Archive for the 'languages' Category

Artificial Poe

Published on September 10, 2008 in alt.nerdy and languages. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

This Poe Parody/Translation [Boing Boing] reminded me of my own take on the first three stanzas of The Raven written in the wee hours of the morning after staying up for two nights trying to finish an A.I. assignment. Procrastination is a cruel mistress. Three hours before class, my professor emailed us and said we had another four days to complete the assignment.

This was my response:

Once wandered one named Alan, who ponder’d how he’d get a gallon
Out of many a quaint and curious volumed water jugs,
While he nodded, nearly napping, suddenly he’d find a mapping,
He’d wake, fingers tapping, clapping for those caffeinated drugs.
“(defvar visitor…” he fluttered, and drank caffeinated drugs.
Common Lisp kept finding bugs.

Ah, how clearly he remembered, and would’ve done dismembered
Lines and lines of silly Java code for nothing more than sport
Woefully he mourned the morrow; he would enter, beg and borrow
For some chance to ease the sorrow, to which Sanjoy would retort
In infinite wisdom, “It’s not my fault Lisp is not your forte.
Sorry.” Tough luck kid, in short.

As the sad forced-typing pressure, of a student who’d feel fresher
If he’d planned ahead and, like some others, slept a good night’s sleep;
Slowed, there rang the email Ding. O’ what worse horror could it bring?
Is the daemon trying to sing? And Oh! How high his heart did climb!
What bliss is this? Class canceled? Salvation for his wretched crime!
This was it. He had more time.

Initialism Infix Injection

Published on July 28, 2008 in languages and www & thecloud. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

All frequent internet conversationalists should be familiar with the concept of initialism, whereby “If I recall correctly,” is shorted to “IIRC,” and pronounced I-I-R-C. The most commonly used initialisms occasionally make the shift to acronyms to be pronounced phonetically, which then gives rise to amusing phonetic perversions; i.e. “Rolling on the floor laughing my ass off!” becomes ROFLMAO which is imported to spoken English, and eventually back into text, as “waffle-mayo.” As a result of this phonetic borrowing I, and perhaps others as well, now sound the ‘word’ out in my head.

Chloey used an interesting, and in my experience unique, initialism construction in gTalk the other day.

… because im(elitist)o that’s the only way to use said adjective.

Now, I’m curious how natural that construction was for readers. IMHO is an often used and widely accepted initialism that has now become part of the standard Internet abbreviation lexicon and has never made the jump to an acronym. Therefore, I still process IMHO as ‘I-M-H-O,’ which might have made it more natural for me parse the unknown syntax. I didn’t chunk the whole word-phrase. ROF(laughing)MAO doesn’t quite seem as natural.

Of course then this could be just pure happenstance. I wonder if this injection is more common than I know or if this is just a one-time thing that won’t catch on. I like it.