NEWSLETTER 614: SATURDAY 22 NOVEMBER 2008
Contents
1. Feedback, notes and comments
Black swans A couple of readers pointed out that Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote about black swans before his 2007 book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. He had previously introduced the idea in his work of 2001, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and in Life. As a result, there are some references to the idea before 2007, among them Maggie Mahar’s book of 2003, Bull!: A History of the Boom, 1982–1999.
Jeremy Ardley e-mailed from the home of actual black swans: Perth, Western Australia. He says that they’re are just as unpredictable as their figurative counterparts. “Their most significant feature is their desire to walk — slowly — to some other location. If this requires them to cross a four-lane highway they will do so. Usually this results in the entire highway stopping while the swan walks to its next dining stop. This happens at random during any day. Truly, to a commuter in Perth, a black swan is a Black Swan. It can strike at any time and cause untold disruption.”
New subscribers A special welcome to the many subscribers who have joined following a link from Randy Cassingham’s This Is True newsletter. If you don’t already subscribe to his weekly compilation of weird and wacky news stories, which show that human beings collectively have a long way to do before they achieve the pinnacle of evolution, you’re missing a lot of fun.
2. Turns of Phrase: Spoken Web
Though the Web has evolved to provide audio, pictures and video, for most of us our primary interaction with the online world is via the written word, typed text in particular. This is a high barrier for many, especially in developing countries. Imagine, for example, how an illiterate person could use it, or somebody with no access to a computer or any understanding of one.
A new project from IBM India Research Laboratory called the Spoken Web is trying to resolve this problem. In essence, it creates Web sites based on the spoken word, VoiceSites, accessed by the spoken word using mobile phones. Computers are not widely available in India, but more than 200 million people have cellphones, albeit low-end ones without the sophisticated browsing or data-transfer facilities now common in developed countries. The key to adoption of the new system is the ease of creating the VoiceSites, which are then given telephone numbers equivalent to the URLs of Web sites. Callers navigate through the Spoken Web by voice responses using a simple audio browser.
IBM’s plans extend to other countries as well as India. It also proposes to introduce facilities such as an instant translation service, social networking and emergency mobile health care.
The “Spoken Web” project aims to transform how people create, build and interact with e-commerce sites on the world wide web using the spoken word instead of the written word... Farmers need to look up commodity prices; Fishermen need weather info before heading out to sea; Plumbers can schedule appointments; and Grocery shops can display catalogues, offer order placement, display personalized targeted advertisements or reminders.
[Business Standard, India, 13 Nov. 2008]
A caller’s experience of an individual VoiceSite is similar to the interactive voice response (IVR) systems that customers encounter when calling, say, an airline or their bank. However, where the spoken web differs from these systems is that different VoiceSites can be linked, just like in the internet.
[New Scientist, 24 Oct. 2008]
3. Recently noted
Neologism alert We’ve had staycation, a holiday spent at home to reduce expense during these financially straitened times. A related term appeared in the New York Times last weekend, Americation, a vacation that’s spent within the United States by Americans looking to reduce their carbon footprint.
WOTY again Once again the Oxford American Dictionary is first past the post in the race to announce the Word of the Year. Last year, you may recall, it chose locavore. This year, its word is another you’ve read about in these columns, hypermiling. The finalists included frugalista, a person who leads a frugal lifestyle, but who stays fashionable and healthy by swapping clothes and buying second-hand; moofer, a mobile out-of-office worker, who works away from base with the help of modern communications; and topless meeting, one in which the participants are barred from using their laptops, Blackberries or mobile phones.
Think local Having mentioned locavore, it may be worth saying something about a related term that has been appearing this past month, another aspect of what a writer in the Wall Street Journal on 5 November called The New Frugality. In the same way in which locavores are urged to shop locally to reduce the carbon cost of the long-distance transport of goods, locasexuals are encouraged to ditch that long-distance partner and find a significant other from nearer home. Barron YoungSmith used it in Slate on 22 October and suggested — with tongue firmly in cheek — the creation of a Date Local movement that would seek to reduce one’s sex miles: “The group would be there to cushion the brokenhearted by imparting newly minted locasexuals with a sense of noble self-sacrifice — not to mention a pool of cute, like-minded enviros who happen to live in the neighborhood.”
Eh? You may have read here recently of the fuss over the proposal by Collins to remove some old words from their dictionaries to make room for new ones. On Monday, one of the replacements, which is to appear in the 30th anniversary edition of the Collins English Dictionary, was made known to the world. It’s meh. It’s a marker for the global reach of English that a word that began life in North America only recently is now an interjection among young people in Britain and Australia to mean boring, apathetic or unimpressive. A big step on its rise to acceptance was its appearance in the Simpsons. The head of content at Collins Dictionaries, Cormac McKeown, says that its popularity lies in part in the way that people who e-mail and text do so in “a register somewhere in between spoken and written English”. For the possible Yiddish background to meh, see Ben Zimmer's piece on the Language Log.
4. Weird Words: Tripudiate/traɪˈpjuːdɪeɪt/ 
To dance with excitement; to trample on an opponent in triumph.
The Oxford English Dictionary marks this as “rare and affected”, a reasonable conclusion. It had its time before the public, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but as writers came to eschew rhetoric and to prefer straightforward prose, it fell out of use and had pretty much vanished by the end of the nineteenth century.
A typical instance of the type of high-flown language in which it flourished is Thomas Carlyle’s History of Friedrich II of Prussia, in which he recounts the occasion in 1730 when the Emperor let slip some premature news about the marriage of his daughter Wilhelmina: “Upon which the whole Palace of Charlottenburg now bursts into tripudiation; the very valets cutting capers, making somersets, — and rushing off with the news to Berlin.” [Somerset is an old form of somersault, to turn head over heels.]
The word is from Latin tripudium, stamping on the ground, which is perhaps from words meaning three and foot, indicating a measured dance of some sort, particularly during a religious ritual. The first sense in English referred to dancing, skipping or leaping for joy or excitement. The sense of trampling on an opponent came into the language only in the nineteenth century.
An example is in Love’s Meinie by John Ruskin: “And observe also, that of the three types of lout, whose combined chorus and tripudiation leads the present British Constitution its devil’s dance, this last and smoothest type is also the dullest.”
5. Elsewhere
Punctuated Last week, the Daily Telegraph and other British papers noted the result of a survey showing that on average nearly half of the 2000 people tested couldn’t use the apostrophe properly. You may feel that there’s little surprising in that, but interestingly, older people used it wrongly more often than young ones. . My thanks to Janusz Lukasiak for the reference.
Aaargh! If I ever thought of running a competition for the worse designed language Web site in the world, I would be dissuaded by the fact that it would take a lot of effort to beat the current front runner, the Australian Word Map. Take a look and tell me I’m wrong. But it might be worth donning your sunglasses to discover expressions like pack of poo tickets.
Yes we can! The US elections may be over but the language lingers on. The Associated Press has compiled a list of the Barackisms (or Obamanyms) that were produced during the campaign. They range from Obamaphoria to Barackstar.
6. Sic!
• Rachael Weiss found an item on a menu in Turkey: “Aubergine Kebap. Ground veal patties with aborigine arranged on a layer of sauteed pita bread, topped with tomatoes and spices.” She observed, “We white Australians haven’t treated the original owners of our land very well, but this seems to go too far.”
• A recent report on the BBC News Web site about the actor Angelina Jolie was headlined “Jolie ‘could give up acting for babies’”. It was found by Len Blomstrand who commented, “Presumably they have difficulty following the plot, but don’t we all sometimes.”