I offer the following evidence:

For those not familiar with the idea of a Googlewhack, Urban Dictionary explains it is:

a combination of two words that when searched through the popular search engine "google" only give one result.

Wikipedia goes into more depth, yet is silent on the topic of spelling.

I argue that stsadmin, or it's correct form, stsadm are not words, so can't be typos - and as such I'm claiming it! 

Mine, as so many other software companies rely on camel case for brand identity.  I knew as soon as I had to spell it out to the lady at ASIC that I was going to be spelling it out every time it is said in meat space.  I ‘spose that’s why the business card was invented.

I found this piece in the current New Scientist.  The one with Africa/Face on the cover.

It’s entertaining, if a little bit old hat to us tech folk, and talks to usability in URLs indirectly.  (emphasis mine)

CamelCase

What’s with the outbreak of bumpy words – or should that be BumpyWords?  Do BlackBerry, MySpace, YouTube and LinkedIn signal an attack on the English Language?

Don’t Panic.  They’re examples of CamelCase (or medical capitals, BiCapitalisatioin, CapWords and InterCaps) and they’re all about forming compound words by capitalizing each chunk to preserve its identity.  This produces “camel” words with a range of “humps”.

CamelCase has been around since the 1950s in a few brand names like CinemaScope.  But it was software engineers who really took CamelCase to their hearts, using it in their program-writing conventions, and developing two separate styles; UpperCamelCase (UCC) and lowerCamelCase (lCC).

It’s not hard to see why.  If you have to wade through lines and lines of programs day in, day out, it helps to be able to tell the difference between structural elements, functions, procedures and objects provided by the language, and the names of things programmers have defined themselves.  If it’s defined by a programmer, you can’t look it up in the manual; you have to find it in the program to work out what it does.

As soon as computer keyboards were revolutionised in the late 1960s to include upper and lower-case characters, happy programmers were suddenly able to make distinctions.  For example, while “switch” is a programming-language element, “switchAddressFields” would be defined by the programmer.  The latter is virtually unreadable when presented in all lower case (switchaddressfields).

CamelCase has now made it into the world of techie products and web services, but will it go totally mainstream?  Very possibly.

In the internet age, CamelCase seems to be surging because it’s not possible to put spaces into web addresses.  Many companies feel obliged to compress their names into (www.)OneBlockOfText(.com) to preserve brand identity across all formats and media.  And consider PricewaterhouseCoopers (note the combination of lCC and UCC) and GlaxoSmithKline.

Marketing Directors at Corel, whose products include WordPerfect, say CamelCase boosts readability.  Not only that, CamelCase brand names are easily turned into catchy typographic icons and are also easier to trademark, even if made up of words which may be tricky to trademark individually.

Should linguistic purists be affronted by this corporate styling?  Jim Wallace, president of the Society for the Preservation of English Language and Literature (SPELL),  is sanguine.  “The use of such new names in daily commerce is no serious threat to the language.  We see no reason to shun them,” he says.

We wait with more than a little trepidation the break-out of a rival convention used by programmers:  underscore_delimited_names.

New Scientist, 27th Oct 2007, pg 58.

Jim Wallace may well be cheerfully confidant – what have contrived acronyms done for the language?, and I would not dare to ponder that SPELL may be a Backronym.

See ORCA - the Organisation of Really Contrived Acronyms for additionally sillyness... Actually, both the SPELL and ORCA sites are in desperate need of being pulled out of the 1990s 

Listening To:  Reggatta de Blanc, The Police

One of those things that makes sense, but you may have assumed otherwise if not had cause to ponder it.  I'm talking about literary translation, and the liberties that the translator and their editor have to take while translating books from foreign languages to English and vice versa.

In Other Words, is a three part series from Canada's CBC, available on their podcast where by some highly regarded literary translators discuss their trade.  They all take the topic of these liberties very seriously, and feel that at times being faithful to the original means straying from it.

In the second episode, one of the guest translators recounts a cartoon to illustrate the point, in which the translator asks the author of the original work: Do you not be happy with me as the translator of the books of you? 

The series examines the question that you may assume we are reading a fidelity reproduction of Don Quixote or Dostoyevsky, until you read a second translation and examine the differences.  How is the difference explained if both are correct?

The third and final part of the series is due to appear on the podcast feed tonight, and makes for very interesting listening.

I've just watched a show on Discovery (yay, annual leave about life being elsewhere in the solar system (europa's seas) or elsewhere in the universe, and the search thereof.

I was happily digesting a sandwitch and Tooheys when a silvery senior figure from NASA tried to quell the discussion in saying that single cellular life would be a significant find.  Speculation followed from the usual sources, with counter arguments from again, usual sources.

