In Zitsland, Jeremy has been sorting through the incoming mail. Not long ago, his mother discovered that he had thrown a postcard from his Aunt Joan into the junk mail box, believing that it wasn’t real mail. Jeremy’s mother remonstrates:
Jeremy simply rejects the idea of postcards, as an outmoded system of communications — deservedly outmoded, because it is unacceptably insecure.
Having just posted on Pad Thai, I should have realized that the inevitable techie phrasal overlap portmanteau (or POP) would have cropped up: iPad Thai. And so it has.
Geoff Pullum on the Lingua Franca blog today, in a posting entitled “Away from one’s desk”, about vacation messages:
Ages ago, when e-mail was young and did not yet dominate our lives, and vacation response was not a built-in feature of mailers, and the Berkeley Unix /usr/bin/vacation had not been written, a friend of mine at Stanford (the linguist Arnold Zwicky) had a little vacation-response script written for him in the Bourne shell language by a computer staff person (it was remarkable how little code it took), and he chose a first-person message. Immediately people started replying to the script: “I know you say you’re away, Arnold, but if you could just take a minute to look at this … “: They could not grasp the idea that a shell script had mailed them. The innate human tendency to perceive agency was too strong. If it said “I am away,” they thought that was Arnold talking.
So I always use the third person.
People are very much inclined to treat computer programs and their products as the work of sentient beings, a fact demonstrated many years ago in the way people interacted with the ELIZA program.
In this case, I continued to use the first person (because I was uncomfortable splitting myself into two entities), but added a note saying that the message was coming to you from a program, not a person. and that it was pointless to reply to it. That seems to have worked.
Via Chris Waigl, this Wondermark cartoon:
Ah, a coding problem.
Last night I dreamed about a new version of Facebook that concentrated on videos. It was called ZuckerTube. A cross between Mark Zuckerberg and YouTube. I can’t wait.
It might be that I’ve been thinking too much about portmanteaus recently.
(No, I doubt it had anything to do with German Zuckertube ‘sugar tube’, though it could have been an offshoot of a sex dream.)
In yesterday’s NYT, “For a Night Each Year, the Airwaves Buzz With Morse Code” by Jessie McKinley, about Morse code, which brings back memories for me.
In a recent Zippy, Griffy and Zippy manage to weave together telephone hassles and gastroenterology:
Once gasteroenterologists are in the conversation, Zippy lurches into the absurd phrasal overlap portmanteau intestinal tract house (intestinal tract + tract house), adding the absurd pseudonym Sigmoid Colon (predictably, the name has been used by others, in particular on the blog Sigmoid Freud: The life and views of a Forensic Psychiatrist).
Then there’s telephonoscopy, using the learnèd “combining form” (part compound element, part derivational suffix) -scopy. From Michael Quinion’s affixes site on the combining form:
-scope Also -scopic and -scopy.
An instrument for observing, viewing, or examining something.
[Greek skopein, look at.]This ending appears in the names of a wide variety of instruments in engineering, medicine, the sciences, and other fields, most containing the linking vowel -o- before the ending. All can have associated adjectives in -scopic, as in spectroscopic or gyroscopic. Many have a linked noun in -scopy that describes an observation or examination made using the instrument: laryngoscopy, endoscopy (among those in which that form is rare are kaleidoscope and periscope, in which names do not represent a scientific instrument).
The link between telephonoscopy (presumably ‘an examination made using the telephone’) and gastroenterology lies in the procedures of colonoscopy and sigmoidoscopy (and endoscopy in general).
(Getting rid of your telephone, cutting it out of your life, would of course be telephonotomy.)
There are No e-Book Zones of Dingburg, where the locals appreciate the look and feel of book books:
For some time, Zippy strips have catalogued resistance to electronic media (as opposed to books and newspapers) in Dingburg and some acceptance as well:
“Memories of media past” (LLog 12/24/09) on newspapers
“Love of books in Dingburg” (AZBlog 2/12/10)
“The Saturday cartoon crop” (AZBlog 3/27/10)
“Actual vs. virtual” (AZBlog 2/20/11)
… against Griffy’s objections:
OED2 has fuddy-duddy from early in the 20th century on, but my impression (like Zippy’s) is that it’s declining in use, especially among the young.
