http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1880

A few weeks ago, we featured Elevate Embuggerance and Holistic Feisty, authors (according to Google Scholar) of The Linguistics of Laughter:

Now, thanks to research by Steven Landsburg and Aaron Mandel, we're proud to introduce you to the prolific writer "Ass Meat Research Group", who is listed at amazon.com as the author of 88 books:

His (their?) frequent collaborators include  "Frozen Horse", who has written 23 books, and "Chilled and Frozen Hors the Fresh", who has written 24. The same circle of writers includes Sheep the Edible Offals of Bovi, and a number of others; we leave the full analysis of this social network to future literary scholars.

Steven's post explains how (most of) this probably happened.  It's clear that there's still some room for improvement in algorithms for automatically parsing biographical records.

[Update: this one has been rattling around the blogosphere for a few years, unknown to me — interesting to see that it still hasn't been fixed.]

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http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1879

Once again, Zippy plays with English morphology. This time it's -ity day in Dingburg:

We get happyosity, based on happy, extended by the accented variant of unaccented -ous; and rapturosity, either similarly derived (from rapture) or based directly on rapturous. Both have been invented a few times by others:

Rapture w/Cilantro and Risotto: I've just renamed this delicious dish, still lingering in tastebud memory from Sunday dinner. Shrimp and scallops cooked in chili oil, garlic, and cilantro. Lemon risotto. Rapturosity, indeed. (link)

If you would like, I would more than happy, even approaching rapturosity, to invent more adjectives to describe you! (link)

Bugfixes, new toys, and all-round happyosity. (link)

Are Americans so preoccupied with unhappiness that the majority of us would rather watch a news program about suffering, than one about happyosity? (link) [Blog posting entitled "Multihappyologist: One who studies many, much happiness"]

Playful -(os)ity formations have attracted occasional attention here on Language Log, beginning with the Snickers nougatocity coining here. This one, with the extension of the base, has an unusual spelling, with C rather than S. Following right on my nougaticity posting came Ben Zimmer on the example that probably started the playful -ity fashion, the noun bogosity, built on the slangy adjective bogus, treated as if it had the adjective suffix -ous.

Then followed seriosity in a Get Fuzzy cartoon, in a posting that also mentioned furiosity and fabulosity. All three are straightforwardly based on adjectives with the suffix -ous. They stand out because the suffix -ity isn't really productive (though there are models like curiosity).

Finally came a Zippy, with the extended noun randomosity, based on random. And now we can experience morphological happyosity and rapturosity again.

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http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1881

[Below is a guest post by Dan Everett]

On the 22nd of December, 1942, Franz Boas and Claude Lévi-Strauss were having lunch at the Faculty Club of Columbia University when Boas fell from his chair. Lévi-Strauss tried to revive him, but to no avail. The founder of American anthropology died of a heart attack, in the arms of the founder of French anthropology.  Boas was 92. Lévi-Strauss was 34. At that moment, Lévi-Strauss assumed from his fallen colleague the symbolic mantle of leadership, becoming the most important living anthropologist of the twentieth century, a distinction he maintained for another 67 years.

On October 30, 2009, nearly seven decades after he bade farewell to the soul of Boas, Lévi-Strauss himself died at the age of 100. In the intervening years, anthropology has grown and diversified intellectually and as a profession, and there is no single figure to take on the leadership of the discipline as Lévi-Strauss took it from Boas. Today, the idea of a single figure setting the research agenda for other anthropologists makes little sense.

What did Lévi-Strauss do to merit the importance and honors that were bestowed upon him for the last decades of his life? As in the case of any major intellectual, the primitive answer is simply that he wrote and said very interesting things.

Franz Boas brought anthropology into linguistics, pointing students like Edward Sapir at the interaction of culture and language. Lévi-Strauss brought linguistics into anthropology, using the concepts of universal mental commonalities and binary oppositions that he learned during World War II in exile in New York from Roman Jakobson, one of the founders of modern linguistics (and who exercised a direct and profound influence, for example, on Noam Chomsky and the generative school of linguistics).

Lévi-Strauss's contributions are so varied that a succinct summary of them is impossible. But by consensus the principal areas are kinship, myth, and a formal systematicization of anthropological theory along broadly linguistic lines.

