Posts tagged language
Twitter Tongues Shows Geographical Multilinguality Of London And NYC - “Twitter truly seems to be an all-knowing entity. If we would like to see how many people are talking about chipmunks in Italy, it could tell us in a second, with even more precise data for regions and cities. Twitter Tongues uses Twitter to show us the languages of tweets sent from London and New York in the summer of 2012, and provides a unique look into these multilingual cities.Playing around with the website application gives a very interesting insight into the different districts that have more or less inhabitants of a certain tongue than others”
City of QR Codes
“This street, this entire block, this city —its beautifully exposed skin now appears in my imagination as a square of white and black squares, each structure and topological feature raising or lowering itself against a field of contrasting color. This city is a QR code. A QR code may not be a sex symbol to you, but stretching anywhere from 21 units by 21 units in dimension to a maximum of 177 by 177, (define these imagined units as you like) my metropolis is a pixelated, hemaphroditic Vitruvian pin-up drawing, a mandala of Kama Sutra-esque data positions.” (Rhizome Editorial)
Making Word: Ryan Trecartin as Poet
“Pronouns are a battlefield. “IT is not |You|„, IT IS WE!” NAK announces. “IT is not |em| and>/ Will not matter as Such.” On the next page she says: “The New Look for This Company, IS re-Thinking the Word |Humanity| as an Object with a (Goal).” Trecartin’s use of corporate jargon brings the concrete back to “corporation,” a word that abstracts the corporeal. Dialogue is propelled by confrontations between voices of a single entity (i.e., the Koreas) and others, whose names convey difference in terms of human-resource hierarchies. A Driver—listed in the dramatis personae as “Pay Role: (2): Driver, Wait”—offers unsolicited business advice: “[…] Focus on finding REAL Consumer Demand„/ For Cross-Over-Culture„„„ ?/ And Time-Shared-Ideologies ?” The suggestion is soundly rejected by Global Korea and her affiliates. He’s just a hireling, and his vision of crossovers and time-shares is too generous, too loose. There’s also an intern—“illegal outsider re-useable friend (prop)”—who goes by Jessica until USA Korea decides she’s Cindy. Either way, she’s no K. Interns are promiscuous, commingling with the corporate body for a limited time, unpaid. “Contemporary Slut!” Mexico Korea rages at Jessica/Cindy. “Every Body’s’ Got the Agenda!”
The Best Translation Program Yet
“Google delivers foreign tongues at the press of a button…A German scientist has developed one of the first translation programs suitable for everyday use. Sheer computing power gives the Google software surprisingly good results — perhaps the best yet seen created by a machine.”
He Was Literally Kicking My Ass
“Young people today (and by “young”, I mean anyone who uses a cell phone) have as much verbal dexterity as your average goat. Not that I have anything against goats: they’re really cute and if they didn’t insist on shitting all over my living room floor, I’d adopt one. But I prefer goats that are…well, goats. Not humans. Human goats are a plague on our society that must be stopped. Which gets me back to my original point: banning words. Without further ado, then, here’s my list of three words that should be stricken from the English language.” Johnathan Kravetz on Three Bad Words.
Teabonics
Signs seen primarily at Tea Party Protests. They all feature “creative” spelling or grammar. This new dialect of the English language shall be known as “Teabonics.”
Happy Hanukkah, Kvetch Later.
“The Yiddish verb for complaining, kvetch—literally to squeeze or to crush—has an onomatopoetic quality to my ear. All of those consonant sounds, squashed into a single syllable, surrounding the explosive grunt of the short E sound, to me, like the prolonged insistence of a grievance. And who has not occasionally been a kvetch, the noun—a relentless complainer?” Robert Pinsky Kvetches about poetry’s most artful kvetches.
