!anaj ,em s’taht

A beautiful word which seems to be used in American English rather than in British English; or at least the Cambridge dictionary doesn’t mention it, but Merriam-Webster does:

shenanigan
Main Entry: she·nan·i·gan
Pronunciation: \shə-ˈna-ni-gən\
Function: noun
Etymology: origin unknown
Date: 1855

1: a devious trick used especially for an underhand purpose2 a: tricky or questionable practices or conduct —usually used in plural b: high-spirited or mischievous activity —usually used in plural

It seems it can also be applied to people:

If Perez Hilton plays nice, he could name his price
By Andrew Wallenstein
April 9, 2008
The Oprah comparison certainly smacks of delusional grandeur, and yet it’s not so easy to dismiss, either. As for overcoming his original sleazy incarnation, it’s worth noting that Winfrey didn’t exactly start out as squeaky clean as she currently is, trafficking in the same kind of talk-show shenanigans as Jerry Springer earlier in her own career.

Dict.cc suggests Schwindel, Streich - maybe Mogelpackung would also work.

…is they key message of this video. The bit of language wisdom to be learned by speakers of German: The prase Herding cats is pretty much the equivalent of “Das ist wie einen Sack Flöhe hüten!” (for speakers of English: herding a bag a fleas).

postmarked: abgestempelt, oder: Es zählt der Eingang des Poststempels (btw: This is a strange expression in German, isn’t it?)

Example:

The jury will consist of the current editorial staff of Packingtown Review.

The deadline for the submissions is March 31, 2008 (postmarked). Winners will be announced on the Packingtown Review web site on May 31, 2008.

The contest is open to the public and there is no fee.

[Source]

I came across* the nifty Zemanta WordPress plug-in which automatically enhances your text with semantic links, tags, pictures - and does quite a good job at it. Using their demo, I entered the plain text of the recent Carnival post:

And Zemanta returned it as follows:

The text highlighted in orange identifies the words that are automatically converted into links. In the full working version, you can add and delete words to the list.

The obvious downside, however, is that Zemanta is not available yet - and if it was, it could probably not be used by wordpress.com users like me, but only by those who have installed WordPress on their own server space. On their own blog and website, Zemanta are not exactly spilling the beans about their immediate plans to release or not to release this plug-in (I quite like Jochen’s notion of a blog being something like a personal tabloid).

It’s also too bad that one cannot just grab the source code of an enhanced page from their demo, as the way it is coded (lot’s of div’s and id’s instead of straight links) is not accepted by wordpress.com! Neither can one simply copy the tags as they use space separation whereas WP uses comma separation (I am all for comma separation, btw, as it allows for collocations). Yet I guess their server would soon be flooded with requests if they offered a demo that allowed you to enhance a page and take the code with you.

*I’ve subscribed to a couple of blogs from Barcamp presenters, and even though I didn’t go to the next one in Klagenfurt (and would not have had anything to contribute anyway), I still get the fresh news that gets circulated there. Nice According to one of those blogs, Zemanta will go beta towards the end of March. By then I might have switched to wordpress.org - and then the decision will be pending whether it wouldn’t be wiser to switch to German, too - blogging in German, however, does oddly not feel natural to me.

On Realpop, I read about the latest “The Downfall” meme: Take the scene from The Downfall in which Hitler/Bruno Ganz learns that Steiner couldn’t gather enough forces to attack and add new subtitles to it, changing The Downfall of Hitler to The Downfall of HDVD or The Downfall of the Cowboys. While Ganz’ acting features the theatrical type of speech that is known from Hitler speeches - and which is on a phonetic level sufficiently close to Chaplin’s idiom as Hynkel in The Great Dictator - it is certainly good material for being subtitled. Too bad though that the trick won’t work if you know German: It’ impossible to shut out and not understand the words of your mother tongue

Word of the Day for German Speakers of English:

fit wie ein Turnschuh (m.) = (as) fit as a fiddle

While we’re at it: I got the suspicion that this German idiom is not used in Austria - but I think they have a similar one, yet couldn’t find it on Ostarrichi.org, the German-Austrian dictionary.

Today’s example comes from the musical “Singing in the Rain”:

Fit as a fiddle and ready for love.
I can jump over the moon up above.
Fit as a fiddle and ready for love!

I haven’t a worry, I haven’t a care,
I feel like a feather that’s floating on air,
Fit as a fiddle and ready for love!

Soon all the church bells will be ringing
And I’ll march with Ma and Pa.
All the church bells will be ringing,
With a hey naughty-knotty and a hotcha-cha darling.

Hi, diddle-diddle, my baby’s OK,
Ask me a riddle, I’m waiting to say
Fit as a fiddle and ready for love!

Soon all the church bells will be ringing
And I’ll march with Ma and Pa.
All the church bells will be ringing,
With a hey naughty-knotty and a hotcha-cha darling.

Hi, diddle-diddle, my baby’s OK,
Ask me a riddle, I’m waiting to say
Fit as a fiddle and ready for love!

A word of the day for German speakers of English that I had been searching for in the past:

(statistischer) Ausreißer (m.) = outlier

Beispiel:

Results very stable, no strange outlier values as often found with other techniques. Interactive Petrophysics needs to be seen to fully appreciate the …

Mein Word of the Day für German speakers of English:

Gewohnheitstier (n.) = creature of habit

Beispiel:

Jake GyllenHO is a creature of habit.

The actor, once again, goes out to lunch to his favorite restaurant, Joan’s On Third, Monday in Los Angeles.

Jakey took his mom.

Where’s Reese???????

