Semantic Compositions

Shaqclones

Longtime readers of the linguistic blogosphere are at this point well-acquainted with snowclones, those endlessly reusable templates for new cliches. Shaquille O'Neal perhaps belongs in a class by himself in this regard, as a walking snowclone machine.

Just yesterday, in explaining why he's taking more time off during games than in seasons past, ESPN dubbed Shaq "The Big Cigar" (in a temporary headline not present in the link), after Shaq commented that like a cigar, he burns more slowly than a cigarette, which represents everyone else in the NBA.

However, it woud be more apt to call Shaq "The Big *", because "cigar" is just the latest in a long line of placeholders. As this article notes, in 2000, he dubbed himself "The Big Aristotle" after quoting the original (and best) Aristotle by saying "Excellence is not a singular act, it's a habit". The Big Shakespeare also let it be known that "[I]t was Shakespeare that said, 'Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them,' and it was great doing it this year for the city and for everybody else". The legendarily bad free-throw shooter dubbed himself "The Big Maravich" after making nine free throws in a row (another time, referring to the same incident, he also came up with "The Big Havlicek"). Those were just a few examples in a prolific season -- L.A. Times columnist J.A. Adande noted at the time that he's also been The Big Continuous, The Big Luggage, The Big Poise, and The Big Historical. That year, he was also "The Big IPO", as his stock kept rising. To cap the year, after winning his first playoff title, he added "The Big Champion".

Of course, other people have long since picked up on The Big Daddy's self-nicknaming habit. Columnist Mike Downey of the Chicago Tribune dubs him "The Big Baby. The Big Ego. The Big Pain in the Butt. The Big Mouth. The Big Back-Stabber." Kobe Bryant simply calls him "that fat [bleep]" (Shaq having had some choice words for the richly deserving Mr. Bryant), while ESPN columnist Marc Stein (same link) prefers to call him "The Big Lucky". Columnist Chad Ford goes for "The Big Copernicus (because everything revolves around Shaq).

Perhaps it was a good idea for Shaq to settle into a pattern as predictable as his accuracy from the free-throw line. The earlier "Shaq Fu" came back to bite him after some unfortunate comments about Yao Ming, and "Shaq Diesel" just reminds us that he used to mistake himself for a rapper (and on occasion, he still does).

Lose-lose vocabulary

Lynn S. of Reflections in D Minor has a link up to a poll on one of SC's very most favorite of topics: annoying and cliched business vocabulary.

Examples of overdone buzzwords include:

• Thinking outside the box
• Synergy
• Value-added
• Core competency

They criticize "customer-centric", but the truth is that "X-centric" is something of a snowclone; in DoD-land, "network-centric" has been a buzzword for a while (often accompanied by "information superiority"). Supply-chain management companies like SAP, PeopleSoft and Tibco like to boast of "process-centric solutions" (and whaddaya know, "solutions" is on the list, too!). Although SC had never heard of anyone saying "value-centric", it was something that one might guess to exist just by virtue of the fact that it combines buzwords, and frighteningly, it has a nontrivial number of intentionally written examples.

Your host has to quibble with their definition of "critical path" as "determining the appropriate steps to take". In his experience, the usage isn't so much about "appropriate steps" as "steps which will cause the total failure of the project if not accomplished". That doesn't make it less of an annoying buzzphrase.

SC will actually quibble with one word's inclusion on the list. "Metrics" is a perfectly meaningful technical term, and every request for proposals your host has ever seen has requested a discussion of the metrics by which project success might be judged. Examples might include "process twice as many queries in the same amount of time as existing baseline systems" or "improve precision by 20% and recall by 10%". That the executives surveyed would voice suspicion about this one leads SC to believe that they're cynical about it because they generally don't actually understand the projects they're managing.

Lost in translation

Two days ago, your host was surprised to read this story in the Telegraph, suggesting that German laws, permitting prostitution and requiring good-faith efforts to take work offered by welfare offices, had finally been interpreted in such a way as to reduce unemployment benefits to a woman who had refused to take a job as a prostitute. Scary stuff.

There was grounds for suspicion on reading the story the first time -- the level of detail seems more fit for Snopes.com than a legitimate story, although it certainly seemed possible that privacy concerns had kept the details vague.

But when a story seems too good to check, often it is. In this case, as the Volokh Conspiracy's Todd Zywicki informs us, if you go back to the actual German sources, this is a hypothetical situation that's been raised by some politicians. There seems to be a real-life case it's based on, but with many of the details being rather less salacious than the Telegraph article suggests. Comparable theoretical examples of what the law permits includes forcing Muslims to work in non-halal slaughterhouses, or call-center workers to take jobs at phone sex businesses. The actual issue at hand is not that German law requires people to take jobs they might find immoral, but rather that it does not specifically preclude such jobs from being considered against a person's range of available opportunities to find work.

