ryan.freebern.org

You may have heard that McDonald’s is planning on suing Webster’s to make them take “McJob” out of the dictionary. The thing McDonald’s apparently doesn’t realize is that dictionaries don’t make these things up themselves, they just record how people use the language. The fact that “McJob” has entered the dictionary just means it’s in common enough usage that it’s a widely accepted and recognized term. When someone says it, people know they’re talking about a crappy job. Suing Webster’s won’t change that or make it go away.

I just hope this whole deal spawns a new term: McLawsuit, to mean any stupid and misguided trademark lawsuit destined to fail.

I have come up with a neologism.

trengedy, n.

What occurs when the mainstream media seizes on a particular type of tragedy that’s not actually very common, seeks out every instance of it, and reports on them all, making people think it’s much more common than it really is.

Example: “The rash of reports in Summer 2001 about shark attacks was a particularly heinous trengedy.”

Googling this term gives one hit, which appears to be a typo on a foreign language blog. Hence I think I can safely claim I’ve invented it. Now, go forth and use it! Maybe this can be my eventual claim to fame.

When she gets too burned out on studying, Sarah’s been playing the game “Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life” on our GameCube since I bought it for her for Christmas. It’s a lot like both Animal Crossing and The Sims in that you’re controlling a character in all aspects of his life, as he attempts to run his farm, make friends, engage in romance, and more.

Meanwhile, I’m attempting to learn basic Italian for our upcoming trip. I’ve been using the short lessons at LearnItalianPod.com as well as at the BBC website, and I’ve got a book out of the library to help me.

While watching Sarah play for a few minutes the other day, it struck me that combining these two activities could quite possibly be the best way to learn a new language. When I start learning a language, I find it pretty easy to learn the rules of grammar: how to construct sentences, in what order to place words, how to manipulate endings to form plurals, etc. What I have trouble with is learning enough vocabulary that I would feel comfortable, or at least not totally lost, in all the various situations I might find myself.

Harvest Moon takes your character and has him engage in a large number of common real-life activities: cooking, shopping, ordering food, looking for people, exchanging small-talk, sleeping, cleaning up, and so on. What if, instead of all English, it began the game by replacing a few common words with words in another language. Instead of “bring your milk to this cooler,” it could tell you to bring your latte to the cooler. Instead of picking a flower, you’d pick a fiore. Instead of your cow being hungry, it could be affamata. Slowly, as the game progressed, more and more common terms could be replaced with their foreign equivalents. At some point, new characters could appear who only spoke in Italian, and you’d have to figure out what they’re saying in order to interact. Eventually, all the text in the game could be in Italian, and if the change was gradual enough, over the course, of many dozens of hours of play, the player might not even miss a beat.

This would, I think, work better than other methods, because 1) people love playing videogames, and will gladly do them for hours, even if they don’t necessarily understand all the words, 2) part of playing games is solving puzzles, so players’ brains would just interpret the foreign language as another type of puzzle, and 3) all the words used would be shown in a familiar sort of context, with visual cues to aid in understanding.

Videogames appeal to young and old alike, so this could potentially be a great learning tool for anyone. Kids are naturally more adept at learning languages, too, so it would work even better for them. And the marketing opportunities are tremendous: sell it to videogamers as a game, or to parents or educators as a learning tool.

Apparently Verizon is selling a phone for kids called “Migo.” Maybe they didn’t know that this term is already in use, and refers to something that kids would probably want to avoid:

Mi-Go, the Fungi from Yuggoth

“They were pinkish things about five feet long; with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid, covered with multitudes of very short antennae, where a head would ordinarily be…. As it was, nearly all the rumours had several points in common; averring that the creatures were a sort of huge, light-red crab with many pairs of legs and with two great bat-like wings in the middle of their back. They sometimes walked on all their legs, and sometimes on the hindmost pair only, using the others to convey large objects of indeterminate nature. On one occasion they were spied in considerable numbers, a detachment of them wading along a shallow woodland watercourse three abreast in evidently disciplined formation. Once a specimen was seen flying—launching itself from the top of a bald, lonely hill at night and vanishing in the sky after its great flapping wings had been silhouetted an instant against the full moon.” (“The Whisperer in Darkness”) (From A Lovecratian Bestiary)

Wow. A baby that developed outside her mother’s uterus was successfully delivered via caesarian section in Ontario, Canada this April. A doctor there said:

“We won’t see another case like this in my lifetime. A case like this won’t happen in the lifetime of my colleagues either.”

I guess that doctor and all of his colleagues must be dead now, because it just happened again, this time in the U.K.

I’m normally not that cranky about the invention or adoption of new words, but I must express my extreme displeasure with Xeni Jardin for her use of the word “pheblogenomenon” today. Boo, hiss.

Romenesko links to a USA Today story in which Tom McPhail, a journalism professor, calls bloggers “pretend journalists” because “they thrive on rumor and innuendo.”

What does this mean? It’s not as if perfectly legitimate newspapers don’t run stories based on rumors. They will generally qualify these stories so that the reader knows where the information comes from, but that’s exactly what good blogs do as well: provide links to their sources. Linking is the whole idea behind blogs, in fact.

Is McPhail concerned that bloggers are biased? That can’t be the only sticking point. Every newspaper in the country publishes a number of opinion columnists in its pages without qualms. These people are paid to be biased. Many of the most popular opinion columnists in the world are tremendously slanted one way or another in their perceptions of the world. Surely McPhail doesn’t consider George Will or Andy Rooney a “pretend” journalist, and certainly there would be very few objections if they were given press credentials to the Democratic National Convention.

Furthermore, the bloggers given credentials were not selected randomly. There are, unquestionably, tens of thousands of bloggers out there who can’t write their way out of a paper bag and shouldn’t be chosen to cover an event like a political party’s national convention. The ones chosen are, by and large, writers for or authors of well-respected blogs (James Landrith has a list of the invitees he knows of) who can be trusted to give an, if not unbiased, at least thorough and well-written look at the events that take place during the convention.

McPhail strikes me as a stodgy proponent of old media, unwilling to admit that the way people communicate is changing at blinding speeds, and unable to keep up with that change. By ridiculing new media as “pretend,” McPhail hopes his academic and professional credentials will help tilt the public’s opinion towards his. In reality, he’s just an old man unwilling to leave his own Land of Make-Believe.