ByMyReckoning

The BBC has just reported that at 0300 GMT (0600 local time) Saddam Hussein has been hung in Iraq at an undisclosed location.

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Yep. You heard it here 2,789th. Last night Britney Spears was spotted out on the town and she was actually wearing underwear!

Her dress was practically transparent, but at least she had her "kecks" on.

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Reddit is down today. Apparently they had some problems yesterday as well.

I'm usually find myself unconcerned by the amount of attention and criticism Oliver Stone and his films generate. However his antics last night at the British Comedy Awards shook me from my indifference.

Stone was in attendance to present the award for best comedy film to the creator of Wallace and Gromit, Nick Park. As he took the stage he quipped "It's great to be back in England. I feel like Jack The Ripper days are back. Nothing ever changes here." Naturally the audience, who failed to see the funny side of his remark, gasped and jeered. Stone realising that his 'joke' had failed miserably, further mocked them by saying "You're a lovely crowd." What a showman?

One audience member commented on his behaviour as follows: "If he was trying to be funny, then he failed.
"To make a joke like that when five young women have been murdered and the killer is still on the loose was in unbelievably bad taste."

What a great strategy for endearing yourself to the British media and public, never mind the feelings of victims families?

The man is an idiot

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Following on from my thoughts yesterday about the ways in which langauges change or evolve. I read an entry in Evowiki about langauge speciation and divergence. The factors listed below contribute towards divergence.

• Isolation - I doubt that this is such a huge factor in the case of English, since it is now so widely used, and tele-visual media may have a homogenising effect. As I stated earlier the dominant culture at the moment is that of the US. Their idioms and modes of expression are spreading rapidly as a result.

• Time - Given enough time, a particular group will doubtless innovate and introduce new words and grammars.

• Conquest - Think of it as linguistic hegemony. This has occurred throughout the ages and although most change or adaptation will occur amongst the subordinate group. It is might also be a two way process, in which the dominant and group are influenced by their subordinates. This has been well documented inn the case of English which has absorbed words and concepts from Swahili, Arabic and various Asian cultures/languages, whilst at the same time requiring large numbers of native speakers to learn English.

• Migration - Migrants bring their languages and customs with them to their new home and these will naturally have some influence on their new neighbours.

• Technological discovery - New technologies spawn new terms and idioms.

• Contact – Interaction between groups with distinct languages which had previously been isolated suddenly allows these languages to influence each other, throiugh the borroweingv of words, grammar and morphology.

It seems to make sense (truthy even that languages are also subject to an evolutionary process very similar to that encountered in the opensource software world, namely Lamarckian (a now discredited theory of biological evolution) evolution. Unlike its Darwinian cousin, Lamarckian evolution allows an organism or entity to pass on characteristics to its offspring which it has acquired during its own lifetime.

After some browsing on the web, I discovered that the connection has already been made between Lamarckism, language and opensource software, by Jean Molino (2000). "Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Music and Language", The Origins of Music and Eben Moglen respectively

So it would appear that anyone fighting to hold back this tide of change is fighting a loosing battle. This probably applies to the French and their attempts via the Académie française to preserve and protect the French language from pullution by Anglicisms.

So.... I suppose the next question is where will all this change lead us?

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My previous post got me thinking for a moment about language and the way it developes. I've come across a few whinging voices on slashdot, who complain about the degradation of the English language, particularly at the hands of Americans, whenever a word such as "truthiness" is coined. This just smacks of fear, insecurity and sometimes jingoism. In fact they are mainly fellow Brits.

Well I'm not an American, in fact I hale from the UK, but I feel duty bound to disagree with this stance, simply because it picks on the US, when any number of English speaking cultures including the English themselves are guilty of exactly the same thing. As has been stated many times during this slashdot thread, language is dynamic and the mixing of cultural influences in the US will inevitably produce new and sometimes downright weird linguistic innovation.

The bottom line is that English as spoken in the UK is also the bastard child of a myriad of cultures, gathering influences from Old Norse, Old Frisian, Old Saxon, but more recently incorporating phrases and concepts from the old colonies and recent immigrants. I imagine that this later category closely mirrors the kind of influences that operate in the US today. In fact the US is now the dominant source of "English" speaking culture and is increasingly becoming the arbiter of linguistic taste. I'm constantly reminded of this by the "MTV English" spoken by young people on the European mainland.

Sometimes I hear phrases coined in the US that grate somewhat. However, I'm aware that there are two sides to every coin.

Afterall, language is the original opensource project is it not?

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It appears that Steven Colbert has an even bigger influence on our culture than we imagined.

Colbert introduced the word "truthiness" in the word segment during his stint on Comedy Central in 2005. The American Dialect Society defined it's meaning as "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true." Colbert himself has defined it as "truth that comes from the gut, not books".

Visitors to Merriam-Webster's website have seen fit to elected "truthiness" as their word of the year.

Now I'm no linguistic maven but surely something akin to instinct covers all the bases here? A statement or position cannot be verified as being true without evidence and until such evidence has been provided it must be classified as instinct, prejudice or belief. On second thoughts methinks Mr Colbert's discovery of this concept was preceded by the current Bush Administration, as they have apparently been using this concept as a guiding principle for some time. Perhaps the folks at Merriam-Webster have hit on something? Maybe it's truly a word for our time?

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