Indistinguishable from English

Zarro Boogs = Oll Korrect?

Asa, it looks like your spell-checker replaced all instances of the word "gonna" with "gonad".

-- Joe's comment on Asa's blog.

(Microsoft Word corrects "gonna" to "going to". ispell corrects it to "Donna". I don't know what spell-checker Asa uses.)

• Wouldn't the sentence "I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign" have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips? (Via Schmack.)
• Can you parse this English sentence? Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo. The answer. (Via Stephanie Harves.)
• "You shanked my jengaship!" I think it's interesting that "shank", a mispronounciation of the past tense of "sink", gained an extra past-tense marker to become "shanked".
• Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. (Via Schmack.)
• Actual newspaper headlines (collected from several sources)
• Capitol Steps: Al-Jazeera [Alouette?]
• Capitol Steps: Look Away (Rush Limbaugh's statement) [Dixie]
• Capitol Steps: Lirty Dies: Kobe Bryant (spoonerisms)
• Mountain Liquor?! I hardly know 'er!

Health Education Outreach flyer on tables at Platt dining hall:

Try this exercise to explore your relationships and how they are effected by alcohol.

At least it didn't go into detail about how alcohol effects babies.

I'm taking a Pomona class called Acquisition of Language. Here are some notes from the first day:

Why study acquisition of language?

• Lets you see mechanisms behind language.
• You can see dramatic changes over short periods of time. For example, most kids start having real conversations around 3 and a half.
• Kids are cute.

I like this class.

Most of my "typos" add extra words:

mozilla crashes at with the instruction pointer at an address not in its address space. [bug 157845]

my high school has a comedy sportz team. the team and an informal club that exists around it, and my brother is part of that.

I think my typo pattern has to do with my typing style. I don't compose entire sentences in my head before I start typing them, and I edit heavily. I edit sentences as I type them. For example, a few sentences ago, I typed "before typing them[Ctrl+Left][Ctrl+Left][Ctrl+Shift+Right]starting to type [End]". Later I changed "starting to type" to "I start typing".

I also move information between sentences in order to keep any sentence from being too complicated and to eliminate parenthetical phrases. When I'm done typing a paragraph, there are often lots of unnecessary parentheses around sentences, which I remove. Sometimes I spend more keypresses editing than typing new sentences.

In the first example, I probably typed "mozilla crashes at an address not in its address space" at first, and then realized I should make it clear that the instruction pointer was what was at an address not in Mozilla's address space. In the second example, I remember that the two sentences used to be one sentence, but I don't know how to explain the error.

Erika Rice also makes strange typos:

After about an hour we got bored (or, in my Case, started to get headaches) so we grabbed some other people and went and watched "Office Space" in the lack.

(Case is a dorm at Mudd and the LAC is the Linde Activities Center.)

The idioms "anything but" and "all but" have confused me as long as I can remember. Now I know why: they have nearly opposite meanings.

• Cambridge ALD definitions for all but, anything but
• Bruce Todd tries to explain the idioms
• An English test for Japanese students (charset: Shift_JIS):

  13. That boy is (　　　) a great trouble to his parents.
  A. all but　 B. anything but　 C. not but　 D. nothing but

• An English test for Chinese students:

  27. It was such a dangerous scene: the boy was ____ drowned in the river just now.
  A. nothing but B. all but C. anything but D. but that

Google searches used: "anything but" "all but" idioms (lots of results, mostly noise), "all but * anything but" (only 16 results, but some were relevent).

These idioms do not appear in any of the idiom dictionaries I have:

• NTC's American Idioms Dictionary
• NTC's Slang American Style (generally the most useful of the three)
• Betty Kirkpatrick's Clichés

I learned a cool word in my Acquisition of Language class this week: motherese, speech that is high-pitched, repetitive, simple, and typically directed at young children.

I found a message from Steven Pinker about the term (and 8 synonyms or related terms). He also talks about an early version of the American Heritage Dictionary's definition for "child-directed speech".

Pinker prefers the term "child-directed speech", saying it is the most transparent. I prefer "motherese" because it is clearly a term and therefore must refer to some phenomenon worth naming. "Child-directed speech" could be mistaken to mean "any speech directed at a child". "Child-directed speech" tries to be more inclusive, but still misses the fact that people also use it when talking to cats. I also prefer "motherese" because it's short, easy to remember, and slightly silly.