The ugliest neologism I have ever heard would have to be ‘webinar‘. Defined for you by the equally ugly-named Webopedia.

And just to show that I’m not just an unproductive complainer, I’ll suggest an alternative: Websem. It’s not much more attractive, but it has two advantages: it’s somewhat intuitive, and it sounds like Newspeak.

I pointed out a curiosity to my linguistics students: we can see that all the following sentences could be construed as a request to open the window.

• Please open the window.
• I need someone to open the window.
• It’s hot in here.

Of course, that last one only works in certain cases, namely if you’re willing and able to open the window, and I say it in such a way that you realise I’m not just making an idle comment on the room temperature.

The curiosity, though, is these two sentences.

• It’s hot in here.
• It’s cold in here.

Both of these could encode the same request.

My students had two ready answers for this:
1. We have a lot of real-world knowledge about what windows are for, and the likely effects of opening one.
2. We have an understanding of context.

But context is a horribly complex and poorly-defined notion. Our context involves all the objects around us, our goals and reasons for being where we are, the sum total of our cultural knowledge, everything we see and everything we know. Yet somehow we are able to quickly weed out all the extraneous information and decide what aspects of our context are relevant to the utterance at hand.

An example of this:
1) I pulled a real Homer Simpson last night.
2) I was at a restaurant last night, and I pulled a real Homer Simpson.

The interpretation for 1) may be that I did something pathologically stupid, or (if you saw the relevant episode) I fluked a victory. However, the inclusion of ‘restaurant’ in 2) leads us to another interpretation: I made a pig of myself.

Is Homer Simpson contextual? Here, certainly, but not in every conversation. To make this kind of reference, I make a guess about your cultural knowledge and ability to decode the reference, I bring the Homer reference up out of nowhere, and then I go on with the utterance as though nothing happened.

This is the kind of thing that gives us dialogue modelers conniptions.

I remember what I was doing about three years ago. It was that fantastic Sunday when the world broke out in protests against the war in Iraq. You were there.

My wife and I skipped church (because you shouldn’t let religion get in the way of morality) and took the kids to Perth city where we marched and shouted.

Oldest Boy was eight. I was explaining about why we were protesting, and he said, “So if George Bush sees us, and knows we all don’t want war, then he may decide not to attack Iraq. Right?”

Dear child.

“No,” I said. “He’s already decided to attack Iraq, and he will.”

“Then why are we doing this?” he asked.

“Because it’s important for us to do the right thing. Whatever happens, we want it to go down on the record that we said no.”

And we saw what a fat lot of good our sign-carrying and sloganeering did.

Yesterday, Oldest Boy asked me, “So is Bush going to bomb Iran?”

“Yes,” I said. “He is.”

Because Iran is next. We’ve done such a crackerjack job in Iraq that now it’s time to extend the neocon experiment. And I don’t know of any protests, though there may yet be. And I’ll carry out the same silly exercise that I did three years ago. And the bombs will fall anyway, and the empires will crumble. And Americans will still send me emails about peeance and freeance to convince themselves that the death they unleash from the sky and the torture of other people’s children is in fact God’s will.

I don’t know what to do to stop it. I don’t have very much power. I have a little money, which I can direct where I want. I can vote, but I’m only one vote. I have a blog that gets read by 10 people on a good day. It’s nothing, really.

But I will use any power I have, however pathetic and futile, to say no.

I am pleased to report that the good old American Heritage Book of English Usage has declared that using data as a singular noun is now kosher.

Sometimes scientists think of data as plural, as in These data do not support the conclusions. But more often scientists and researchers think of data as a singular mass entity like information, and most people now follow this in general usage.

If anyone gives you a hard time about using data as a kind of stuff, just point them to the link, and then feel free to flail them with a wet towel.

Can you tell the difference between the rhetoric of the American Religious Right and that of Al Qaeda?

Take this quiz and find out!

I got 16 out of 20, so I guess that’s a B-. It’s harder than it looks.

We live in a world where we talk to people, and they understand us and respond to what we say. This happens with such regularity that it is difficult to imagine it any other way. It is therefore natural to apply this pattern (wrongly) to non-humans. We talk to the dog, and we think the dog understands us. We talk to plants, and we imagine that they ‘respond’ by growing better. We talk to empty space, and we take any unusual happenstance as a sign that the empty space is talking to us.

We live in a world of designed objects. All around us are things that someone made. It is therefore natural to think that someone made the world.

We live in a world where we go to sleep and wake up again. In our experience, this has always happened. It is therefore natural to think that when we die, we will wake up again somewhere else.

Religious belief depends on these natural but unexamined assumptions.

US Senator Russ Feingold has begun a censure resolution against Bush.

Bush has broken the law, and defends his actions. It’s the right thing to do. What’s to lose? Bush’s approval ratings are in the toilet. So Democrats should be jumping on to this, right?

Nope.

Sen. Feingold said the following to Fox News’ Trish Turner: I’m amazed at Democrats, cowering with this president’s numbers so low. The administration just has to raise the specter of the war and the Democrats run and hide.

Democrats? C’mere. I want to show you something.

This is a recent link from Opposition leader Kim Beazley on the Australian Labor Party web page. Keep in mind that this is the Opposition party, like the Democrats now. Would Democrats ever put something like this on their web page?

With the changes to industrial relations laws that he rammed through parliament in the days before Christmas, John Howard has gone too far.

He is now riding roughshod over the will of the Australian people.

These laws are a threat to the Australian way of life. They destroy rights to overtime, penalty rates, holiday pay, redundancy pay and other rights that generations of Australians have fought hard to win over the last hundred years.

There is only one good thing that can come out of these laws: the beginning of the end of the Howard Government.

Labor will urge Australians to make every member of the Howard Government personally responsible for their vote to take away the rights of working Australians.

And for the sake of working families and future generations, Labor will fight every day until the Howard Government is brought down for these vicious, unnecessary and unAustralian laws.

Page after page of this. Hammering on Howard. Keeping the pressure on. Everyone knows it’s the way they do it here.

If a newspaper reports, “John Howard says, ‘It’s a nice day,'” there’ll be a bit at the end of the story where Kim Beasley says, “John Howard might think it’s a nice day for him and the special interests that elected him. But for ordinary Australians without a job, without adequate health care, for children locked up in our detention camps, it is not a very nice day.” That’s the game! Nobody minds!

Democrats: a majority of Americans agrees with you. You have permission to sledge Bush, and sledge hard. Don’t worry — you can still be the minority party and lose elections! Labor’s done it for ten years.

Just pluck up your courage, back each other up, grab the hammer and start bashing away. America is on your side.