I'm Reading O'Brian Again

I do this every few years; I start reading Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series again. I ran out of library books to read during the pass-by of Hurricane Irene in late August so I went to my personal collection and grabbed Master and Commander. Again.

It may be the start of another run through the whole 20-book series. Maybe. Last time, it was May to October of 2006. That has been the only time I have read through the series start-to-finish. I've read most of the novels in the series at least twice, but usually in a disconnected, non-sequential way.

I enjoy sea-stories and stories from the Napoleonic wars. But what I love most about these books is the language. Writing like this:

...it would have been difficult to imagine a pleasanter way of spending the late summer than sailing than sailing across the whole width of the Mediterranean as fast as the sloop could fly. She flew a good deal faster now that Jack had hit upon her happiest trim, restowing her hold to bring her by the stern and restoring her masts to the rake her Spanish builders had intended. What is more, the brothers Sponge, with a dozen of the Sophie's swimmers under their instruction, had spent every moment of the long calms in Greek waters (their native element) scraping her bottom; and Stephen could remember an evening when he had sat there in the warm, deepening twilight, watching the sea; it had barely a ruffle on its surface, and yet the Sophie picked up enough moving air with her topgallants to draw a long, straight whispering furrow across the water, a line brilliant with unearthly phosphorescence, visible for a quart of a mile behind her. Days and nights of unbelievable purity. Nights when the steady Ionian breeze rounded the square mainsail -- not a brace to be touched, watch relieving watch -- and he and Jack on deck, sawing away, sawing away, lost in their music , until the falling dew untuned their strings. And days when the perfection of dawn was so great , the emptiness so entire, that men were almost afraid to speak.

I marked this passage as I read by it the other day and thought it might make a good blog post. In searching back through this blog for previous O'Brian posts I realized I've done this kind of post a few times before.

I finished Master and Commander yesterday. The library is closed, so I moved on to Post Captain, the second in the series. I don't know if this is the start of another run through all 20 novels. That would probably carry me into January.

I Am Easily Amused

I spent a bit of time today at work checking out a new on-line data exploration and mapping site from the GIS company ESRI. Community Analyst was announced as part of a federal government GIs conference (I was watching via twitter). It is a promising tool and may be a real success.

But this brief post isn't about substantive things. No, this post is about the silly little things that amuse me.

Community Analyst is in beta testing. The makers are looking for feedback. As a dutiful data freak, I immediately looked for the feedback link and found the first thing to comment on: it is a "feeback" link.

What I wanted most of all at that point was to be the first to have noticed. And I was!

I got a kick out of that.

Unforgiving Grammarian Moment #298

I know this is petty of me, but I get annoyed by bad grammar in newspaper writing. It is usually the subtle little errors that irk me the most; so subtle that sometimes I'm not even sure they are errors.

Like this one from a story on a fish kill in today's News Journal:

Unlike many other regional species, DNREC Fisheries Manager Craig Shirey said the croaker spawn late in the season, in the early fall, and are therefore less equipped to handle cold temperatures and rough surf.

My first question is, what do the other species say about when the croaker do their spawning? And is Craig Shirey really a distinct species? I've met Craig, by the way, and he is a nice fellow, but not that unique.

The fix is simple, by the way. Simply insert a comma:

Unlike many other regional species, DNREC Fisheries Manager Craig Shirey said, the croaker spawn late in the season, in the early fall, and are therefore less equipped to handle cold temperatures and rough surf.

Or even better:

Unlike many other regional species, croaker spawn late in the season, in the early fall, said DNREC Fisheries Manager Craig Shirey. They are therefore less equipped to handle cold temperatures and rough surf, he added.

You could probably leave off the "he added," I suppose.

Yes, I know. I am being petty. And I am often guilty of equally egregious grammatical errors. But newspaper writers and editors get paid to write.

I'm just blathering on here for my own amusement.

Speaking of Presidential Word-Clouds...

