Swans on Tea

Be there in a jiffy
There are five three formal/scientific/technical definitions of “jiffy.” How long it takes to make popcorn is not one of them.

Crescat Graffiti, Vita Excolatur
Since September 27, 2007, I have been documenting the graffiti left in public study areas in the Joseph Regenstein Library (”the Reg”): the study nooks tucked into the stacks, the whiteboards in the all-night study space, and the study carrels in the reading rooms. I have transcribed over 620 “pieces” of graffiti—many [...]

I also checked on the spinless/spineless mixup that I got at Google, and come up with these:

(Wikipedia is great, but I do dislike that the search function has placed the emphasis on article titles, rather than content. This seems to have changed somewhat, since it now gives article links, too. I don’t recall [...]

There are some bits of dialog that just kill a conversation.
On Thursday I accumulated the datum that the phrase I might work better wearing lederhosen, but we’re just not going to find that out instantly ends the meeting.
(No, I wasn’t the one who spoke the line)

English Professors and other language professionals, long jealous of the attention and funding afforded the Large Hadron Collider and other “big physics” projects, have embarked on a new research initiative: that of high-energy language. The ambitious project will follow several avenues of investigation in an attempt to invigorate the field of research.
“We [...]

Schott’s Vocab: A Rolling Stone Leads to Rome
This weekend, co-vocabularists have proved that the pen loves company (and misery is mightier than the sword) by Frankensteining proverbs with bizarre, amusing and apposite results
…
Living well makes the heart grow fonder.
Absence is the best revenge.
Youth is wasted on a winner.
Everyone hates the young.
All’s fair in love [...]

Cosmic Variance: Fake Style
Discussion of journalistic guidelines for physics articles (mostly), some more tongue-in-cheek than others.
I think you have to start with avoiding the phrases that should be tossed over the event horizon.

A Markov text generator, based on Jabberwocky. O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
There’s also one based on the Iliad and the US States (welcome to Missourizona, The Show Me the Grand Canyon State) and dinosaurs (Platosaurus, the philosophy lizard)

A Venn diagram of the etymology of baseball team names
San Diego Padres
…
Named after the earlier Pacific Coast League team, which in turn was named for the term for Spanish missionaries in the area. Only team with an entirely non-English name.

Uncertain Principles: Using Analogies on the Internet Is Like Doing a Really Futile Thing
No matter how carefully you set up your analogy, somebody will come along and interpret it in the most stupidly literal way possible, find some tiny point where it fails to correspond perfectly with the actual topic of discussion, and decide [...]

The List of N Things
Some of the work of reading an article is understanding its structure—figuring out what in high school we’d have called its “outline.” Not explicitly, of course, but someone who really understands an article probably has something in his brain afterward that corresponds to such an outline. In a list of n [...]

All Sorts: A Linguistic Experiment
All Sorts is a collection of collective nouns that may or may not have found their way into the Oxford English Dictionary. If you think that a charismatic collective is far superior to a dullard ‘bunch’ or ‘flock’ then this is the place for you.
It culls them from tweets, grabbing [...]