This case is very much the translation equivalent of the children's game, Telephone. Passed through another language and a few more newspapers, perhaps we would have read of the poor woman's funeral.

On the multifarious meanings of Google

SC has quoted from TheStreet.com's Cody Willard before, on the various possible blends of "chicken" and "economy". Yesterday, Mr. Willard treated his readers to some brief speculations on verbs you can make out of "google":

The market will be Googleized tomorrow as the company gives the Street its earnings report for the second time in its short history. (That's Googleized, meaning the markets will be affected by Google's (GOOG:Nasdaq) earnings report, as opposed to "Googled," which would mean that someone would be researching the market on Google. Come to think of it, though, the market will be Googled tomorrow as it is every day, too!)

It seems to SC that not all company names are susceptible to this sort of derivation, albeit for extralinguistic reasons. One can imagine saying "The market will be IBM-ized", intending the same meaning as Mr. Willard's above, but even when IBM has good news, it doesn't seem to stop the markets from taking a dive. If Mr. Willard is right, Google's good news will be good news for everyone.

My life as a sarariman

Languagehat has an interesting link up to a site on the origins of Japanese company names. Although they're all well known, perhaps the best-known Japanese company name isn't on the list, Sony. Your host's first job was with Sony, so he's going to use this as an excuse to talk about it.

But first, the name. Sony started out as Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo Kaisha, and was dedicated to the production of radio receivers (shades of the Walkman!) and electrical measurement equipment. Readers familiar with Sony only through their consumer electronics may not realize how huge Sony is today in the latter department. In any event, as radios and consumer electronics came to be the company's main claim to fame, they went for a name which both reflected that fact and was easier to sell to English speakers. Sony is claimed to be derived from both "sonus", Latin for sound, and "sonny", because they liked the suggestion of youth that it provided. SC's pet theory is that someone misspelled "Sonny" when silkscreening it onto a batch of parts, and the "sonus" justification was invented post hoc, to save money on having to make more.

In any event, in 1994, your host was just wrapping up high school, and wanted a job to keep him busy over the summer. Thanks to a friend of Dad SC's, who had just become legal counsel for Sony Imagesoft (a now-defunct subsidiary devoted to making video games), SC ended up with the job you all only wish you had -- as a video-game tester.

It wasn't actually a "sarariman" job -- that's the Japanese transliteration for "salaryman", and refers to a white-collar worker. SC had more of what they'd call an "arubaito" -- again a transliteration, from the German for work (arbeit). Arubaito implies part-time, but SC worked 40-hour weeks, albeit as an hourly independent contractor (in order to keep from having to provide benefits, testers were not officially employees of Sony Imagesoft).

Now SC is going to tell you why you're wrong, and you don't actually want to be a video-game tester. You probably think it means sitting around all day getting paid to play more-or-less finished product, having fun, and just making suggestions for how it might be tweaked to do better in the marketplace, much the way that focus groups are brought in to help edit films prior to release. You would be very, very wrong.

Like all software, video games have to be debugged. Unlike trivial things like the operating system that keeps all of your personal data, and the bank databases that keep all of your financial records, video games are held to very high standards for reliability. Crash bugs are simply not acceptable. So you have to go do the same thing over and over...and over and over...again, but with slightly different variations on all the possible key-pressing combinations until you get something to break. Early in a game's lifecycle, this is easy. Later, it's hard for the people at the development shop, but simplicity itself for the testing gods employed by the hardware makers. Your dedication to quality must be truly fanatical in order not to go screaming on your third consecutive day of testing menus when there's no actual game code to be played -- SC is glad he never found out what would happen to his mind on a fourth such consecutive day. Sony was not yet in the game hardware business when SC was there -- we had sneak peeks at the upcoming Playstation, but didn't have any development projects underway -- but Nintendo and Sega had some truly amazing people putting pressure on us. Despite the inclination of most people to think that playing games for money is stress-free, when an executive producer comes into your cubicle to let you know the release you swore was rock-solid actually is going to need another round of debugging, your day can be quite terrifying.

Your host was involved with the production of two games, done simultaneously on two platforms. Back then, Sony had the rights to produce games under the ESPN name, and so we worked on ESPN Speedworld and ESPN National Hockey Night (some better screenshots of Speedworld can be found here). Both were done in Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis variants. The release dates listed for both games on the linked site are wrong -- your host left Sony in August of 1994, and neither game was out on either system at that time, although Speedworld had been approved for production. Both made it to the stores in time for Christmas of that year.

