a walk in the park for cumulo humilisaurus
2012-06-29
2012-06-28
knowing... and maybe bit sad
this rooftop sculpture is one of antony gormley's figures from the series Another Place. it has a fanstatically intense, yet completely blank stare, making it a vehicle for whatever pensive attitude the clouds bring with them... another place you might have come across these figures is the long-standing installation at crosby beach, just on the edge of liverpool, where some of the 100 iron men installed along the 3 mile beach have recently been involved in a fantastic act of yarn bombing.
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i've always been intrigued by unmatched pairs of words in language. in this case gormless (deriving from a much older word 'gorm', meaning knowledge or sense), is a shorthand for stupidity in the absence of style, and is tragically bereft of its morphological twin gormful. you'd think gormful would be a pretty positive word - 'knowing' - but the phonological similarity to mournful makes me think its probably more like 'sadness borne of great knowledge'... like finding out that pluto doesn't make the grade, or discovering in advance the manner of your own death, or knowing that you'll never, ever find the other glove...
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and yes. bonus points to anyone who played sculpture bingo right at the start, and twigged to the link between my favourite new word and the sculptor.
2012-06-26
2012-06-25
2012-06-22
2012-06-21
geek is a synonym for lonely
some folks mock the elegant simplicity of Roget's Thesaurus 1805 invention as an outmoded form of scholarship. there's a school of computational linguistics which ties his hand-crafted word lists quite concretely to the ways in which the mind organizes language. in particular, network analyses of the interconnected web of concepts captured by this tried-and-tested old work show that it has the same mathematical structure as the thousands upon thousands of 'word associations' provided by hundreds of University of South Florida undergraduates, collected over a period of several years.
in one classy paper, it is shown that these thousands of word-to-word associative relationships can be defined as 'small-world, scale-free' networks, which, like a fractal, have the same structure the deeper and deeper you delve into their detailed complexity: a small number of words are massively hyper-connected to tonnes and tonnes of others, while increasingly small numbers of words are connected to increasingly small numbers of neighbours. the vast majority of words only connect to one other. it it's the same statistical structure as characterizes the links between websites.
so where does good ol' roget fit in all of this? his book of relationships has the same mathematical structure as the random moments of lexical spontaneity provided by generations of university students. good job peter mark, you started something quite special.
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also... there is a game involving dictionaries... but perhaps i should keep that one to myself...
2012-06-20
2012-06-19
2012-06-18
a finial example to us all...
for all of this season's couples... in particular, M+S, T+J, D+D, and L+A. well done all of you, you're certainly doing better than these guys. maybe it's got something to do with this old thing.
still looking forward to S+S later this year, and of course Ch+S coming up sometime soon too!
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oh yes, and a finial in architecture is a decorative knobby thing on a balustrade, or detailed ridge cap on a roof. it's also what you call the twizzly bits at the end of curtain rods, and the flourish at the end of a calligraphic stroke! neat, eh?
2012-06-15
boy you goin' down!
oh, shelley!
his first gothic novel was published in the year he matriculated to Oxford, where he attended precisely one lecture (on minerology - which he walked out of dejectedly before the end, complaining that all they were talking about was rocks, rocks, rocks!). he proceeded to follow his passion for chemistry and metaphysics -- experimenting in one discipline by burning gaping acid holes through the carpet in his college rooms, and experimenting in the other by writing an inflammatory pamphlet "On the necessity of atheism", which was Dawkins-like in the strength of its assertions that people follow religion out of intellectual laziness. he sides instead with the British empiricists, who follow reasoning deriving from sensory experience alone. unlike the politely academic metaphysicists before him, it was probably his social commentary on humanity's remembered fear of church power moguls, that got him in trouble... or perhaps the assertion that the clergy pretend knowledge of the divine (ouch!). he and his coauthor were sent down (read: kicked out), for the offense.
if you want to read the absurdly strongly-worded pamphlet, the 1811 version is online via the University of Maryland's Shelley Resource Page, or the 1813 version via the Secular Web.
alternatively, if you are more interested in the poet's coach-driver hair, squeaky voice, shambolic delight in dueling pistols, or natural propensity for the human steeplechase, it's all in the published recollections of his pamphlet co-author, and oxford sidekick du-jour, thomas jefferson hogg, whose 1832-3 account, Shelley at Oxford, has been digitized by Project Guttenberg.
finally there's kate beaton's delicious take on shelley's prophecy of his own death over at Hark A Vagrant, where the toussle-haired shelley and byron are some of my favourite melodramatic historic reinventions.
2012-06-14
2012-06-13
2012-06-11
rococo
ah the rococo period of art and design. a mighty spewing-forth of unrestrained, fruit-laden, cherub-infested, gilt curliques, plaster frivols and hypnotically vertigenous architecture.
how about a gold cherub riding a lion? we can do that! or a painting of fruit, in a gilded, fruit laden frame finished off with the heads of two gold cherubs that look suspiciously like the might be kissing? why not. or a teapot in the shape of a leafy pumpkin? sure, it's the rococo man, the rococo.
i am not alone here - even good old Noah Webster weighs in on this! according to the well-worn, two volume 1880 New Edition With Supplement I've just dipped into, he comments that the rococo is...
A kind of florid ornamentation [...] by some [...] thought to be rich, though luxuriant; and by others it is condemned as a weak attempt to refine and improve upon the purest models of art, producing capricious, fantastical, or childish results.thank you noah. i see we are in agreement.
2012-06-10
2012-06-09
2012-06-08
2012-06-07
2012-06-06
2012-06-05
clue balloon: uses literary devices
oh clue balloon! deploying 'would' where a plain 'will' ought to suffice. it's a very trendy literary device, which lends a hint of subjunctive mystery with that whiff of the counterfactual... poor clue balloon - getting a bit caught up in narrative devices, and not concentrating on CLUES!
clue balloon: episodes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ... and more!
Update: apologies for today's earlier incorrect posting - gotta keep the story in order ;)
2012-06-04
2012-06-03
clue balloon: casts a broad net
ah, clue balloon, speculating wildly in your hunt for clues... not a little influenced by the grimy monochrome underbelly of the other place over at cambridge noir. here's lookin' at you, d.
clue balloon: episodes 1, 2, 3, 4 ... and more!
2012-06-02
clue balloon: seeks connections
oh clue balloon! how i love your spectacularly tenuous sleuthing! colin dexter would be proud... or perhaps appalled.
clue balloon: episodes 1, 2, 3 ... and more!
2012-06-01
wot! crime? quick - send up the clue balloon!
following on from yesterday's post, a new solution to the colin dexter effect! cynan's genius idea. crime fighting, now solved!
clue balloon: episodes 1, 2, 3 ... and more!
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