Vanderbilt and the Yeggman. Vipers. Vigor, the Hammersmith wonder.

I'm trying to do something to sort out my swearing. Not whether I do too much of it or not -- that's a subject for another day, and for the disapproving parents of any children who might be listening. But I'm concerned that most of my swearing doesn't really make sense. Can you help? Things I feel I should exclude:

• Parts of the body -- what's insulting about calling someone after a part of the body? We've all got one (or, more often, about half of us have got one). Some of the parts commonly so used are actually among my favourites, and even the others are very usefully functional. So I think to implicitly malign them in such comparisons is nonsensical. Likewise normal bodily functions and waste products.


• Sexual practices -- whether or not I indulge in, or even approve of them, myself, I don't think it makes sense to impute specific sexual practices to the insultee. Outside the world of swearing I wouldn't dream of judging someone on the basis of their sexual preferences, so how can it work as an insult?


• Suggesting their parents weren't married -- really now, we're living in the 21st century guys. This is true of half the kids I know, and nothing wrong with that.


• Blasphemy -- generating invective via terms associated with religious belief makes no sense if you're a believer yourself, and even less if you're not.


• Euphemisms associated with any of the above -- should also be excluded, for the obvious reason.

That doesn't seem to leave much! Any ideas?

[Poll #1359991]

A few things that have interested me lately:

• "Experimental" font Optica. I'm not sure if this is genius or idiotic. Apparently it's easy to read at gigantic sizes seen from some way off. (It says "Tres tristes tigres", if you can't read it at all.)
• Natural Harvest, a new book which can I think safely be described as a seminal work. The comments are quite amusing -- they read from the bottom up. Possibly NSFW.
  
• Atlas of True Names, which will be self-explanatory when you click through to it. It's a bit silly in places (OK, York = Wild Boar Village, but New York was named after the then Duke of York; and I'm not sure about eg. Lake of Victory either) but interesting and entertaining I think.
• The ideal Christmas present, a statue of your face. Send them two mugshots, they do the rest. Also available: your face at various ages, different races, genders, etc.
• A fun adaptive spelling bee spun off from the Visual Thesaurus. You have to pay to get your score registered, alas. Good article here about the way it learns.
• If you're interested in web design you probably already read Smashing Magazine. This article sampling some nice favicons is a recent example of how it makes you think and explore. Any of you done any favicon designing?
• On a related note, article from Yahoo about speeding up your website. Take with several pinches of salt, as Yahoo's interests are not the same as your own, but some tips (eg: putting stylesheets in the head element, which doesn't actually speed up page load but does give the user a speedier impression) are useful.

On a non-tab-closing note, I finally got to see the RL World Cup final from the weekend. Australia were I think 10-1 on to win at kickoff, but New Zealand made a nonsense of that with a terrific display of teamwork and concentration. Really good to watch, and realy good for the sport as a whole I hope. It seems invidious to single out players, but Cayless's tireless captaincy and the massive performance of Smith at loose-forward will stay in the mind for a while. His ankle-tap on Thurston, with just a handful of minutes to go, was surely the moment of the match. You have to feel a little for Lockyer, who had a brilliant game -- the Australian handling was mesmerizing at times -- but the better team won on the night. Hooray for them!

From the BBC news magazine:

"Tesco is changing its checkout signs after coming under criticism from linguists for using "less" rather than "fewer". But it's not just huge, multinational supermarkets that get confused about this grammatical point. The grammatical question of fewer versus less has been raising the hackles of plain English speakers for years."

I see two errors in this excerpt.

• First, it would be more accurate to say that Tesco has come under criticism not from linguists, but from pedants. (Some of whom may also be linguists, or at least think of themselves as such, but that's not what characterizes them in this context.)
• Second, plain English speakers couldn't give half an etiolated toss about fewer vs less, because they care about clarity of communication rather than smug pseudo-intellectual one-upmanship about fanciful and arbitrary grammatical "rules".
  

I've never understood why so many English-speakers seem keen to stifle their language -- the most versatile, flexible, powerful and expressive in the world. I'm pretty sure though that it is a social / intellectual insecurity thing -- if you know a bunch of made-up signifiers by which you can claim that you are "right" and lots of other people are "wrong", you mark yourself out as somehow better than the norm.

(Please note that I'm not saying that there should be no rules in English; that would be ridiculous. What I'm saying is that some of what are claimed as rules -- like less vs fewer, not splitting an infitive, not ending a sentence with a preposition, etc -- are meaningless, hallowed neither by usage tradition nor by innate sense, and frankly pathetic.)

Our quiz streak has come to an end, or (as I prefer to see it) been interrupted -- after winning the Copdock pre-school one, the last one at the Nelson (they concentrate on food instead during the summer), and the Neighbourhood Watch one, we only ran-up at the Dove beer festival quiz.

I'd like to say (although it isn't true) that this was because we were musing over a curiosity of usage that popped up in one of the earlier questions. See what you make of it!

The question was "What is unique about the Edradour whisky distillery?"

And the answer was "It's the smallest distillery in Scotland."

Now this made me feel quite uneasy, but I'm not sure why. Clearly being the smallest does in a sense make it unique, in that there can be only one that is the smallest, and this is that one. But it seems to me that "unique" should require more than that.

Thinking about it, I think that for "unique" to be satisfying, it must be a quality that only one thing possesses, but that others could do -- they just happen not to. Eg. Edradour might be the only distillery with red roof tiles, or the only one owned by a cat, or the only one that begins with "e".

So things like "the smallest" which is just one extreme of a continuum along which they all lie, don't count. Nor does any other quality of which there must always be exactly one example -- this seems to me like a "trivial uniqueness", for which there ought to be a different word.

[Poll #1195623]

How Chinese children learn English (via Language Log).

If you haven't already seen this, you might like to give it a go -- not just because of the free rice aspect, but because it's a fun and well-designed game.

Get three in a row right and you go up a level -- get one wrong and you go down a level. At higher levels you get asked more difficult words, difficulty being assessed by the proportion of previous contestants who've got them wrong.

50 is the highest level, so if you can stay there for any length of time, you're doing pretty well. My longest run at 50 was 4 words. Beat that if you dare!

And you'll learn lots of interesting (but, for the most part, practically useless) words.

(Thanks to watervole for pointing me at it!)

I was intrigued to note (courtesy of mrsdanvers63) that, according to Google, this LJ is the world-leading authority on the subject of dialect terms for gigantic buzzing beetles, thanks to this entry from last year.

(I can add that I've now also seen stag beetles in flight -- we had two males competing for a female in the garden this summer -- and, as suspected, it's a very impressive sight, preferably viewed from a fair distance.)

Has anyone else noticed Google declaring their journal an expert on any such somewhat random subject?

Three portmanteau words I have learnt recently:
( Cadavernous gilberfish are interestine )
(Those last two from the poem "A Lot of Rot". Your challenge: to work "interestine" into a poem of equal merit.)