Tomorrow is National Grammar Day

Not sure how excited to be about this, but I suppose, if invented usage celebrates any day, it should celebrate National Grammar Day.

It's certainly nice to see that the usage blog community is alive and well -- I found out via twitter about this grammar limerick contest.

I'm entertained enough that I will participate by pretending it's about cognitive grammar, and maybe grammatology, rather than the pedantic lack-of-error grammar and a celebration of cringes. I intend to have a grammartini, at the very least.

(Thanks to Maveric for the tip!)

Update: Unfortunately, his week is also National Procrastination Week, so grammar will have to wait.

Introducing The Interrationale

Another shameless blog plug: I have recently started a new blog as a creative outlet as well: The Interrationale.

Unfortunately, I don't think it is very accessible, at all, since it is essentially just place to put detailed research notes as I read up on some schools of thought that I didn't get to study in college.

The result is all the clarity and cohesiveness of Western Marxist social theory expressed in the vivid, dynamic idiom of analytic philosophy.

That said, I would treat it as a personal favor if anybody read and reacted to it. It actually is going to have a lot to do with language and rhetoric, since one of my main sources is Habermas' The Theory of Communicative Action.

Ultimately, one goal I have is to build to a rigorous answer to this question: how is computing and especially the internet communication changing society?

Introducing Invented Versage

invented usage has, in more ways than one, spawned an offspring called Invented Versage (www.inversage.blogspot.com). inverse.blogspot was taken, so Invented Verses was out. No matter for the denizens of invented usage--we just make it up as we go along.

as of right now, my plan is to make Invented Versage a home solely for my poems and commentary about them. i'm in a narcissistic mood about them because i just participated in my first san francisco poetry reading last night at a bar in the mission called, forebodingly, 'amnesia.'

my poetry, to my great excitement, was pretty well received, and i met a few very nice people--including fellow readers--who asked whether my writing was online. so, now i was no longer lying.

i've only posted one poem so far, but my plan is to quickly post the bulk of my existing work and then be inspired to write more. and have the energy to maintain invented usage more than i have been... though, i may as well say, it's been harder to think deep thoughts about language since i was informed that i didn't get into berkeley. maybe i'll write some tragic poetry about it.

Invented Versage.

where have I been?

greetings, faithful reader(s). i've gone over 6 weeks without posting. i'm currently too tired to look anything up, but that may be a record.

where have i been? i've been entering grown-up land! but don't worry, there's lots of language out here too.

between christmas and new year's, a friend and i loaded up a u-haul and moved to san francisco. i also managed to find a real, paying job out here since the last time i posted. i'm the assistant editor of FireRescue1, a news website for firefighters. my first news story (i'll be writing at least one a month) is online here: rappelling firefighters. in addition, i'm putting together bi-weekly and fourish-times-monthly newsletters, the most recent of which you can check out here: volume 221. i'm learning the business of 'web editing,' so maybe you'll see some fancy html up here soon.

though, i have to say, it is surprisingly exhausting to work as much as i'm currently working. mentally, that is. so consider this post my warm up, or my running start--Invented Usage will be flying again in no time. or fall on its face.

i've also got an application in to UC Berkeley's rhetoric Ph.D. program. I should know within the next few weeks if i don't get in. hm...

to make this a more legit post, an invented usage overheard at Tart-to-Tart, a neat little bakery chain that has a branch out here in my new neighborhood, the Sunset: "i don't want too much frosting. I've never cared for the flavor of frost." or something like that. it wasn't totally ironic, either. the speaker said he realized as he was using the word that it was a neologism, but would probably make his meaning understood. and it did. i'm still amazed.

and, as an added bonus, a few teasers about posts i've been considering writing for a while now:

• jobs that make us break conversational implicatures and hence, create awkward social situations
  
• AP style (the other thing I'm learning at my job)--practical reasons to solidfy conventions
• language barriers in san francisco
• The Department of Rhetoric and the media-specific analyses of language I would undertake if I were accepted there someday...
  

no promises, though. there's a quiche in the oven.

a new get rich quick scheme

Hey kids. Being something of a sponge at the moment, I've been nursing a variety of ways to turn a quick buck. My latest such idea is a children's book, which--in my estimation--would be near and dear to the philosophy of Invented Usage. Currently, the project is nameless. So for now I'm referring to it as the "A-Z Kid's Book Fake Dictionary Type Thing." By now, mind you, I mean right now. If you ask me about it, I'll probably call it something else.

