YouTube Comment Snob
This is the answer to the problem, but I would kind of miss such helpful comments as “y dun’t u suck a bag of dicks,” when trolling the internets.
YouTube Comment Snob is a Firefox extension that filters out undesirable comments from YouTube comment threads. You can choose to have any of the following rules mark a comment for removal:
- More than # spelling mistakes: The number of mistakes is customizable, and the extension uses Firefox’s built-in spell checker.
- All capital letters
- No capital letters
- Doesn’t start with a capital letter
- Excessive punctuation (!!!! ????)
- Excessive capitalization or Profanity
Dear Clusterflock: This is preying on my mind.
What words might you use on a regular basis, in the way you use them, that have become unglued from their original etymology?
Today, I caught myself using the word terrific! to close phone conversations with clients, vendors and employees alike. I use the word all the time! I use it in lieu of “great” or “fantastic” or “perfect!” (Likely, none of which I use for their intended purpose either.)
The use of words, and their original purposes, has been on my mind a little while, so when I had opportunity to comment on Brandon Hobson’s post on August 8, I first wrote “terrifying” but in a moment of realization, I recognized terrific for what it is. The comment takes on a darker color, yes? Honestly! What have I been saying to clients, vendors and employees alike?
Please note, dear angel who watches after me and usually “categorizes” my posts, I made an attempt, this time, to do it myself.
Say My Name
Tonight at Randalls, my cashier’s name was Crystal Glass.
As I was leaving she said, “Thank you Mr. Pizer.”
Mamihlapinatapai
A single word from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego
It describes a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start. Ending up mutually at a loss as to what to do about each other.
— via kottke
At least it’s not Basque
[I]n my early thirties, I went with my parents to the Basque country. . . .
This trip went down as the most colossal linguistic failure in Harris family history. Never mind the fact that Basque has twelve grammatical cases (versus Latin’s cushy five); it’s linguistically unrelated to any other tongue. This means—as I learned when I cracked open the textbook Dad [a famous linguist] and I had each bought—that trying to learn it is like trying to stick Velcro to particle board. I’d do the exercises, biting my lip, and get them all wrong. The moment I’d finish, I’d forget everything. You don’t know how close I came to hurling the damn book off the subway. Me? Unable to learn a language? This was a soul-challenging, humbling, deeply frustrating first.
“Bet Dad can do this,” I thought. I emailed to find out. “How’s the Basque going?” His reply: “Fucking language from hell. This is a waste of my time.”
—“Tongue Tied” by Lynn Harris, at Nextbook, my place of employment
I’m currently attempting to cram a bit of French for a trip, and this article makes me feel a lot better—about French, not my inability to learn it. I could be trying to learn Basque! Or Hebrew!
So, dear Clusterflock, what languages are you competent in, and which ones would you like to learn?
Grammatical Inconsistencies
I say The Dallas Cowboys are and U2 is.
I Love Scottish Accents
This was sent to me from a Scottish friend living in England.
A wee Glesga wummin goes intae a Butchershop, where the butcher has just came oot the freezer, and is staunin haunds ahint his back, wi his erse aimed at an electric fire.
The wee wummin checks oot the display case and asks: ‘Is that yer Ayrshire Bacon?’
‘Naw,’ replies the butcher ‘Its jist ma hauns ah’m heatin.’
as expected
For Jeff:
The role of different modulation frequencies in the speech envelope were studied by means of the manipulation of vowel–consonant–vowel (VCV) syllables. The envelope of the signal was extracted from the speech and the fine-structure was replaced by speech-shaped noise. The temporal envelopes in every critical band of the speech signal were notch filtered in order to assess the relative importance of different modulation frequency regions between 0 and 20 Hz. For this purpose notch filters around three center frequencies (8, 12, and 16 Hz) with three different notch widths (4-, 8-, and 12-Hz wide) were used. These stimuli were used in a consonant-recognition task in which ten normal-hearing subjects participated, and their results were analyzed in terms of recognition scores. More qualitative information was obtained with a multidimensional scaling method (INDSCAL) and sequential information analysis (SINFA). Consonant recognition is very robust for the removal of certain modulation frequency areas. Only when a wide notch around 8 Hz is applied does the speech signal become heavily degraded. As expected, the voicing information is lost, while there are different effects on plosiveness and nasality. Even the smallest filtering has a substantial effect on the transfer of the plosiveness feature, while on the other hand, filtering out only the low-modulation frequencies has a substantial effect on the transfer of nasality cues.
Clbuttic
A clbuttic example unintended consequences. Also this is very nerdy.
