Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for December 26, 2013

First, I think it’s funny. I get the joke, and it’s a good one. SMBC is a great comic, and one that I read regularly through my RSS reader. That’s my disclaimer, since I’m about to pick nits, but they do not in any way make the comic unfunny or unworthy of your own subscription.

But: “nuclear” does not have only two syllables, even in the standard pronunciations. The IPA options are [ˈnu kli Éš], [ˈnju klɪ É™], or [ˈnu kjÉ™ lÉš] (see below). The two-syllable option I assume would be with the diphthong [ˈnu klɪɚ], as if it were “new clear”. To me, it sounds similar to the difference between “likelier” and “like Lear”.

The real dig of the comic, though, is at that third option, [ˈnu kjÉ™ lÉš], as if the word were spelled “nucular”, which is also a completely different word, the adjective form of “nucule”. Dictionary.com calls applying that pronunciation to “nuclear” an example of metathesis, the transposition of sounds, as when someone pronounces “ask” as if it were “ax”. Merriam-Webstar comes right out and labels it non-standard. Since the George W. Bush presidency, this non-standard pronunciation seems to have become even more vilified or ridiculed, since politics makes anything divisive more appealing, but there are other “non-standard” pronunciations that seem to be making gains toward acceptability.

Merriam-Webster, for example, also labels the pronuciation [ˈɔf tÉ™n] for “often” as non-standard, but I hardly ever hear “often” pronounced [ˈɔ fnÌ©] to rhyme with “soften”, no matter how educated the speaker or what accent they have. Amusingly, the “ax” pronunciation of “ask”, like the “acrosst” pronunciation of “across”, warrants only the label “dialect” or “chiefly dialect”, rather than “non-standard”.

Like the way the letters we use can affect the way we think about sounds (in the recent “Throwing in the Vowel” post), the pronunciations we use can affect the way we think about words. Check out Going Nucular: Language, Politics. and Culture in Confrontational Times for more about this (mis)pronunciation and other spins on words.

—jhunterj

A subjective diagram of relative mouth positioning for English/IPA vowels by Wikimedia Commons user Ordoon

If you’re a native English speaker, you probably learned in elementary school that there are five or six vowels: a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y. The letters that aren’t vowels are consonants. It’s a nice enough rule of thumb, and serves many purposes well.

But it’s not quite accurate.

First, there is a tiny set of words that would make this list “a, e, i, o, u, sometimes y, and very rarely w“. A cwm is a type of valley, and a crwth is a crowd, for example.

More importantly, though, there’s the problem that vowels are aural and letters are visual. In linguistics terms, the letters are graphemes while the vowels are phonemes (and possibly diphthongs and triphthongs, depending on which linguist is doing the labeling). There’s another -eme to complete the language triumvirate: graphemes are units of a language’s written representation, phonemes are units of a language’s spoken representation, and sememes are the units of a language’s meaning. English graphemes include letters, numbers, and punctuation. Phonemes are where you’ll find the vowels and consonants.

We try to line up the graphemes with the phonemes, but it’s a messy network of mappings once you get through all of English’s oddities, like the consonant sounds at the beginning of one, ewe, or union, or the vowel sounds in myth and cwm, or the derivation of ghoti. The network got a good shakeup during the Great Vowel Shift.

So instead, linguists created a new alphabet of graphemes that has a one-to-one mapping with the phonemes. It’s called the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). American English’s vowel sounds are

• [i] (long e) as in seat
• [ɪ] (short i) as in sit
• [eɪ] (diphthong, long a) as in sate
• [É›] (short e) as in set
• [æ] (short a) as in sat
• [É‘] (short o) as in sot
• [o] (long o, also part of the diphthong [oÊŠ]) as in so
• [u] (long u) as in suit
• [ÊŠ] as in soot
• [ÊŒ] (short u) as in shut
• [aɪ] (diphthong, long i) as in site
• [aÊŠ] (diphthong) as in shout
• [ɔɪ] (diphthong) as in soy
• [É™] (schwa) as in the middle of separate, if you say it with three syllables
• [ɹ̩] (syllabic consonant) or [É?] (rhotic vowel) as in shirt
• [lÌ©] (syllabic consonant) as in subtle

or something close to that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bCM9RnDBZw

So keep all this in mind when people tell you that English is one of the hardest languages to learn.

—jhunterj

An example XO Box

If I were going to name that kind of thing, I might call it an “XO Box”, since that’s also a five-letter palindrome and the thing itself ends up in a box shape.

Hypothetically, that is. But enough theory; I think I’ll go write this blog post about it right now, and call it an “XO Box” for reals! I’d love to see some more examples (or 4×4s or 6×6s or …), in the comments or linked back.

—jhunterj

Muppets mash-up movie poster for “Lord of the Grins”

These are from my contributions to a two-year-old Twitter meme #minoranagrambooks:

• The Lord of the Grins
• The Little Pincer
• Anne of Green Bagels
• The Scrotal Web
• Harry Potter and the Holy Lad’s Wealth
• The Very Hungry Cellar Tapir
• James Clavell’s Hung So
• Frank Herbert’s Nude
• What Color Is Up Your Trachea?

Others’ here: http://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23minoranagrambooks

Feel free to contribute in the comments!

—jhunterj

GURPS Monsters

Another of my GURPS books made the jump  to PDF from e23: GURPS Monsters can now be yours in instant download from: http://e23.sjgames.com/item.html?id=SJG30-6418

It just went “live” on April 25 and has been selling briskly, as far as my experience goes (which is not very far, admittedly). Enough so that in that handful of days, it pushed my royalties into the “cut a check” level all by itself, when otherwise orders for my previous books trickled in to get me a check every handful of quarters. So, good times, thank you, and go help out my May numbers if you don’t have yours yet!

