A Girl With a Sword

linguistic notes

I just notice random linguistic things, and since I don't have a roommate I'm going to blog about them. Here are the linguistic notes for today:

1. As I was riding home from the grocery store, I went through a little park and noticed a sign on the way out, a STOP sign that said "kids STOP caution" or something like that, I don't actually remember the third word. But I realized that the sign could either mean you should be careful because there were kids, or kids should be careful, whereas if the sign had said "traffic STOP caution" it would not be ambiguous because traffic is never told that it (as "traffic") needs to be careful. We spent a lot of time talking about elipsis in our semantics course--constructions in which a few words stand in for a whole sentence, things like "low battery" to mean "the battery on your iPod is low on power" and "not yet!" to mean "don't tell me the answer yet!" Anyway, we had to collect examples of this and interpret them and as with most assignments like that I found many more (and better) examples after we had already turned the assignment in.

2. This is from the wikipedia entry on barley wine:
"In the United States, barley wines are required for this reason to be called "barley wine-style ales." Though this could be taken by some to imply that they are not truly barley wines; in fact it only means that they, like all barley wines, are not truly wines."

I like how it is explaining that people get confused about the syntactic grouping of the phrase "barley wine-style ale," is it [[[barley wine] style] ale] or [barley [[wine] style] ale], although the entry claims that it's the second option, the first seems to be a lot simpler and neater and seems like the better option. I mean, the second one isn't even using the term "barley wine" really, it saying barley ale that's in the style of wine. But it's not in the style of wine, it's called "wine" because it has a high alcohol content like wine does. Damn confusing.

Anyway, I'm going to get back to thesis research and stop distracting myself now.

names

I found this name chart the other day that for some reason really fascinates me. I've been interested in name trends since I was little, I have newspaper articles cut out and journal entries contemplating the topic, and this chart makes it all visual and dynamic.

You have to get used to the change in the graph between names, but it's so much fun to see how names go up and down. I wish they had it documented farther back. Interesting that Michael was the top boys name of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Linnea had it's day in the sun back in the 40s, actually making it to the top 1000.

I wish they would do something like this for names in childrens stories and names in fantasy books ("oh look, Elora and Rowena were very popular in the 80s, but the 90s writers opted for the more ordinary Eleanor and Catherine"). And then I want them to do another list just of hipster kid names. These people on the BabyNameWizard blog keep talking about hipster parents and the outrageous things they name/would name their children (Hepzibah being one of the most discussed) and it's made me curious to see stats.

summer evening

My apartment feels like this right now, open windows, big music, beautiful summer night. I just wish I had those speakers, and those floors!