People who make buttumptions about their regex scripts, will be embarbutted when they repeat this mbuttive mistake
I like the way
William becomes Will becomes Bill.
it is what it is
For Cindy
(link to “another” site I “liked”)
陪我玩啊，Toesday Tuesday & Card
小芥：貓咪想要玩耍時就是會四腳朝天扭來扭去，很可愛，不過通常這時候阿丹這樣子忽然去侵犯他的雪白嫩肚，可是會被抓抓啃啃得很用力的。如果生氣離開，他還會怪你怎麼不玩了，這種啃抓的遊戲雖然代表貓對你很看得起是自己人，不過還是兩隻貓扭打在一起比較不痛，我們家三姊妹的手都會因為這樣常遭殃，人的手皮很脆弱啊，哈哈。
Michico : when cats feel boring want you to play with, sometimes they let their feet up and twist their body over. It’s cute, but when Adan doing that and I molest his lovely white tummy (just love rubbing this tummy suddenly), my hands will be bitten and grabbed by him very hardly. If I leave he even will blame me why not continue playing. Cats let you play with them physically are showing they like you, but human’s skin is too weak, 2 cats play won’t pain so much. Anyway, Pamilla, Toshie and I often are bitten by Adan, just let him feel fun.
This sentence was in the NYT
In a voice-mail message left for a reporter, Gloria Steinem said she hopes the women using vajayjay are doing so because they think it is more descriptive than vagina, not because they are squeamish.
Word Splicing
1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject
financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.
2. Ignoranus: A person who’s both stupid and an asshole.
3. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you
realize it was your money to start with.
4. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.
5. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright
ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign
of breaking down in the near future.
6. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting
laid.
7. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
8. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who
doesn’t get it.
9. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
10. Hipatitis: Terminal coolness.
50,000 word novel without the letter ‘e’
Probably old news to most, but I just stumbled across the novel Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright which does not use the letter e ( the most common letter used in the English language ). I find this quite amazing, so much so that I might actually have to read the book. The Wikipedia entry for Ernest Vincent Wright mentions:
However, the stress of writing such a novel was apparently too much for Wright, who died at the age of 66 on the day Gadsby was published.
Anyone out there already read it?
The Evolution of Language
In the middle of the 19th century, the main professional bodies governing linguistic research formally banned any investigation into the origins of language, regarding it as pointless. The topic remained disreputable for more than a century, but in the last decade or so, language evolution has eased toward the front burner, attracting the attention of linguists, neuroscientists, psychologists and geneticists. Their search is the subject of “The First Word,” Christine Kenneally’s lucid survey of this expanding field, dedicated to solving what she calls “the hardest problem in science today.”
From the Comments
Cindy S.:
Swassy asshole like a fox.
Freshly Minted
A few new words for the Clusterfolkmoot to incorporate into its chitchat, from Erin McKean’s workshop at FooCamp:
coprocranial ’shithead’ [Although this form seems more adjectival, so it might be better as 'shitheadedness'. Coined by Nat Torkington.]
ecomaniacal ‘crazy about money’. [Coined by Scott Berkun, except that everyone in the session was *sure* it meant 'crazy about the environment.']
Googlegänger ‘the other person who shows up in Google search results when people search for you’. [from Karl Fogel.]
ludevescant ‘evocative of a game; describing the feeling that someone is perhaps toying with you’. [From Latin ludus, 'game'.]
malignation ‘the state of being maligned’.
swassy ‘trying to look good while sweating profusely’. [Hard to do ...]
triggernometry ‘the mathematical calculation that leads heads of nations to start wars’.
See Dictionary Evangelist for more.
Lolxicographers
Old words, new words
First of all, some existing words I think we might find handy around here:
- agroof
- face-downward
- bucculent
- having a large mouth
- chatoyant
- having a shimmering quality, like a cat’s eye
- dringle
- to waste time
- folkmoot
- a meeting of people
Are these words important? You be deciduous!
Mr. Kottke linked to the new book 100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know with the sneer, “Alternate title: 100 mostly useless words.”
Here’s the complete list.
Where cake comes from . . . and where it goes
That clever Anatoly is at it again, this time on the etymology of cake. In the process, he notes,
One of the first readers of my Word Origins… and How We Know Them complained that he had expected entertaining histories but felt like going to college again. Poor, benighted former student! Entertainment is to him like being tickled: once a feather touches his nostrils, he sneezes and giggles happily. He has never been taught that the greatest thrill comes from following a researcher’s thoughts.
Let’s call the whole thing off.
However, the most opaque item on our list is lieutenant. Those, who, like speakers of American English, say lootenant, will not object to its spelling once they learn (“larn”) that lieutenant has been borrowed from French and consists of two parts: lieu “place” and tenant “holder” (from Latin locum tenans, understood as “deputy, substitute”); even the word order–first the noun, then the attribute, as in court martial and heir apparent–betrays its place of origin. But the British pronunciation is leftenant, and f in the middle remains a puzzle, the more so because, according to an authoritative British English pronouncing dictionary, published in the fifties of the past century, until recently the usual pronunciation of lieutenancy in the navy was lootenancy (stress on the second syllable) or lootnancy, while lieutenant was pronounced leftenant in the army and letenat in the navy, though the variant with f also had some currency among sailors.
At OUPblog.
Will the sun ever set on the English language?
English was once the language in which power was exercised, note the authors, but now it is the language in which power is accessed. And in the future, speaking only English won’t be enough; the real advantage will go to those who are proficient in a multilingual, multicultural, increasingly interconnected world.