September Linkfest

Seven links in honor of September (from septimus, meaning "seventh"):

1. If you're a fan of global football (soccer), you may know the teams NAC Breda, Gimnasia y Esgrima La Plata, and Sampdoria. But do you know what those names mean? Even if you don't follow soccer, this article from the Guardian (UK) is fascinating. (Hat tip: Lance Knobel.)

2. If Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations were published today, it would be titled Invisible Hands: The Mysterious Market Forces That Control Our Lives and How to Profit from Them—am I right? Check out other contemporary retitlings at Your Monkey Called, and be sure to read the comments. The post got picked up by Kottke.org, where commenters submitted a slew of new suggestions. (Then: Infinite Jest. Now: Epic LOLZ.)

3. Syntactic ambiguity ("The man saw the boy with the binoculars"), independence of syntax ("Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"), lexical ambiguity ("Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo) and other linguistic example sentences, in English and 18 other languages. (Via @thatwhichmatter.)

4. News Dots, from Slate, is a brilliant interactive map of how every story in the news is related to every other story. Updated daily. (Via @poniewozik.)

5. I've long known the unfortunate slang meaning of "Nancy." Turns out just about every name has a dark side, at least according to Urban Dictionary.

6. Who knew there were so many varieties of doughnuts in the world? Sixteen in Spain alone.

7. Finally, tomorrow represents a rare confluence: Rosh Hashanah and Talk Like a Pirate Day.  I couldn't find a glossary of Yiddish or Hebrew pirate-talk, so here are the next-best things:

• Yiddish lyrics to Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance
• Talk Like a Pirate in German. (Hey, German and Yiddish are related!)
• A 2006 Jewish Journal article about Jewish pirates.

Oyrrrggh!

 

Comments

[Karen]

3. My favorite example of syntactic ambiguity: "Visiting relatives can be boring."

5. I am either the greatest thing that ever happened to the world (1-6) or the worst (8-infinity): http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=karen

[Gedaly Guberek]

Shanah TovARRRR!

[Q. Pheevr]

Urban Dictionary doesn't get much about me right, but it does seem to know that I like the Pogues.