After yesterday's discussion of word clouds related to the "back to school" speech by President Obama, I was referenced in a tweet by jamesparks101 who invited me to check out a wordle project he (I think) completed in August. He has created word clouds of every one of the 56 inaugural addresses from US history.

I've posted the word-cloud from William Henry Harrison's marathon inaugural in 1841, above-right. It is the longest inaugural address in history and Harrison made it hat-less and coat-less on a cold, wet, March day. After two hours speaking (yikes) he attended several inaugural balls. He caught a cold; the cold lingered, became pneumonia, and led to Harrison's death on April 4, 1841.

I find this interesting, though I do have to point out that jamesparks101 is being something of a pain by tweeting the same thing, over and over, apparently to anyone who sends a tweet making reference to word-clouds:

...take a look at this wordle project retweet if worthy.

I'll not re-tweet, but thought it worth a mention here.

I'm Not At All Surprised

Lewes/Rehoboth area restaurant Crabby Dick's is on a web site's list of 40 Unfortunately Named Restaurants. It is posted along with places named things like "My Dung" and "The Chocolate Log." The web site it's on -- Manofest -- is not particularly mature.

Locals will recall the rolling brouhaha this sign caused a few years ago. When Crabby Dick's first opened on Route One about halfway between Lewes and Rehoboth, the sign often featured messages like this. The thinly veiled double entendre (single entendre?) messages generated complaints in the local media from parents who didn't want to have to explain them to car-loads of kids.

The sign eventually settled down to milder messaging a while back. But folks still remember.

And a hat-tip for spotting this, by the way, to the excellent The Grammar Vandal blog.

What's Next? Space?

One of the great things about my little city of Lewes is that it is home to a University of Delaware research campus. It features a constantly renewing population of marine scientists from all over the world. That adds an international spice to the town.

When we moved to Lewes, that campus was The College of Marine Studies -- "CMS." At some point, that got changed and they started calling it The College of Marine and Earth Studies --"CMES." I never could get used to that name and so I didn't use it.

As it turns out, it was prescient of me to not learn "CMES" because CMS/CMES is now The College of Earth, Ocean and Environment -- "CEOE."

How do we pronounce that? See-oh-eee?

Wait... What?

There is a discussion paper posted on the web site of the Open GIS Consortium entitled "Uncertainty Markup Language (UnCertML)."

The Uncertainty Markup Language (UncertML) is an XML encoding for the transport and storage of information about uncertain quantities, with emphasis on quantitative representations based on probability theory.

I believe that this is a serious paper, but I have to admit I looked to make sure the publication date wasn't April 1.

I'm just not sure how much of this I should read...

What the Hell Do They Think That Word Means, Anyway?

A TV ad in the other room has just reminded me of an abuse of the language that has bugged me for years. Whoever it was, they were promising, I think to investors (and I wouldn't trust them, whoever they were), "personalized, objective advice."

Just what the hell do they mean by "personalized" advice. Taken literally, doesn't that mean that they will give you their standard advice, but will make it personal? Won' they just take their usual sales pitch, and personalize it by adding, I don't know, your name?

Well, (insert name of client here), I think we can make great progress for you and (insert name of client's spouse, SO, kid, or pet) if we marginalize the hamifranistration index and purdleplast the frostimatriculation scale.

Now, I know you are a careful and thoughtful investor (insert name of client here), but I think it's time for us to grab the...

I keep hearing that word in TV and radio ads. I suppose they mean "personal service." But "personalized" just bugs me.

And so I have posted this rant.

From the New Lexicon #102: "Sarah-phonics"

NY Times Op-Ed Columnist Charles M. Blow has coined a new term in his column on the Biden/Palin debate (The Joe Biden Show).

Palin launched into her charm offensive — winking, smiling, dodging questions and speaking in her signature Sarah-phonics , a mash up of sentence fragments and colloquialisms glued together with misplaced also’s and there’s — gibberish really. Everyone in the bar lapped it up. It was The Sarah Palin Show." [Highlighting by yours-truly]

While we're on the NY Times site, I can also recommend Bob Herbert's column "Palin's Alternate Universe," which includes this gem:

...Ms. Palin’s words don’t mean anything. She’s all punctuation.

