I just learned some Finnish. Keevekset – it means scrotum. Not sure how you spell it because i am at 35,000 feet and i am not on Lufthansa, but the word is evocative, you have to admit. Its amazing the useful information you find on podcasts. And there was me thinking it was nice to learn some African words, through Uche and Koranteng. My vocabulary is coming on in leaps and bounds.
I wonder if blogging will begin to emerge a new language, like organic Shirky style tags. I mean, English is so boring. Given that many bloggers are articulate and are from all over the world maybe we’ll see some clockwork Orange style lingo Yarbles, Keevekset, its all the same thing… Anthony Burgess has a point about language evolution and splicing. It would be nice to think the blogging phenomenon will start to educate us and make our language richer.
Certainly its nice to think we’ll do more than come up with a self-referential dialect, being complete RSSholes.
I am on a plane and i can’t search to see if anyone else has put this meme forward yet, but to me, worth posting. Anyone know of any “foreign” words being injected the English lexiconstream from blogs?
I never really meant for this post to talk about this idea about emergent language splicing. Pidgin Linklish or whatever it will be. But you know me….
If we’re going to remix and splice everything then why not human languages, beyond 0s and 1s? Of course this remixing has been going on for as long as humans have been dirtying up this beautiful little planet–The Bantu, for example, as i remember it according to Jared Diamond, use some pygmy words even though the originators have long since ceased to live in the area where the Bantus hang.
Many English say they don’t like the French, but that is just going down a cul-de-sac. And some right wing Americans don’t like the French because they don’t have a word for entrepreneur, right? Or is it Libertee the French don’t understand? Fraternity? The French don’t like Anglo-saxon overbearingism or Google. Le Weekend, indeed.
Canoe. Hammock. Typhoon. Gestalt. . . Language splicing has been going on for ever, but i should point it out because its on blogs now, and that makes it cool, right? Tres cool. It must be an entirely new phenomenon. I hope it doesnt come across like that. Blogs and world flattening might just accererate some hybridization trends.
So i am off track. But that is emergent semantics for you. Or maybe its travelling on planes for 22 hours and making three changes and getting very stressed out because they say you might not get back til Monday. I feel awesome (you would not believe the crap i have gone through to get home. more on that later. why are plane travellers so unbelievably selfish? That post yesterday about being human – well you dont find it with people on American Airlines, if today is anything to go by)
Back to the subject in hand though, or maybe i never went off it. Or got onto it. Anyway i am not an avid podcatcher; I am too much of a reading junkie to get as excited by this stuff as Gillmor, Winer or any of the other smartacres creating our new world of idea communication.
But Cote is funny when writing so i figured i should check out Cote and Charles: He’s Burger, Web Apps Suck. Of course i didn’t listen to the first three episodes so who knows if they were any good. But episode 4 is spot on. Scatalogical humour always gets me right in the funny bone. Good work guys.
So Cote and Charles are talking about Ruby On Rails and the major limitations of Web App UI frameworks – “Programming on the web is like programming with soft poo”. So now you know. Templating on the web, JSP-like, Ruby is nice and all, a little bit easier and less verbose. Stateless requests, HTML and Javascript. “This stuff doesnt work together, you can’t build decent wizards over the wizard. Its like the 90s and we’re in the 21st century… and we’re still programming with soft poo.”
“AJAX doesn’t even exist.” “I don’t want to create a freaking Wizard Framework I want to program a business application”
Someone is going to punch Charles in the keevekset, as he aknowledges, perhaps.. Maybe those macho types at O’Reilly ( I actually don’t entirely agree with Shelley, but the meme is too funny to ignore (gin-ore).
So back to Cote and Charles. You’re upset? You’re upset. You never finished guys. Get your act together and tell me what a useful framework should look like. What are you? Just a pair of knockers?
I guess i am hooked if you are annoying me with a cliffhanger.
I didn’t mean the language splicing throiugh RSS meme as a joke. On the contrary blogs can accelerate this existing phenomenon, if we reach out to Palestinian bloggers, Iranian bloggers, Nigerian bloggers, Indian bloggers (unfortunately Sriram just went offline to join Microsoft) and so on. If i can suggest one improvement to your life go to your blogroll and try and make it just a little bit less homogenous. Oh crap i just realised i am at it again. I keep promising to stop writing diversity posts..
But seriously your life will be better if you think about who you subscribe to and ensure that not only are you subscribing to some people you don’t always agree with, that work at different companies (it always freaks me out to see a blogroll from vendor A that only has bloggers from vendor A on it.) or have different political views. but lets take it a stage further. I disagree with Stephen. Let’s have some positive discrimination. If your list of feeds is pure white bread you life will be less rich. Look abroad. Bring some interesting information into the sphere.
Working with one worldview is like working with soft poo… have at it. or tollchock me in the marbles.
[Disclaimer: This post was written under the influence of Gin and Tonic and air travel.]
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