Remunity

My parents are having work done at their home and need to have some piping reworked under the driveway. My father knows the guy who is going to do the work, and we were all chatting, and we got on to talking about Led Zeppelin, and a recent show he heard on Howard Stern. I've long been familiar with some of these histories, but I gave the show a listen, and I decided to look into it a little bit more, for the sake of it.

Apparently, Jake Holmes, from whom Zeppelin got Dazed And Confused, sent the band a letter reading:

I understand it's a collaborative effort, but I think you should give me some credit at least and some remunity. [emphasis mine]

What is REMUNITY? I couldn't find it in any dictionary, even the OED. Obviously, it is supposed to eb the same thing as remuneration, from the context, but there's still something fishy. Google gives me 20 hits for "remunity", when you go through them. Of the 20, they break down as follows: 8 are the previous quote. 5 pair the word closely with communion and community. It looks like those pieces have to do with the works of Jacques Derrida. I don't know if he coined the term, or the expression of the two together or what, but he's an interesting common link. I guess Holmes must've read Derrida (or had a friend who read Derrida), becaue there doesn't seem to be much trace of the word existing anywhere else.

For those who are curious about the other occurrences, one was an icelandic page that seemed to want to use the word "immunity," one was a site that indexed tons of expired domains, one was part of a user's blog name with no other context, one page did not actually have remunity on the page or in the cache, and another required a subscription to see the page. If you've been counting carefully, you'll notice that is only 18 pages. One had the word, but I could not establish the context because the page seemed to be malfunctioning, and the source did not elucidate this. As near as I can tell, it occured in a sentence all by itself in some periodical of sorts.

My personal favorite is the last one, which is from Google Books, specifically The Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803 to the Present Time listed as by Great Britain Parliament, Thomas Curson Hansard. I was worried that my theory would crack with this attestation, but I was relieved when I read the sentence. It came out as:

Public estimation is equally the re-

-munity whilst they are wholly inadequate |

It was seperated by a break, and I quickly realized seeing the line running down the middle of the page, that the book was published with two columns per page. Google Books doesn't seem to be able to figure out that the words are actually re-(ward) and (com)-munity. An interesting little quirk. It also works for stings. Search for "tbe tional," for the same text, and you get the same kind of thing, second result, illustrating yet another weakness of this automation. Still, it's quite impressive technology.

Kusaal Language Efforts

SIL field linguist Mike Steinborn contacted a colleague of mine about work he and his wife are doing in Burkina Faso with the language of the Kusassi people. They are developing a written form, orthography, lexicon/dictionary and more, and are trying to get individuals to help with analysis over the internet. Anyone who has a small amount of linguistic knowledge and some free time is more than welcome to help.

The link to the central site of the work is here.

The previous text was slightly paraphrased from a message sent to me by a colleague.

It looks interesting, to say the least, and I am a large fan of more open-soucre collaborative efforts. It really does seem like an honest effort more interested in larger than personal goals. Help out if you can.

Extension Of Misplaced Apostrophes

We're all familiar with the chronic misplacement of apostrophes after individual letters and numbers. It's common among the handful of illiterates who can't tell the difference between as and aa nor is and is by context. I'll admit, I usually capitalize it if it's going to be a single letter like that, the ABCs, for example. Very often we get apostrophes thrown in there, ABC's, a's, b's, when it's intended to signify the plural. This happens all of the time too with numbers, especially decades in my experiences, "the 90's" and so on.

Now, earlier today I was watching tv during a failed attempt to get myself to stay awake. I cannot remember what the commercial was for, since I fell back asleep, but the captions were on, and I distinctly saw the word TWO'S in the context where TWOS would be correct. I guess for some the idea of separating numbers from this s, possibly from inflectional suffixes or whatever, is becoming adapted regardless of whatever graphic form the number is represented by.

