How F Scott Fitzgerald conjugated the verb “To cocktail”
F Scott Fitzgerald, in a 1928 letter to Blanche Knopf: "As ‘cocktail,’ so I gather, has become a verb, it ought to be conjugated at least once." (via JWZ) Read the rest
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F Scott Fitzgerald, in a 1928 letter to Blanche Knopf: "As ‘cocktail,’ so I gather, has become a verb, it ought to be conjugated at least once." (via JWZ)
Read the rest
From an excerpt from last year's The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers, the rules of "Freddish" -- as Mr Rogers' crewmembers jokingly referred to the rigorous rules that Rogers used to revise his scripts to make them appropriate and useful for the preschoolers in his audience.
Rogers' nine rules are a ...
Bruce Sterling republishes the acronyms in a recent Daimler white-paper on self-driving cars:
Advanced Driver Assistance System
Automated Driving System
Automotive Safety Integrity Level
Automotive Information Sharing and Analysis Center AUTOmotive Open System Architecture
Computer Emergency Response Team Central Processing Unit
Car Park Pilot
Cyclic Redundancy Check
Dynamic Driving Task
(Statistisches Bundesamt) Federal Statistical Office of Germany Design Failure Mode and Effect Analysis
Driver-in-the-Loop
Deep ... In this clip, an Englishman circa 800 A.D. is asked to chatter about his life. He understands the eallníwe léasspellung but prefers the old talk. A fun little thing to show reconstructed pronunciation of textbook Old English in a casual setting. I've tried to throw in a few natural abbreviations (for example 'c rather than ic), ...
The Roxy 8 Movie Theater in Dickson, Tennessee changed the title of Hellboy to Heckboy on its marquee. From WZTV:
(Owner Belinda) Daniel told FOX 17 News that she has never displayed any words on the sign that may be seen as profanity, especially since the Roxy is next to Oakmont Elementary School...
“As it turned ...
Grether Labs's Science Fiction Plot Generator can sure pick 'em: "You are friends with a talking fireplace, and you are working to solve this ancient puzzle before the creatures consume you"; "You are a cyan-eyed cartographer who is finding the awful truth beneath this false utopia, and who is struggling with the terribly thick ...
The Whiskey River Soap Company's funny soap varieties mostly fall flat for me, but there's one exception: the Grammar Police edition. (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)
Read the rest Hitting them with "Throughout" first is pretty sadistic. But that they stumble on "choir" suggests that they are hamming it up, un peu? Read the rest
GPT-2 is Open AI's language-generation model (last seen around these parts as a means of detecting machine-generated text); it's powerful and cool, and Gwern Branwen fed it the Project Gutenberg poetry corpus to see what kind of poetry it would write.
Pretty good poetry, as it turns out.
Scott Alexander (previously) does a ... English is a dragon of a language, dozing atop en enormous mountain of phonemes. What if they were all melted down and minted into something more consistent? And then we tried to speak it? The results sound a bit like a Welsh accent. [YouTube] Read the restHow F Scott Fitzgerald conjugated the verb “To cocktail”
The nine rules of “Freddish”: the positive, inclusive empathic language of Mr Rogers
Self-driving car jargon
What old English perhaps sounded like
Movie theater changed “Hellboy” to “Heckboy” on marquee
A madlibs science fiction plot generator
Soap for grammar police
Watch French people try to say difficult English words
Some pretty impressive machine-learning generated poetry courtesy of GPT-2
Phonetically consistent English