Briefly noted: endorsements for skills or expertise

LinkedIn tells me every so often about endorsements I’ve received for skills or expertise, from friends, colleagues, former students, and readers of my blogs (about 30 of them so far). For:

Teaching, Linguistics, Academic Writing, Research, Computational Linguistics, Higher Education, Natural Language Processing, Courses, Text Mining, Theory, University Teaching

Teaching figures prominently. I must say that’s gratifying.

I’m not at all sure what these endorsements mean, but it’s always nice to be recognized for your abilities and accomplishments.

 

Sex sells

… or, at least, attracts readers. From WordPress stats yesterday on my most-viewed postings during the previous week, the top six:

agapanthus: 1,019 views
The body and its parts: 359 views
Pub(l)ic notice: 345 views
Cock tease: 131 views
Bell pepper sex: 97 views
Annals of ejaculation: 87 views

The agapanthus posting, about a plant and the etymology of its name, has been at the top of the charts for quite some time, for no reason I can fathom. But the next five all have sexual content.

Now I do post fairly often on sex- or sexuality-related topics, though most of my postings are on other things — only one of my last twelve postings had to do with sex or sexuality — but these are the postings that attract attention.

Code 404

Today’s Rhymes With Orange, with a pun on page:

A pun of a type that juxtaposes two strikingly different contexts (here, court life in a monarchy, on the one hand, and the internet, on the other) in such a way that two different senses of an expression are both applicable.

Facebook bizarreness

My posting this morning on three references to putative sex / gender differences caused Facebook to put me through a captcha test to get the thing posted — I presume because of the word sex in the text. Then people began reporting that FB had been labeling this posting (and two previous ones) as potential spam, in a bizarre use of the word spam, since the objection would have to be to the content of the postings (not to bulk mailing of unsolicited messages, especially advertising, which I certainly can’t be accused of doing: people get FB postings from me by virtue of having mutually friended me).

Spam comment watch

Every so often I report on the march of comments spam, which is quite remarkable. Back in 2011, there were about 100,000 spam comments on this blog. At the time this was about 27 times the legitimate comments.  This week we passed 300,000 spam comments, and the ratio to legitimate comments was about 44:1. Oi.

 

Followers

WordPress tells me that I now have 100 “followers”, people who get notifications of each of my postings on this blog. Amazing, in a way, especially since only a few of these are friends or colleagues.While I have my dark moments in thinking about my net life, there are also gratifying moments. (That goes along with being a teacher.)

 

 

Fear of Twitter

Back at the beginning of this month, an invitation (with the header “3Q Twinterview”) in e-mail:

I’m sorry to bother you at a busy time of the year, but I wondered if you’d be interested in taking part in a really very short Twitter interview? I run the language/linguistics Twitter/Facebook pages for UCLan (http://fb.com/LangLingUCLan and http://twitter.com/LangLingUCLan) and for 2013, I’m starting a monthly Mini Bios feature where I ask a famous linguist three questions and tweet the answers. If you are interested, there is one catch: due to the limitations of Twitter, each answer would need to be around fifty words, maximum.

Something of a nightmare prospect for me. Not just an interview, but one with extraordinarily tight space limitations. I do have a Twitter account, but have never used it, so that’s a graceful way out of this exercise.

The wonders of spam

I get huge amounts of spam, both in e-mail and in blog comments, so I mostly don’t even look at the stuff. But here’s one (lightly edited to remove links) that caught my eye as I was deleting spam from my mail:

The Better Business Bureau has been recorded the above mentioned plaint from one of your users as regards their business relations with you. The information about the consumer’s uneasiness are available at the link below. Please give attention to this issue and notify us about your glance as soon as possible.

We amiably ask you to click and review the [Grievance Report] to respond on this grievance.

We awaits to your prompt rebound.

It has been coming in multiple copies, with small variations in form. The text looks like it’s inexpertly translated from another language, but whether that effect is inadvertent or intentional I cannot tell.

I am, however, considering using “We awaits to your prompt rebound” in my own writing, or possibly working it into a piece of light verse.

Not X but Y?

Two pieces of mail to AZBlog, both telling me that I’d said some expression E was an X but that it was really a Y instead. I stand by my original claims, while adding that E is in fact both an X and a Y, though in two different senses:

conjunctive: E is an X and E is a Y, and those two claims are not incompatible;

disjunctive: what we’re calling E is in fact two different expressions, E1 and E2 (that is, E = E1 ∨ E2), which happen to be phonologically identical; E is “sometimes an X and sometimes a Y”, in that E1 is an X and E2 is a Y

The first case has to do with the expression Latkepalooza: portmanteau (as I claimed) or neologism? And the second with expressions like bi, homo, and hetero: common nouns (as I claimed) or prefixes?

Not fully functional

Two recent mess-ups in my postings: my original comments on the latest One Big Happy (here), which crashingly missed the point of the strip, although that wasn’t subtle; and, going back a while, my labeling my new right hip the Platinum Wonder Hip, when in fact it turns out to be titanium. Different specific sources, though both errors probably go back to the circus of medical treatments.