wording’s specific subtext, enchanted by the possibilities of a Creative Commons future. "Suppose you have permission…" Wow! Suppose I have permission! It’s telling me to imagine a wondrous world where I’m legally allowed to photocopy this image I hold in my hands! What a spectacular sight that would be! Then I could perform ALL KINDS of measurements on it! But, aw shucks, for now I’m just stuck with my dreams.
This week The New Yorker, the creme of the fact-checking crop, perpetuates the common misdiagnosis of Memento‘s protagonist. According to movie critic David Denby, an otherwise careful judge of character and plot, Leonard "suffers from short-term memory loss." Um, no.
As any cognitive neuropsychologist worth his salt–or any attentive adult, or, come to think of it, your average inattentive six-year-old–can tell, Leonard’s short-term memory works just fine. How else would he carry on a conversation? What he suffers from is an inability to transfer things from short-term memory to long-term memory. A few minutes after a conversation is over, he forgets it.
Now, maybe I’m a stickler for details. After all, I did spend two years in a lab that studied learning and memory. And the professor I worked for, Anthony Wagner (now at Stanford), was interviewed on NPR about Memento. And he collaborated with Sue Corkin, known for her studies with the most famous anterograde amnesia sufferer in the annals of science, patient HM. (Leonard in Memento has anterograde amnesia.)
But, really, is it all that complicated? The concept of short-term memory? Remembering things for a short amount of time, as Leonard so capably demonstrates over and over throughout the entirety of the film? The real question is: How did this Memento misdiagnosis meme begin? It’s easy to hear "short-term memory loss" and repeat it without stopping to think about it (as nearly every movie critic has done), but who was the first person to say, yeah, that’s what it is! Leonard has no short-term memory!
Sure, "short-term memory loss" is easier on the ear than "anterograde amnesia," but you know what’s even easier? "Amnesia." And, it’s–get this–accurate. If you’re into that sort of thing.
So I was reading my horoscopes today on My Yahoo!…
Your Daily Aries Forecast
Quickie: Cooking can be a creative and romantic way to express yourself. So what are you waiting for? Put on that apron!
Overview: Hel-LO, romance! If you don’t have a hot date for tonight, find one immediately. Think way, way outside the box when planning your evening — like demolition derby rather than dinner and a movie.
Nice synergy, but with one apparent glaring contradiction. Cooking but no dinner. Hmmmm…. let’s review.
Quickie:
Romance: good.
Creativity: good.
Cooking: good.
Overview:
Romance: good.
Creativity: good.
Dinner: bad.
Demolition: good.
Are my horoscopes telling me to COOK UP EXPLOSIVES? AS A DATE?!
(I wonder if Karen Marcelo is in town tonight…)
Oh, wait, the horoscopes go on:
Daily extended (by Astrology.com)
You’re faced with an almost impossible choice. It’s akin to being told you can have ice cream or cake for the rest of your life — but not both. When you’re faced with equal (yet different) kinds of lusciousness, what do you do? Well, first you cackle with glee at your embarrassingly fabulous situation. Next, keep your own counsel. The wisest thing to do in this case is to get very quiet, and see what advice your own heart gives you.
So it’s true… I get to wear an apron AND blow shit up! BUT, I must keep in mind: When finished cackling, keep quiet and, if it comes to it, obtain counsel.
I received the following office-wide email at work today:
Hello All,
The fridge needs some serious attention!
Laura and I are cleaning it out, so if you have anything that you want please let us know in the next 5 minutes.
Thanks
I pity the poor fool who doesn’t check his email EVERY 5 MINUTES.
News @ nature reports today on a paper published in Biology Letters showing that "men looking at explicit pictures of two naked men with a naked woman have been shown to produce higher-quality sperm than those watching pornographic images featuring women only." Apparently males of many species produce better sperm in the face of competition. Not literally in the face of, but, I mean, er, you get my drift.
Why stop with two competitors? When I fall in love and settle down to start a family, I’m totally stocking up on gangbang videos. Only the best for my progeny. I can see it now:
"Darling, it is time for that most special moment, when we spark the life of our first child, whom we will love and care for with unyielding attention. A new, wonderful person shall flourish before us. Oh, how I love you. Hold on a sec while I put on The Lonely Slut’s Pile-It-On Cum Drainage 7."
Monday night I was on the phone with my friend Jamie. At the end of the conversation he told me to brush my teeth. I instinctively quoted Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (the movie I have, due to youthful indiscretion, seen more than any other movie ever) by singing "brush brush brush, brush brush brush." Jamie told me that the way I said it I sounded like I was brushing my teeth. I said, "Like an onomatopoeia, but different. Wait, there’s a word for this, and I read about this word THIS VERY DAY." Fucking incredible. Here is what I read. The word is phonestheme and it describes a type of sound-meaning association.
To top it off, Jamie, under the moniker Jonny 5, has an album called Onomatopoeia!
To top it off EVEN MORE, I googled the "brush brush brush" quote and immediately found a blog comment on this page. The VERY NEXT comment (also quoting Pee-wee) goes:
I often say to people who are whispering behind my back "Is this something you can share with the rest of us, Amazing Larry?"
What’s the significance? My conversation with Jamie BEGAN WITH A DISCUSSION OF THE YING YANG TWINS’ WHISPER SONG. What is the world coming to? [Now checking outside for locusts.]