Please people!  enough.

Once you start a back-and-forth on semantics of proof (not to mention some very poor web design there guys!) you are already on the wrong path.

Bill Bryson concluded that life doesn't want to be much.  No social commentary intended, just his noting that of all living creatures, only one species has been so motivated to write books about living species.  The rest are just content to be moss, plants and etc.

Are Bryson and our aforementioned NASA silvery senior on the right path?  Maybe.  In either case, consider if "life" were substituted with "a mere inevitable chemical reaction"; if so Bryson should be careful to attribute "want", and our silvery senior should be careful when attributing "life" to it also.

Jon Kabat-Zinn noted that our subspecies name of Homo sapiens sapiens is no mistake, sapiens derives from the latin sapere, to taste but also to know.  The word sapient derives here also- meaning wise and insightfil, but isn't in wide use in present day English - maybe there is less call for it these days?   But seriously, the use of sapiens sapiens implies a meta awareness.  Man who knows and knows that he knows as Kabat-Zinn puts it. 

And this is exactly where the wheel comes off the cart for the extraterrestrial life argument.  Where can the term life be defined outside the realm of subjective experience?  To be alive and not know it renders me unable to describe life.  If we sustain that line of reasoning one step further, any concept dependant on a definition and description of life, be it religion or God, can only itself be described in the context of a subjective description.

While ever discussion of these matters is bound by shifting semantics of language, you will find me perched on an esky at the sideline tossing my empties into the skirmish.

Love him or hate him, the late Bill Hicks had a way with words.  From his 1989 live recording, Sane Man...

Wouldn't you like to see a positive LSD story on the news? To hear what it's all about, perhaps? Wouldn't that be interesting? Just for once?

"Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration … that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There's no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we're the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather."

Its been a little while since my last Language Nerd post, so...

Rory Blyth has had a seriously cool and often unhinged blog for quite some time now.  He's tapping into the wealth of his best blog posts for his new podcast, The Smartest Man In the World. 

He really is an imaginative and original writer.  Go check it out ;)

In light of everyone talking about Australia's chance or otherwise in the soccerfootball world cup, I thought it was time to mention Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary on my blog.  His entry on Patriotism is as follows:

Patriotism, n
combustible rubbish ready to the torch of anyone ambitious to illuminate his name.
In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as "the last refuge of a scoundrel."
With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.

I enjoy the Devil's Dictionary sometimes beause of the wit, and at other times because the cynicism expressed therein makes me feel like my own thoughs are a ray of sunshine.

I love it when a word comes to the surface that really fits its need. 

Julian Burnside (offical web site caution: Ugly!, selected history) wrote well on it in his book Wordwatching although he was talking about Black Holes:  Places in English where dispite our vast vocabularly and rich idomatic variations, it [English] lacks words for some common and useful ideas. (p19).  These black holes are unnaturalized foreign words.  Faux pas and deja vu make for common French examples and Schadenfreude from German.  The point of these are that the word as it is fits exactly the sentament. 

Douglas Adams, famed creator of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy also took on this subject in his book The Meaning of Liff (with John Lloyd, who later produced Blackadder), where he took little-used British place names and gave them definitions so that they could be used in conversation.  Kind of like a Robin Hood for the language:  Take a word from where no one cares much and give it to common usage.  Adams' purpose is closer aligned with this blog post than Burnside's broad historical take.  For example Skibbereen (in reality a city in West Cork, Ireland) should now mean: the noise made by a sunburned leg leaving a plastic chair.  The point of this further distraction is the meaning is not only familiar adn unnamed but modern.

To the point of all this, today I learned about the phrase Yak Shaving.  It describes situation you get yourself into when in order to do a given task you must first do another task, which itself cannot be done until you do a third task, and before long you are doing something that is completely unrelated to the task you actually intended to do but logically must preceed it.

The Wikipedia article has an excellent (allbeit New York-centric) example, as follows:

I want to wax the car today.

Oops, the hose is still broken from the winter. I'll need to buy a new one at Home Depot.

But Home Depot is on the other side of the Tappan Zee bridge and getting there without my EZPass is miserable because of the tolls.

But, wait! I could borrow my neighbor's EZPass...

Bob won't lend me his EZPass until I return the mooshi pillow my son borrowed, though.

And we haven't returned it because some of the stuffing fell out and we need to get some yak hair to restuff it.

And the next thing you know, you're at the zoo, shaving a yak, all so you can wax your car.

NB: This example actually refers to shaving a Yak, but that is only to illustrate the point.  Really it can be any kind of multi-level distraction.