Good clean fun

I've been a little surprised in the past that this blog has been nominated for awards like the one below. Don't get me wrong, it's cool and all, but we aren't really about language learning.  In fact, we don't fit any category I've seen on any of those contests. If you're into it, please go vote, but until there's a category 'good clean fun', we don't stand a chance ... .

We guess, I suppose, brush up on the old amo, amas, amat and give it a shot next year, but I think we all like our amateur status.

And the winner is ...

My sense is that most of our readers aren't into the Grammar.net grammar blog contest, but just in case, here are the winners.

• 1st place: A Clil To Climb 
• 2nd place: Grammar Girl 
• 3rd place: Arrant Pedantry  

 I know the second and third, but haven't been able to get the winner to open. 

Lingua-blog scandal?!?!?!

Grammar.net is holding its 2011 Best Grammar Blog contest now (here), and I just got this email: 

Dear bloggers!

Yesterday, October 17, at 11.59 p.m. PST the contest for the Best Grammar Blog of 2011 was supposed to end. The competition was intense; voters were doing their best to support their favorite blogs. The winners will be announced on Friday, October 21st. Unfortunately, we had to disqualify two blogs. But we would still like to have real winners, so we have extended the voting until Thursday, October 20th, 11.59 p.m. PST.

We will continue to monitor the voting process and hope the competition will be fair (each person can vote only once).

Contact us if you have any questions.

Best regards,

Grammar.net team
contest@grammar.net
It's all about grammar!

Wow, voting rigging on a grammar blog contest?!?!? I had checked in a couple of time out of curiosity ... it's really about grammar blogs and not linguistics blogs, so it's not something that we have promoted here. But a scandal! Linguabloggers cared enough to cheat!

Somebody has to know the inside scoop. Dish please!

New linguablog: The Diacritics

Just found out about another language blog: The Diacritics. Former ling undergrads, now law students.

Read it.

What hath God wrought? Mr. Verb on Twitter

Yes, if DARE jumped off a cliff, we would too.

http://twitter.com/MisterVerb

I've filed it under 'blogal', because 'twitteral' will take getting used to.

Let's see how this goes ...

Do not vote for Mr. Verb

The Lexiophiles annual Top 100 list nominations are out and we're again nominated for "Language Teaching". I'm confident that you've haven't learned a language from this blog or sharpened your skills in any languages you know, and so trust that you will show the good judgment not to vote for Team Verb. Give your votes to John Wells Phonetics Blog or Grammar Girl. (Here's the link to vote.) Wishydig has expressly asked for votes and I say give him all he needs, by voting here.

What we aren't: xkcd on successful blogs

Just a reminder that Team Verb is in this for the yucks. Pure, clean yucks. Most of the time.

Neanderthals walk among us. Really.

The story about human-neanderthal inter-breeding has now made the rounds — here's one version from NewScientist. (The image is from there too.) The news is based on genome evidence from Neanderthal bones (found in the Vindija Cave pictured), and it doesn't look like the conclusions are being instantly accepted by everybody, as this story indicates.

But I've got the clincher evidence here: Neanderthals are still among us, and using computers. Last night, we got dozens of blog spams, basically the same (some URLs varied), as comments on a bunch of different posts.

OK, seriously, I don't have a clue about Neanderthal intelligence and maybe they were good folks, but the spam attack was primitive.

Althouse

I bet we don't share many readers, but if people read Althouse, the local free weekly, the Isthmus, just did a cover story on Madison's most famous blogger here. Seems like a pretty fair profile to me.

You had me at 'recursiveness': Überlinkfest

A Walk in the WoRds (their spelling) is doing this:

Because language is recursive, I thought it would be fun to post links to linkfests from some of my favorite linguistics blogs.

I always like the linkfests, starting I think with Fritinancy's. So here's a non-festive link, I guess!

My story: Mr. Verb

People keep asking who I am, and what I look like. OK, here's the story. And here's my pic:


When we started this blog, none of us, I think, had any idea that parts of speech are so often personified by teachers.

Moribund blogs ... A question

I normally deal with loss straightforwardly enough — it's ugly but it's real and you gotta face it. But I'm finding it hard to deal with blog loss. I've been a fan of PolyglotConspiracy since I first saw the name, surely, and now that fine blog, which had been inactive, is officially "Essentially discontinued". That's a blow. Good old Wishydig at least has promised to get back in the game more actively (here), but even he had to say "I am still here, and this link is not defunct." A couple of other (non-lingua-)blogs on my blogroll are likewise at the very least on long-term vacation, MIA or maybe dead.


So my question: Do I leave them, as reminders of fine old blogs that I really liked? Or is it bad enough to have moribund links that the unhappy housecleaning is required? Seriously, I'd appreciate advice.

And yeah, I know the pic doesn't quite fit the post, but I'm kind of a sucker for PunditKitchen.com.

Get me down my blogging shoes ...

I actually like the piece as an image, but somebody showed it to me for blogal reasons.

Ben Zimmer, Superstar

Wow. Keith Olbermann just gave Ben Zimmer as his (second) Best Person in the World, for setting the record straight on Walter Cronkite's last name (not) becoming noun for journalists in Dutch and Swedish. See here with links to earlier posts.

Forgive me for quoting crude (and ironic, when it's not ironic here) material, but Wonkette said it so well:

Fuck the Pulitzer. We are talking NOBEL PRIZE here, for awesomeness.

Yes, pure awesomeness.

Kudos, "Mr. Zimmer", kudos.

Update, Tues. noon: Here's the video: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/32307229#32307229

Reader Poll!

