Thesaur's Ramblings

Google's gmail ads sometimes are humorous. For example just now as I was checking my spam folder, it recommended spam fajitas. Unfortunately, it was the wrong kind of spam. I'd love to watch electronic spam sizzle, but that's not going to happen.

This reminds me of the fact that Hormel sued to prevent the usage of the word "spam" in products related to electronic spam. They lost in the UK and the US. After a brief search of online history, I came up with a lawsuit filed back in 1997 attempting to prevent the same thing. That time, it was against a spammer, not against an anti-spam product.

If Hormel had thought of gmail back then, they might have been able to persuade a court to take preventive measures. As it is now, they've got no choice but to grin and bear it.

Excerpts taken from the paper “Shifting Sands: The Developing Myth of 9/11”.
© 2003, 2006 Klaus Guenther. All rights reserved.

Note: This writing sample is excerpted from a longer academic paper entitled “Shifting
Sands: The Developing Myth of 9/11”. Throughout the paper, the date “September 11, 2001”
and its variants refer to the historical date and events, while “9/11” refers to the developing
myth. Endnotes are original and refer to the bibliography which is not supplied in this
excerpt.

Ground Zero

The historical events of September 11, 2001 will remain a very strong presence in the
minds of those directly affected by the tragedy. However, as time goes by, details fade from
the collective memory of the nation, and hence opinions are bound to change. Internationally,
this can be seen especially clearly. But even within the United States, the fluid memory starts
forgetting.

In a Time article published the day after the attacks, Nancy Gibbs took on the idea that
America was weakened by the attacks on these prominent American landmarks:
If you want to humble an empire it makes sense to maim its cathedrals. They are
symbols of its faith, and when they crumple and burn, it tells us we are not so
powerful and we can't be safe. The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, planted
at the base of Manhattan island [sic] with the Statue of Liberty as their sentry, and the
Pentagon, a squat, concrete fort on the banks of the Potomac, are the sanctuaries of
money and power that our enemies may imagine define us. But that assumes our faith
rests on what we can buy and build, and that has never been America's true God.i
From the very moment of the attacks, the American TV stations interrupted their
programming and brought only news of the attacks and their progress. Over the course of the
next few weeks, rerun after rerun of attack footage and the collapse of the twin towers
dominated the news. No movies were broadcast, no commercial breaks, and no sports events.
A nation grieved. Prayer vigils were held in churches and places of worship around the
country. America wept and prayed and hoped for survivors.

Continue reading "The Myth of 9/11." »

The other day I posted on Cindy Sheehan. Mohamed, over at Iraq The Model has a very moving response. It's nothing we don't already know from Iraq, but it's the response of someone who lived in a country where people really were killed for no reason.

I realize how tragic your loss is and I know how much pain there is crushing your heart and I know the darkness that suddenly came to wrap your life and wipe away your dreams and I do feel the heat of your tears that won't dry until you find the answers to your question; why you lost your loved one?

I have heard your story and I understand that you have the full right to ask people to stand by your side and support your cause. At the beginning I told myself, this is yet another woman who lost a piece of her heart and the questions of war, peace and why are killing her everyday. To be frank to you the first thing I thought of was like "why should I listen or care to answer when there are thousands of other women in America, Iraq and Afghanistan who lost a son or a husband or a brother…”

But today I was looking at your picture and I saw in your eyes a persistence, a great pain and a torturing question; why?

I know how you feel Cindy, I lived among the same pains for 35 years but worse than that was the fear from losing our loved ones at any moment. Even while I'm writing these words to you there are feelings of fear, stress, and sadness that interrupt our lives all the time but in spite of all that I'm sticking hard to hope which if I didn't have I would have died years ago.

Read it all.

A few days ago, a friend of mine posted a blog entry about meeting a Marine who is back from Iraq.

Dad announced Saturday night that we were going to Cracker Barrel for lunch yesterday to meet a man named Isaiah. The man, he told us, is a Marine who recently returned to the U.S. after losing one of his legs in comabt in Iraq.

I wasn't terribly excited. I didn't know this man or his family and didn't think the encounter would be that interesting. But I was wrong.

...

Read it all.

The Washington Times Insider has an article today (free registration required) that the controversial (read: full of lies) ad that NARAL was running on CNN and several local stations has been pulled. The best part of the article was the second paragraph:

"We regret that many people have misconstrued our recent advertisement about Mr. Roberts' record," Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, wrote in a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter.

That's got to be the understatement of the year. After the flogging the ad received from FactCheck, an independent group that reviewed the ad, you wonder how she can say that it was "misconstrued" with a straight face. Spector, who has a stellar record with NARAL, had written that the ad was counterproductive.

California Senator Barbara Boxer apparently missed the memo on the ad. In a speech she gave at Golden Gate University, she said "Roberts sided with some of the nation’s most violent anti-choice extremists." While she at least tries to come up with some facts to prove it, she's still wrong. And she doesn't care.

Dean Esmay is talking about Cindy Sheehan and how she has been changing her story.

I thought it might be of interest for some to see her columns over at the libertarian site LewRockwell.com. They're full of bitterness, as only a mother who has lost her son can be.

If you're going to talk about a person, at least read what they have to say. Not that you agree, but in the interest of fairness. This even applies to screeds written by the Kossites. It shows their true nature. It's easy to dismiss it, but once you've experienced it first-hand, it becomes tangible.

Something that may be of interest to forensic linguists is the recent controversy regarding Dan Brown's bestseller The Da Vinci Code. John Olsson, of the Forensic Linguistics Institute has published an expert comparison of several novels at the core of this case.

