Archive for the ‘Scholarly life’ Category

Our playful entomologists

July 25, 2016

In the August 2016 Funny Times, a wonderful piece “The Name Game” by M.K. Wolfe, about binomial nomenclature for living things, but with special reference to the taxonomic names of insects (there are, after all, so very many of them). A copy of the piece (which you should embiggen for easier reading):

  (#1)

An entertaining tour of playful, even silly, names that have been adopted. As far as I can tell, these are all entirely accurate, even the insects  Agra vation, Lalsapa lusa, Pison eu, and Vera peculya.

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Posted in Language and animals, Naming, Scholarly life, Science, Silliness | Leave a Comment »

Spam journals, spam conferences

September 24, 2014

From the scholarly Martin Haspelmath on Facebook a few hours ago, a report on a spam conference, the Global Summit on Languages & Linguistics, June 16-17, 2015, in Alicante, Spain, with a glossy website calling for papers. Martin noted that the sponsoring organization, OMICS, “is well-known as a spam publisher, and now seems to be moving into organizing spam conferences”; on OMICS, see this Wikipedia page.

(Spam publishers make money by collecting fees from authors, and spam conferences make money from registration fees.)

As Martin’s posting was arriving on Facebook, not one but two messages in my e-mail solicited submissions to spam journals in linguistics.

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Posted in Scholarly life | 1 Comment »