Tag: words

Belt of Verbs – Friday Leather Punch Edition

/ dmueller / 4 Comments

If you’re a user of the language, you’ll need a
verb sooner
or later.

Evidently, today’s Friday Leather Punch Edition is concerned with
evidenced. As in,

The strong odor in the office evidenced Yoki’s sick stomach.

Here
it comes: I really don’t like the verb evidenced. I know it’s a
legitimate word, but it always sounds wrong to me, no matter the context.
A faint hunch tells me it’s a rip-off of evinced (that one, a verb of verbs!).
I doubt I would be stating it too strongly to say that this is the real dividing
line in the academy and, yes, all of humanity: those who use evidenced, and those who do not.

I checked it against the only corpus of texts I have on my trusty laptop
computer–the last nineteen years of CCC articles. Thirty-one out
of 414 articles put to good and proper use the verb evidenced. More than
seven percent! But the distribution isn’t even across the years. Just nine articles use evidenced from 1989-1999; twenty-two articles use evidenced since the turn of the century.

What does this evidence evidence? The question is too fresh to return a
decisive answer. And in the mean time, I will stick with suggested,
indicated, and proved as ready-to-verbalize ahead of evidenced.
Make room for evidenced, if you must, in one of the deep pouches on the
expanding belt of verbs.

Belt of Verbs

/ dmueller / 4 Comments

Buckle on your verb belt because it’s time for "Belt of Verbs": a couple of
kicky, kooky verbs for filling up the empty pouch.

1. From this ESPN headline: decisions

Former WBC Ortiz decisions Garcia

I’m not much for

boxing (anything that reminds me of enduring punishing blows to my head, no
thank you), but "decisions," the lexicon tells me, has been around for quite
some time. It’s what one winning boxer does to a losing boxer without a
knockout. Improper usage: "I decisioned to have an A&W Root Beer with
lunch." Unless you’re a boxer. Then you can say "decisioned"
whenever you please.

2. From a book I’ve been reading: multiplexed
"Two kinds of apprehension are mutliplexed together."

I guess this means something like giving off many complex and layered signals
all at once: an entangled conduction that allows for (even anticipates) loss. So it’s in the realm
of the intelligible that comes just before noise. Not to be mistaken for
the many-screened movie theater or the manufacturer of
foam planes.

Any- and All-words

/ dmueller / 5 Comments

The loosest terms going, or the first five entries to the laxicon of
free-floaters:

1. Interactive (adj): between something or other and something else
2. Social (adj): A. togethering and whatnot; B. with people
3. Technology (n): A. tools and such; B. the intricate logics of tools and such.
4. Discourse (n): language stuff
5. Image (n): A. any of a number of lookseegawks; B. a picture

Nah, I’m not calling for constricted usage.  Yet these are a few of the
ones that, when they get used, stir me to quietly wondering just what’s meant. 
Simply, they’re ballooning with connotations.

Floccinaucinihilipilification

/ dmueller

Friday’s web zen–wordy
zen–includes a link to
Ask Oxford,
the place where Oxford Dictionary aces answer all of the peculiar questions you
simply can’t go another day without having resolved.  Examples:

the opposite of exceed,

the word for a word which is another word spelled backwards, and

words containing uu. Splitting at the hyperseams with lexical
overmuchness, this site is.

My favorite Q&A, however, and the one to which I first returned for practical
usage was
the
name for a group of cats: clowder.  When the Villanova Wildcat
contingent rushed the court after knocking of #1 UConn (much to my satisfaction,
I’ll add) earlier this evening, I had something to call it by.

Wordwatcher

/ dmueller

Earlier in the fall our program hosted Tim Diggles, coordinator of the
Federation of Worker Writers
and Community Presses in Staffordshire, for a colloquium on working class
writing/publishing.  I didn’t get around to posting any notes after Diggles
visited, and although I have a few lines about a range of things he talked about
penciled into a composition notebook, I want to zero in on the thing Diggles
mentioned that has been on my mind periodically ever since: wordwatching.

