The 12th Day of Christmas (a linguist's version)

On the twelfth day of Christmas, 
my true love gave to me 
Twelve dialects humming, 
Eleven parsers parsing, 
Ten words aligning, 
Nine lemmas leading, 
Eight memes a-morphing, 
Seven sounds a-switching,
Six /i/s a-lowering, 
Five right-branchings, 
Four helping verbs, 
Three French phones, 
Two purple wugs, 
And a sentence as a parse tree!

The Superior Olive:

An auditory nucleus in your brain stem that lets you figure out the position of sound in space based on relative amplitude and/or on time differences between your two ears.

 - Seth S. Horowitz in The Universal Sense - How Hearing Shapes the Mind

Until I read this most fascinating book, I thought olives were simply playful food items used by children as fingertip covers and by adults as martini decorations.

And wouldn't superior olive be a great name for a vodka brand?

Have you "heard" about the new vodka?
It makes an outstanding dirty martini.

After a quick internet search, I learned that the superior olive already lends its name to a rock band ( which is quite appropriate as well).

Below is the image that adorns the home page of their website where their music is described as "blending orchestral tenderness with raw primal rock energy, as if the spirit of Mozart inhabited Ozzie Osbourne and became the front man for Pink Floyd."

Hmm ... I might have to give them a listen while I snack on my fingertips and sip a dirty martini.



Image credits: 1, 2, 3

Recap Rock on the Radar

Somehow I received a free subscription to an interesting magazine called Radar." In the May/June issue there is a column that lists the term recap rock as being on the radar for vocabulary. Apparently recap rock is a new category of music conceived by two fans of the television show Lost in which they write and sing lyrics that summarize episodes of the show. What a great idea and what a fun word. I love it.

The Barenaked Ladies and Semantics

The Barenaked Ladies are one of my favorite "newer" bands, not only because I like their sound, but also, and more importantly, I love their lyrics. They are a band that knows how to have fun with words. They play with word meanings and with listeners' expected interpretations of words.

Take a couple of lines from one of their more recent songs titled "Adrift" as an example:

Ever since we said our goodbyes
The onion rings, the phone makes me cry

The syntactical juxtaposition of the words onion, rings, phone and cry almost causes the word rings to be interpreted as a verb because normally people think of a phone as something that rings and onions as something that makes you cry.

Another example is a couple of lines from their song "Crazy":

I'm a few bricks short of a load,
but a full load always hurt my back.

Here, by adding the second line, they prompt the listener to identify the individual words and their meanings in the idiom "a few bricks short of a load" rather than think of it as one unit.