Found by Losing: A Corollary

I'm moving to a new apartment next month (maybe one that is bigger on the inside than on the outside... one could only hope) and there is one item I am lacking - a dinner table. And I've been looking around, shopping for a table that would be right and won't break the bank, when suddenly...


I got an idea!


So this summer has been relatively boring so far (compared to the previous, ultra stressful school year) and I always find myself with very little to do and I end up wasting my time doing stupid things - like, well, nothing at all. That's pretty stupid, right? And instead of wasting my time shopping for a table I was never going to buy, I decided to make a plan - a plan to design and build my very own dinner table from scratch. (I like plans.)

Just one more thing to get lost in before discovering that the final resolution is greater than the sum of its parts.

Inside (literally) The Book

As part of the curriculum for the MLIS program at Pitt, we are required to prepare discussion of a book for orientation. The title of this book is Everything is Miscellaneous. The book itself is written in a Saganite tone except that it's not quite as thought provoking as the universe. However, some of the points it makes about information are good to think about.

Just in the first chapter, it discusses how iTunes has revolutionized the organization of music sales by making everything miscellaneous and allowing the users to decide what are the most popular/downloaded items; more explicitly, focusing more on the track rather than the album. Having read and understood this I seemed to agree with their argument that before online music stores, music sales were all about the economic benefits of the album. Without going into all of the consequences of this within the music industry (i.e. artists' recording habits, singles vs. albums) I thought about how ground-breaking this was for the information age. Now, I'm honestly not a big fan of Apple being a corporate, manipulative giant, but they seem to have grabbed a corner on the market.

Likewise, Google Books has increasingly become the top choice to find printed content of many professionals. However, this is still very much in codex format. There are still pages with a limited amount of text on them. Yes, eBooks have certainly influenced booksellers and readers alike, but what about the apparently everlasting novelty (no pun intended) of the printed book? If we make the argument that many people enjoy holding a tangible object or the smell of old or new books, we can always counter that with eReaders and scratch'n'sniff stickers or the fact that - let's be honest - the majority of readers prefer electronic media. It is easily accessible to those who are tech savvy enough to at least use a word processor.

Where am I going with this? Well, my immediate thought was an analogy between albums and books. Of course, these are very different types of content with different purposes, and information architecture should - I believe - always be aware of the type of information it is grouping together, but I've found - at least in academic settings - that there is more of a focus on the author or a specific article. This is actually somewhat like the microsizing of weblogs (Twitter) only it focuses more on a specific topic as part of a bigger picture whereas tracks of an album don't necessarily have to relate to one another. There is a bit more codependency as far as books go - especially if it's a chronicle. However, not all books are like this. And I feel that breaking down and re-synthesizing these types into new media would be beneficial for the content and more accessible to the reader/researcher. This should be considered in any digitization process.

In the future, I imagine a world where all literature and knowledge (printed or otherwise) is easily and readily accessible to everyone. For free would be nice, too.

Photo credit: http://www.bbc.co.uk

The Phono-semantic Bias: A Subjectivity in Linguistics

Yesterday, I was reading a few example abstracts on the website for the Linguistic Society of America. The reason why I was there is because I was considering submitting one for their upcoming conference in Pittsburgh. Despite all of the examples having obvious counter-arguments, there was one that made me literally chuckle. This one. At least it was good until the end - when they started talking about "glorping." It got me thinking. Why do I think this is so hilarious? Well, "glorping" sounds like a pretty funny word to me, but it wasn't that. It was the fact that the researchers were attempting to use it as a neutral, unbiased term for some action being described on a television screen. What action that is, I/we may never know. What action do you think it might be? Well, certainly it's one that can be displayed on a screen. So it's a tangible, physical, noticeable action.


Using English language conventions, we can extract a base word "glorp" which is undeniably the source of hilarity - at least for me. To me, "glorp" makes an interesting sound when I say it. It makes me want to think that "glorp" is some sort of onomatopoeia. It almost seems like a clumsy word. Maybe it's similar to "stumble" but flailingly. Or maybe it has something to do with speed - being slow sounding. If I heard that someone was glorping, I wouldn't assume they were moving very quickly. Or maybe it has something to do with some sort of awkward, alien-like march in which the participant makes an official "glorping" march noise on each step. It could be - and very well might be - the fact that it's not even a real word that makes it all the more entertaining and silly. Regardless, I wouldn't expect to hear this word in the context of writing a TPS report, in giving an official declaration or speech, and certainly wouldn't expect to hear it as part of a compliment. Why?


Well, in doing a bit of dictionary (including Scrabble) research, I was able to find a few words with similar sounds in them: namely the [orp] sound. I will assume all related words (i.e. torpid, torpor) and not include obsolete words.


gorp: a mixture of dried fruit and nuts, often with seeds and other high-calorie foods such as chocolate, eaten as a snack food, originally by walkers and campers. (OED)


torpid: benumbed; deprived or devoid of the power of motion or feeling; in which activity, animation, or development is suspended; dormant. (OED)


dorper: a prevalent and flourishing breed of sheep primary used for meat; some have black heads. (Wikipedia)


corpus: from Latin; a technical term referring to the "body"; used in various professional fields including law, medicine, writing, language, and the arts (Wikipedia)


dorp: a (Dutch) village; formerly more or less naturalized in sense: Village, THORP. In South Africa, a small town. (OED)


So far, we have one word that slightly matches my instincts: torpid. Nonethesless, none of them are verbs like "glorp." However, to be completely honest, I don't use "torpid" in daily conversation and had to be reminded of its existence while searching. So this word barely influenced my judgments regarding the word "glorp." Maybe it's the other half of the word that makes a difference: the [gl] sound. I will, however, refrain from listing all of the words I find as there are evidently hundreds. In fact, I will only list words which come to mind (seeing as this is obviously very subjective).


glop: obsolete; to swallow greedily (OED)


gloop: can be a wide variety of things (thanks to Urban Dictionary... goes and pukes)


glue: the sticky stuff


So now that I have a series of grotesque images floating around in my mind, I'm going to stop searching and just make my point. It seems that the actual phoneme segments in the fake word, "glorp," do NOT directly influence its assumed meaning. Instead, I hypothesize that there is a much more complex explanation to this phenomena (and I do believe there is one).


I hypothesize two separate conclusions:


(1) Intuitive Hypothesis: It is the combination of an uncommon sound of English with another sound or group of sounds which create a sort of "bigger picture" for the meaning of the fake word. By "bigger picture" I mean there is a completely fabricated definition which is influenced by the unique combination of sounds and some sort of psychological analysis.


(2) Non-intuitive Hypothesis: There is a word association using the words outside the perceiver's known vocabulary that combines many different similar words together so intricately that it is difficult, if not impossible, to decipher any or all of them. (Unlikely, but possible)


So I was wondering: Is it worth it to explore this further? Would anyone like to join me? Should I submit an abstract to the LSA for their conference in January?


I would actually be surprised if anyone read this let alone responded to it.