Another Word Cloud

I wanted to try another of these wordle word-clouds. This one is a cloud of the tags I use in del.icio.us. A more practical and clickable version of this has long lived at the lowest left-hand spot on this blog, of course, but I think this gives an accurate picture of what my focus is when I browse the web and mark things for further use.

I search mostly for items of and about Delaware. Many of these I find in my work for state government; I track land-use issues among county and municipal governments. Many of these I mark for inclusion on various pages of my office's web site; we use items relating to land-use planning, about proposals reviewed under the PLUS Process, on the US Census, and about the use and sharing of geospatial data (GIS stuff). I've also used del.icio.us tags to supplement an aggregation of state GIS coordination RSS feeds that I help maintain for the National States Geographic Information Council (NSGIC).

I still want to take another crack at a family-tree wordle. The one I did the other night was just a selection from among the Mahaffies on my tree. I'm trying to figure out a way to extract all 1,700 of the people on my family tree and make a wordle from that last.

Very Many Mahaffies

There's a neat light java tool out there called Wordle which creates colorful word-clouds. They are not the sort of thing that you can use for navigation, but they are loads of fun. 

I have created a few, including this one based on a bunch of names from my family tree. Have a browse through the gallery and see if you aren't tempted to make one yourself.

"Delawarisms" Get Some National Attention

One of the blogs of the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) has a piece today on some of the linguistic tics unique to Delaware's political scene. The blog, The Thicket, selects a few bits from a post this week by proto-blogger Celia Cohen on her Delaware Grapevine.

In Leg Hall Lingo, Celia offered a brief glossary to help watchers of Delaware's political antics keep up with the local dialect. Many were words and phrases familiar to legislature-watchers everywhere, but a few were new to the NCSL writer, including "Thurman's Office," "Body Parts People," and the "Big Head" committees.

The legislature is a community unto itself and, like any community, it has its own customs, its own norms and its own language. Ours is not the only one with its own words, The Thicket offers a neat little lexicon: Sine Die and Other Vulgarities.

Purple Prose Enlivens a Tale of the Emerald Diamond

I've been checking through old newspapers at the Library of Congress' Chronicling America site. I'm searching for references to my various forebears; it is a low-return fishing expedition, but great fun.

For example, a search for references to any Mahaffies in California in newspapers from around the turn of the 20th Century has turned up several sports-page notes about a baseball umpire named Mahaffy. I doubt that he is a direct relative, though he may be a very distant cousin. What's great about this, though, is the prose in which I find him.

Here are two paragraphs from Page 42 of the September 30, 1906, edition of the San Francisco Call. William J. Slattery writes about a game between the Portland Beavers and the San Francisco Seals (in first and second in the standings at the time).

Neither team played anything that looked like high art. Errors happened frequently and did a deal of damage. Neither pitcher was there any too strong and and both of them delayed the game as much as possible by indulging in a series of senseless winding ups and warming ups between the rounds.

Maybe it was because of the banishment of Cousin Park Wilson that San Francisco did not perform according to the tips of the wise brigade. Cousin Park assayed to engage in an oratorial contest with Umpire Mahaffy in the eighth spasm and before he realized that the worst was yet to come, the indicator man had already made a mysterious high sign and given Park notice to skidoo. He also informed the leader of the Seals that his pay envelope will be shy five dollars when the next day of reckoning with Cal Ewing is at hand.

The Seals were not doing well in their season series with the Beavers in 1906. The Beavers won this game, 3 to 1, moving to a record of 98-47 and a won/lost percentage of .697. The cellar-dwelling Fresno team, by contrast, was at .335 percent at 51-101.

An Alignment of Pet Peeves

A blogger out in Ohio has touched, in a way, on a pet peeve of mine in discussing a pet peeve of his own:

In the past year I’ve noticed that the media, and sometimes city officials, use the terms Delaware County and Delaware (city) as interchangeable terms. They’re not.

