LANGUAGE LOG.

September 23, 2003 by 23 Comments

A new language blog has hit the shores of Blogovia, to wit Language Log, written by four actual linguists, Geoff Pullum, Steven Bird, Mark Liberman, and Chris Potts. The latest post (Posted by myl at September 23, 2003 12:33 PM) is on a woman who wrote “egg corns” for “acorns”; I’d give a permalink, but the site doesn’t provide them: wake up, guys! (Via UJG, who doesn’t actually link to the site: wake up, jim!)

Comments

  1. jim says
    September 23, 2003 at 3:07 pm

    Yeesh! All right, already. Still dizzy from the flash botzing last week. Still looking for the copy of Bird’s Edinburgh dissertation turned book that I have around the library somewhere.

  2. Tim May says
    September 23, 2003 at 3:33 pm

    It doesn’t have permalinks under each entry, but each post does, in fact, have its own URL – you can get to the latest ones by clicking on the “Recent Entries” links in the sidebar. The article referred to is here.

  3. Tim May says
    September 23, 2003 at 3:36 pm

    Actually, scratch that, it does have permalinks in the main body, they’re the times of posting.

  4. Nao says
    September 23, 2003 at 3:39 pm

    When I went to look at the site, there were permalinks (click on the time under each story). They don’t show up at the top after you click on them, but you can do the right-click (ctrl-click for Mac users) trick to get the URL.
    Here’s the one for the egg corn story:
    <http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000018.html>
    nifty story!

  5. language hat says
    September 23, 2003 at 4:29 pm

    OK, I know I’m an imbecile when it comes to all computer- and HTML-related matters (this blog exists only by the grace of generous helpers), but I don’t think I’m the only one out there who assumes that if they click on a link, look up at the address line and still see the URL they started from (in this case http://www.languagelog.org/), it’s some sort of goddam frames madness and you can’t link to individual entries. I’m willing to take it on faith that this right-click/Ctrl-click thing works (though I’ll forget it by the next time I need it), but why can’t it work the normal way? Hmph. But thanks, Tim and Nao. I’m glad somebody knows these things.

  6. cbrayton says
    September 23, 2003 at 7:14 pm

    I saw that! I wish those guys would enable comments so we could bring the Welcome Wagon basket to their door (cheese log, etc.).

  7. Nao says
    September 24, 2003 at 9:05 am

    I’ve been doing a little more detective work. The site is in a frame, Languagehat.
    What’s odd is that it must somehow be possible to post comments in general, as one thread has two comments, and the option to add more. But none of the others does.
    All very weird.

  8. Tim May says
    September 24, 2003 at 3:15 pm

    OK, I think I’ve got a basic idea of what’s going on. All there is at http://www.languagelog.org is the frame – AFAICT it doesn’t provide any useful functionality at all, apart from reminding people of that URL. The actual front page of the blog is http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/, and it’ll function perfectly well whether it’s in a frame or not. If you’d rather see the url of whatever page you’re on in your address bar, it might be worth making a bookmark pointing to there instead of the more memorable address.
    I hadn’t noticed the odd behaviour myself, because once I’d found the site I accessed it through my RSS aggregator, the links from which jump straight to the articles, and so bypass the frame problem entirely.
    No idea what’s going on with the comments, though.

  9. jonas says
    September 24, 2003 at 6:06 pm

    Concerning comments: With Movable Type, comments is an option that you can enable or disable for indiviudal entries.
    Most people never touch that control, but I guess these do.

  10. language hat says
    September 24, 2003 at 7:03 pm

    Tim: Many thanks for the alternate URL; I’ve changed my blogroll link accordingly.

  11. Lars Mathiesen says
    May 10, 2020 at 5:07 am

    History in the making! Establishing the seniority of LH over both LL and the eggcorn.

  12. Stu Clayton says
    May 10, 2020 at 5:32 am

    Actuality precedes potentiality in being, time and dignity.

  13. David Marjanović says
    May 10, 2020 at 7:18 am

    some sort of goddam frames madness

    Google purged this madness from all the innertubes: it finds the actual pages, not the frames, so pretty soon nobody was seeing the frames anymore, and it finally dawned on the web designers that frames were more trouble than they were worth.

    Even in the bad old days you could link to actual pages, though, by going back out to the main page and copying the link instead of clicking on it.

  14. John Cowan says
    May 10, 2020 at 4:34 pm

    There are still a lot of frames; they are just invisible to the naked eye, and serve to escape the dreaded Same-Content restriction.

  15. languagehat says
    May 10, 2020 at 6:33 pm

    What is the dreaded Same-Content restriction?

  16. Lars Mathiesen says
    May 11, 2020 at 5:02 am

    Same-Origin? In practice, most ads you see on websites are in frames because that isolates them from the main page where Javascript manipulation and other undesirable activities are concerned — so the browser doesn’t have to apply all sorts of security rules that can be pretty complicated to adhere to if you actually want to have content from different domains in the same page without frames. It’s not the only use for them, but a common one.

  17. David Marjanović says
    May 11, 2020 at 5:06 am

    ads you see on websites

    Ah, ye of little adblocker and clogged innertubes.

  18. Lars Mathiesen says
    May 11, 2020 at 5:48 am

    Generic you. But I actually don’t use ad-blocker, ads don’t distract me from stuff I can read.

  19. David Marjanović says
    May 11, 2020 at 6:55 am

    Moving ads distract me, and they often take up far too much bandwidth. Seeing as I wasn’t going to buy anything anyway, there’s no point in showing them to me.

  20. Lars Mathiesen says
    May 11, 2020 at 7:03 am

    I’m agin being tracked, but I have a project to disentangle myself from Google which goes well beyond ad-blocker. Also back in the days of Java applets that kept running on non-visible tabs, I usually did something when my laptop got too warm. Current browsers are good at stopping invisible content from using the CPU.

  21. languagehat says
    May 11, 2020 at 8:44 am

    I use an adblocker; I’ve always hated ads (a family inheritance).

  22. John Cowan says
    May 11, 2020 at 1:43 pm

    I use an adblocker too. But frames with ads in them are the very reverse of hidden. Hidden frames (apparently a more common term than invisible frames, which seems to be mostly applied to glasses) are used for simultaneous uploads, navigation between pages (which turn out to really be visible frames) while maintaining state in the hidden frame, and numerous other use cases.

  23. languagehat says
    May 11, 2020 at 1:57 pm

    And apparently that’s what’s happening in the new version of Wordorigins.org, which has screwed up my Back button.

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