Orange
Silver
Purple
Month

Makes you think - why three colours? And this one doesn’t rhyme in German:

Mensch (man, meaning mankind)

W00t! I actually do not know how to pronounce “w00t!” - I mainly knew it through Lenina’s blog, but have no phonetic representation for it. I thought it was a variation of ‘what!’, but that may not be true.

Regardless of my confusion, w00t! has become Merriam-Webster’s word of the year 2007. The New York Times writes:

Merriam-Webster’s president, John Morse, said ”w00t” was an ideal choice because it blends whimsy and new technology. ”It shows a really interesting thing that’s going on in language. It’s a term that’s arrived only because we’re now communicating electronically with each other,” Morse said. [...] ”W00t” was among 20 nominees in a list of the most-searched words in Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary and most frequently submitted terms from users of its ”open dictionary.” The choice did not make Allan Metcalf, executive secretary of the American Dialect Society, say ”w00t.” ”It’s amusing, but it’s limited to a small community and unlikely to spread and unlikely to last,” said Metcalf, an English professor at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill.

W00t has not yet been added to the Merriam-Webster’s dictionary - at least I couldn’t find it - but it is supposedly going to be added soon. I admit that I kind of disapprove of that - which official word can have two numbers in its middle in particular if these aren’t pronounced like numbers?

Here is the complete top ten - I’d also prefer if brand names wouldn’t be granted access (I know, I know - dictionaries are no longer prescriptive, they have become merely descriptive:

2. facebook

3. conundrum

4. quixotic

5. blamestorm

6. sardoodledom

7. apathetic

8. Pecksniffian

9. hypocrite

10. charlatan

Btw, am I correct in assuming that w00t is - more or less - pronounced like the German ‘Wut’ (anger)?

It works by using your intuition. I found it here (via. J.A. from Cape Town):

As an aside, once, whilst drinking with a psycholinguist (say that after a few pints) I was taught a useful way of quickly working out the stressed syllable in any English word - something which is apparently called the ‘fuck test’.

Simply insert the word ‘fucking’ into the word, as if you were using the swear word for emphasis, and the syllable that follows the ‘fucking’ is the stressed syllable.

For example, absolutely -> abso-fucking-lutely. The stressed syllable is the third: i.e. absolutely. It works for every multi-syllable word I’ve found so far.

Which just goes to show that psycholinguists are some of the coolest melonfarmers in the whole of cognitive science.

I am no longer an English teacher, but my guess is that students would love this method to memorize stress patters:

fucking-photograph
pho-fucking-tographer
photo-fucking-graphic

As an addendum to the meta data discussion, a glimpse of what could happen if classifications stop making sense: the well-known examples of the Chinese encyclopedia, cited by Borges and Foucault:

In “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” Borges describes ‘a certain Chinese Encyclopedia,’ the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, in which it is written that animals are divided into:

1. those that belong to the Emperor,
2. embalmed ones,
3. those that are trained,
4. suckling pigs,
5. mermaids,
6. fabulous ones,
7. stray dogs,
8. those included in the present classification,
9. those that tremble as if they were mad,
10. innumerable ones,
11. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
12. others,
13. those that have just broken a flower vase,
14. those that from a long way off look like flies.

This classification has been used by many writers. It “shattered all the familiar landmarks of his thought” for Michel Foucault. Anthropologists and ethnographers, German teachers, postmodern feminists, Australian museum curators, and artists quote it. The list of people influenced by the list has the same heterogeneous character as the list itself.

[source]

Hey! Two visiting lecturers who were sent in via the Magellan and Erasmus programmes just stopped by - one of them from Maryville, Missouri, one of the few other places next to San Francisco, Kansas City and New York that I’ve visited in my life (my boyfriend went there for an exchange, and I visited him, but I didn’t mention it). The other one was from Maastricht, giving me an opportunity to speak Dutch, which I haven’t done in ages. And it still worked surprisingly well! But apart from that, this day provided plenty of opportunities to not regret that I’ll be leaving soon. An email from the head of the degree program saying that the students didn’t want to do digital stories, because they didn’t want to reflect on themselves and that their suggestion was to produce a commercial instead.

So: Why don’t they hire students to teach students, if they think that students are better developers of curricula than the lecturers who teach them? Ta!

Emelie is a wife and the mother of three children. She has martial problems because she thinks she isn’t loved by her husband anymore. [...] Beth is the exwife of Emelies brother but Emelie and Beth are still best friends. Because Beth had the same martial problems a few years ago, she is able to help Emelie with her good advices.
Emelie isn’t satisfied since a half a year, she feels that she isn’t lived since a longe time. Because Emelies dad died for about 4 months, she inherited a lot of money.[...] After the divorce Emelie dedicates her life to her rose garden. Now Emelie is very happy, she had shifted off a grant border and found her new life task.

As a an addition to Lenina’s recent txt spk post, it might be worthwhile to have a (brief) look at the I Can Has Cheezburger blog which has been consistently among the top ten blogs in the past weeks. It works as follows: The owner(s) post a picture of a pet, mainly a cat, and add a bubble to it to indicate the ‘thoughts’ of the pet. The thoughts are offered in flawed English, the flaws supposedly representing the inferiorness of the animal to the human. The humans who visit this site, however, seek to come up with even more faulty language, and they assess each other’s comments too. The trashiest or most infantile comments (or those of members who have earned a standing in the group) get the highest ranking of 5 out of 5 cheeseburgers. Lolcats, according to the group’s language, are photographic representations of cats that make you laugh out loud.

And while I am struggling to suppress an allergic reaction when reading the comments, the ‘lolcats tagged for you convenience’ do make me chuckle