Language

Thing: Futurese: The American Language in 3000 AD by Justin B. Rye. TIME MACHINE PREP: unless you can tell what the word ZHÜBwatögh refers to, you’re going to need to click and read, overwhelmedly. Also, a tremendous quote:

When looking at a biological family tree (such as the evolutionary history of the horse), the general public insists on seeing any movement as intrinsically progressive, moving from primitive to advanced designs. Yet somehow when looking at the linguistic equivalent (such as the development of the Romance languages from Vulgar Latin) they see exactly the reverse - any change is proof that the language is in decline. In reality they’re just as wrong both times!

Thing: The Itch of Curiosity from Wired.

Thing: Creating Cultural Change by John Rauser. The keys to cultural change — whether that means getting people to brew another pot of coffee, dance en masse on the side of a hill, or buy more of a particular brand of cereal — include letting them in on the big joke:

It’s Not Really a Bonus If There’s Always a Bonus

A montage of the greatest Iron Chef America mystery ingredient reveals. Stick around for honeycombs wielded as weapons, the overwhelming glory of the farmer’s market, and Bruce Lee swish noises used to punctuate eyebrow gestures. I don’t understand any of this:

[via Ryan See]

Thing: The Best Magazine Articles Ever by Kevin Kelly. KK is putting together a list of the best magazine articles ever, spanning from an 1816 article on criticism to a piece from tomorrow’s New Yorker on hospices, and people are voting on them. This is the most obvious instant bookmark you’ve come across in quite some time.

Thing: Your Complete Guide to Bad Burqa Puns by Muslimah Media Watch. For newspaper headline editors, stupid burqa wordplay has replaced meet the new boss, same as the old boss as the cliche of choice.

Thing: Mood, twitter, and the new shape of america by Harvard’s Complexity and Social Networks Blog. Some math people did a Twitter-data thing to map our state-by-state zeitgeist as it changes throughout the day and across the country. You can read about how they did it, or you can watch the mesmerizing video:

Conclusions: people in Florida and California are pretty much never unhappy; Georgia is happy but the relatively grumpiest state in its neighborhood; and the Mississippi delta region and parts of the midwest are pretty much never happy.

America’s favorite time of day: quittin’ time is an obvious favorite, but early birds (people up between 5 AM and 7 AM) tend to be obnoxiously chipper* and have skewed our whole mornings green. America’s least favorite time of day: the post-lunch-pre-quittin’-time death march is pretty bad, but apparently oceans of horror start washing all over Twitter after 1 AM. Except in Florida and California, where they just have oceans of warm water.

* Full disclosure: I’m an early bird.

It may seem Americans are the world’s lone gunmen when it comes to using the word soccer instead of football, but Canda, Australia, and New Zealand are guilty of soccrilege (anybody?) as well. In fact, at least one-fifth of the English-speaking world calls it soccer, not football:

All data from Wikipedia. I broke the countries down as follows:

Football countries: England, Wales, Scotland, India, Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria, Cameroon, Uganda, Kenya, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guyana, Madagascar, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Malta, Singapore, and Belize.

Soccer countries: Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the United States, and South Africa.

I tried to avoid English-speaking countries where there’s no clear winner — for example, the Philippines. There may be some debate over including South Africa as a soccer country, as its national team calls itself the South African national football team. However, the domestic league is called the Premier Soccer League, and the 2010 World Cup flagship stadium is called Soccer City.

Any disparity introduced by including South Africa as a soccer country is more than outweighed by this: not everyone in India speaks English as a first language — many Indians don’t speak any English. The same goes for many of the African countries listed as football countries. So if we were to get particular and exclude South Africa, we’d also need to ding India’s football population by a significant percent.

An 80/20 split means everybody should be happy. Football proponents can rest easy, knowing the beautiful game’s traditional name is securely dominant. And there’s comfort for users of soccer in knowing we’re more than just a handful of stubborn Americans.

Though it’s often confusing and inefficient, there’s no real harm done by using two different names for the same sport. It’s just the way language works. Sure, the game hails from England, but Americans invented trucks, and you don’t see us getting mad when English call a truck a lorry.

The obvious, as John Cleese states, is that the game Americans call football involves at least as much hand as it does foot, and its principal object isn’t exactly shaped like a ball. (As Americans, we’d eventually retort by pointing out cricket doesn’t involve insects. But first we’d run a monster truck lorry into a wall of fried chicken, because so what?)

Some Extra Charts

For no good reason at all, let’s also look at the same two groups, using combined GDP as our metric:

And finally, an even less relevant chart:

• Using Xmas instead of Christmas was originally a respectful abbreviation that openly acknowledged the speaker’s belief in the divinity of Christ. It’s funny that we assume anything that looks like English’s letter X must imply antagonism or deletion in every language in which it’s used, just because we often use it that way. Sometimes a letter is just a letter.
• “Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000.”
• The legendary Justin-Britney post-breakup dance-off as metaphor for a really strange decade. Also, the quote in the title of this post.

Git up, git out

This is the best movie I watched this week:

Skhizein (Jérémy Clapin,2008) from Bertie on Vimeo.