The intellectual evolution of Lévi-Strauss began in earnest in 1935 when he joined a French cultural mission to Brazil to teach Sociology at the University of São Paulo. During the next four years Lévi-Strauss began and completed his ethnographic field research, with brief trips to the Bororo, Kadiweu, Kawahiv, and Nambiquara peoples (all speaking different languages from different linguistic families). But when the dates are pieced together, the time spent was almost negligible. Like Boas before him, Lévi-Strauss did surprisingly little fieldwork for one so influential among field researchers. He never learned to speak a single language of the groups he studied and never spent more than a few weeks in any community of non-European heritage. But the book recounting his Brazilian travels, published almost twenty years after his expeditions, Tristes Tropiques, established him as a writer and intellectual of the first rank, bringing him world fame. In this book philosophy, penetrating observation, and fascinating experiences were interwoven to create one of the best travel books ever written - even though he denigrates travel writing at the outset of the book.

I have a personal connection Tristes Tropiques - when I was writing my own book about adventures and discoveries in the Amazon, always in places near where Lévi-Strauss had worked, his shadow hovered over my shoulder. His seemingly effortless eloquence was a constant rebuke to the awkwardness of my own drafts.

But Lévi-Strauss was more important as a thinker than as a prose stylist, and his anthropological ideas were beautiful and influential. In his work on kinship, for example, he proposed that the key to understanding the role and structure of perceived relations among members of a society were basic terms, especially the 'mother's brother'. His kinship system provided new perspectives on social cohesion and constraints, built around alliances to what he termed the 'social atom' - the nuclear family plus the mother/wife's brother. This 'alliance theory' shaped debate on kinship for decades.

His work on myth, arguably the most important of his many contributions, also focused on oppositions, as though myths involved some sort of Hegelian dialectic of thesis/antithesis → resolution. He traced the movements of myths across the world, especially throughout the Americas. His four-volume Mythologiques is an awe-inspiring tour-de-force of intelligence and learning.

Structural Anthropology, the school that Lévi-Strauss founded, tried to bring together the competing strands of formalism (cultures are defined in terms of the forms of their relationship, rituals, etc.) and functionalism (cultures are defined by what their forms do, not what their forms per se are like). He asked three questions of each item he interrogated: (i) what is its function; (ii) what is its form; and (iii) how do the form and function come together? The debt to Saussure's concept of the linguistic sign - a composite of meaning and form that is the building block of language - is clear. Perhaps the clearest exposition of his ideas in a single volume is his classic La Pensée Sauvage ("The Savage Mind", or via a pun in French "The Wild Pansy") brought him into conflict with his greatest rival for the leadership of the French intelligentsia, Jean-Paul Sartre.

All of Lévi-Strauss's work was united by the idea that there is a fundamental psychic unity among humans based on universal constraints on categorization - the building block of human knowledge, culture, and life. His influences were many, but in his focus on universal, likely innate constraints on human thought, he shares many points in common with the Universal Grammar oriented linguistics of Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker, and others.

Are myths really constructed around the dialectic Lévi-Strauss proposed? Is kinship based on the maternal uncle? Are any of his theories correct?

Ultimately the work of Lévi-Strauss was as seminal as the work of Freud and Chomsky. It matters little whether any of these three is correct. In fact they are probably all wrong about their views on what is universal in the human psyche. But progress in the mind is not so much finding the truth as learning to ask useful questions that bring new rigor and satisfaction to research and researchers.

Lévi-Strauss will be missed because perhaps no anthropologist who has ever lived has brought such energy, challenge, and promise to the study of Homo sapiens. He will also be missed because we are unlikely to see in our lifetimes any humanist who better unites continental intellectual traditions with Anglo-American theories and a focus on scientific rigor.

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http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/11/do-businesses-hate-their-workers-income-disparity-myths-edition.html

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http://finerthingsinmac.com/?p=222404541

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Hold down the Option when changing volume with Apple Keyboard volume shortcuts to open System Preferences and go straight to the Sound pane. Works in 10.5 Leopard and 10.6 Snow Leopard, possibly earlier versions as well.

