"Prohibeted Items" at Nationals Park. Yeah. How long do you think that's been misspelled?

http://mlb.mlb.com/was/ballpark/prohibited_items.jsp.

The URL is correct, but both the page title and the page heading are misspelled. Ugh.

Things You Already Knew Because You're Smarter Than Me

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

Turns out that the sentence is grammatically correct. It means "THE buffalo FROM Buffalo WHO ARE buffaloed BY buffalo FROM Buffalo ALSO buffalo THE buffalo FROM Buffalo."

It is classic, but worth repeating.

More from wikipedia.

Death to Citating! No, Really, You Might Be Able to Stop...

www.Zotero.org is an MIT project that allows you to save bibliographic information about the pages, PDFs, and Word documents you view in your browser and then spit them out in any format you want. That's right law-schoolians, that includes Bluebook...automatically. The only hitch is that you need Firefox 3. For my money (and, mind you, it is free as is the browser) that is totally worth it!

(HT: Wehwah)

National Council of Teachers of English

On a road trip a while back, RSC and I spotted a sign for this organization. I thought it was read like a nomenclatorial stutter. "Of" after "of." We set about testing manipulations and found that every other option of which we could think lent itself to misinterpretation. The National Council of English Teachers might be teachers from the UK. English Teachers Association - same problem. Society for English Education - again, not clear if it meant English the language vs. literature vs. that particular breed of education found with the Brits. This is all due, of course, to our silly decision to associate political/social grouping with language names. If the Brits spoke Flipity and we spoke Floppity, we wouldn't have this problem. Of course, we'd have the American Floppity Teachers Association, and that might just be worse.

And, in case you were wondering, yes, 'nomenclatorial' is a word.

[HT to McCloskey for the idea]

Things You Already Knew Because You Are Smarter Than Me

Sitting around the dinner table last Friday night, the crew (a portion of it anyway) was swapping stories about the craziest name we'd heard. Winner for the evening in my opinion was "Absidee." It won because it is spelled, "ABCDE," making it damn-near impossible to guess the pronounciation.

That was the end of that, until Tuesday, when I ran across the term "abecedarian" in a legal opinion:

Abecedarian
One who teaches language and the alphabet.
http://www.answers.com/abecedarian

What do you call a word that sounds like what it means? This is not onomatopoeia because the word doesn't imitate a sound.

Things You Already Knew Because You Are Smarter Than Me

"Nonce" - Anglican slang for a sexual predator. I saw the term here for the first time today.

It's not clear where the word came from. Here is some etymological speculation from http://www.answers.com/topic/nonce-slang:

It is possible that it is an abbreviation of nonsense or nonsense case, perhaps
derived as British prisoner slang for prisoners who have committed a "nonsense
crime", as opposed to a crime such as theft.[2] [4]
It is also possible that it comes from the acronym used in prisons to describe said
individuals: "Not On Normal Communal Exercise" or "Not on Normal Courtyard
Exercise".[citation needed]
There is also evidence for a possible connection with nancy, a derogatory term referring to effeminate or homosexual males, and with a dialectical use of "nonse" to refer to a worthless person. [2]
Jeffrey Archer in A Prison Diary said that "Nonce" was an acronym for "Not of Normal Criminal Element".

Interestingly, the word also has a standard meaning - 'presently', as in, "Her tendency to discover a touch of sadness had for the nonce disappeared” (Theodore Dreiser).

Things You Already Knew Because You Are Smarter Than Me

Teetotaler
I have always thought this word was "teatotaler" and referred to foppish male analog to a flibbertigibbet, bouncing from tea party to tea party sharing childish giggles over whispered gossip dotted with the clink of glasses.

Turns out the "tea" part is correct, but not for the reasons I thought. Teetotalism is the religious or principled refrain from all alcohol. The "T" stands for "temeperance," so the movement is actually one of "total temperance."

Things You Already Knew Because You Are Smarter Than Me

Most of us have had to use a Notary Public at some point in our lives, though we could not, for the life of us (lives of us?), tell you what value the Notary added.

Most of also know that courts have clerks for the same reason that, say, buildings have janitors or certain movie sets have fluffers. Namely, someone has a dirty job that keeps the whole operation flowing.

Enter Pennsylvania, whose state courts have "Prothonotaries." Prothonotaries, obviously, evolved from Triloclerks, moving out of the Rolodex, erecting counters, and eventually evolving the computerized bar-code filing formats that can only be accessed through the passing of long forms in triplicate with payment under glass that we have come to expect from modern-day clerks.

Actually, the terms is ecclesiastical, coming from the Greek: protonotari, meaning "first scribe." Insert funny closing zinger here.

Braindroppings Comma Langauge.

I have noticed that many people when using paranthetical phrases, will put in the second comma, but not the first - as in this sentence. There should be a comma between "people" and "when." I think that if they stopped and thought about it, they'd hear the natural pause that damn-near requires the little ticks. It is annoying, isn't it?

Lingua Franva

"Infuritating"

Losing an hour of work to a Word crash.
Download times on Blackberry browsers.
Waiting for people who pay cash right in front of you at the checkout line.
Doesn't that sum it up nicely?