A poll on what Voinovich meant with his remarks about Southerners going 'errrr, errrr' on the teevee is now up. (See earlier post, here.)

Of course I've posted this poll at the moment when our readership appears to have slipped to a long-time low, but, hey, we're just in it for the yucks.

Correction! Safire did not endorse singular 'they'!

Well, you should never blog in haste. Ever-alert reader and lexicographical superstar Ben Zimmer points out:

The "On Language" column about singular "they" was by Patricia T. O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman, guesting for a vacationing Safire.

(I'll be guesting in the Aug. 9 edition, by the way.)

Finding an error on the internet obviously warrants an immediate post, but the bigger message is that Ben will be subbing for Safire.

Image, of course, from here.

Linguablogging: The race is on

Here it is:


In reading many of my favorite linguistics blogs, and hearing reports from people who are friends with various of the key bloggers, it looks like many people have put out pleas for votes for their excellent blogs on language and linguistics. If Mr. Verb is actually your favorite linguistics blog, feel free to vote for Team Verb. but it wouldn't be very (Upper) Midwestern of us to ask for your vote.

Besides, as I indicated earlier, I'm mostly just amazed at how big this corner of the internet has gotten. Lexiophiles apparently got 473 nominations, and a lot of them look pretty interesting — many focused on learning particular languages, etc., but there's a lot of good stuff out there.

Blogal: The language blog world has gotten big

Just learned that we've been nominated for Lexiophiles "Top 100 Language Blogs 2009" competition — by Leonard Bloomfield, no less. We all appreciate Professor Bloomfield coming back from the dead to help us out here, and are happy to be in the mix.

But what really got me about this competition was the thought that just how many language blogs there are these days. Lexiophiles has split things into four categories:

• Language Learning
• Language Teaching
• Language Technology
• Language Professionals.

By the way, we're in "Language Teaching" ... maybe we should step up the pedagogy.

PS: Yes, I'm thinking about Palin, and there was some interesting stuff in the speech, but I can't keep staring at this horrible traffic accident that is her career.

Scholarly communication: Listservs, blogs and who knows what all

Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jeffrey Young has a nice piece called:

COLLEGE 2.0
Change or Die: Scholarly E-Mail Lists, Once Vibrant, Fight for Relevance

It's behind a paywall (click here if you have access), so here's the opening paragraph:

Once they were hosts to lively discussions about academic style and substance, but the time of scholarly e-mail lists has passed, meaningful posts slowing to a trickle as professors migrate to blogs, wikis, Twitter, and social networks like Facebook.

Let's start from the history. Now, I know all you young kids have only heard the stories of such halcyon days of yore, if I may use an expression common back in those times. As an early subscriber to LINGUIST, H-Net networks (for historians) and other lists, I recall it being pretty different. First, there was the issue of whether these were valuable tools or a massive waste of time since only print stuff (books, articles) counts, etc. But there was a heyday of a few years where discussion really bubbled. You could post a query to LINGUIST asking for examples of some linguistic phenomenon and quickly get a set of detailed responses (on or off the list), often from the leading specialists in the world. You could also get flamed publicly by jerks, famous or not, and those flames of course could be dead wrong.

What's happened? Well, as the article goes on to argue, specifically with LINGUIST and H-Net as examples, these folks have developed clearly defined roles in their communities. For H-Net it's the book reviews and LINGUIST is really one-stop shopping for information on languages and linguistics. Young describes LINGUIST as possibly "the largest single academic mailing list out there". Go linguists, go LINGUIST!

What gets me here is the either/or mindset of the title (and the image above) … when we get a new tool, like fMRI, it's kinda dumb to abandon all previous tools for that one. We're doing with scholarly communication what we do with our technical resources: We try to find the places they're most useful for and deploy them there.

Blogs seem better than lists for rambling thoughts and screeds, so in some sense may represent an evolution of flaming. But they are not a replacement for scholarly publishing, surely, although at least one local academic blogger is apparently arguing that line. You gotta use all the tools that make sense. Where does it stop making sense? The line for me falls just before Twitter: Over thousands of years, we've developed easier, quicker ways to record and transmit information. Clay tablets and parchments were pretty slow and expensive, printing on paper quicker and cheaper, and electronic communication even slicker. We can say as much as we need (or want, sadly) and get it out instantly.

But Twitter? From Young's piece again:

"In the last month, i unsubscribed from 4 academic lists," wrote David Silver, a professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco, abbreviating his comment to stay within Twitter's 140-character limit on all messages. "Thru other means, mostly Twitter, don't feel like i'm missing much."

"I find that I almost hate e-mail now," wrote Kimberly Gibson, an instructional designer at Our Lady of the Lake University. "It feels so slow and outdated. Thus, I'm not really reading my scholarly lists anymore."

Can you really get the info you need from 140-character chunks? That's the equivalent of a whispered comment to your neighbor at a conference talk, not scholarly discussion. Beyond chit-chat, that might make for art or humor, but to abandon lists for this? Are these folks who've also abandoned reading stuff printed on 'paper'? I know I'm missing something here, but not sure what.

Image from here, with interesting and relevant discussion of this issue from a non-academic perspective.

Anonymous comments

Of late, a few bloggers* I know have mentioned experiencing nastiness from anonymous comments on blogs.** We don't have that problem here, for whatever reason. To be clear, I do delete comments (on the last post, in fact), but this is essentially always because they're blogspam of one sort or another.

Still, for those who've been plagued by such demons, check this …


Just saying …

*Why, in the name of simple self-interest, does the spellcheck on blogger not recognize bloggers? Or spellcheck?

**Yeah, yeah, anonymous bloggers are worse, yadda yadda. Whatevs.