liv: alternating calligraphed and modern letters (letters)
Courtesy of [personal profile] cosmolinguist, another cool regional dialect quiz. This one is helping students practise linguistic research.

What's cool about it is that it shows each individual response as a dot on the map, instead of shading regions like the other one that was doing the rounds recently. And it separates out regional words for different things, accent and pronunciation variations, and variations in grammar. So even if you can't do the survey, they have some really fun results to explore. (There are tabbed menus that give you the actual data; the landing page confused me briefly because it's just an image of a map and not itself clickable.)

The reasons you might not be able to answer the survey are two-fold: one, it's only for people who spent most of their childhood in the UK. They're a bit short of Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish responses compared to English, though, so readers from the nations are especially encouraged to play. And two, it's only for people who are willing to identify as either male or female (you can decline to give a gender at all, but you don't have any other options). So apologies to NBs and speakers of non-UK English.

Meanwhile, in a personal linguistic report from the youth: I said to my 10-year-olds the other week, "OK, that's enough gossip, time to concentrate on the lesson". And they laughed at me: "I can't believe you actually say gossip!" I asked what word they would use instead, and they only said that "It's like saying 'Ell Oh Ell' out loud". But I couldn't get an explanation of how the word 'gossip' is like pronouncing 'LOL', beyond that they're both uncool. Does anyone who has either academic or practical knowledge about how kids speak know what's wrong with the word gossip? In my head it's a normal word, it's not slang or something that marks a particular subculture.
liv: alternating calligraphed and modern letters (letters)
Not exactly a shitpost, but an entirely frivolous poll. While I have an influx of new readers!

Consider the expression They can't see the wood for the trees:

poll )
liv: cartoon of me with long plait, teapot and purple outfit (Default)
I'm having a bit of a discussion (in a locked post) about the connotations of the word girl. So I shall post a poll, because that's always fun. Feel free to expand or criticize or whatever in the comments!

[Poll #706016]
liv: cartoon of me with long plait, teapot and purple outfit (Default)
I'm not sure what inspired me to ask this question, but now it's come into my head I'm quite curious.

another of my language usage polls )

As usual, if you want to talk about the subject, comments are good. And yes, I was mean and used radios instead of ticky boxes. That's mainly because I get more comments that way, from people complaining that they don't like being forced to choose only one option!
liv: cartoon of me with long plait, teapot and purple outfit (Default)
Some conversations I've been having recently have led me to wonder what sort of connotations the term geek has. So of course I obviously had to make a completely unscientific LJ poll, which won't tell me the answer but might be interesting anyway.

clicky clicky )

If you don't like my options or have further comments, that's what the comments are for. I don't want a lot of interesting thoughts in the poll where I can't reply to them easily.
liv: ribbon diagram of a p53 monomer (p53)
No, I'm not dead, just completely snowed under right now. I'm submitting this week, which means the end is in sight, but it also means I absolutely have to finish a lot of work in a short time.

Anyway, I saw a link in a comment on another LJ discussion to the Open mind AI project. I really badly do not need another source of displacement this week, but it's kind of an interesting concept so I thought I'd pass it on.

Much as I like this kind of distributed information building (I'm a huge fan of Wikipedia and I used to do a lot of volunteering for various open directory projects in the days before there was Google), this particular effort does seem a bit implausible to me. But it's interesting, both in outline and in detail. It's surprising how hard some of the questions are, actually; I was really stumped by exercises such as 'Describe in not more than five sentences what you need to know to understand the statement: The dog was straining at its leash'.

Soundbite

Miscellaneous. Eclectic. Random. Perhaps markedly literate, or at least suffering from the compulsion to read any text that presents itself, including cereal boxes.

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