American Dialects...

At the University of Cambridge (UK), Bert Vaux has been running a survey of English dialects for some time, collecting a large amount of data (you can take the survey and add results yourself).  Now Joshua Katz at the North Carolina State University Department of Statistics has taken this raw data, filtered it for the United States, massaged it a bit, and produced a beautiful set of interactive graphics like the one below, each exploring a different particular dialectical variant.

The example I've reproduced below shows one such dialectical variant: what you call the device for drinking water in public.  The red areas mostly say “water fountain”, the blue areas “drinking fountain”, and the weird little green areas are where they say “bubbler” (what's up with Rhode Island and Michigan?). 

If you're at all interested in language, or just English in particular, this is a fascinating interactive graphic, very well done...

Programming Is Changing...

The article that included the graph below surprised me:

The gist of the article is to note that in 2012 (the year graphed above), markedly fewer programmers are working in a single programming language.  The article has the same data for 2010, and indeed there are many more programmers working in a single language just two years earlier.

The surprise for me isn't that we have more multiple-language programmers – it's that we have so many single language programmers, even today!

As I've written before, over the course of my career I've used dozens and dozens of programming languages – probably over 100 of them.  If I look at just the last two years, I've used seven: Java, JavaScript, Scala, PHP, C, C++, PIC assembly (two of these at work, all seven for personal projects).  I have trouble imagining an application programmer using less than two today, as just about every application uses JavaScript (for the client side) and at least one other language (for the server side).  And what application today isn't a web app?

Certain kinds of programming, much less common these days, perhaps can be done with a single language – things like embedded systems, low-level systems programming, etc.  But surely it isn't true that close to 20% of all programmers fall into these categories?  I'll speculate that on some larger teams, it's possible to write for years in a single language because you're slotted into some narrow area of work.  I still have trouble imagining 20% of all programmers fitting into that category.

So I'm surprised!

English is a Scandinavian Language?

Jan Faarlund, a professor of linguistics at the University of Oslo, Norway, makes a very interesting claim: that Old English didn't evolve into Modern English (as is the general consensus of linguists today).  Instead, he says, Old English simply died out after the Vikings invaded England, and Modern English evolved from the Vikings' language – much influenced by the Old English of the people they conquered.

The history of languages is an area that's long interested me, though I haven't had the opportunity to immerse myself in it very much.  One reason why it fascinates me is that it's one of those areas of science that is extremely volatile: linguists' understanding and current models change very rapidly.  Just within my adult lifetime there have been something like five or six “revolutions” in our understanding of the history of the world's languages.  If Faarlund's claim ends up being verifiable, it's yet another example of this volatility...

Faster Than C, Safer Than Java, Simpler Than *sh...

Even the title of this post raises all sorts of questions and red flags!  What on earth are they talking about?  A programming language I'd never heard of before: ANI...

Do You Know...

...where the word “hello” came from?

Julia...

Julia is a newish programming language, intended for scientific programming (where general mathematics capabilities are very important, especially statistics).  It's getting some rave reviews, especially when compared to the venerable R.  I'm going to have to check it out...

English is a Crazy Language...

Passed along by my friend and colleague Aleck L. (for whom English is a second language).  As always, click to enlarge:

Origin of Some Common Sayings...

Again via my lovely wife, Debbie:

They used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families used to all pee in a pot & then once a day it was taken & sold to the tannery. If you had to do this to survive you were "Piss Poor." But worse than that were the really poor folk who couldn't even afford to buy a pot ... they "didn't have a pot to piss in" & were the lowest of the low.

The next time you are washing your hands and complain because the water temperature isn't just how you like it, think about how things used to be. Here are some facts about the 1500s:

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and they still smelled pretty good by June. However, since they were starting to smell, brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.

Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children. Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it. Hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water!"

Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof. Hence the saying "It's raining cats and dogs."

There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came into existence.

The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt. Hence the saying, "Dirt poor." The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until, when you opened the door, it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entrance-way. Hence: a thresh hold.

In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire.. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while. Hence the rhyme: Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old. Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man could, "bring home the bacon." They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and chew the fat.

Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.

Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the upper crust.

Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a wake.

England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a bone-house, and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive... So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the graveyard shift.) to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be saved by the bell or was considered a dead ringer.

North American Dialects...

Here's a fascinating little web site that's chock full of information about the English dialects of North America.  There are even audio samples you can listen too!

Concatenative Language...

No, I'd never heard of a concatenative language before, either.  But I've used one (Forth) without knowing it.  I used Forth many moons ago, and though I haven't touched it for at least 25 years, I remember it as being fun, unexpectedly powerful (considering the alternative was assembly language), amazingly portable (there were Forth interpreters on every microcomputer I was working with back then, something like a dozen different instruction sets).

I just ran into a little blurb on Factor, a much more modern concatenative language.  I haven't used it, just read about it a bit.  It's stack-oriented, much like Forth is (yes, Forth is still around!).  But it's got all sorts of interesting features that Forth doesn't...

Homophones...

Homophones are words that sound alike but are spelled differently, and have different meanings.  They're a frequent cause of mistakes in written English.

Logan and Brandy are really, really fed up with the abuse of homophones.  So fed up that they've written a very funny (if a bit profane) page all about it, titled Learn Your Damn Homophones!.  As if by explanation, at the bottom of the page they say (complete with a link to an XKCD cartoon):

You think this is obscene? Do you even read any of the stupid shit you write? That’s obscene.

But it's more than just funny – you can actually learn something here...

Via reader Simon M.

What's UP?

From my mom:

There is a two-letter word in English that perhaps has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that word is 'UP.' It is listed in the dictionary as being used as an [adv], [prep], [adj], [n] or [v].

It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP?

At a meeting, why does a topic come UP ? Why do we speak UP, and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report? We call UP our friends and we use it to brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver, we warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen. We lock UP the house and some guys fix UP the old car.

At other times the little word has a real special meaning. People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses.

To be dressed is one thing but to be dressed UP is special.

And this up is confusing: A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP.

We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night. We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP!

To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP, look the word UP in the dictionary. In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4 of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions.

If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used. It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't give UP , you may wind UP with a hundred or more.

When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP. When the sun comes out we say it is clearing UP. When it rains, it wets UP the earth. When it does not rain for awhile, things dry UP.

One could go on & on, but I'll wrap it UP, for now...my time is UP, so time to shut UP!

It all makes sense to me!