I try to track news and discussion about the State of Delaware. I have deployed standing searches using Google and other tools to try to catch references to, and discussion about, the First State. I've found some fascinating things this way, but I do have to wade through far too much news about Delaware County and city in Ohio, that county just north of us in Pennsylvania, and numerous Delaware Roads and and Avenues around the nation.

Maybe we should have copyrighted the name.

What Did We Call This Place When?

In order to save electrons, allow me to point to a blog post I just wrote on the NSGIC Blog: Getting Serious About Original Place Names.

It is about a recent small grant by the Federal Geographic Data Committee to the state of Hawaii to add audio pronunciation guides to geospatial place-name data for that state. It builds on an idea developed by the Coeur d'Alene Tribe, in Idaho. The Tribe's GIS program has created audio map data, including for Google Earth and has entries outside of Idaho.

The project is open to input on names outside of traditional Couer d'Alene areas. Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania, for example, is at the same spot as what was once known as Tsi wahswèn:to (MP3) which translates as "at the coal forked mouth."

I think this is a cool idea.

Unexpected Fact #195

I found out today that the spell-checker in Microsoft Outlook includes the word "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious."

I had added an extraneous "l."

How and why did I learn this unexpected fact? I found a use for the word in an e-mail at work. Every once in a while it helps to use absurd language. Even if the sound of it is said to be "quite atrocious."

A Sign of Trouble?

This is probably way too over-simplified an analysis, but I can't help thinking that this image, from the News Journal's story on risky borrowing, is symptomatic of what our basic mistake was.

If we can't get the grammar right, what makes us think we can handle complex financial affairs?

In Troubled Times, Where Shall a Bruised Nation Turn for Soothing Ironic Distance?

I found myself drawn to this recent headline from The Onion: Nation's Crumbling Infrastructure Probably Some Sort Of Metaphor.

The satirical "newspaper" recounts recent infrastructure failures and notes that these failures are "forcing many to question whether the nation's rapidly deteriorating roads, contaminated drinking water and groundwater, and run-down schools could perhaps be a metaphor for something."

"Everywhere you turn you see improperly maintained railways, structurally deficient bridges—not to mention billions of gallons of untreated sewage flowing directly into our groundwater," said Adam Perry, a representative for the ASCE. "Is there an underlying message here? There are so many layers, and each one is so subtle and nuanced, that I'm hesitant to make any kind of blanket statement about what this means 'for America.'"

"I think our overstretched and increasingly obsolete infrastructure might symbolize something important," Perry added. "But what?"

I find myself missing that sort of irony-heavy satirical commentary now that the TV-writers' strike has darkened the nation's airwaves. I wonder where to turn for the acerbic commentary I once depended on The Daily Show to provide.

As it happens, commercial television is not the only place to find such content. As we turn away from reality-TV, we are rediscovering thoughtful, written cynicism in all manner of formats, from traditional printed books and magazines to on-line blogs and, for the more adventurous, personal conversation.

Aside from The Onion, there are other goofy-news sites such as ScrappleFace, McSweeney's and the (somewhat NSFW) Daily Mash over in the United Kingdom. There are sites featuring humorous writing in general, such as Francesco Explains It All. And the TV writers are creating new on-line video content in their own cause at Speechless.

So, as the writers' strike drags into a new year, and we resign ourselves to television without great wit, people around the nation are re-discovering the joys of literature, learning about alternate media, and indulging in conversation.

And some -- a brave few -- are starting to express their own, very personal, satire.

As The Phrase Turns

On a conference call at work today, a colleague coined a phrase that stuck in my ear. I had to write it down, bring it home, and share it here:

You don't know what it is really going to be until it really is.

This is grammatically suspect, and sounds redundant. But I like it.

Stupid Thoughts That I Feel (for Some Reason) That I Have to Share #77

The word "visibility" has a lot of eyes in it.