Fritinancy

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!

 

Avast, Wasteland!

It's September 19, which means International Talk Like a Pirate Day has once again hauled itself over the gunwales and keelhauled the mizzenmast. Or something. To get into the spirit, visit the official website and spend a few pieces of eight on the Pirate Guys' indispensable guide to all things piratical, Pirattitude. Or take the scurvy-dog route and learn basic and advanced pirate lingo on the website, then practice with the English-to-Pirate translator. Over at YouTube, you can see and hear a pirate song one of the Pirate Guys, Cap'n Slappy, wrote "fer the children." (ITLAPD is celebrated on September 19 because it's the birthday of Cap'n Slappy's ex-wife.)

Perhaps you possess a pirate's soul in a landlubbing cube-dweller's body. Fear not, me hearty! Karate Party steps into the breach with a handy Chat Like a Pirate guide for text messages. A few choice examples:

IRBM : I'd Rather Be Marooned ("So...me and my buddies are going to scrape barnacles with our tongues. Interested?" "IRBM.")

POE: Pieces of Eight ("It's all about the POE." "True, brother, true!")

WWLJSPD?: What Would Long John Silver's Parrot Do? (Asked when one is on the horns of an ethical dilemma.)

I would have thought ITLAPD was beneath the lofty academic purview of Language Log, but it turns out those laugh-loving linguists have been following the event since 2003. Drop anchor here to see how they're celebrating this year. Don't miss the annual reproduction of the Corsair ergonomic keyboard for pirates, whose six keys include "R," "!," and "Avast." A corsair, or privateer, was a pirate who operated with the permission of his government. Sound like anyone you know?

Lots more piracy-lunacy links in this Boing Boing post. And the wonderful Wordsmith is featuring words about piracy all week in its A.Word.A.Day feature. (Yesterday: buccaneer. Today: filibuster.) Stop by, subscribe, and consider making a donation to support this excellent web site.

(Remember "a vast wasteland"?)

Image by Richard Winchell.