TMI

Andy Rogers, in a Facebook comment today on “Commando no more“:

Waaaay too much information in the blog!

I have revised this posting to begin with the following warning:

[TMI Warning: The following posting contains information, opinion, or reflection that some readers might find uncomfortably or unwelcomely personal, private, or intimate in topic or content: too much information, as the saying goes. As a general observation, I’m willing to go almost anywhere in my postings, including some places that some readers don’t want to go.]

I will now go back and add this warning to other postings. I invite your suggestions, preferably by e-mail to zwicky@stanford.edu, as to which postings should be so labeled.

In the Usenet newsgroup soc.motss, I used to preface my racier postings with a warning that they treated sexual activity in plain language, so that some readers might want to avoid them. The tenor of blogs has changed enough in the 30 years that have gone past that I now rarely issue this sort of warning, but I wonder if I should return to some version of the practice. (I put “adult” visual content on AZBlogX some time ago, along with creative writing — poetry, fiction, fictionalized autobiography — with “adult” verbal content, but much verbal content remains on my regular blog, as does some “borderline” visual material.) I welcome opinions on the matter, as comments on this posting.

 

Avoiding a split infinitive

From the 12/3/11 Economist, p. 43, in “Marijuana in California and Colorado: Highs and laws”:

In October, California’s four federal prosecutors threw the state (and drug-lovers everywhere in the country) into confusion when they announced their intention aggressively to go after landlords who rent their buildings to dispensaries of medical marijuana, and even after newspapers, radio and television stations who accept advertising from sellers of the weed.

The placement of the adverb aggressively (which modifies the VP in go after… that follows) before the infinitive marker to struck me as awkward, suggesting (momentarily) that the intention was aggressive, that is, that the prosecutors intended something aggressively. This brief potential ambiguity in the scope of aggressively isn’t problematic in itself, but if the writer had alternatives that are better stylistically, they’d have done better to go with one of them.

And there is a clearly better placement for aggressively: snuggled right up to the head V, go, of the VP it modifies (go after landlords …): the intention to aggressively go after landlords … Why not go for it?

Presumably because that involves the configuration misleadingly known as a “split infinitive”, against which some people bear an irrational prejudice. More on this in a moment. First, a note on why I’m resurrecting a quote from last year.

Blog news

Three bulletins that concern this blog: on the continuing plague of spam comments; on the rhythm of blog views; and on the paucity of my postings.

More A-word

In a comment on my A-word posting (about Geoff Nunberg’s choice of a book title — The A-Word — that would allow the demure New York Times to cite it in print, despite the verboten word assholism in the subtitle), the commenter “John” writes:

Most notable of course is their handling of the book “The No-Asshole Rule.” See the author’s blog…

I don’t want to fall into the trap of being expected to catalogue every instance of taboo avoidance in the NYT — I’ve probably posted too often on the topic already — and I was sure that the paper had contrived to avoid asshole in the past (and dimly recalled a notable instance a few years ago), so I let the general principle of NYT asshole-avoidance stand, without exploring yet another case history. But, now, somewhat reluctantly, I’ll take up the story of Bob Sutton’s 2007 book The No Asshole Rule and how it fared in the NYT.

Ch- ch- changes

Behind the scenes here at AZBlog, there have been changes, set off by Apple’s closing down, on June 30th, its storage site that I (and many others) had been using for image files (earlier web.mac.com, then web.me.com, a.k.a. MobileMe). First, all these files had to be moved to a new site (Amazon Web Services). And then all the links to Apple had to be changed to links to Amazon.

Ned Deily has been doing this work for me, in steps, all except one of which have been done: (1) altering all the links on AZBlog; (2) altering all the links on “new” Language Log; (3) moving the gallery of postcard collages to a new location (it’s now a Page on the AZBlog site, here); and (4) altering all the links on “old” Language Log (Language Log Classic). Step 4 might be tricky, and until some way can be found to manage it, all the links there to my image files are broken.

During the migration, some of the other links might have been broken for a short period, but Ned and I think things are working fine now on items (1)-(3).

Image files on AZBlogX are unaffected, since they’re stored on the LiveJournal site (which allows X-rated images, while the other sites do not).

Yes, it’s complicated.

 

Completism

There are some topics I keep coming back to, often with reservations about whether I’m just piling up more and more examples of familiar types and falling into the temptation to accumulate all the instances of this type — an impossible goal. In a few cases, I’ve asked people not to send me more data (I really don’t need any more examples of the snowclone The New Y, as in Pink is the new black) or to send me cases only if they’re especially interesting: for instance, two-part back-formed verbs (latest: to recess appoint, to pleasure read, to pinpoint-strike), portmanteaus (they tend to come up in all sorts of contexts; see mocktail, here), crash blossoms (in the last week, one posting on this blog and two on Language Log), and noun pileups (last posting here a week ago).

The danger is completism, the urge to completeness or comprehensiveness.

A little milestone of sorts

Mark Liberman reports that last night (new) Language Log racked up its two millionth spam comment. At about the same time this blog went over the quarter-million mark (already up past 125,600). Whew!

 

2011 in review

(For what it’s worth, the annual report from WordPress. Note: not written by me, just forwarded.)

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 180,000 times in 2011. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 8 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

On the spam comment front

Back in the old days, a year ago, I noted that

A long time ago, I noticed that spam comments on this blog had inched up to being about 10 times as numerous as legitimate comments. Yesterday I checked again, noting 29,181 spam comments and 1,907 legitimate ones; the ratio has slowly crept up to 15.3. Sigh.

While I was sleeping, the number of spam comments (since I started the blog in December 2008) crept over the 100,000 mark, to 100,161 this morning. As against the 3,705 legitimate comments and pingbacks, the ratio is up to just over 27, almost doubling the ratio of a year ago. (And it would be even higher if we excluded the pingbacks.)

For comparison: back at the beginning of September, (new) Language Log had logged over a million spam comments (see Mark Liberman’s posting here), for a spam-to-legit ratio of only about 7.4. I see that as more a reflection on the very high rate of commenting on LLog than on the rate of spamming there.

Categories and tags

Recently, the WordPress software for this blog has started producing a page of information every time I post something. Among other things, it tells me how many postings I’ve made so far, adds an exclamation of congratulation (“Awesome!” and the like), suggests topics that I might want to blog on (basically, topics for generic school themes), tells me what categories and tags I used, and adds some more I might want to consider. So, for my recent “as would’ve” posting, on categories and tags I got:

You used the following categories and tags: Constructions, Ellipsis, Morphology, Phonology, Style and register, and Syntax.

Add a couple more to make your post easier for others to discover. Some suggestions: cowboys and indians, word sequences, intergalactic battle, cliticization, and unpublished version.

The first is just a straightforward reproduction of the categories I chose. The second is an immensely entertaining gleaning of short phrases from my posting, including the quotations in it (that’s where cowboys and indians and intergalactic battle come from); only cliticization would be genuinely useful to someone searching for content.

Though it would be intriguing to try to weave the full set of phrases into a story.