A bit of shameless re-blogging to get me back into the swing of things:
Collins English Dictionary is adding an entry for meh (“an interjection to suggest indifference or boredom”) to next year’s 30th anniversary edition. It was the winner of a campaign launched by Collins seeking public nominations for new words, and it beat out such competition as jargonaut (a fan of jargon), frenemy (an enemy disguised as a friend) and huggles (a hybrid of hugs and snuggles). This follows on the heels of another Collins competition that we discussed last month, where the public was invited to vote for which old, infrequently used words should be saved from deletion.
[Ben Zimmer via Ideas]
Apparently this announcement has caused a certain amount of support and disapproval from the blogosphere, centered around whether onomatopoeias and interjections are worthy of inclusion in dictionaries.
Zimmer, the linguist who wrote the column I linked to above, also describes a bit of the surprising etymology behind “meh”:
An additional problem with meh is that it still feels like a bit of a novelty, since it owes much of its current popularity to online discourse. But meh has a fascinating story to tell. As I learned when I researched the word for a 2006 Language Log post, the onomatopoetic roots of meh, along with its slightly more disapproving sibling feh, go back to Yiddish.
The word was then popularized of the Simpsons and spread “as an all-purpose lukewarm reaction in online communication, particularly in fan forums, chatrooms, and the like.” Now it’s even made its way onto American Idol in noun form as “meh-ness.”
Thank goodness. Meh is probably one of my favorite words, and I fully support the idea of dictionaries tracking innovations in the use of language — even if it’s through transparent publicity stunts. Now I was going to write a little bit on the purpose of dictionaries, but meh, maybe I’ll save that for another day…
[via NYTimes]
An article out today in the Shanghai Daily (have you noticed I’m addicted to Shanghaiist.com yet?) about the latest in the official crackdown on silly translations on Beijing street signs. This is old news, as the latest linguistic purging started as early as last year (see nytimes link above), and snarky bloggers have been making fun of these signs ever since…well, since snarky people started having blogs (see link on “Racist Park” photo below).
Asian countries somehow seem particularly adept at mangling the English language in brilliantly humorous ways, an ability variously referred to as Engrish, or when perpetrated by that most populous nation of the Far East, Chinglish. This article offers a dissenting opinion to the crackdown, quoting American linguists who are evidently a lot more amused by Chinglish than the Chinese government is: After the jump: The world would be a funnier place if we celebrated Chinglish instead of trying to get rid of it.
Thanks to C.J. for sending me the following, incredibly cool link: 80 Million Tiny Images. It’s a mosaic of millions of online images corresponding to nouns in the English language, and the spatial arrangement of the images in the mosaic reflects their semantic relationship to each other–i.e. closer images represent words that are closer in meaning. From the page (which also contains a link to the research paper):
Each of the tiles in the mosaic is an arithmetic average of images relating to one of 53,463 nouns. The images for each word were obtained using Google’s Image Search and other engines. A total of 7,527,697 images were used, each tile being the average of 140 images. The average reveals the dominant visual characteristics of each word. For some, the average turns out to be a recognizable image; for others the average is a colored blob. The list of nouns was obtained from Wordnet, a database compiled by lexicographers which records the semantic relationship between words. Using this database, we extract a tree-structured semantic hierarchy which we use to arrange tiles within the poster. We tessellate the poster using the hierarchy so that the proximity of two tiles is given by their semantic distance.
The most interesting thing about the result is the remarkable degree of color agreement that they achieve. Despite the fact that each tile is the average of several photos of the same thing, the end result is often surprisingly recognizable, and close-by tiles tend to have the same color scheme. The overall mosaic, rather than appearing as a wash of meaningless color noise, has some fairly uniform blobs on it because of the semantic association of images. The one they give on the website (composed of 7.5 million images, it seems–not 8 million) almost looks like a hunched over figure of a person. I wonder what the full 80 million images put together looks like.
The real question is, when can I get this as a wall poster to put up in my room?
