A Tech Czech Net Site
Google Reader (1000+) "Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking." (Clement Atlee) There is no doubt that pithy aphorisms are an important instrument in the socialisation toolkit (construction inventory) or any group (from couples, groups of friends to political parties, nations and, these days, humanity). To…
Read more →On The Media I'm not a psychologist, but I think that at some deep level, if the situation you’re living is a lie, and the situation these boys were living was one, and, moreover, at least the father was complicit in some way in the murder of these children’s parents - that situation, I do…
Read more →Is It Possible To Be Half-Adopted?   Imagining someone giving away semen or an egg couldn’t possibly feel the same as imagining a parent giving a way a baby. Could it? The friend who asked whether I consider Mrs. Ramirez to be adopted is adopted herself, something she doesn’t associate with rejection but rather with…
Read more →Now, there's no doubt in my mind whatsoever that George Lakoff's theory of mental imagery (usually referred to via the concept of Image Schemas) describes a phenomenon that is profoundly real. However, the question remains what kind of reality it has. It exists and we see it all the time. But is it something that…
Read more →Evening News 24 - Refuse fire near City Hall   Arsonists sparked an emergency response after setting light to a rubbish container near City Hall on Saturday evening. The suspects started the fire shortly after 7pm on St Giles Street. Two fire engines were sent to the scene and firefighters used hoses to extinguish the…
Read more →Just Say No "Nonetheless I took the tomatoes away." This is only partially a hermeneutic post. It's so rare to see poetry in blogs (unless they're poets' blogs which I don't read) but this last line in a post, turned it into a poem. It reminded me of my favorite poem by Vladimír Holan about…
Read more →On The Media In the parlance of Republican-primary politics, âsanctuaryâ? â as in sanctuary city â has become a bad word. ... GEOFFREY NUNBERG: Well, sometime around 2005, 2006, you begin to hear people on the right using the word, not for these cities and movements that aimed at providing specifically political asylum, but rather…
Read more →Anil Dash: Cats Can Has Grammar The core behavior has existed for some time; "Image macro" is a generic term for this kind of folk art, and cats have always featured heavily in these types of Internet in-jokes. But a few distinct categories have sprung up that have helped amplify and popularize the phenomenon. Two…
Read more →"Be polite, be professional, be prepared to kill." Lt. Col. Nagel summarizing a new US Army counterinsurgency manual (on the Daily Show ) This quote reminds of the critique of universalist pragmatics by Anna Wierzbicka. Wierzbicka and others (e.g. Goddard) points out that concepts like politeness (let alone professionalism) are extremely culture and language specific…
Read more →When Languages Die: Science and Sentiment : In his book When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge K. David Harrison illustrates the individual face of language loss, as well as its global scale. He shows that the disappearance of a language is a loss not only for…
Read more →Its All Semantics - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog A similarly obtuse but less jargon-laden example of unintentially comedic writing is the title of IRS form 5213, which I am convinced was penned by Terry Gilliam a la Crimson Permanent Assurance: âElection to postpone determination as to whether the presumption applies that…
Read more →BBC NEWS | Technology | Robot unravels mystery of walking "Babies use a lot of their brains to train local circuits but once they are trained they are fairly autonomous."Only when it comes to more difficult things - such as a change of terrain - that's when the brain steps in and says 'now we…
Read more →Shifting Idioms: An Eggcornucopia : OUPblog Original New sleight of hand: 85% 15%: slight of hand fazed by: 71% 29%: phased by Ben Zimmer lists the increasing changes (by 'false' analogy) in the spelling of some common English idioms. I saw his table and wondered what would happen in a Google Fight . Not only…
Read more →Language Log: Keeping "wrong grammar" off the air A program will be assigned a "PG" rating if it shows "people speaking with wrong grammar (except for humorous effects)." The article doesn't say who gets to be the "grammar cop" -- some colonel with time on his hands, I guess, who would presumably delegate the problem…
Read more →Language Log: The Supreme Court Fails Semantics All that the Court actually argues is that "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS" contains a reference to drug use. Gibberish is surely a possible interpretation of the words on the banner, but it is not the only one, and dismissing the banner as meaningless ignores its undeniable reference to…
Read more →Language Log: The Linguistic Abilities of the Presidential Candidates For what it's worth, if we count only confirmed languages spoken fluently or reasonably well, the average number of languages other than English spoken by the Democrats is 0.83, by the Republicans 0.33, or 0.53 overall. I can't say that I'm impressed. This is a useful…
Read more →Quote Details: Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy is a battle... - The Quotations Page Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. Ludwig Wittgenstein Austrian philosopher (1889 - 1951) Two interesting things about this quote. First, that it was posted in the first place. It's on a list of quotations that…
