Goallessness

Not about my objectives for the year, I'm still considering those.

My last post was a very simple one. But it was topical, posted just a few minutes after the incident to which it referred, and it was short, just 34 of my words around the quote.

One of those 34 words was goallessness. Anyone who watched the game, anyone who has watched any football, will know exactly what that word means. But it's not in the dictionary.

Yet I don't care. As Stephen Fry asked of those pedants who obsess about grammatical correctness: Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it?

Though in my case, it was simply the clearest most concise way of expressing the thought. Without using those bloody txt contractions.

Frying Language

Oh frabjous day. I love it when "someone famous" expresses the same opinion that I've been banging on about here since the dawn of blogtime, especially when that "someone famous" is a linktastic legend. Five quotes almost randomly selected from 5000 words of pure bliss:

1. People seem to be able to find sensual and sensuous pleasure in almost anything but words these days. Words, it seems belong to other people, anyone who expresses themselves with originality, delight and verbal freshness is more likely to be mocked, distrusted or disliked than welcomed. The free and happy use of words appears to be considered elitist or pretentious.
Yes. Leave my words alone.

2. the only people who seem to bother with language in public today bother with it in quite the wrong way. They write letters to broadcasters and newspapers in which they are rude and haughty about other people’s usage and in which they show off their own superior ‘knowledge’ of how language should be. I hate that, and I particularly hate the fact that so many of these pedants assume that I’m on their side.
He's not, and I'm not.

3. There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphrys than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories [but] Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it? ... Do they? I doubt it. They’re too farting busy sneering at a greengrocer’s less than perfect use of the apostrophe. Well sod them to Hades.
My echo - Trussed or Trust.

4. The worst of this sorry bunch of semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs. How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be?
I call it Consultantspeak

5. I think what offends [us] when confronted with extremely informal, unpunctuated and haywire language is the implication of not caring that underlies it. ... But that is an issue of fitness, of suitability, it has nothing to do with correctness. ... Context, convention and circumstance are all.
Exactly. I actually said context and implied meaning were everything. Close enough.

He even recommends Steven Pinker! The whole blessay is excellent. However, Mr Fry, there is something to be said for conciseness too.

Outlook Rules

We have already had the Top Five Spreadsheet Rules and Top Five Powerpoint Rules, and today I received an email suggesting that there should be only five Outlook rules for managing your email.

However, as you should know, I don't put stuff up here without adding some personal slant to it, so I suggest the five rules could be re-written as a few simple words that Dovetail (Alliterate).

So, Five Rules for your Email InBox:

1. Do (Action)
2. Defer (Adjourn)
3. Delegate (Allocate)
4. Direct (Answer)
5. Delete (Avoid)

All your email drops into one of those five categories. Empty Inbox. Clean Mind. But still a big old tasklist.

Six and Out in Melbourne and London

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms.

That's today's quote from Google. One thing about George Orwell, he certainly had courage.

It's not only the likes of Sherry Jones and Taslima Nasreen who have shown courage. Scott Adams gets it too. But it would be too easy to just relate tales of Jon Swift and Lenny Bruce and Monty Python and a long history of comic subversion. Let's turn to cricket instead. There are many lessons for life in The Art of Captaincy and Opening Up, but most autobiographies are dross. And in CricInfo yesterday we are back to Orwell:

Upon hearing of the bugs squashed on the wallpaper of the hotel opposite his, young kitchen hand George Orwell did not beseech the bugs to write his book for him. Down and Out in Paris and London is no less grisly or educational a read for the lack of bugs' insights. Yet in cricket we see the bugs everywhere, furnishing us with their bug's-eye perspectives, and not just any old bugs but former top-level bugs.

But those "bugs" that Christian Ryan refers to are some serious big names in the world of cricket. So there goes his chance of getting any exclusive interviews with them. That was brave too.

Objects in the rear view mirror

may appear closer than they are.

So wrote the musical genius, the songwriting legend, the greatest theatrical composer of the twentieth century, Mr Jim Steinman. That description was perhaps a little over the top, but it does reflect my opinion, he's been an idol of mine for decades. And as he himself has often stated, if you don't go over the top, you can't see what's on the other side. He's more known for intense symphonic power epics than for catchy melodies, but some people just can't stop humming those tunes now. Superb.

Actually, in terms of the science, it's surely wrong. In order to get the maximum range of vision, any curved rear view mirror is usually convex. So objects in the rear view mirror may be closer than they appear. The opposite of the title. Have a look, that's what the text on your mirror probably says.

But of course the reverend Steinman was not talking about real mirrors.

If life is just a highway, then the soul is just a car.

Blogging - It's good for you

Scientific American offers reasons to keep going ...

Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits. Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery.

So far so good ...

The frontal and temporal lobes, which govern speech—no dedicated writing center is hardwired in the brain—may also figure in. For example, lesions in Wernicke’s area, located in the left temporal lobe, result in excessive speech and loss of language comprehension. People with Wernicke’s aphasia speak in gibberish and often write constantly. In light of these traits, Flaherty speculates that some activity in this area could foster the urge to blog.

Gibberish?

Bear Stearns

I'm not really one for nominative determinism, more for pointless puns. But I couldn't help but think that the name Bear Stearns was a delicious candidate to be the first bank on Wall Street to feel the crunch. After all, the definition of bear from the American Heritage Dictionary:

One, such as an investor, that sells securities or commodities in expectation of falling prices.
A pessimist, especially regarding business conditions.

It's maybe not the ideal sounding name for a company in which you would want to invest your savings.

Unlike bear, the word stearn is not in my dictionary. The closest match is probably stern. I'll just quote in its entirety the third of three definitions of this noun from Wordnet, not because it's relevant, just because it's funny:

the fleshy part of the human body that you sit on; "he deserves a good kick in the butt"; "are you going to sit on your fanny and do nothing?" [syn: buttocks]

The bare sterns did get a good kicking.