Continue reading →

Eloquent Images II

/ dmueller

Wysocki – "Seriously Visible," 37-59
First, hypertexts, in their affordances of choice, are inherently engaging, and
these engaging properties (engagementalities?) extend to civic and democratic
practices (freedom, liberty, etc.).  Second, predominantly visual documents
are unserious; they are the stuff of children’s books–lite, silly and
non-rigorous. Wysocki opens with these old feints, and offers "responsive
counterexamples" elaborated through analyses of
Scrutiny in the
Great Round and
Throwing Apples
at the Sun, two visualmedia pieces.  Before introducing the
counterexamples, Wysocki thickens the air with surveys of the critical tensions
invested in the opening positions.  To set up the idea of hypertext reader
as civic agent, she cites Lanham, Bolter, Edward Barrett (cognitive science),
Woodland, Nielsen, then extends to Mill, Habermas and Virilio to explain the
correlation between hypertext as choice and the dependence of public sphere on
divergent opinions.  Importantly, Wysocki includes a section in the essay
(40-41) to acknowledge the "quickness of [her] preceding arguments" before
imparting a second survey of positions suggesting that the visual is elementary,
again from Habermas and Virilio.  Included here are a series of scholars who
have called for renewed attention to the complexity and dimension of images
(42-43).  Before shifting into the analysis of the visualmedia pieces,
Wysocki explains,

The assumption behind the critique of the visual is that we take
in what we see, automatically and immediately, in the exact same way as everyone
else, so that the visual requires no interpretation and in fact functions as
though we have no power before it[…]; the assumption behind the celebrations
of hypertext is that any text that presents us with choice of movement through
it necessarily requires interpretation (43).

Continue reading →

Eloquent Images I

/ dmueller / 2 Comments

Bolter – "Critical Theory and the Challenge of New Media," 20-36
In this brief article, the first in Hocks and Kendrick’s Eloquent Images,
Jay Bolter begins with a historical overview of the image-word problem. 
He traces a larger outline of new media by propping up a series of artificial
dichotomies: visual-verbal, theory-practice, critique-production,
ideological-formal (34); the project of new media is to collapse these terms. 
Bolter explains that unlike film and television, which few cultural critics
conceived of as full-scale replacements for print, the web and its hyper-blended
forms of discourse introduce a different kind of contest between old and new media
forms. Yet it would be a mistake to view new media forms and print as strict
teleological trajectories, each edging out the other, competing for a mediative
lead.  This matters differently if you’re the CEO of a Weyerhaeuser, I
suppose, and maybe there’s something to the race track metaphor (one car to
each, one driver, one big-dollar sponsor) that admits or allows for the capital
backing of media forms.  That’s not really Bolter’s point here. He
explains, "It is not that there is some inadequacy in printed media forms that
digital forms can remedy: New digital media obviously have no claim to inherent
superiority" (24). 

Continue reading →

How to do things with boxes

/ dmueller / 2 Comments

Rather than diving into John Austin’s How To Do Things With Words
tonight, I’m refueling.  Presented on Foucault–again–tonight; that
went well.  Tomorrow I carry on about Ways of Reading in an online
distance curric. for FYC–talk and talk until folks are yawning or fifteen
minutes passes, whichever comes first.

And to restore my creative groove tonight, I knew what I’d do at the moment
D. pulled the last Puffs tissue from the box here in the office: box
bot.  I’m ashamed to say I can’t remember the sequence of links that
led me to this the other day (Metafilter?  Slashdot?  Some kind,
unattributed blogger on my roll or one degree removed?).  Shameful, but I’m
filled with gratitude if it’s worth anything.

Here’s the bot.  Unremarkable, perhaps, but carved, scissor notch by
scissor notch, from a drab, empty Puffs box–a box pulled empty of its puffy
softness by the whole family’s first cold in Syracuse. 

Box bot

You really should try one–even especially if it
turns into something you never imagined.