Tuesday, April 12, 2005
- Google, Blogoscoped: a page packed with handy online Tools You Might Have Missed (be sure to try the addictive Image Quiz game, that generates a block of unlabeled Google Images; your job is to guess what one- or two-word search generated them)
- The NameVoyager is a fascinating Java-loaded page that dynamically graphs the popularity of thousands of names in the U.S. since 1900 - if you type in a few letters or the first syllable of a name, all names that match the criteria show up. I noticed an interesting pattern: frequently, both male and female names with similar phonetics trended similarly over time. For example, the names Brian, Brianna, Bridget, Brice, and Britney all rose and fell in popularity during the same time periods.
- Obscure linguistic constructs in country-pop lyrics? FLoP and Anti-FLoP:
Neal Whitman has given the name FLoP coordination to a certain kind of incompletely-parallel coordination. The canonical example is from Garth Brooks' "Friends in Low Places":
I've got friends in low places,
We start from a structure in which a final constituent is construed with both members of a preceding conjunction, say:
where the whiskey drowns and the beer chases
my blues away.Kim selected and Leslie packed the samples.
and then add something else that only makes sense with the second conjunct, e.g.Kim selected and Leslie packed the samples up.
It's not clear what the status of these structures is. Ordinary examples like the one that I just constructed seem pretty doubtful to me, but there are plenty of cases like the Garth Brooks lyric that go down fine, at least as long as I don't think about them too closely. [Language Log] - File under "Are You Sure This Was Unintentionally Sexual?": Unintentionally sexual comic book covers from decades ago, which suggest that either we read way too much into sexual symbolism these days - or some seriously twisted folks were getting away with murder in the Good Old Days. You decide. Also: I Am Better Than Your Kids - some good, dirty abrasive fun at the expense of unwitting child artists. If you've ever resented having to tape yet another scrawled family portrait to your cubicle wall, you'll appreciate the humor here. Neither page is exactly safe for work, although this depends on where you work; if you work at home, it's safe, but your kids might need therapy. [via Wither in the Light]
- "How Much Is Inside?" Some surprisingly side-splitting amateur quantitative analyses of consumer products, mit fotografen.
- State of (Priority) Confusion:
Jim Nowlan, director of the civic leadership fellows program at UIUC, thinks the name of the state of Illinois should be changed to the State of Abraham Lincoln. Nowlan's reasoning? "Few in the world know what or where Illinois is. Some have heard of Chicago. Yet the world knows Abraham Lincoln..." And the Trib, bless their hearts, put a poll on the editorial page: "Should Illinois be renamed the 'State of Abraham Lincoln'?"
Okay...I'll bite...we have a state named "Washington," so why not "Lincoln"? Having the name changed on everything from drivers' licenses to municipal letterhead might prove a welcome boost to the economy. [Gapers Block]...{I'm kidding, you know.}
farkleberries Links du Jour 79
