Wednesday 2 June 2004

Language & Other Matters

Very Traditional Japanese Costume
www.smh.com.au/ftimages/2004/06/02/1086058899547.html
Check out some of the others. Tasteful

www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/eprime.htm
REDUCED ENGLISH
(related to which - The "Verbs Bad" Manifesto:
www.scholastic.com/artandwritingawards/gallery/ 2001/winners2001/tedholm.htm
For further Language stuff, also see itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/ the Language Log (e.g.
Gene Buckley emailed to point out the widespread adoption of the eggcorn inclimate weather, which has 11,000 whG (web hits on Google), or 2,567 whG/bp (web hits on Google per billion pages). The original phrase inclement weather has 173,000 whG or about 40,372 whG/bp, so the original is only about 16 times commoner than the eggcorn. This is a genuine folk-etymology-in-progress, not a simple misspelling, since the morphologically incoherent "incliment weather" and "inclemate weather" have only 719 whG and 73 whG respectively.).

I like the whG (web hits on Google) & whG/bp (web hits on Google per billion pages) measurements, too.
See WhG/gp and other problems of quantification at
itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/ 000974.html
Also try www.mindbluff.com/ For visual as well as other recreation.

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