Not-so-hertz
Of lexis
Repetitive, regular,
Becomes you.
Well proportioned
Law abiding
Zip(f) in nature
Nothing above ‘the’.
Constancy
Is everywhere.
Typical of you,
Token, your words.
Category Archives: miscellaneous
long time know sea
no time
passes between
the coma
of friendship
The more I study language the more I find the emptiness of words.
I do not mean words are empty but that words are now containers to me than I had once thought. No longer do words hold a power over me. I have stripped it of its special place. It is not a mystery anymore.
The poem above hinges on the word ‘coma’. Like a coma victim coming out of his or her long slumber no time passes. Before the sleep the world was a certain time and place. After the sleep the it could be that months, years or decades have passed. For the victim time is lost. For the awake much has happened in that time.
Friendship just seems like this where time has been forgotten people still seem to be the same after the period of separation.
This is not true, of course. People change. You just don’t notice it. Like the mind, words can deceive.
Cool Chinese character tattoo or lifetime laughing stock?
As a language person I know all too well how difficult it is to translate perfectly from one language to another. This is why for many Westerners who are getting Chinese characters tattooed I will advise they should be careful. For one, those doing the tattoo may not be telling you the truth. Secondly, what seems fine in standalone translation may backfire when put in some kind of context. This article is a good introduction to this topic. I have seen some pretty funny tattoos and t-shirt meanings.
The moral of the story is if you don’t fully know what it means you should not let it go near your skin.
Hideo Kageyama Rocks
According to The Japan News (formerly The Daily Yomiuri) renowned Japanese educator Hideo Kageyama (homepage in Japanese) will be release a rock song entitled ‘Benkyo Shiyoze’ (Let’s Study!) on 8 May.
You have to hand it to Prof. Kageyama who is now advisor to the Osaka Prefectural Board of Education. His techniques for motivating students are fun and simple, making you wonder why we didn’t think of that in the first place.
collocation
the node
has centre stage
as always, egotistical
to no end
handsome as a lover
heavy as a smoker
frequent to haunt joints
come keep him company
for loneliness is an eyesore
Tie Fighters and cultural unconsciousness
I spend a lot of time thinking about language, even when buying presents for my kids.
This year I got the Lego Tie Fighter for my son (deep down the toy is for me but I believe we have kids so that we can continue our childhood into adulthood).
For most of my life I have thought why George Lucas and his cohorts should decide to call it the Tie Fighter instead of the H-wing Fighter. Afterall, the rebel fighter is called the X-wing Fighter because of its shape.
My conclusion is this: the H-wing Fighter just doesn’t sound good. There is nothing unconventional about the letter ‘H’ (X is such a rarely used letter it makes it sound mysterious). But the question is why ‘Tie’? My theory is that is looks like a bow tie and a Bow Tie Fighter will not cut it either. So the shortened form Tie Fighter sounds cool even though it has nothing to do with its function.
If this be the case then the name betrays its twentieth century roots. I mean I don’t see Darth Vader, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Luke Skywalker or Yoda sporting one in any scene.
In short, in the very distant future in galaxies far far away bow ties are out.
Some thoughts on the numbering system of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
There are two “facets” to the numbering system of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. One is to show the logical importance the comments to propositions/comments. The other is to show to which of the propositions/comments are they a comment of.
Two “problems” immediately come to mind when I look at the system:
- In certain parts the less important comments come first before the more important ones.
- There can never be more than ten comments to a comment.
A metaphor …
This was a random anonymous quote for me from the WordPress team:
“A metaphor is like a simile.”
As a metaphor scholar I rather like it. But I wonder are my blogs being turned into a corpus database for their purposes?
The Culture of Plagarism
Undoubtedly, there is a plague of plagarism.
In our day and age of internet and searchable data it is almost impossible to plagarize and not get caught.
The short of it is don’t plagarize if you are an academic of any worth.
Blog revamp
I have changed the title of the blog to my name – Warren M Tang – and upgraded the blog design to reflect the new direction this blog is heading.
While the blog originally was about corpus linguistics only, I have personally moved on to other areas, and so a more generic title is necessary. With the new title and new look I can now do more in other areas.
I will move away from focusing on just corpus linguistic tutorials and concentrate on making this blog more useful as an information and resource site for corpus linguists, cognitive linguists and English as a Second Language researchers.