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Current Music: Victoria bloody Derbyshire on 5 Live. Why didn't they hire Delia Derbyshire instead?
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http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2009-11/010.html

Today was also not a day for getting a lot accomplished, mostly because I had three and a half hours of meetings and another hour of meeting prep. One of those meetings was a kick-off meeting for a new monitoring and metrics project, and much of the rest of the day was spent helping brainstorm the technical architecture we want to use to separate the data gathering from the data reporting and put a network protocol in the middle to make it easier to plug and unplug components later.

Maybe this time we'll follow this project through to completion and produce something we'll be able to keep using, unlike several of the previous iterations of this project.

I was going to write a review this evening, but I ran out of steam. I'm also not yet finding energy to work on Debian things. Hopefully tomorrow, with fewer meetings and more time for concentration, will go better on that front. I'm also hoping to get to play some volleyball for the first time in quite a while. I'm also considering writing the review in the morning before heading into work, taking advantage of morning energy.

I'm writing up some bits about authentication and directory systems on a Usenet group, which is reminding me of all the white papers I'd really like to write about how we do things at Stanford. It takes a lot of time to do that, but it feels so good to do it. Not this week; too many other things that are behind. But it's good to be reminded that I should make time for that.

Preliminary goals for tomorrow: finish getting ticked messages out of my mail and into my to-do system, and then finish the Heimdal implementation of password strength checking.

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http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-931561-64-8.html

Review: The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger

Henry has time-traveled for most of his life. Starting as a child, he'd periodically experience seizure-like symptoms and then suddenly be somewhere else, in a different time, unclothed. The destinations clustered around important events and people in his life, although could be almost anywhere. Sometimes he'd be in another time for days; sometimes only for hours or minutes. When he returned, he may have been gone for much less or much more than his subjective impression of how much time had passed, usually for much less. He could never take anything with him, or return with anything. It was inexplicable, uncontrollable, and mostly unbelievable, except for Clare. Henry first showed up in a meadow at her parents' house when she was six, and appeared there over 150 times over the course of her childhood. Eight years older than her in normal time, Henry was part of her life for nearly as long as she could remember.

The Time Traveler's Wife takes the traditional heterosexual romance apart by giving the male protagonist a non-linear life. Apart from that one change, the rest of the romance is fairly conventional, although extending well into the marriage and through various post-marriage problems. But that one change has profound effects that cast parts of the romance in interesting lights.

For example, Niffenegger neatly includes and rewrites the typical love-at-first-sight trope by opening The Time Traveler's Wife with Clare meeting Henry for the first time in normal time. She's already completely smitten and has been looking forward to this moment for two years, during which she's not seen Henry at all. Henry has no idea who she is. The scene plays out much like a love-at-first-sight scene, but with a viable explanation and a mismatch of knowledge that makes it both more thought-provoking and more delightful than the typical romance. Throughout the story, Niffenegger uses time travel as a reassurance device of the reader, taking some of the stress out of the hard parts of the story and easing the reader through threats to the relationship. As someone who often finds painful relationships a bit more painful than I want to read, I appreciated that, although it may smooth things out a bit too much for people who prefer their romances uneasy and jagged.

The mismatch of knowledge is something that Niffenegger plays with effectively throughout. Henry tries not to tell either Clare or his earlier self details about how things work out in the future, but unlike some SF stories dealing with this premise, he slips up, reveals some information just by how he reacts or appears, and just cannot withhold some details. Clare knows far more about him than he knows about her in regular time, since she grew up with him. She occasionally knows things about the future that he hasn't discovered yet. Sometimes he travels into the future and learns things he doesn't want to tell her. The reader gets the union of their separate views and gets to have all the fun of putting the strands together.

The story is told in tight third person, interleaving scenes told from Clare's and Henry's perspective and putting the reader in both of their heads. I'm not sure how Niffenegger pulls this off; there's a great deal of time travel and a lot of folding over of the story, and the result should be horribly confusing at least in places. It never is. Niffenegger uses the technique adroitly for foreshadowing and hint-dropping but maintains a clean narrative line, giving the reader a clear biography of both of the protagonists and lots of opportunities to recognize the other "half" of a scene that had appeared earlier in the book. The skill with which she pulls this off is, I think, the most impressive part of this book.