Read more →Metaphorically Challenged : Terrible Mother on Offsprung.com âThat is an awesome metaphor,â? I said. Because it is. Itâs funny without the use of burning children. But it isnât accurate. John isnât on some emotional island where he canât understand what heâs doing. And he isnât trying to fight, really. He doesnât want to be inconvenienced…
Read more →CBC.ca Arts - Retired Czech leader Havel pens new play "Living in the world of political language was quite an inspiration" he said. "I try [in my play] to reflect the automatic political language, where you say one word to which other words are immediately added and the cluster [of words] then travels from one…
Read more →The Newshoggers: Jeri Thompson - asset or albatross? [Part Two] However, thanks to a commenter at my place , I see by common definition "trophy wife" is indeed considered to be an insult. All I can say is that I didn't mean it as such. I define the term to simply mean a marriage where…
Read more →RealClearPolitics - Articles - Is the War on Terror Over? Do we still need to fight a war on terror? The answer seems to be no for an increasing number in the West who are weary over Afghanistan and Iraq or complacent from the absence of a major attack on the scale of 9/11. The…
Read more →The following segment from the Wikipedia entry on suicide attack is a good example of how the restrictions on mapping in conceptual integration can be negotiated even "against the grain" of the "logic" of some of the basic propositional structures behind the conceptual frame. So, the argument against 'homicide bombing' correctly points out that the…
Read more →Politics, Lies, and 93 v. 8 - Swampland - TIME David Brooks has an excellent column today, and not for the usual reasons that liberals praise Brooks (and he drives conservatives crazy): because he comes halfway toward us. It’s because, in discussing the US Attorneys story, he nails a distinction that I, at least, was…
Read more →Golden Arches Wants 'McJob' Removed: McDonald's Targets the English McLanguage - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News McDonald's Corp. on Tuesday restarted its push to get the word "McJob" removed from dictionaries -- and has set its sights on the gold standard of lexicons, the Oxford English Dictionary. " Dictionaries are supposed to be paragons…
Read more →Eugene Robinson - An Inarticulate Kickoff - washingtonpost.com What is it, exactly, that white people mean when they call a black person "articulate"? ... Biden explained Obama's appeal as a presidential candidate by calling him "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." ... It's interesting that Obama's…
Read more →Media Matters - Conservatives continue to use Fox's 24 to support hawkish policies conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham told host Bill O'Reilly: "The average American out there loves the show 24. OK? They love Jack Bauer. They love 24. In my mind that's close to a national referendum that it's OK to use tough…
Read more →The Politico But it wasn't revealing because she was suggesting her husband is "evil and bad." It was revealing because -- asked about dealing with evil men like Osama bin Laden -- her mind seemed to go to her domestic enemies. It's absurd to suggest that she thinks Bill is evil like Osama. But Kenneth…
Read more →digg - The Digg Comment Algorithm Everything in this world can be shown as a flowchart algorithm. This, of course, applies to the complex and not well researched field of “Digg comments“. Here’s my humble attempt to define an algorithm which should encompass all of the many possibilities of comment development on Digg. There are…
Read more →Limp language leaves kids with an awesome paucity of speech [Teenagers on which the author eavesdrops] They've got one all-purpose word -- "awesome" -- to cover everything from mild approval to exhilaration. When they're indignant or angry, they have to fall back on clichés -- including a few tired four-letter words. ... Today, teens aren't…
Read more →YouTube - Team America Finale Speech PhatGun (3 months ago) HAHAHAHAHHAHAHA SO TRUE!!! Tomster22 (19 hours ago) Neo-Cons = Dicks, Peacenicks = Pussies, Islamo-Fascists = Assholes AerisRocks (2 months ago) lol! Thats a great metaphor they used...assholes want us to shit on everything and dicks fuck assholes lmfao, great scene. This post has been brewing…
Read more →ANTI- Album - Orphans What’s Orphans? I don’t know. Orphans is a dead end kid driving a coffin with big tires across the Ohio River wearing welding goggles and a wife beater with a lit firecracker in his ear. Just like true mythopoeic narrative is returning to its roots through TV series after a brief…
Read more →Buzz Out Loud: CNET's podcast of indeterminate length on CNET.com [ click here to listen to clip ] recently featured this fascinating discussion of analogies. A caller suggests an analogy and the hosts discuss both the aptness of the analogy itself as well as the medium of analogies for elucidating certain issues. The combination of…
Read more →One small word is one giant sigh of relief for Armstrong âThatâs one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,â? they heard him say as he dropped from the ladder of his spacecraft to make the first human footprint on the lunar surface. But from the moment he said it, and for 37…
