m. c. de marco

The Oxford University Press blog has an excerpt on profanity in science fiction, especially alternate f-words like fug, frell, and frak, from Brave New Words:

Francis Towner Laney coined the fannish slur fugghead around 1950. In the 1960s, Norman Spinrad’s novel Bug Jack Barron was considered so profane that the bookseller W.H. Smith banned sales of the magazine in which it had been serialized. And no doubt as a commentary on this state of affairs, Larry Niven wrote a series of stories in the 1970s in which the words “censored” and “bleep” had themselves become curses.

On the mundane profanity front, Language Log discusses the linguistics of the SNL Sofa King skit and the dangers of taking color terms from old Chinese-English dictionaries.

Today I picked up some books I saw recommended while I was searching the new conlang list archive. The Unfolding of Language is a fascinating, well-written book about language change aimed at the general language-changing public. Historical Linguistics has the nitty-gritty of sound change laws and the like, with plenty of examples.

Via del.icio.us (scifi tag): a Treknobabble generator that generates a long page of babble perfect for your NaNoWriMo novel. If you need a Trek plot to go with your treknobabble, try these random Star Trek plot generators.

Here are some fun and interesting linguistics links I found, starting from this LJ post by Suzette Haden Elgin: Phonosemantic Coherence in English Assonances is an intriguing list of correlations between meaning and initial consonant clusters; How to Make a Linguistic Theory should be titled How Not to Make a Linguistic Theory; and the Chomskybot will make your theory for you.

Science News (via GeekPress) reports on the long road From Counting to Writing:

Temple excavations reveal that the Sumerians often kept sets of tokens in clay globes, or envelopes. Temple clerks marked the envelopes by pressing tokens into the soft clay before sealing and baking them, making visible the number and shape of tokens enclosed. Excavated specimens show circular imprints left by spheres and wedge-shaped imprints left by cones.

In the course of a Slashdot article I came across a particularly poetic bit of geek-speak: commenters noted that the eternal September is now over.

[the] September that never ended

All time since September 1993. One of the seasonal rhythms of the Usenet used to be the annual September influx of clueless newbies who, lacking any sense of netiquette, made a general nuisance of themselves. This coincided with people starting college, getting their first internet accounts, and plunging in without bothering to learn what was acceptable. These relatively small drafts of newbies could be assimilated within a few months. But in September 1993, AOL users became able to post to Usenet, nearly overwhelming the old-timers’ capacity to acculturate them; to those who nostalgically recall the period before, this triggered an inexorable decline in the quality of discussions on newsgroups. Syn. eternal September. See also AOL!.

Here’s an interesting post about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in Jack Vance’s The Languages of Pao.

Also by way of del.icio.us comes this hilarious animated gif [1.4MB, but worth every byte].