A post that is nerdy.

Slate has a really interesting series on the fallibility of memory, which you should read, but I wanted to pull this little bit:

[Elizabeth Loftus] was trying to find out how people’s brains stored and retrieved words. She couldn’t see inside their heads, but she could administer inputs and measure outputs, as she had done with her rat. The inputs were questions, and the output was response time. Sometimes she asked her subjects to name a “yellow fruit.” Sometimes she asked them to name a “fruit that is yellow.” On average, they answered the latter question a quarter of a second faster than the former. From this, she drew an inference: The brain organized such information by the noun, not the adjective.

Non-English Romance languages and most east Asian languages use this structure, but English doesn’t. If anyone knows or has a theory how or why this happened, I’m interested.

Also, eyewitnesses are unreliable, etc.

Take note, the Internet.

Wrong: “untracked”
Right: “on track”

Wrong: “intensive purposes”
Right: “intents and purposes”

Wrong(ish): “mediums,” “stadiums”
Right(er)*: “media,” “stadia”

* Yeah, I know.

Writing exercise.

There’s an piece in this week’s NYer about creative writing programs. In true NYer style, it’s good (and incredibly long), but this sentence came off with a clonk, especially in an article about learning to write well:

As McGurl points out, the horses that the Plains Indians rode when they hunted, so picturesquely, the buffalo were European imports.

I think every journalism professor in the country just had a stroke. How would you fix this sentence? Discuss!

I don’t know why they used images for all the text.

The photographic dictionary is pretty neat. I wonder when “antimeria” will be added and how it’d be represented.

turns out i'm xanthous.

HT: Andrew Sullivan

Really, people. “Turmoil”?

Merriam-Webster’s top 10 words of 2008 gets pretty political:

1. bailout
2. vet
3. socialism
4. maverick
5. bipartisan
6. trepidation
7. precipice
8. rogue
9. misogyny
10. turmoil

It bothers me that so many people don’t know the definitions of these words.