Not convinced? There’s a 10-page preview available there as well, to try before you buy, and my designer’s notes are freely available on Pyramid. Or if you’d prefer the physical book, there are a limited number of those left too. (You can order it used or new from Amazon as well: GURPS Monsters; but today’s prices make that seem unlikely.)

—jhunterj

Reading Two Gentlemen of Verona. Photo © by Chris Shea. Used with permission.

Free Shakespeare! is back in downtown Dayton. All this week (24×7), Chris Shea and a parade of volunteers are down at the Dayton Visual Arts Center for Shakespeare for Life, reading the complete works of Shakespeare.

You should be too.

I’ve participated both times that it’s been done here (the inaugural run was back in 2010). This past Friday, some coworkers (+1) and I had just finished enjoying Cap’n Johnny’s Whiz Bang Show at Gilly’s, and I asked them if they wanted to go read some Shakespeare. They were game, and we arrived in time to get in on The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

The “rules” of Shakespeare for Life. Photo by J. Hunter Johnson, released under CC-BY-3.0

Reading the Bard is fun, or can be. The Shakespeare for Life venue is laid back (no one is going to argue pronunciation or character motivation with you), and reading it aloud is a different experience than studying it in high school or seeing it on the stage—although you should do those too! It’s certainly something different to engage your brain with, and that kind of diversion is good for you too.

The Shakespeare for Life event is being held to raise money for Free Shakespeare! (they put on other productions throughout the year) and Grandview Hospital’s Oncology Clinic, so even if you can’t read, consider sponsoring someone who is.

—jhunterj

Now, there are some dictionaries that list the Latin-style plural. The American Heritage Medical Dictionary is one, but even it lists both the English-standard “scleras” along with “sclerae”. And there’s a wonderful tool that can show that this is probably the right way to go, if you’re going to create a descriptivist dictionary.

scleras vs. sclerae Ngram

Google’s Ngram Viewer lets you see how different alternatives have been used in actual publication throughout the years. And, except for a period in the 1860s, “sclerae” definitely outpaces “scleras” in English publications. So I won’t say either is wrong.

I will continue to use the less-common “scleras”, though. English has enough inconsistency that I see no reason to use non-standard plurals when standard plurals are accepted. I don’t say “alumnuses”, for example, as it has barely-there use—but in that case, I’d probably opt for the less formal “alums” rather than “alumni”, if the outlet permitted the drop in formality. But I opt for “vertexes”, “cherubs”, “dogmas”, and “ninjas” over “vertices”, “cherubim”, “dogmata”, or “ninja”; both forms are in measurable use, so why not adopt the word fully into English?

—jhunterj

Coach and Sam in the Cheers episode “King of the Hill”

Sam: I mean how much for the whole thing?
Coach: Oh, six hundred bucks Sam, but the salesman said, the salesman said satisfaction guaranteed.
Sam: Or …?
Coach: Now, that would have been a good question.

I was reminded of that clip from Cheers when reading the rules for The Resistance. They include a restriction on “good” players not screwing up:

“Note: The Resistance Operatives must select the Mission Success card; Spies may select either the Mission Success of Mission Fail card.“

This kind of rule is not needed. It’s sound strategic advice (there’s no reason for the good guys to fail any mission, while there are instances where a bad guy might play a success card). It might be there to keep griefers from messing up the game, but then I reach my usual follow-up question for such direct, absolute statements: “… or what?”. What happens if the Resistance Operative plays a Fail card? The Spies are much more likely to win, that’s all. There’s no way to see the “foul” during play (unless more Fails are played in a single round than there are Spies in the game), so if you’ve got a griefer, you’re still stuck playing the whole game out before you can determine that this rule was broken. And you can just as easily ostracize a player who plays Fails inappropriately without this rule.

At work, we have agreements between departments, teams, and other groups. They are set up like contracts, except they aren’t always written by lawyers. When reviewing them, I frequently come across things like “so-and-so will do such-and-such within this amount of time” and I have to ask “… or what?” Are we just documenting goals and aspirations? If the   doing of such-and-such actually affects the business, we need to have the consequences listed.

Game rules and team interactions, if you are saying something has to happen one way, but it’s theoretically possibly for it to happen a different way, you need to have your “… or what?” answer, otherwise you’re relying on the good intentions of your audience.

—jhunterj

Buy Sidekicks!

I took several photos at the event, as each author and the editor read a story, and enjoyed the material enough that I bought a copy right there (cover price!) in order to get it signed. I was expecting all of the stories to be about super-powered heroes, but they were not: post-apocalyptic, fantasy, supers, and crime humor were all represented in the stories presented, and I’m sure there are more awaiting me in the reading.

But on to the gallery! (All photos below I release under CC-BY-3.0)

Michael Haynes reads “Learning the Game”

Steve Lickman reads “Fangirl”

K. W. Taylor reads “Doomed”

Steven Saus raffles off a copy of Sidekicks!

Sarah Hans reads Alex Beldsoe’s “Hunter and Bagger”

—jhunterj

Orc by EspenG (CC-BY-SA-3.0)

An orc cook goes to the orc butcher and asks for some prime elf steaks. The butcher says “It’s not ‘prime’ these days. Elfmeat went to ‘good’, ‘plusgood’, ‘doubleplusgood’.”

“Oh. Okay, gimme some plusgood elf steaks and some doubleplusgood pixie wings.”

“Pixie wings are now grade A, B, or C.”

“Erk. Gimme grade-A pixie wings. Oh and some … uh, what are faerie-light patties graded on this week?”

“Violet, blue, pale blue, sky, and white”

“I hate this!”

“Hate what?”

“Your shifty grades of fey!”

—jhunterj