Something very interesting about this is that I think this result will result in an increase of cases where students copy and paste. Why should they get punished for something that a major author can do and get away with? I don't think there's anyone who after considering the evidence can seriously come to the conclusion that Dan Brown didn't take ideas and probably even passages from other books.

This reminds me of the 2001 case around the parody novel The Wind Done Gone. Though the book is clearly a parody (which the US Supreme Court has ruled to be protected speech), a Federal district judge issued an injunction against publication. This was overturned by the appeals court, but the issue wasn't settled until there was an out of court settlement of an undisclosed sum. More information at FindLaw and Wikipedia.

Also, let's not forget that RIAA is able to charge people who distribute content for free, whereas an author who takes a book and rewrites it for profit is exonerated by the courts. This doesn't seem very consistant to me, even though I recognize that creative powers are required in the case of the author and not the file sharer.

For the record, I tend to recognize the medieval concept that it isn't a bad thing to take something that already exists and give it a new meaning. In MHG, they called it "diuten". This creative process necessarily isn't a copy of someone else's work. (Due to the nature of context, it is impossible to reproduce the context of a quote, and therefore even an accurate quote is not the same as the same passage in the original work.) Of course, passing off someone else's work as your own is not acceptable.

Haser, Verena. 2005. Metaphor, metonymy and experientialist philosophy: challenging cognitive semantics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

In this brilliant indictment of Lakoff and Johnson's theory of metaphor (and language as metaphor), Verena Haser points out many inconsistencies and circular reasoning in the works of Lakoff and Johnson and other prominent cognitive linguists. This book is a must read for anyone who has anything to do with semantic theory or cognitive linguistics.

The synopsis taken from Amazon:

The present book provides a detailed criticism of experientialist semantics, focusing both on philosophical issues connected with experientialism and on cognitive approaches to metaphor and metonymy. Particular emphasis is placed on the works of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, but other cognitivists are also taken into consideration. Verena Haser proposes a new approach to the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, which contrasts with familiar cognitivist models, but also builds on some insights gained in cognitivist research. She also offers an account of metaphorical transfer which dispenses with the notion of conceptual metaphors in the sense of Lakoff and Johnson. She argues that conceptual metaphors are not a useful construct for explaining metaphorical transfer, and that the clustering of metaphorical expressions is better accounted for in terms of family resemblances between metaphorical expressions. Another major goal of this work is a reassessment of the relationship between experientialism and traditional Western philosophy (often subsumed under the vague term "objectivism"). This book contrasts with most other critical approaches to experientialism by providing close readings of key passages from the works of Lakoff and Johnson, which enables the author to pinpoint theory-internal inconsistencies and other shortcomings not noted in previous publications. This book will be relevant to students and scholars interested in semantics and cognitive linguistics, and also in psychology and philosophy of language.

(Full disclosure: I was asked to read this work at an earlier stage. I studied under Bernd Kortmann, one of the editors of the series in which this was published, at the University of Freiburg.)

Just after the IAFL conference in Cardiff, the BBC aired a documentary titled "Textual Evidence". It takes a look at several cases, many quite high profile, and looks to see how forensic linguistics can provide evidence toward guilt or innocence. It's fascinating to listen to for anyone.

For a while, the BBC was hosting a copy in their archives. However, apparently they took it down after a while. Due to the intense interest of many members of the Forensic Linguistics list, I have decided to host a copy on my server so that the documentary is not lost. Thanks to John Olson of the Forensic Linguistics Institute and Peter French of J P French Associates for providing me with the original audio.

Though I have a substantial amount of bandwidth available for this (250GB/mo), it still would be the best idea if you would download the files. If the bandwidth starts getting short, I will mirror the files on another server that has a similar amount of bandwidth available.

There are several formats. Please select the version you would like to download, right click on the link and select "Save as..." or "Save link as...", depending on your browser.

MP3

• 32kbps Mono (6.18 MB)
• 128kbps Stereo (24.7 MB)
• 320kbps Stereo (61.8 MB)

OGG

• 128kbps Stereo (31.5 MB)

The editors of the Dalles Morning News made a brave and historic decision: No longer will they refer to the terrorists in Iraq as "insurgents". Let's hope this becomes a trend.

Here an exerpt from the Friday, July 15 editorial entitled Call Them What They Are: Those who murder Iraqi civilians are terrorists:

Today, this editorial board resolves to sacrifice another word – "insurgent" – on the altar of precise language. No longer will we refer to suicide bombers or anyone else in Iraq who targets and kills children and other innocent civilians as "insurgents."

The notion that these murderers in any way are nobly rising up against a sitting government in a principled fight for freedom has become, on its face, absurd. If they ever held a moral high ground, they sacrificed it weeks ago, when they turned their focus from U.S. troops to Iraqi men, women and now children going about their daily lives.

Read it all.

In reply, I sent the following letter to the editor:

As an American abroad, I applaud your decision to relegate the word "insurgent" to the dustbin. We live in a time when we can truly be proud to be Americans – when the brave men and women of our Armed Forces are the ones spreading freedom throughout the world. Those who kill the innocent to prevent the march of freedom cannot be called insurgents or militants. Whether in Iraq, Israel, the UK or elsewhere, they must be recognized for who they are.

Hat tip: LGF.

UPDATE July 19:
The letter was chosen for publication with the headline "Our military spreads freedom". It is available on the Dalles Morning News site (probably only available for one week, registration unfortunately required).