The Quintessential Sound Changer

I’ve recently been wishing for an umlaut rich keyboard, which made me curious about the history of the umlaut. When I typed that curiosity into Google, the first result was “metal umlaut.” Being a dense and literal person, I expected an entry on welding and metal art.

Once I started reading Metal Umlaut, I no longer needed any other information about the umlaut. This entry on Wikipedia is wholly satisfying. It is such good reading that I want to find out who the author is. It is also “the personal favourite of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.”

Here are some of my favorite parts:

A metal umlaut^[1] (also known as röck döts)

Umlaut roughly means changed sound or sound shift, as it is composed of um-, “around/changed”, and Laut, “sound”

Lemmy, the lead singer of Motörhead said about the band name’s umlaut, “I only put it in there to look mean.” Read more »

fish, mammal, whatever

Two weeks ago, after finishing Moby Dick for the first time, I went straight to Wikipedia to confirm what I had learned in elementary school, that the whale is a mammal. Melville, or rather, Ishmael, insists that the whale is a fish, despite all the information that led a Swedish Biologist to reject the classification in 1778, seventy-three years before the novel was published. In the novel, Melville exhaustively discusses horizontal tails, warm blood, breathing, and giving birth to live young, but refuses to admit what those features imply. He knows all the facts; he’s just stubborn. I’m particularly interested in how he leaves the matter: Jonah and the Nantucketers call it a fish, so I do too.

The fact is, in 1851, for the majority of readers, if Melville called it a fish, then they had no reason not to themselves. Doing anything more than taking Melville at his word would have taken a significant amount of work. Did Melville have a responsibility to provide accurate information about his subject? In a world with such comparatively limited access to information, does Moby Dick have to be, not only the great American novel, but also the definitive book on whales and whaling? Maybe. But if that’s true, has the novelist’s responsibility changed with the dawn of unlimited access to information? Should novels only be half what they used to be? Read more »

Listening to NPR’s On Point on Tuesday morning, I heard something that gave me pause.  The show, which was about new technologies and their effects on the brain, included the writer/journalist, Nick Bilton, who said that the brain isn’t programmed to read. He said that we’re programmed to communicate, but reading is actually quite unnatural. It’s something we teach ourselves to do despite our natures. I don’t know if I believe this, but it does kind of make sense. Most people, barring those with developmental disorders, who are exposed to other communicative people learn to speak, but reading is something that takes years of practice to get really good at, and even then, some people never get to the point where they can interact with texts in complex ways (locating implications and assumptions, arguing with the text, finding logical fallacies and holes in reasoning, making connections, etc.), so maybe, as Bilton later states, reading is much like other technologies that have an effect on the brain; it teaches our brains to behave in certain ways in order to collect information, just as using the Internet, iPhones/Pods/Pads, cell phones…do. The worry, though, and the difference for me, is that reading doesn’t seem to contribute to attention problems while these other communication technologies promote short attention spans, according to anecdotal evidence and other studies that were brought up on the show. The other guest, Nicholas Carr, who wrote the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and the book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, argues that these new technologies are changing the way we pay attention. Read more »

Back in February, Melina started a great discussion about plagiarism. This month, the original Copyright Act, The Statue of Anne (named after the queen who reigned when it was created), turns the ripe old age of 300.
Here are some fun facts about the Act:

• Violating copy­right was defined as “infringe­ment,” not “theft” (and remains so today).
• Before the Act, print­ers, not authors, were the ones granted monop­oly rights over works.
• The United States, before and after the Act, was the source of many illicit reprints of British texts – since America did not get similar copyright rules until much later.
• Copyright was designed to create an incentive to create, but to still permit an eventual public benefit by expanding the public domain. Read more »