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I remain an incorrigible word geek. Here are some items related to this theme that have caught my interest lately…

TOP OF THIS LIST: Stupid Attractors. The attractor is key concept of the mathematics of systems. Hidden Dimension Galleries describes three types of attractors:

• A finite attractor is the solution to a system of equations which converges to a single point.
• If the solution converges to a periodic orbit, it is a periodic attractor
• If the solution is a fully determined, fractal curve with no recursion, it is a strange attractor (a cornerstone of chaos theory).

I posit a fourth type of attractor: The stupid attractor. Rather than create a meaningful pattern, here the “solutions” that converge are random bits of cosmic jetsam and annoying dunces. Examples of stupid attractors include shopping malls just before Christmas, or the IMAX theater just outside of the Grand Canyon.

However, in the grand design of the universe, stupid attractors serve the greater purpose of consolidating idiots in clearly identified clumps that can be avoided.

Read the rest of this list…

1. ‘In Other Words’: Translating the Untranslatable. I heard this interview today on NPR’s Morning Edition. It’s an interview with linguist Christopher Moore about his book In Other Words. My favorite part of the web feature: “taarradhin [tah-rah-deen] (noun) Arabic has no word for compromise in the sense of reaching an arrangement via struggle and disagreement. But a much happier concept, taarradhin, exists in Arabic. It implies a happy solution for everyone, an ‘I win, you win.’ It’s a way of resolving a problem without anyone losing face.” Excellent! Much better than the clunky, smarmy English phrase win-win situation, which never ceases to grate on my nerves. I’m going to start saying taarradhin now… It’ll be a pleasure to explain it!
2. Today’s Podcast, by Scott Brenner. An excellent brief daily podcast (2-5 min.) “offering words to the wise and the otherwise.” Each day Brenner explores an unusual word or intriguing quote. (Subscribe)
3. The LINGUIST List, a great resource for the most avid word geeks. Description excerpt: “Dedicated to providing information on language and language analysis, and to providing the discipline of linguistics with the infrastructure necessary to function in the digital world. LINGUIST maintains a web-site with over 2000 pages and runs a mailing list with over 20,000 subscribers worldwide. LINGUIST also hosts searchable archives of over 100 other linguistic mailing lists and runs research projects which develop tools for the field, e.g., a peer-reviewed database of language and language-family information, and recommendations of best practice for digitizing endangered languages data.”
4. Blogs are Banished! On Jan. 1, Crawford Kilian noted that the word blog and all its derivations made this year’s list of Banished Words from Lake Superior State University. Said Kilian: “Granted, it’s a graceless and cacophonous word, coined by someone too bone-lazy to say web log. And now that I think of it, Tim Berners-Lee should have thought twice about naming his creation the web. The purpose of a web, after all, is to halt travel and permit killing the traveler. The system we use is supposed to expedite travel and leave the traveler better off for the journey. (Journey, by the way, is also a banished word!)”
5. Lower-case internet and web: Where’s the fuss now? Back on Aug. 16, 2004, I drew a surprising level of criticism when I announced that in this weblog I would no longer capitalized the words internet and web, and their derivations. See Jargon Evolution: Ditching Unnecessary Capitalization. See also my followup article, Yes, I said “internet.” So Did NPR!, Sept. 30, 2004. I’d just like to note that since then, I’ve continued to lowercase those terms and no one has complained, or even noticed!