K-Squared Ramblings

Chatspeak IRL

Went to the comic store on a late lunch today. As I got in the car, I saw the clerk locking the door. At 2:00, it seemed a bit early for closing, but then I noticed he had just hung up a sign that said:

AFK BRB

A bit cryptic to the uninitiated*, but probably completely understood by the target audience.

*And for the uninitiated, that’s “Away From Keyboard” and “Be Right Back,” common online abbreviations that have made the transition from IRC chat to modern IM. Though I suppose in this case it could be “Away From Kounter.” Oh, and IRL=”In Real Life.”

Spam from the Third Age

I’ve held off on posting funny spam subject lines lately, but I just had to comment on this pair. First up:

Mazrim Taim was one of those, raising an army and ravaging Saldaea before he was taken.

It’s a quote from Lord of Chaos, the 6th book in Robert Jordan’s fantasy series, The Wheel of Time. The next one is a bit less obvious:

If Lan was attempting jokes, however feeble and wrongheaded, he was changing.

I wasn’t sure about this one, since there must be other stories with characters named Lan, but Google Book Search found it in book 5, The Fires of Heaven.

I’ve seen lots of spam that used filler from The Wizard of Oz and other novels old enough to be in the public domain. Project Gutenberg and the like have been transcribing them, making free plain-text ebooks for years, making it easy to snag a couple of lines of actual English text.

In theory this should be harder to identify as filler than randomly-generated text. Read the rest of this entry »

Inadvertent Language

This morning’s Los Angeles Times article, “A %$#@ slippery slope on raw talk?”, discusses the recent court ruling that relaxed FCC restrictions on inadvertent swearing. On one side, watchdog groups (and the FCC) are complaining that this could lead to swearing and nudity throughout prime time. (Won’t someone think of the children?) On the other side, the networks point out that it’s not likely to open the floodgates of indecency:

Broadcasters could air expletives after 10 o’clock “every night of the week,” one executive said. “We don’t for a reason, because we don’t think our audiences want to hear it.”

My take: this is a much-needed relaxation of rules that, frankly, have gotten overly uptight in the last few years. If an adult screws up and accidentally lets loose with stronger language than is acceptable on TV, and the guy with his finger on the *bleep* button misses it, chances are they both already know they messed up. Give ’em a slap on the wrist. The ton of bricks approach is unnecessary, and ultimately counter-productive.

It takes a spectacularly skewed worldview to think that the occasional slip-up in the heat of the moment is equivalent in naughty content to, say, a scripted scene from The Sopranos. Once a year vs. 10 times in every scene? Big deal. We’re not talking about murder, we’re talking about words—words that everyone (yes, including your kids) has heard plenty of times.

On a related note, the article brings up the infamous Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction, since it spurred the “war on obscenity” into action. Personally, I think the most disturbing thing about the incident is the fact that all the blame is on Jackson herself. No one seems to remember that it was Justin Timberlake who ripped off part of her wardrobe.

The Origin of “Nukular”

After a great deal of painstaking research^[1], I have uncovered the true^[2] origins of the “nucular” pronunciation of the word nuclear.

Nukular turns out to be an abbreviation of “Nuke-you-la’r,” a traditional Texan leave-taking^[3]. The phrase is a contraction of “Nuke you later,” and refers to the intense heat of a Texas barbecue grill. Essentially, one is saying that the other person is always welcome at a barbecue.

The word appears to have become conflated with nuclear due to their similarity, much as many people confuse affect and effect, or use infer when they obviously mean imply^[4].

Nukular in its original sense has fallen out of use except in some rural parts of Texas, and most speakers are no longer aware of the saying.

—

1. In other words, 30 seconds of making stuff up.
2. No, not really.
3. Or greeting. It’s kind of like aloha in Hawaiian: it can be used for both hello and goodbye.
4. This isn’t hand grenades, after all.

Convicted…huh?

I was listening to the news this morning, and I caught a reference to “Convicted Lobbyist Jack Abramoff.” It occurred to me that the phrasing is a bit odd. It makes it sound like he was convicted of being a lobbyist, which, last I heard, was still legal.

I suppose “Convicted corrupt lobbyist” sounds too unwieldy… and there are people who might consider it redundant!

¿Cómo se dice, «duh»?

NPR’s “Morning Edition” ran a story today on the rise of the Spanish-language television market, and Univision in particular. They led into it with a remark that Spanish-language coverage of the World Cup has been getting higher ratings than the English-language coverage.

This should surprise no one, given that soccer (as we norteamericanos call what everyone else seems to refer to as football) isn’t terribly popular in the USA, with two notable exceptions: Parents of 6-year-olds who want to put their children into a sport, and the duration of the World Cup. El fútbol, however, is wildly popular in Europe and Latin America, and we have a lot of recent immigrants from Latin America.

So no, I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn that there are more Spanish-speaking hardcore soccer fans than English-speaking ones.

Acronym Overload: is that D&D or D&D?

On Friday I received an email about the “IEEE GLOBECOM 2006 D&D FORUM.”

My first thought on seeing the subject was, “Well, it’s clearly not Dungeons and Dragons.” So I thought about other D&Ds, and the next thing I thought of was drag and drop. I knew that couldn’t be it, either. Who would hold a conference on drag-n-drop? (Now, I can see a D&D game dealing with a “dragon drop” contest, but that’s another issue entirely!)

I opened the newsletter, and of course it was a design and development conference. Should’ve been obvious, but I just didn’t think of it.

Any acronyms/abbreviations you’ve mixed up? Not just acronyms for which you know more than one meaning, but the ones that you’ve seen in one context, and the first meaning you thought of was from some other field entirely.

Kids’ language and the media

KCRW ran a story on the indecency wars this morning, and quoted someone who was concerned that kids are picking up bad language from broadcast media.

Yeah, right. Broadcast media is so locked down they can’t find that kind of language there.

When I was in middle school, I spent a week working at a cub scout day camp. I think I was around 12 or 13 at the time. The adults warned us that we had to watch our language around the cubs (who were probably around 8 or 9), because they didn’t want the kids picking up any bad words from us. They needn’t have bothered. The kids were far more foul-mouthed around us than we were amongst ourselves, and actually managed to shock us. This was in the late 1980s.

Kids don’t need TV or movies to learn bad words. They learn them from their friends at school, or they learn them from parents, or from neighbor kids.

There was a B.C. comic strip a few years ago that I thought illustrated this point well: Two kids (well, ants) walk into the room, one crying, “Mom, he said the Z-word!” The parents send the kid to his room, then have this brief conversation: “Where’d the little %@#&! learn the Z-word?” “Beats the #@*$ out of me.”