Baby names, apropos of nothing in particular

I wonder what it means that the last time I made a list like this it was much more rife with unpronounceable Polish on the one hand, and unabashed hippiness on the other. I hope it's that I have developed more respect for the plight of my theoretical future children on the schoolyard and not that I have sold out and become boring in my old age.

In any event, here is the list of names I would actually consider bestowing as of today, girls kinda sorta in general order of predilection, boys alphabetically:

Girls

Eleanor (Ella)
Zoe
Isabel (Izzie or Bella)
Alexis (Lexie)
Imogene (Idgie)
Matilda (Tillie)
Bree

Boys

Aidan
Asher
Ethan
Ewan
Ian
Jesse
Jonas
Linus
Miles/Milo
Noah
Robin

For some reason it's much, much easier for me to think of girls' names that I like than boys' -- and I'm not quite sure why this should be. Maybe it's that, being a straight male, I've spent more time considering the aesthetics of girls' names? I'd be interested to hear about other folks' experience with this, and also your lists, if you have them.

By the way, I'm sort of embarrassed to have included Aidan in the above, considering its appalling trendiness at the moment. I'm afraid I have to say I just really do like that name for a little boy, and in my defense I did first hear it attached to an adult and not a toddler.

A suffusion of yellow

Douglas Adams' book The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul is available in Finnish, entitled Sielun pitkä pimeä teehetki, which translates as "The Soul's Long Dark Teamoment."

In case you were wondering.

Lesser-Evil Politics and Endless Despair

If you are like me in feeling utterly disgusted with and unrepresented by both major political parties in this country, and I suspect you are, why do you keep voting for them? No, but seriously.

The argument that everybody endlessly gives, viz. that otherwise the other, worse, party will get elected is, frankly, asinine. It seems like some kind of mass insanity which inevitably results in nothing but the ongoing prosperity of the completely unacceptable status quo. The plain fact is that we will never have a genuine democracy in the U.S. until there are more than two viable parties to choose from, and this fact should in itself be enough to persuade anybody that voting Democrat is a Bad Idea.

I would never, ever vote for a candidate who did not openly and without reservation support same-sex marriage, a woman's right to choose, socialized medicine, funding for social programs, a firm boundary between the government (and education) and religion, massive reduction of our military budget, and environmental well-being over corporate greed -- and neither should any intelligent, responsible, ethical person.

Seriously, people, there needs to be a change in this country, and it needs to happen now. This means you. Don't support the parties whose primary goal is not to rock the boat for fear of losing Ohio.

(For information, here is a comparison of Democrat/Republican positions on a number of key issues compared with the Green Party. Note that I don't necessarily advocate the Greens specifically, but I find this chart instructive.)

More funky relativization

The story you're about to hear is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent, at their surprisingly adamant insistence.

So the other day I was talking to a co-worker, Micole Arny, about the fact that she had come back from lunch very sleepy and somewhat confused, at which point she uttered the following phrase:

"Do you know what's fault it is?"

She was going to follow this up with a description of the enormous burrito she had just consumed, but was immediately interrupted by my impassioned demands to know whether she had just said what it sounded like she had just said.

It's confirmed: not only did she say this, but she felt completely unselfconscious about it even when questioned. Clearly this is an exciting development.

That this could happen is, of course, not all that surprising, especially by analogy with "whose" which sounds like "who" plus a possessive suffix (in fact, isn't "whose" hwæs in OE, the genitive of hwa "who?" This makes sense because hwæs would also be the genitive of hwæt "what," giving rise to this whole problem). It is, indeed, a fairly stupid thing about English that it lacks a standard way to relativize an inanimate possessor in a manner that doesn't sound completely ridiculous: "the book whose cover had been defaced" sounds marginally acceptable, but certainly not "Do you know whose fault it is?" with the meaning that Micole intended.

...and so we're forced to circumlocute, or if we're more adventurous, invent some new, more convenient morphology. Any bets on whether this one will be "normal" in 100 years?

Gapless relative clauses in Polish

I am thrilled to report that a few weeks ago I was finally able to capture this odd relative construction that my grandmother occasionally perpetrates in Polish. The "standard" phrase would run something like this:

Tomek, którego poznałeś...
Tommy-NOM, which-ACC meet-PAST-2SG
"Tommy, whom you met..."

Really a very normal Indo-European relativization strategy. The somewhat weirder one that my grandmother has been observed to do is as follows:

Tomek, co go poznałeś...
Tommy-NOM, what him-ACC meet-PAST-2SG
"Tommy, that you met him...," i.e., "Tommy, whom you met..."

So instead of a declined relative pronoun, we have what may be an invariable marker something like the English "that," followed by the relative clause with a retained pronoun. I have never (consciously) observed pronoun retension in Polish relative constructions in any other context.

It would be interesting to find out how common this is, and whether that "co" is really indeclinable in this construction -- under ordinary circumstances, of course, it has the full array of forms: co, czego, czemu, czym, etc. I'll have to try to come up with a test that I can administer to my grandmother without making her self-conscious.

Interestingly, by the way, my mother's usual way of phrasing this kind of relative clause in English is a nearly perfect analog to this Polish clause: "Tommy, who you met him..."

Other comparative linguists out there: how often does this pronoun-retension strategy manifest itself in Indo-European? The only IE language I'm aware of in which this is the standard is Farsi, if I'm not mistaken.

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Potato Cannon

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Date: 2007-08-06, 11:21AM EDT


It's 8ft long. My neighbors figured out what was happening so I need to get rid of it today.

• Location: Park Slope
• it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

(Original post here)

I love cleaning vomit

...I mean, who doesn't, right? But no, I mean I REALLY love cleaning
up vomit. I think some people might even be surprised by the way my
face lights up whenever I'm informed that someone has let out the
peacock in the bathroom sink and could I please deal with it. And
really, the more easily identifiable the chunks are, the better I like
it. Large pieces of steak in particular really do it for me for some
reason. And can we talk quantity for a minute? When I'm cleaning my
vomit, I like there to be enough to really get both of my hands
immersed in it -- not that I'd turn up my nose at cleaning up a thin
puddle on the floor, but the experience isn't as transcendental.

Does this make me a weirdo in some way?