The Linguistics of LOLspeak

This video shows a presentation by two linguists from Australia, Lauren Gawne and Jill Vaughan, who have studied LOLCats and the language that people use when creating LOLCats. They even include a discussion of the LOLCat Bible! If you prefer to read, you will find their work online at the Open Research Library.

Here is the video; also at YouTube.

I can has language play:

Construction of Language and Identity

in LOLspeak

Are Emoticons the Future of Language?

You all have probably noticed that I use the smiley :-) a lot in when I write. This YouTube video offers some thoughts about emoticons by Ben Zimmer, a linguist and one of my favorite language commentators.

Resource: Grammar Lessons with Food

A totally charming little grammar video from the guys at PleatedJeans.com! 

Grammar Lessons with Food

 

Quick Summary:
You're - Your
Hyphenation
Homophones
Confusing Word Pairs (complement - compliment)
Ironic Quotes (a.k.a "scare quotes")
Compound Subjects
Than - Then
Less - Fewer
Would Have (not "would of")
Literally

Wanna Live Forever? Become A Noun

This charming video from NPR features a fun song about the people whose names became nouns: sandwiches, leotards, shrapnel, and more!

ADAM COLE: (Singing) I always dreamed my name would go down in history. But that sweet path to fame still remains a mystery. Like inventors, kings and sages, I don't want to be forgot. And so I'll search these pages for people who were not.

(Singing) Well, from August down to Zeppelin, the world is full of eponyms. People die but names live on. Lamborghini made a car. Mason made a Mason jar. And Henry Shrapnel was the bomb. There's Volta, Watt and Newton, energetically disputing whose contribution most deserves top prize. For each scientific unit there's a genius attached to it. And when they get together they harmonize.

CHORUS: (Singing) When I'm six feet underground, when I up and die, I hope my name becomes a noun. I hope I'm objectified.

COLE: (Singing) Leotard has reached new heights. He has to wear his clothing tight or he'll get tangled up in his trapeze. General Burnside isn't skilled. He often gets his soldiers killed but his sideburns can't be beat. The Earl of Sandwich ups the ante with a snack that's nothing fancy; he'll never have to leave his poker game. Silhouette's a penny pincher. He won't pay for painted pictures so the cheapest kind of portraits bears his name.

CHORUS: (Singing) When I'm six feet underground, when I up and die, I hope my name becomes a noun. I hope I'm objectified.

KRULWICH: (Singing) Wait a second. Wait just a second.

CHORUS: (Singing) Robert Krulwich.

KRULWICH: (Singing) Yeah, it's me. Has it ever occurred to you that becoming a noun, it's just - it can be a little embarrassing?

COLE: (Singing) What do you mean?

KRULWICH: (Singing) Well, let's say your name is Cardigan and you're a man of many parts. But once you become a noun, then all you are is a sweater with buttons, forever.

CHORUS: (Singing) Oh.

KRULWICH: (Singing) Or you're a guy named Guillotine and your wife likes you. Your kids like you. But once you become a noun...

(SOUNDBITE OF A SCREAM AND SLASHING EFFECT)

KRULWICH: (Singing) ...nobody likes you.

(Singing) Are you familiar with a man named Dunce?

COLE: (Singing) My name is Jon Duns and I was well-respected once for my brilliant meditations on theology. But my rivals took offense and they said Dunce means someone dense, and those perverse reverse on entomology.

KRULWICH: (Singing) Now you know what I'm talking about.

CHORUS: (Singing) Now when I'm six feet underground, when I've up and died, I hope my name is not a noun and I'm never objectified. You know that, that would hurt my pride. I hope I'm never, ever objectified.

Resource: Grammar Rock

When I was a little kid, I knew all these Grammar Rock songs by heart (they showed them on TV during Saturday morning cartoons). In addition to Grammar Rock, there were other videos too; you can read more about the whole series at Wikipedia. I've got another post here with the Interjections video; you can see the rest of the Grammar Rock videos below:

Unpack Your Adjectives:

Conjunction Junction:

Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here:

Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla:

Verb: That's What's Happenin':

A Noun Is A Person, Place Or Thing:

Busy Prepositions:

The Tale of Mr. Morton:

Resource: Beware the Zombie Nouns!

It's scary: zombie nouns are everywhere!

Zombie Nouns by Helen Sword in the New York Times

Helen Sword provides a fine description of nominalizations, a.k.a. zombie nouns, and how they can suck the life out of any sentence. The article is a fun read, with many examples of zombified language. For example, here is an item she cites from George Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language; it's a passage from the Biblical Book of Ecclesiastes which Orwell has rewritten in a style abounding with zombie nouns:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

 The change in style actually deprives the sentence of any real meaning!