Peeve

"Should of" makes me want to hurt people. Look, it's like a-whole-nother. Somewhere mid-phrase, the typist should realize that it is completely nonsensical.

What could "You should of called," possibly mean? Is it a title, like Robin of Loxley, or perhaps a unit of measure, like "bowl of cherries"? This isn't an obscure contraction. I don't see what the problem is.

New Terms

"Chimping" - Admiring the photo you took two seconds ago on the LCD of your digital camera. (Derogatory, duh!) [Wiki]

HT: www.kottke.org

100 Most Common English Words

You know them. Can you name them in 5 minutes? I got 43.
http://codebox.no-ip.net/controller?page=misc.QuizCommonWords

HT to Kottke.org

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"Market Dislocation" - That popping sound you hear before the pain hits you, telling you that your stock positions are now hanging limply from the empty socket of your trading account.

All kidding aside, this is what market professionals call the subprime crisis, etc. I looked, and it does not appear to be a technical term - i.e. dislocation is not a mathematical or statistical phenomena. Rather, it appears to be a euphemism like "outplacement" instead of "firings" or "nice" instead of "you should date in dimly lit restaurants."

Can anyone find a technical definition?

Things You Already Knew Because You Are Smarter Than Me

"Lame!" is an historical exclamation. To wit, Prof. Volokh:

I'd always thought that "lame" as in "lame argument" or "lame excuse" was
relatively modern youth slang. Then I ran across it in a 19th-century source,
and so decided to check the OED. It turns out that the definition of "[m]aimed,
halting; imperfect or defective, unsatisfactory as wanting a part or parts,"
"[s]aid esp[ecially] of an argument, excuse, account, narrative, or the like"
dates back at least to Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida: "blame me not if
any word [of my work] be lame." Then there's Shakespeare, in Othello, speaking
of a "most lame and impotent conclusion." Most lame, dude! And Swift, in
Gulliver's Travels, "The theory of comets, which at present is very lame and
defective."

Fine, but at least we can claim credit for the phrase: "totally lame."

In other news:

* Cavil means to raise trivial objections.

* While it is wrong to incorrectly split an infinitive with an adverb, like so, you will likely be surprised to learn that is not incorrect to split the "bare infinitive" (be) from a "modal auxiliary verb" (will, would, can, etc.) with an adverb. Some people believe that this is a poor stylistic choice. Those people need to read the Chicago Manual of Style and Modern English Usage.

Things You Already Knew Because You Are Smarter Than Me

Per the Volokh Conspiracy:

"Splitting the Atom" is an oxymoron. 'Atom' is the Greek equivalent of 'Singularity.' The phrase means "Splitting that which cannot be split."

Poetry

I have been spoofing some poetry recently, which has led me to discover that many of my compatriots have never read one of my favorite poems. Ah, whimsy!

The Naked and the Nude

Robert Graves

For me, the naked and the nude
(By lexicographers construed
As synonyms that should express
The same deficiency of dress
Or shelter) stand as wide apart
As love from lies, or truth from art.


Lovers without reproach will gaze
On bodies naked and ablaze;
The Hippocratic eye will see
In nakedness, anatomy;
And naked shines the Goddess when
She mounts her lion among men.


The nude are bold, the nude are sly
To hold each treasonable eye.
While draping by a showman's trick
Their dishabille in rhetoric,
They grin a mock-religious
grin Of scorn at those of naked skin.


The naked, therefore, who compete
Against the nude may know defeat;
Yet when they both together tread
The briary pastures of the dead,
By Gorgons with long whips pursued,
How naked go the sometime nude!

Things You Already Knew Because You Are Smarter Than Me

"Green Collar" job: a job that putatively aids the environment. Why putatively? Because, like CFLs which contain hazardous waste, and Ethanol which takes more petroleum to produce than it saves, most environmental jobs are not all they are cracked up to be.

But before you go haranguing me for poo-pooing the "green revolution" know that at least this term has been around since 1992. Of course, it will never have been bandied about with such reckless abandon as it will in the coming six months.

Poetic Justice

A poem on the famous TJ Hooper by Stuart Buck:

A very, very learned man
Went by the name of Mr. Hand.
A famous judge, he was the sort
Who redefined the law of tort.

The T.J. Hooper was the case,
Where Hand was called upon to face,
A tug that failed to stay afloat.
It even sank another boat.

A sudden storm had struck. Oh no!
The tugboat had no radio.
If it had heard the storm report,
It might have sailed back into port.

But as it was, the boats were lost.
(An example of a true sunk cost.)

The tug was negligent, said Hand.
It should have made it back to land.
A radio would have saved the day.
The tug owner should have to pay.

Defer to custom? No sirree.
The PL here was more than B.
As any idiot would find,
The industry had lagged behind.

And so the story shows, you see,
The potential liability
Resulting when you do not lug
A radio aboard your tug.

It refers to Judge Hand's famous equation in Tort law: PL > B -- if the Probable Loss is greater than the Burden of preventative action, then the defendant's failure to take the preventative action renders him or her liable.

Books.

Last
Everything is Illumuinated, Jonathan Safran Foer. Wow. Read it. It starts funny and ends powerful.

Current
Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe. Yet another example of how much you can do with words, and another reminder of how little I manage to do with mine.