On the way in to work this morning I got stuck in traffic behind a semi truck. It had a good deal of grime on it, and someone had made the following inscription in the grime:
EL PASO
EL CRUNCHO
<—
—> —>
I thought this was a lot funnier than “WASH ME.”
Posted on April 20th, 2006 by Nils
Filed under: culture, humor, language | 4 Comments »
Our six-year-old, having taken piano lessons for some seven months now, considers himself quite the little maestro. He loves the damper pedal. Since he only measures 43 inches tall, he isn’t able to reach it without standing up. (We finally invested in a piano pedal extending platform so his posture won’t go down the tubes). […]
Posted on March 20th, 2006 by Araceli
Filed under: culture, humor, language, music | 2 Comments »
Our church is putting on a “Greatest Hits Night”—an evening of live music that was heard in our worship services during the year. It’s a time of fellowship, food, fun, and worship for the church. It’s also an opportunity for members to invite friends and family from outside the church who might find an evening […]
Posted on January 20th, 2006 by Nils
Filed under: culture, humor, language, links, movies, music | 3 Comments »
Last night I was spelunking through the automatically generated code of a Rails application I’m writing. I did a double-take when I came across the following line in ./config/environments/development.rb:
config.whiny_nils = true
You’d think that a Danish hacker would choose names for his Ruby attribute accessors that didn’t insult so many Swedes. Then again, maybe not; I know from […]
Posted on November 3rd, 2005 by Nils
Filed under: culture, humor, language, links, projects, software, technology | 3 Comments »
Araceli was in Nordstrom Cafe the other day with the kids. She was speaking to the hispanic waiter in Spanish, as is her habit. She ordered hot dogs for the kids, but instead of using the Spanish word for hot dog (salchicha) she used a Spanglish term for hot dogs that I made up years […]
Posted on September 5th, 2005 by Nils
Filed under: culture, humor, language, links | 1 Comment »
What’s surprising about this is that it’s not a bad guess at where I’ve spent the years of my life: 50% Northern Ohio, 45% urban Southeast Texas, 3% coastal Northern California, 2% New Hampshire.
Nils’s Linguistic Profile
75%
General American English
15%
Yankee
5%
Dixie
5%
Upper Midwestern
0%
Midwestern
How about you? (Via Richard Tallent.)
Posted on April 15th, 2005 by Nils
Filed under: culture, language, links | 4 Comments »
I just heard ADM’s new tag line this morning in an NPR ad. I don’t think it’s bad marcomm per se. The problem is that this is ADM’s third tag line in as many years.
The company used to call itself “Supermarket to the World.” This slogan is presumably what gave rise to the domain name […]
Posted on December 13th, 2004 by Nils
Filed under: business, corporate identity, culture, language, links, pictures | Comments Off
Wes has a good and balanced summary of the strengths and weaknesses of Bush’s and Kerry’s performances in last Thursday’s presidential debate. He has a lot to say about the linguistic devices used by each candidate and the political strategies that probably informed their use.
I never really thought highly of presidential debates, which, I felt, […]
Posted on October 4th, 2004 by Nils
Filed under: culture, current events, language, links, software, technology | 2 Comments »
L. Scott Johnson just submitted a few new autonyms (‘written’, ‘writable’ and ‘abbr.’) and a contranym (‘highfalutin’). His ideas inspired me to think of a new pair of strange attractors: ‘left-to-right’ and ‘right-to-left’, which become strange when you try translating them into a Semitic language such as Arabic.
Posted on September 30th, 2004 by Nils
Filed under: culture, language, projects | Comments Off
My team at work is pretty international. The other day Roberto, whose office is next to mine, wrote It works for me on his whiteboard. Someone had reported a bug to him but he couldn’t reproduce it. (What he meant by “It works for me” was, “It works on my machine.”) Later he wrote the […]
Posted on September 27th, 2004 by Nils
Filed under: culture, language, links, pictures | Comments Off
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