Here's the premise. A book of words A-Z that are misused but not illogically so. Here's an example:


So you've got a picture of a portly, mean looking man cutting the hair of an apparently distraught child. Barbarous is the word, but here it means to take on the qualities of a barber. You get the idea, I'm sure. If you're interested in checking out the rest of my sketches, I have A through I posted online OVER HERE!!!

For now, this is my get rich quick scheme. I've even found an artist to illustrate it! If it doesn't work, I've been pondering starting a Fantasy WNBA league. With all the publicity Don Imus has been bringing to women's basketball, it's a guaranteed cash crop. Who wouldn't want to make friendly wagers on the trials and tribulations of nappy haired HOSsiers?

a tangential blog

one can never have enough blogs. so here's another.

Behold! the new digital idiocy

Hark! My newest digital project is beginning to take form as it shall for some time. Ladies and Gentlemen without a safety net: I shall now amputate. I shall now contort.

Click on the gate to enter "the new digital idiocy".

living on invention

it's only somewhat related to our recent milestone, but we've been getting more and more traffic from search engines as our size and internet notoriety has grown.

recently, we've been hit by searches for "exclusionary tactics," "language is use wittgenstein," "deconstruction (use of language)," "anymore usage," "cheetah template trailing comma," "poet wag," "when was the word snot invented," "semantic narrowing," "putz definition," "fruit that is actually a vegetable," "flurl means," "definition mad crunk," "triangle as meaning," "who invented the first army tank," "fugly urban dictionary," and so on.

i'm not sure what a few of these people were thinking. but i'm thinking that, as far as the internet is concerned, language is location. (maybe this is support for my point that language has other purposes than communication.) that is, we ARE "invented usage." just the words. but if people get lost, then we're near a few other related things. for instance, insert any noun that has sparked recent discussion on inuse into the frame "who invented the ____" and google it.

invented usage is in the top five hits for:
"who invented the tomato?"
"who invented the army tank?"
"who invented the semiotic triangle?" (hit #1! i feel lucky!)
"who invented text apparatuses?" (ditto)
"who invented the stradivarius?" (yes indeedy)
"who invented the snoot?" (also, too)

and so on. pretty much any noun in one of our recent post titles will work. and the same goes, by and large, for the frame "usage of ____." if, on the internet, language is location, then it's possible to be in a lot of different places at once. it's like we live on 'invented' street, and also on 'usage' street, and also on 'flush toilet poem' street, and anyone who thinks to go to those locations might happen to wander in here.

and it seems people are desperate for prime linguistic real estate. hit counters swarm with ads for traffic-boosting keywords, and spam robots pile their product name into every available space to increase its importance on the internet (hence our comment verifier!).

but the corner of 'invented' and 'usage' seems like a pretty cozy place to be. while we're not on the first google page for either word, we are in pretty interesting company. search 'invented'. search 'usage'. for instance, i just learned that people invent problems to sell solutions; that the yo-yo has an interesting history behind its invention; that 'invention' is a vague thing, especially where al gore inventing the internet is concerned; and, near and dear to my heart, why QWERTY was invented. we picked such a nice neighborhood.

Happy 10,000

I would just like to congratulate myself as being the 10,001 visitor to Invented Usage! Whoever got the distinction of being 10,000, screw you because my number is a palindrome.

Anyway, it's been a great year plus. Hopefully, we're well on our way to 100,001.

Seconded

I would like to formally second cristi's post about our birthday. It's awesome! One year and 106 posts later... Just genius!

We love you guys. Keep reading and we'll keep writing. Actually, if you stopped reading we'd probably keep writing anyway.

To Invented Usage and blog for all seasons and a waste of time for all reasons!

happy birthday to us!

laughing in the face of the ridiculously high blog infant mortality rate, Invented Usage is celebrating its first birthday today!

we'd like to thank our approximately 11 faithful readers and 20 daily random readers who've given us the motivation to keep going through midterms, finals, writers block and many other obstacles that keep lesser blogs down.

in addition, we invite you to visit our May 2005 archives and remember the days when Scott and I were scratching out a foothold for the current dynasty and posting almost every day--sometimes twice a day! May 2005 is a classic vintage; it's got fights we picked with older and more qualified bloggers, prose poetry, the original 'like' posts, the conversation that led to our name in the first place, and a link to kittenwars.com. worth a look, indeed!

thank you again! please commence the singing of 'the birthday song' loudly into your screens at 20:00 EST, 5/9/06.