Quadralingual Vinyl

I stumbled across a record by somebody called Sándor Fehér and his Gipsy (sic) band. My taste for such music aside, I was intrigued by the reverse which featured liner notes in four languages. The first I figure to be Hungarian, then English, then it looked like German, and Russian. Such tidbits are always fun to glance through, but there are things that jump out at me, suggesting that the translations were not carefully executed efforts, but rather hastily done to get it done. An obvious example was the second song of side B, is titled "Were Do You Fly Swallow?"

Now, I'll admit, I didn't catch the spelling error the first time around. I was focusing on the fact that it was the only one of the four versions to feature a question mark. I initially thought that maybe this was a pressing done where English was the base of the notes, and they were expanded to the other languages, putting Hungarian first to seem authentic. After all, the obverse of the record does feature the title as it is written in English.

When I saw the spelling error, I was still about to write it off, but then I noticed that there was another title that was a question, but no question marks on any of the versions. I can't really do too in depth of an analysis, but it does seem to be that the translations were done from the Hungarian, but possibly there was a bit of poetic license and or judgement calls on the part of the translators, since there are a few oddball quirks.

Gender Differences In CDS

While my work with children kept me around kids to hear all sorts of hilarity, it's not that often I'm around real youngins. I was out for an early dinner/late lunch and there was a nice couple seated next to me with two children. The older was probably around 2, and the younger was quite young, but I'm real bad at guessing ages. She couldn't speak, but yelled out nonsense every so often. That in itself wasn't so interesting, but the fact was that the mother kept responding to her. Almost exclusively, she said "oh yeah?" and "that's right" or similar statements.

Even more interesting, at least to me, is that the children were oriented so that the mother would be mainly occupied with the older girl, and the father with the younger. The father was the one feeding the younger child for the most part too, but I remember him conversing much more with the older girl.

The other thing that I noted was that the father called (I'm pretty sure it was) soy sauce "salt water" while talking to the older girl.

Why You Should Hate All Caps, But Don't

While I agree that it is poor etiquette to write in all caps, I disagree with the reasoning, at least on a matter of principle. Apparently people like to say that it is akin to being shouted at, but that is what I've always used exclamation points to indicate. Any instance of all-caps (while I almost exclusively use it in jest) would be more in the lines of being assertive, or attention seeking. It's just obnoxious. And frankly, even with my distaste for volume, I'd much rather deal with loud intelligent statements than with a reasonably volumed idiot. When people see book titles, or movie titles, or advertisements or anything like that, nobody thinks that that is similar to yelling, it's merely trying to attract the reader. In internet-speak, the use of all caps is also terribly unpleasant to read, much like writing not sectioned into paragraphs, or written with punctuation.

Please everyone, stop says "stop yelling" every time somebody writes in all caps. Just explain to them that they are most likely an idiot.

Speech Perception Problems

A colleague of mine and I were talking on the phone, and he happened to mention somebody by the name of Sassoon (This guy? The subject quickly changed), but I was unable to understand him. He repeated himself a couple of times, but it wasn't until he spelled it out that I was able to know what he meant. Now, we were on the phone, but I had no other difficulty understanding him, and as he pointed out, 8-bits should be plenty for me to understand. Occasionally there is ther other miscommunication here or there, where it is strong like this, but there's nothing in common from the few examples I can remember. In the interest of discovering why my otherwise excellent speech perception is failing, I'm going to begin to index these. Any theories?

Wordplay

I don't really know what you call this type of joke, but it is one of my favorites, and I just felt like showing it off. While discussing a not-feasible option for travel, I responded:

No thanks.
I already bought my tickets.
It's be more expansive in cost to change them now

I suppose it's just an offshoot of puns. The basis of the joke also lies in that there is a similarity in contexts. The way we do it, the pun should be executed relatively deadpan. Mildness and moderation in speech have always been things I've been a fan of, so why not also in humor?

[In the unlikely event you didn't get the joke, it's that I said "expansive" where I could've said "expensive" with even less context. I won't explain why it's funny since that never works anyway.]

There aren't too many other places I see this type of joke, but I guess it's because it's not so obvious that it is one, that it's not preferred to use in other media.