The Time Traveler's Wife is not about the mechanism of time travel at all; from that perspective, it's fantasy, not science fiction. Niffenegger does introduce an entirely implausible medical explanation for Henry's time travel, purely for plot reasons, and science fiction readers should expect to cringe all the way through the explanations that show up. This is thankfully brief, and for the most part the characters neither attempt to explain nor think much about the mechanisms. Henry's had this happen to him since childhood and Clare has been exposed to it for nearly as long, so for both of them it's just life. This was a wise choice on Niffenegger's part. What Henry does cannot be explained through any normal physics, and any attempt to do so would have distracted from the point of the story.

Instead, as in the traditional romance structure it's based on, the book concentrates deeply on the two characters and their relationship. As hinted by the title, it centers on Clare, although Henry is a full protagonist in his own right. The book therefore succeeds or fails on the reader's empathy for the characters, and I found Clare a compelling success. Henry's interesting at times, although at times a bit too much of the damaged but sensitive man, but Clare shines. It helps considerably to get to see her as a smart, creative, and capable child as well as a creative and interesting adult. The reader gets to fall in love with her much the way that Henry does, watching her grow up. (The potential ickiness of Henry meeting her originally as a child and then later marrying her is handled smoothly, adroitly, and with sensitivity by both of the protagonists, defusing it entirely for me.)

Unfortunately, I think Clare, or rather the situation the structure of the book imposes on Clare, is also the biggest flaw of the book. Clare's entire life revolves around Henry in a way that goes beyond even the traditional romance. It's to some extent unavoidable, since Henry started visiting her as a child and transitions from an elder uncle role in her life into a future husband. She knows he's going to be there in the future, she remembers him from childhood, she's completely infatuated with him, and the unpredictable nature of his time traveling forces her into a largely reactive role. Since she's also the child of a rich family and Henry uses knowledge of the future to make quiet investment profits and remove money as a problem in their lives, she has very little forcing her out into the world apart from Henry. Both she and Henry have to deal with difficult (and realistic) problems with their extended families, but apart from that and her art projects (well-described, but a bit rare in the book), Clare seems to have little life outside of the romance.

Clare at one point compares her life with Henry to the life of a wife of a sailor, who sees her husband leave and isn't sure when he'll come back or if he'll come back. But the time traveling is both more random and more involving than that, partly because the time periods of absence are shorter, which means that Clare doesn't have the sailor's-wife opportunity to develop a separate life she can live when her husband isn't around. All of this leaves her with very little agency and little ability to change the direction of events, particularly since so much of her life is known in advance. Niffenegger uses the cast-in-stone solution to time travel paradox, where once an event is known to have happened it's forced into happening no matter what the characters do. This takes away even more agency. Since Henry is the one traveling, he at least has some illusion of control and proactiveness. Clare is forced into an almost entirely reactive position.

Obviously, not every book needs to take a strong feminist position with respect to its female protagonist, and the story pattern that Niffenegger is reworking has very conservative tendencies. Still, this started to bug me about half the way through the book, and the stereotypical nature of Clare and Henry's major disagreement and relationship struggles didn't help. The conclusion of the book, while bittersweet, pounds this home in some uncomfortable ways, leaving one with the feeling of Clare bounded, defined, and entirely encircled by this one relationship. It's a loving, beautiful, complex relationship, but it's still just a little creepy to me.

That said, I think most readers will be able to put that problem aside and still enjoy this story. The characters are complex and deep (including a wonderful character introduced late in the story), the intellectual exercise of piecing together the interwoven timelines from Henry's and Clare's separate perspectives is a lot of fun, Clare is smart and stands up for herself in the relationship, and I loved how Niffenegger introduces most major plot points of a developing relationship and analyzes and reworks them in the light of the introduced time travel element. If you like taking apart a traditional story structure and seeing how the pieces look in a much different light, this is great fun.

Don't go into this story expecting science fiction or you'll be sorely disappointed. The time travel part is best taken via pure suspension of disbelief, the one change from reality required to tell the story. But as a romance and as a commentary on romances, I found it quite enjoyable. Niffenegger does an exceptional job at keeping it clear and avoiding confusing the reader, and the pacing and momentum of the story is well-handled throughout. Recommended, particularly if you're sympathetic to romances, with the caveat that the gender roles are fairly strongly traditional.

Rating: 8 out of 10

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