You learn some interesting things working as a game tester. It's not commonly known, but there are five different versions of the Super Nintendo out there, distinguished by sound hardware alone. Sony provided the first-generation chips, but they and Nintendo had a falling out over the CD-ROM drive that ultimately became the Playstation, and so Nintendo had to find another supplier that could produce something backward-compatible without violating Sony's proprietary rights. This was problematic, and Nintendo ended up going with four different iterations of chips over the lifetime of the system. Games had to be seamlessly compatible with all of them, and they all had different quirks. The hardware makers provided different levels of access into the machines as well -- while Nintendo only allowed debugging information to come up through an expensive software package run on development machines (which meant the testers never got to use them), Sega had a nifty little test rig called an address checker, which would display the last memory address accessed (in hexadecimal) when the system crashed. This device plugged into the console, and EPROMs holding the games would be plugged into the address checker. Real cartridges were only ever put out at production time, and so we'd all stab ourselves frequently trying to pull the bare chips back out of the consoles after testing. There's an art to doing that right, but SC never got the hang of it.

We had a neat Easter egg in Speedworld that had to be pulled out because it caused the regular game to crash sometimes. It was a version of Pong featuring two clowns on Pogo sticks, who bounced a squid on a plate back and forth between them. Sending the squid flying back towards your opponent didn't occur automatically on contact; you had to press a button to make your clown whip the squid. It looked ridiculous, but none of the testers could get enough of it.

Like any creative work, there's a certain pride that comes in seeing your name in the credits when a game is finished. So although your host had already played ESPN Speedworld thousands of times, with all of the possible combinations of wheels, spoilers, engines, transmissions and racing season modes, he still bought a copy when it came out. Unfortunately, he didn't work on National Hockey Night long enough to be credited (they only kicked it over to the testing staff a month before he left), so he never bought a copy of that game. Since he never owned a Genesis, there are no copies of the Genesis versions of either game in Chez SC, either. But every now and then, he'll pull out his copy of Speedworld and remember when he had the job that everyone else wants.

Wine talk revisited

Forget jam and chalk, it's war!

Alcoholic fruit bombs? Ayatollahs of terroir? Battle between the resistance and the collaborators?

Find out what Sancho Panza, David Hume, Samuel Pepys and wine critic Robert Parker all have in common in this extraordinary article in the London Review of Books by Steven Shapin. Also who insured his own nose for $1 million. It's a motherlode of interesting sensory language, and even more interesting historical notes. For anyone who remembers the last go-round on wine-related language, or for anyone who simply appreciates a well-written review article, a must-read.

More on the sound/spelling interface

This past evening, your host received a call from Oh Brother SC, requesting that he settle a dispute between OBSC and a friend. The question was whether "diminished" contained three syllables, or four.

Now, the cheap and easy answer would be "go check a dictionary" (you can do so here). But it wasn't clear that a dictionary was close at hand, and so SC was forced to try to explain how we count syllables to two people who both have bachelor's degrees from upper-tier American universities. Shades of Mark Liberman's concern that linguistic education for nonlinguists is woeful.

It was probably, on reflection, a mistake to try to explain syllable weight, or the notion of moras. Ditto for onsets, nuclei and codas (if you want definitions of these, or any other linguistic terminology, this is an excellent, albeit slightly dated, resource). Fortunately, your host was able to communicate the essential idea that there were three vowels about which the rest of the phonological material syllabified, and that there weren't any syllabic consonants to mess things up.

Or so he thought. Immediately after going through all that, OBSC's friend piped up, "But there are four vowels in the word!". It turns out that it's rather difficult to convince people -- at least on short notice -- that there isn't necessarily a 1:1 correspondence between sound and spelling, even though they may recognize in the abstract that English spelling isn't phonetic. Although the discussion ended with a consensus that there were in fact only three syllables in "diminished", the reasoning was more of a deferral to authority -- "you've got the master's" (or, from another perspective, "I have the power!") -- than an intellectual breakthrough.

How to order coffee in France

Courtesy of Arts and Letters Daily, one of the funniest articles SC has read in some time, on French service. It starts out well:

The French have a saying 'le client est roi' - the customer is king. But we all know what they did to their royal family. The guillotined head of Louis XVI bounced across the Place de la Concorde as a few thousand Parisians laughed at it - and those chuckling spectators were the ancestors of today's French waiters.

And it only gets better from there. Particularly interesting to your host is the bit about espresso, which the author says is known among French waiters as "un express". At appropriately snooty establishments in the U.S., one will get corrected for saying expresso instead of espresso. There's a whole dictionary of drink-related expressions at the end, so read the whole thing.