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Orgasm – 32,700,000
Wargasm – 222,000
Nerdgasm – 43,600
Geekgasm – 21,700
Foodgasm – 17,800
Floorgasm – 12,300
Assgasm – 7,900
Obamagasm – 2,520
Applegasm – 926
Techgasm – 791
Feargasm – 448
Pottergasm – 341
Sexgasm – 314 (Seriously, “sexgasm”? There is already a word for this, people.)
Poorgasm – 289
Facegasm – 185
Sportgasm - 93
Gungasm – 65
Gasmgasm – 46
Kneegasm – 27
Knifegasm – 8
Ronpaulgasm – 6
Jockgasm – 5
Kittengasm – 4
Tentaclegasm – 2
Microsoftgasm – 1

Stop it.

Chris’s post on how to inadvertently make the BBC say “fuck” reminded me of another instance when a well-intentioned and useful little bit of software managed to confuse the crap out of me with its unintended consequences. A little over a year ago, I was using a Firefox extension (or it may have been a Greasemonkey script – I can’t track down the exact one I was using then) that would automatically convert any money amount in the text on a web page into your local currency. Very neat, very useful.

The downside? My job at the time involved an awful lot of writing and reading about football. And as such, I was repeatedly and frequently confused whenever I read an otherwise normal article that would suddenly, for no apparent reason, make reference to a player who “looks a certainty for inclusion in the squad, despite his disappointing performances at £1,350 (€ 2004)”.

It normally took be about ten seconds to twig what was going on. And then I kept forgetting about it, and getting confused again the next time.

TweetVolume is shockingly jolly little doo-dah that lets you fight words and phrases against each other in the Twitter arena. Twitter, in case you’re late to that particular party, is the thing that is currently eating the internet – an absolutely essential addition to the web 2.0 pantheon of utterly non-essential things. It’s a combination of microblogging, instant messenger and Tourette’s syndrome, letting you blurt out whatever’s on your mind or record whatever you’re doing, and have it permalinked and Google-cached for all eternity. Hooray. You can see my Twitter down on the left sidebar, assuming that the Twitter servers haven’t swooned and taken to their bed with a severe case of brain fever. Which they usually have.

Anyway, TweetVolume is a very pretty little thing that searches every burble ever blathered on Twitter, and compares the scores of different phrases you type in. With a nice little graph. As such, with some judicious searching, you can build up a horrifyingly accurate picture of the Twittersphere*.

To begin with: Twitterers are tired. Overwhelmingly tired. “I am tired” has been said 6340 times, compared to only 2420 for “I am hungry” and 2650 for “I am bored”. Don’t get me wrong: Twitteristas are certainly very bored and very hungry. But above all else, they are tired.

I am tired.

(Meanwhile, the classic internet staple of “I am naked” only gets 514, while “I am the resurrection” gets 20. I am clothed and non-messianic, though.)

Elsewhere, we are happy to find that good triumphs over evil, love defeats hate, hope vanquishes despair, and Forest will totally beat Leeds next season. Wow! Twitter is a wonderful place.

So, these Twitterinos – they’re happy-go-lucky sorts, right? No. Bear in mind that they’re also tired, bored and hungry. “Oh God no” beats “Oh God yes” hands-down. They want you to stop, not carry on. They say variations on “aargh” quite a lot, and swear like good’uns.

What can we conclude from this? That the average early-to-middling adopter of pointless, hyper-addictive, badly-scaled web apps are extraordinarily tired, bored, hungry, good-hearted semi-naked people who want it fucking stop. Which we knew already. Apart from that, all we can be sure of is that a lot of them are annoyed with Twitter.

And that Forest will totally beat Leeds next season.

[See also here for more of this.]

*Just to show how incredibly fast Twitter’s grown, the term “Twittersphere”, which I just made up because it sounded silly, already has 11,000 hits on Google.

The great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges was obsessed with the perfection of meaning in words – one of the strongest repeated themes throughout his work is of crafting words so precise in meaning that they encompass infinities; and related to that, of the illusions of meaning that are produced by mental groupings and classifications that lie behind all allusion and evocation (see ‘Funes the Memorious’). As such, it is fairly clear that the common work of the translator – of interpreting not just words, but words in cultural contexts and in the light of author’s experiences – is utterly inappropriate for Borges; indeed, it’s implicitly parodied in ‘Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote’.

It is clear therefore that the only correct manner in which to translate Borges is for it to be done without any attempt to read intention into his writing, without the slightest possibility of subconscious correction for cultural or personal mores. To be explicit, it must be done by a machine.

Therefore, as a tribute to the late master and as a result of being bored yesterday afternoon, allow me to present the first definitive English langauge translation of ‘The Library of Babel’ (as translated by BabelFish).