Sword also provides a link to a web tool - The Writer's Diet Test - which can help you determine whether your writing is zombified or not. I was pleased when I tested this tool on the current class announcement. Result: I am "fit and trim" overall, although my verbs need toning, ha ha.

In the narrative writing that you do for this class, the threat of zombie nouns is admittedly not as great as in the academic writing you are doing for your other classes. So, in this class but even more so in your other classes, take heed ...

and beware the zombie nouns!!!

(Zombie Walk by Rodolpho Reis at Flickr)

Want to learn more? Here's a YouTube video for you to enjoy on the topic of the zombie nouns:

Punctuation: Semicolon Video

Here's a TED video: How to Use a Semicolon. There's a Semicolon Lesson page too! This is a cute video that uses vintage arcade graphics to illustrate the use of the semicolon in comparison to the comma and also in comparison to the period.

Ursula Le Guin: Writers Who Can Remember Freedom

Ursula Le Guin is one of my all-time favorite writers, and she was recently honored at the National Book Awards; here is a video of her speech, which includes these moving words (transcript here): "We who live by writing and publishing want—and should demand—our fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom."

Kafkaesque and Orwellian

Sometimes a writer has such a distinctive approach to storytelling that their name becomes an adjective! In these two videos, Noah Tarlin explores the meaning of the words Kafkaesque and Orwellian:

English: Back in Time

English is changing, always has been changing, and always will be changing. To get a sense of that change over the centuries, I thought you might enjoy this video:

How far back in time could you go and still understand English?

10 Letters We Dropped From The Alphabet

Here is a fun video about the history of the English alphabet: 10 Letters We Dropped From The Alphabet.

Technology of Writing: The Machine

Here is a thought-provoking video from Michael Wesch. It's been an YouTube for a while now... with over one million views! Join the crowd and take a look, and you can also read some commentary by Michael Wesch here: The Machine is Us/ing Us Final Version.

Book: William Shakespeare’s Star Wars by Ian Doescher

I enjoyed these three audiobooks so much that I got the print books and read those too! You can listen to samples of the audio at Audible.com; and here are the book covers:

Here's an excerpt:

The Creative Process

Watching someone revise and edit a piece of writing is not so much fun to watch, but watching someone revise and edit a drawing is so cool! Here's a video by Bethany Stevenson:

Imaginary Friends and Real-World Consequences

This is a TEDx video from OU with an OU faculty member: Jennifer Barnes. It was featured on the TEDx Innovations page... and since you are spending a lot of time with imaginary characters in this class, I think you might really enjoy what she says about our emotional investment in fictional worlds.

Jennifer Barnes:

Imaginary Friends and Real-World Consequences

 — Parasocial Relationships

Jennifer is a great person to follow at Twitter, too! She is @jenlynnbarnes.

Matthew Taylor on The Power to Create

Matthew Taylor is the director of the RSA, The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce; find out more at his blog. This is an animation of a longer talk which you can listen to here if you are curious: Matthew Taylor introduces the Power to Create.

This video focuses on the universal power to create: we are all creative, and society needs us to use this creative power to solve the bigger problems that face us in the future. Schools, employers, and governments need to think about ways to remove barriers to that creativity and to increase people's access to the resources they need to achieve their creative vision. In the past, creativity was associated with a kind of elitism, but Matthew Taylor urges us to set that aside and see how everyone has creative power. Find out more at the video:

The Power to Create

How did English evolve?

I thought you might enjoy this video from Kate Gardoqui: How did English evolve? You can find out more at the TED-Ed Lesson page.

A Writer's Notebook

I thought this was a really cute video from Peter Macala, an English teacher, who is encouraging his students to keep a "writer's notebook," which is something very similar to how you will be using the reading notes for this class: A Writer's Notebook.

And, of course, you can keep other kinds of writing notes too: if you overhear a snatch of conversation standing in line somewhere that you think would be useful in a story, save it on your phone! Or maybe you will decide to start carrying around a tiny notebook in which to jot down things you see or ideas you think of. Keep track of little details you notice about things, places, people... anything at all! You can then use the notes from your blog posts, your phone, from your physical notebook, etc. to write your stories for this class each week!

Resource: History of the English Language (video)

From the Open University, here is a great video about the history of the English language - funny and informative! Here is link to the video at YouTube.

Resource: The Shapes of Stories by Kurt Vonnegut

This infographic is based on some ideas from the great novelist Kurt Vonnegut (his Breakfast of Champions is one of the genius books of all time, IMHO), as turned into an infographic by Maya Eilam (and here's a full-size view). You'll want to consult the chart for details; the eight types are:

Man in Hole
Boy Meets Girl
From Bad to Worse
Which Way is Up?
Creation Story
Old Testament
New Testament
Cinderella

And here is Vonnegut himself in a vintage video on The Shapes of Stories... and you might also want to look at Vonnegut's Eight Tips on How to Write a Great Story.