Diacritiques

Here is a nice and useful list of French/English false cognates. (A strange term, that. Most of them are real cognates after all. Aren’t we allowed to say false friends? It’s got a nice alliteration.) Purple is French, Green English.

“That is one butch chick,” is the Gender Genie’s unchanging comment when I once again inform it (him? her?) that I am, in fact, not male. Its verdict has a very funny side since I am not butch either, though several of my dearest friends are, and proud of it, and I of them. But that’s another story.

The Gender Genie eats texts, digests them and comes up with an opinion about the writer’s gender. (I’m inclined to write “sex” instead of “gender” whenever appropriate, but here “gender” does fit better.) The program behind the input box searches the text for “masculine” and “feminine” keywords, assigns a weight to them, and calculates a male and a female score. Whichever is higher determines whether, to the genie, your texts look masculine or feminine. Its success rate, according to user feedback, is only about 62.5%, but this number can’t be very reliable: Are you more likely to tell the genie that it was wrong or that it was right? Is there any indication that the likelihood of a user giving feedback is the same in both cases?

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Sorry for today’s layout upheaval. There were a number of css bugs that needed fixing and problems that only showed up in Internet Explorer, which is not available in my setup. For once, it was not all IE’s fault. Those nifty new navigation-cum-language-changing bars were more difficult to implement than I had thought. I learnt a lot about the obscure science (or art?) of clearing floats. (If you you’ve never heard of it, be glad. I won’t even try to translate the term into French.)

Thankfully, with the help of Root at the 404! and the great people in the #wordpress irc channel the worst errors seem to be corrected now. How, we aren’t quite sure. Or in Root’s words:

I am reading your css but to tell you the truth I have never really understood what is holding your layout together, so I am looking for variations in something I do not understand anyway

Well, neither do I. :-)

You stumble into a room, by chance, and before your eyes appears a wondrous display. As you get closer, amazing events start to unfold. You savour the sounds, words, images, and when they seem wind down you think the curtain is about to fall. But no, the scene just shifts, and new marvels materialise. And […]

ˌser.ənˈdɪp.ɪ.ti  is getting more and more bilingual! Thanks to noprerequisite’s language picker plugin (and my fiddling with the template) reading this blog in the language of your choice has become much easier. You have two options: Imagine you are reading a post that exists in both English and French and you’d like to see the French […]

Ellipsis Eclipses is the title of a work of art that will soon embellish the English town of Newcastle upon Tyne. I am mentioning it because pronouncing its name ten times a day might help people who want to improve their spoken English master the notoriously difficult lax i-sound [ɪ]. Just try it: [ɪˈlɪp.sɪs ɪˈklɪp.sɪz […]

You’d think the CIA were presenting ironclad evidence after receiving reports of interviews with an English-speaking Iraqi defector who claimed to be able to provide first-hand information on mobile biological weapons labs? You’d be wrong. Not if the interviews were conducted in English and Arabic by German intelligence officers, translated into German, and finally “translated […]

The linguists at Language Log have coined the word eggcorn, which refers to a particular kind of lapsus. An eggcorn is created by speakers (or writers) who, when searching for a word the meaning and pronunciation of which they know but the etymology and the spelling of which they have forgotten or never learnt, […]

ˌser.ənˈdɪp.ɪ.ti  has recently added a collection of free online dictionaries to its menu section on the left-hand side of this page. So why is the Académie française’s famous dictionary absent from the list? Because its online version is nothing short of a disgrace, an ergonomic nightmare, pitifully designed and unworthy of any reputable institution. If […]

BBC News held a caption competition for this picture showing Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, singing and dancing to the Village People’s YMCA at this year’s ASEAN security meeting. The winners are here. Apparently, this is a tradition the government delegates can’t avoid. Don’t miss the (low-quality) video, but careful, I found […]