I think you will agree that the ominous poetry, and the perception of simultaneous familiarity and alienation, that stems from the new readings of lines like

“One allows to sleep of foot; another one, to satisfy the final necessities. That way it passes the stairs spiral, that abisma and rises towards the remote thing.”

or

“Visibly, nobody delay to discover nothing.”

posesses a degree of power and truth not found in any previous translations, or possibly even in the original text.

Quick, Africa, organise a charity event to help send copy-editors to Oxfam. Your contribution could make all the difference.

So several sources today reported that Marco Materazzi, defending himself from allegations that he called Zinedine Zidane a “dirty terrorist”, said:

“It is absolutely not true, I did not call him a terrorist. I’m ignorant. I don’t even know what the word means.”

Which, on face value, is a fairly astonishing example of Geoffrey Pullum’s bugaboo du jour, linguification: the rhetorical practice of taking a non-linguistic claim, then turning it into a completely different (and often false) claim about language, presumably on the grounds that it intensifies the first claim, or sounds fancier, or is funnier. (more…)

Sternest Meanings – Conversations with an anagrambot:

webuser: Hello, Sternest.
sternest: Hot, relentless.
webuser: Yeah, I suppose I am.
sternest: I am a shoe yuppies.
webuser: That as well!
sternest: Law stealth.
webuser: I think that’s pushing it a bit.
sternest: Inhabit up this skintight at.
webuser: I’d rather not, but thanks.
sternest: Heartthrob’s kind taunt.
webuser: Oooh, you big tease.
sternest: Hooey! Taboo guise.
webuser: Man, you’ve seen right through me.
sternest: Introvert huge, mega hush money.
webuser: Fuck, you’re more perceptive than my therapist.
sternest: Up-market vehemency or up ferocity. The rapist.
webuser: Yep, that sums him up pretty well. (more…)

I normally like to think of myself as very much down with what the kids on the street are saying. I have been known to refer to my friends as “blud” or “bredren”. I occasionally call things “grimy”. I think these examples are sufficient to demonstrate that I am at least as black as David Cameron.

So I was somewhat taken aback when, passing by some youts on the street tonight, I overheard a snatch of conversation that I found utterly incomprehensible. The scene: this one dude was talking to his friend, and laughing gleefully.

Yout’ 1: …I am going to be roaming in mayonnaise tonight!
Yout’ 2: May-o-naaaaaiiiise!
Yout’ 1: Nice and creamy!

So, my question: what the fuck were they talking about? There’s only two colloquial meanings attached to mayonnaise I can think of. I’ll assume that they can’t, surely, have been using mayonnaise as a euphemism for semen: “I’m going to be roaming in semen tonight”? Unlikely, at the very least. Which leaves the other meaning, namely the stereotype that black people don’t like mayonnaise (this study notes that a major mayonnaise manufacturer in America once refused to buy ad-time on a major black radio station on those grounds). So, a possible connection – has it become used as slang for anything black people don’t like, or that’s particularly un-black. “I’m going to be amongst people or things that I don’t like tonight,” perhaps? Maybe, but as I mentioned, it was said with some joy, which doesn’t really fit that explanation. So, anybody who has any idea – please, please help. I’m confused.

On the faint possibility that they were, in fact, talking about actual mayonnaise, the question seems obvious: how exactly do you roam in it?

Ack. I can’t resist it. It’s not often I get to do a bit of Language Log-esque bashing of journalists for sloppy writing about linguistics – that’s mostly because I don’t know anywhere near enough about linguistics to actually correct anybody. But Jackie Ashley in today’s Grauniad (in an article that was slapdash, ill-informed and hysterical enough already) managed to pull from somewhere a sentence that crams so much astounding wrongness into a few simple clauses that you’re simply left gasping it its dunderheadedness. Talking about how bad evil technology is irreversibly turning us all into lolloping imbeciles, she says:

This is not just the obvious ageing person’s whinge because my kids can sort out computer or digital camera problems that baffle me. It is more about the way they absorb information and entertainment.

There are the “icons” (a word to dwell on) of the iPod or Windows, those cute and reassuring little pictures that perform the role of Chinese ideograms rather than western culture’s words…

In the thirty-two words of that sentence, I count at least seven different things that would have had me – were I Jackie Ashley’s editor – frantically circling with a red pen and writing “WHAAAAA?”. Let’s ignore the cheap scare quotes around “icons”, the condescension of “cute and reassuring”, and the bafflingly meaningless pseudo-erudition of “a word to dwell on”. (I’ve dwelt on it. I’m getting nothing.)

We’ll gloss over her failure to notice that the iPod is largely text-based (you know, what with all those song titles and everything) or that Windows icons normally have a text identifier helpfully underneath them. It’s understandable that it would have been a bit hard for her to go and fact check those.
(more…)