Read more →'Google' becomes an official verb - ZDNet UK News Though you may have been "googling" people for years, the verb you were using was technically slang, until recently. In fact, many regularly used tech words are just now getting the official stamp of approval from English-language dictionaries. On Thursday, Merriam-Webster announced its latest update, and…
Read more →English is Spoken Here - Yahoo! News The second dumbest statement in the debate over Senate legislation establishing English as the national language came from Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.), who said it was needlessly divisive. ADVERTISEMENT Wait. A law that unifies a country under a single language is divisive? What kind of logic is that?…
Read more →CNN.com - 'National' or 'common'? Senate ponders what to call English - May 19, 2006 WASHINGTON (AP) -- Whether English is America's "national language" or its national "common and unifying language" was a question dominating the Senate immigration debate. The Senate first voted 63-34 Thursday to designate English as the "national language" after lawmakers who…
Read more →The Prejudice Map The Prejudice Map According to Google, people in the world are known for... Here's an interesting 'mash up' of Google's API that supposedly answers the question above. It uses a very simple Google query as in http://www.google.com/search?q="germans+are+known+for+*" to create a graphical overview of the different 'prejudices' about various cultures in the world…
Read more →The Aargh Page # Not surpisingly, "argh" is much more frequent than any of the alternatives, and the items with fewer 'a's or 'r's are more frequent than their longer neighbors. # However, there are high-frequency islands , even way out in the long-word planes. For example, "a17r23gh" (17,23) occurs in 171 pages, even though…
Read more →On The Media-- NAMING RIGHT The key variables that differentiated the titles that had been number-one bestsellers from the titles that had failed to be were whether the title was literal or figurative, the word type of the first word, although it was interesting that the word type of the second word didn't matter, and…
Read more →ABC News: Sharon Reportedly Moves One of His Hands The headline is the only thing of interest here. It is an example of several things. On the one hand, it shows how easily a person's personal tragedy can be abstracted away from the larger symbolism (Terry Shiavo last year and Charles Kennedy this are other…
Read more →The GIF Pronunciation Page The GIF graphics file format was invented by CompuServe in 1987. In the years since, a debate has been raging as to the correct way to pronounce "GIF": like "jif", or with a hard 'g' as in "gift" as a majority of Mac users seem to prefer. With this page I…
Read more →There are two analogies in this post! What great value. Discover Music through The Music Genome Project by Pandora Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes…
Read more →Propp and other formalists had many things figured out quite right. Then the structuralists came and elevated emergent properties to the level of meaning creation. This post is an analogy in the sense that it compares the idea of the 'morphology of the folktale' but takes the source domain from cognitive morphology rather than traditional…
Read more →I am coorganizing a conference Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines (CADAAD) to be held at the University of East Anglia on June 29-30, 2006. The first call for papers goes out today. More on http://discourse.uea.ac.uk .
Read more →Navigating the 'human terrain' - Los Angeles Times THE U.S. ARMED forces have a problem. They have the technical capability to hit any target on the planet. But which targets should they hit? Unfortunately, our enemies in the war on terrorism don't operate tanks or warships that we could blow up. They lurk in the…
Read more →John Grishamm, The Broker Sure, this is a great book that fulfills all the prerequisite of its genre in a way that allows the reader to probe some of the possibilities of depth. The writing is taut (although I've only listened to it as a book on tape) and reminds me of the masters: Elmore…
Read more →Killing the written word by snippets - Los Angeles Times Students are trading in books for search-and-seizure learning on the Internet, and real literacy is getting lost along the way. ... One memorable freshman sagely informed me that people shouldn't be reading entire volumes these days anyway. ... Many of this generation are aliterate —…
Read more →Who would have thought that a simple misspelling of a person's name would cost me so much time. But it did happen and it was an entirely my fault. A friend whose name is pronounced by all and sundry Maia or Myra, spells her name (as a consequence of Welsh blood in her East Anglian…
Read more →Bring Democracy to Congress Perhaps we should redeploy the democracy experts we have sent to the Middle East and ask them to work on our Congress. The past few days have confirmed that our national government is dysfunctional. ... Which brings us back to those democracy experts we are sending around the world. Let's bring…
Read more →It's hard to avoid the comparison between the country [Bosnia] deemed a quagmire in the 1990s and the one where the United States is bogged down today. Start with the U.S. and other NATO troops who began arriving in Bosnia shortly before Christmas 1995. There were 60,000 of them at first in a country of…
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