So Close

I am honored to be in the RSS feed of the writer of Polyglot Conspiracy, a quite wonderful linguistics blog I enjoy reading. Here is the story of how I learned that, and one other little fun tidbit getting me just a hint closer to the big dog.

In the most recent Language Log post as I write this, Mark Liberman writes at the end that

[...] we can also learn on the web that PsyBlog is "the Language Log of psychology, maybe"

The thing I noticed here when you hover over "PsyBlog" is that it goes to Polyglot Conspiracy, but the search parameter is "catafora." I noted that this was the spelling I use for my website right here, and the normal English spelling is Cataphora, as it is in my protocol. I clicked the link, and noticed that two posts come up, one I mentioned before, and one I missed (!).

Two other points: First, it was lovely to see the connection again, and maybe some Language Log legionnaires will follow that link... and then the other link. Second, and most importantly, I need to wonder what was the basis for using that as the link? I would like to think that this is a subtle hat tip to my little ruminations here, and that ideally Mark Liberman takes a glance every so often in this direction. It's also possible that he just wanted a search parameter that was (more or less) unique to the page. There's a problem-set with that theory though, one, is that there is no problem just using a regular link to the page, and the second is that the mention of my site is not particularly close to the thing they were trying to reference on Language Log. On top of that, searching Psyblog will yield /only/ the desired result, and seems to be the natural choice. Either way, I should probably class it up here just to be safe.

Also! As of this post I am 2nd on google for a search of "catafora," and am mentioned in the 5th result if you search "paratactica." I'm the first result for "paratactic cataphora" sans quotes, and the first of just three (again, as a reference) for "catafora paratactica." I'm not really sure how proud of this I should be, but hey, it's something!