Category Archives: Language

Outsourcing

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Between reading blogs and watching sports on TV over the weekend, I was exposed to a few expressions that are, well, just wrong, dammit!

Walk the talk — no, it’s talk the talk vs walk the walk. The former is easier than the latter. If you walk the talk, aren’t you repeatedly putting your foot in your mouth?

Untracked — as in, “The quarterback finally got untracked.” No. It’s a train metaphor. He got “on track.” Something that is untracked has gotten off the rails, and that’s not where you want to be.

But (h/t to Lev) it turns out that there’s a collection of these mistaken words and phrases (no doubt collected using cheap central American labor combined with the nimble fingers of Asian children in sweat shops). Yay! Someone else is doing this for me!

Common Errors in English

It’s fairly long, because English is a horribly mixed-up language, but to give you an idea of the completeness, it even has quantum leap, something about which I’ve already complained.

The thing about quantum leaps is that they mark an abrupt change from one state to a distinctly different one, with no in-between transitional states being possible; but they are not large. In fact, in physics a quantum leap is one of the smallest sorts of changes worth talking about. Leave “quantum leap” to the subatomic physicists unless you know what you’re talking about.

OK, it’s not perfect, since you can have a leap that encompasses other allowable transitions, but the gist is right, and it puts this a leg up on the Bad Astronomer.

Define Your Terms

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There’s quite a bit of physics/science terminology that is defined in a way that doesn’t jibe (or is essentially opposite) of the everyday use of the word, like coincidence. But even within science, different disciplines will interpret terms differently, because of the conventions and anticipated results.

Bandwidth and Community Expectations over at Uncertain Principles.

[W]hether a femtosecond laser is a single-frequency source or a broad-band source really depends on what the expectations of your particular research community are. By the standards of chemistry, it’s incredibly narrow, but for laser spectroscopy types, it’s comically broad.

There’s more. Typically, to a physicist, the Gamma ray portion of the spectrum is comprised of photons that comes from nuclear interactions and X-rays come from atomic interactions, while astronomers tend to use an arbitrary cutoff of 1 MeV to distinguish these from each other.

Soda vs Pop

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The Pop Vs Soda Map

One thing I usually forget when I go on vacation to western New York is that I’m in “pop” country; “soda” means club soda. If it comes up, I make the mistake once, and then I remember … until the next trip. I grew up on the other side of the state, in “soft drink = soda” country. However, I don’t recall it being so much an issue in some other map areas — they’ve got Orlando, Fl as a “Coke” area, and The Willamette valley in Oregon looks like it’s supposed to be a “pop” area. (Orlando has so many resettled folks, though, that there are lots of ways that it doesn’t seem like the south. Get outside of town, though, and that can change in a hurry)

The largest linguistic difference I recall from CorVegas was “sack” instead of “bag” at the grocery store.

Hint: It's Not a Verb

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Sat-nav for flappers

Sat-Nav wristwatches have been around since 1920.

OK, the idea of a small chart scrolling on one’s wrist is clever, but the “sat” part of “sat-nav” stands for satellite, as in artificial satellite. What artificial satellites are involved here?

Yes, I have a peeve about using acronyms and abbreviations where one obviously doesn’t know what the terms stand for. Like saying “Please RSVP,” “LCD display,” “ATM machine” or “PIN number,” though these are examples of pleonasms rather than the first example, which is merely incorrect. But I digress …

Original article has several pictures of interesting inventions.

Please Tell Me You Don't Teach Math

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Indiana Jones and the Temple of Absurdly Implausible Excess in the NY Times discusses “Nuking the Fridge,” the expression spawned from some inanity in the latest Indiana Jones flick.

Jason Nicholl, a 37-year-old high school teacher who runs one of the sites, said he went to a message board shortly after the new “Indiana Jones” film was released and saw that the phrase had already caught on. He thought it was likely to be more than a passing fad.

“‘Jump the shark’ is for people over the age of 60, who remember the show,” he said, adding that “nuke the fridge” was a “new, fresh take.”

Wait, what? I remember the show, and have a ways to go before I hit 60. Happy Days ran from 1974-1984 and it literally and figuratively jumped the shark in 1977. You don’t remember the show if you were born after 1948? Nobody who was under the age of 26 when it first aired remembers the show?

Good Talk, Bad Talk

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Thoughts on Conferences at Faraday’s Cage is where you put Schroedinger’s Cat

The second case was a conference where the only requirement for approval was an abstract. I realize that some of the more “cutting edge” conferences proceed this way so that people can present their latest results. I don’t like them, however, because many people seem to have worked up to the last minute on the project and not seem to have give much thought to the actual talk.

There’s another option? I thought all data for talks were obtained in the last few days before the conference.

This was brought on by a list of things not to do while speaking in public (which, if a strict grammarian I know had her way, would include “Not starting a sentence with the word ‘hopefully.'”

&@#*%$

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The use of symbols to represent swearing actually has a name: grawlix

[I]t looks to have been coined by Beetle Bailey cartoonist Mort Walker around 1964. Though it’s yet to gain admission to the Oxford English Dictionary, OED Editor-at-Large Jesse Sheidlower describes it as “undeniably useful, certainly a word, and one that I’d love to see used more.”

You're So Analytic

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Sometime you have to let art flow over you. But apparently, this is not one of those times. How To Win the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest

Should you make a pun or, perhaps, create a visual gag about a cat surreptitiously reading its owner’s e-mail? Neither. You must aim for what is called a “theory of mind” caption, which requires the reader to project intents or beliefs into the minds of the cartoon’s characters.

I’ve entered this exactly once. To me, caption contests are backwards. I have an idea and draw a situation to match — the trick is distilling an allegedly funny idea into something that I can draw in a single-panel cartoon.

The “theory of mind” approach lets you take a single point in time — the utterance of the whatever’s in the caption — and force the reader to construct what has just happened (and sometimes the drawing does that anyway), but that and the common experience the reader must have is as much of a setup as you get. I’ve had people tell me a joke and suggest that it would make a funny cartoon, and I have to point out it took 45 seconds of talking to set up the punchline. It’s rare that that will lend itself to a single-panel cartoon.

via Cosmic Variance