Gonna Be An Interesting November

Friday, August 29th, 2008

So.

John McCain and Sarah Palin, a newbie governer from Alaska. That’s… that’s quite the Republican ticket. This election just keeps getting more and more interesting.

ETA: Here’s a short, somewhat humourous and nerdfighterish basic primer on Sarah Palin.

On a completey unrelated note, I want to know how David Tennant managed to retain his svelt figure while shooting Blackpool. How did he not gain fifty pounds playing marathon-snacker Peter Carlisle? He and my sister must share the same legendary metabolism.

Evolution of Language

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

This is an interesting article about the artificial constraints we tend to put on what, exactly, constitutes a “real word”. I have often made a similar argument in dinner-table discussions when my father insists that some word I have said “isn’t a word”, and once went so far as to look up the word “word” in the massive dictionary my father keeps in his office. To qualify, it seems a word needs only three things: it must be composed of one or more syllables, be utterable by a human, and convey an idea or meaning. It does not, as it turns out, have to appear in a dictionary to count as a word.