And so a few people may drop by the blog for the first time today. In which case, hi, people! I’m Josh, I work at Metafilter, I’m a musician, and I like making stuff, and here are some things I’ve made:

- ThinkStank is a tumblr I started after SXSW last year. It’s full of ideas I have that I kind of like or kind of hate but mostly don’t have the time or the will to flesh out in any case. Some of the things that have come out of that after all are Useless Fliers (fliers that don’t do anything), Nine Inch Niles (NIN tracks reconstituted entirely from snips of sound from the sitcom Frasier), and silly art things like Ennuigi and Beep Calm and Tenori On

- The Baseball Card Hall of Fame, a post-a-day collection of awards for unorthodox baseball card achievement.

- I’m a recording musician: I’ve got lots of mp3s and sporadic blog posts about new music and music experiments on music.joshmillard.com. Last year, I wrote and recorded an album from scratch in the month of February; it’s called Inchoatery, and if you’re interested in this sort of thing you can read a post-month breakdown of the process here.

If you’re curious about what random thing I’ve done on any given week, follow me on twitter: @joshmillard. Thanks for dropping by!

And while it’s certainly coincidence, I can’t help but note that they’re (for the moment, at least) using the same theme that my recent redesign was built around.  I don’t care if it’s meaningless: I elect to be flattered and there’s not a damned thing anyone can do about it.

I’m also pleased to see that Melvyn Quince is posting again.  Give ‘em what for, Doc.

“Keep New York New York“.

Considered as a bare string, it doesn’t even look like a sentence to me, and yet its perfectly comprehensible (and, in context, not even ambiguous: I doubt anyone will see the sign and think, “yes, yes, congestion pricing, but what does that have to do with Broadway showtunes and who is trying to get rid of them anyway?”).

In Portland (where there’s been, in fact, talk of congestion pricing for some bridges serving the downtown area), there’s a related phrase that’s been around for I don’t know how long: Keep Portland Weird.  As far as that goes, I suppose “Keep Portland Portland” would work too, but there’s something a bit more daring (and divisive, I guess, for folks in the anti-weird camp) about a specific named quality.

He talks a little about the place that the familiar “forth” holds in modern English usage, including a rundown of occurances of the word in the WSJ archives, but a couple things struck me:

1. Where does “further” come in to the history of “furth”?  If one can be furth of Glasgow, could one be (or at least have been, at some muddy point in Scots linguistic history) further of Glasgow?

[Update: while it doesn't actually dig into an answer to the question, I have to admit I missed outright this late line from Geoff on the subject of further: "(Note, though, that as Jim Smith points out to me, all modern English dialects have preserved the comparative and superlative forms further and furthest.)"]

2. “Go forth” is listed in Pullum’s corpus rundown as an afterthought, mixed in with “hiss forth” and “tumble forth” and a couple dozen other relatively uncommon also-rans.  (Set, bring, and put forth are the three big hitters, along with the fixed expression “back and forth”.)

Go forth?  Not common?  How could that be?  It’s easily the first phrase I think of when thinking of “forth”.  What gives? 

Ah, but I grew up in Catholic churches; and how often did I hear God or some prophet or metatron suggest (or some narrative simply record) that this or that figure should or did go forth — to multiply, to war, to Galilee, to sin no more.   And regardless of the texts in the readings or the homily, every Sunday had a guaranteed coda: “Go forth, to love and serve the Lord.”

So I suppose that as long as the WSJ isn’t quoting biblical passages or Catholic mass tropes, “go forth” as a rarity might be perfectly expected after all.  Oh well.

(It probably doesn’t help my case that the second thing I thought of, after “go forth”, was the programming language Forth.  I am not a reliable barometer of baseline forthiness, I don’t think.)

But this new fellow, this Melvyn Quince, is something else.  For as hard as the rest of that lot have tried, over the years, they’re looking a little old hat, a little out-worded if you will, by Quince, whose first two postings display already the kind of verve and insight and flat-out linguifictive integrity that you just can’t fake. 

And though he’s a newcomer to the Log, an examination of his credentials (e.g. via a google search) will, I think, both underscore his bona fides and suggest, to the discerning reader, the estimable value of his future contributions to this proud, arguably somewhat science-esque discipline.

Sideshow Bob (defending himself): To what degree was this dementia blown?

Psychiatrist: Full! [Jury gasps.]

Heidi Harley’s yearly Simpsons ling-joke roundup now available in an exciting 2008 model.

Econ wonk Paul Krugman, thirty years younger.  The Metafilter thread has some great pull-quotes.

So what’s missing? A vocabulary list! And that’s just what I’ve put together over the morning cup of tea. Four lists, actually, available here in order of strictness (and, by association, readability):

alphabetic – only letters a through f allowed
leet – some numeral-for-letter subsitutions
leeter – more aggressive subsitution
leetcore – identical list to ‘leeter’, but with gratuitous subsitutions for A, B and E, too.

More details about this — generation method, thoughts — after the jump.

The pure alphabetic list has two problems:

1. It’s very short.

2. All the words come out in faded pastels.

The first problem is not surprising; very tight alphabetic constraints means very few words that will match. The second problem is more interesting as a side-effect: A-F are the high-value digits in hex, and so strings that contain only alphabetic characters will have large values for each of the Red, Green, and Blue components of their represented color. So introducing some numeral substitutions doesn’t just broaden the vocabulary of these hex colorstrings, it significantly expands the palette as well.

Here’s the full (tiny, yes) alphabetic list, color coded:

#ACCEDE (accede)
#BEADED (beaded)
#BEDDED (bedded)
#BEEFED (beefed)
#CABBED (cabbed)
#DABBED (dabbed)
#DECADE (decade)
#DEEDED (deeded)
#DEFACE (deface)
#EFFACE (efface)
#FACADE (facade)

So, given the lousy constraints (both linguistic and chromatic) of a purely alphabetic list, it seemed like a good idea to allow for some leet-speak style subsitutions — which is, in fact, well within the spirit of the examples that Huff has already put up. The question is this: how much substitution to allow?

Every substitution means extra parsing work for the reader. Some subsitutions, like numeral 0 for letter O, don’t cause much trouble; 5 for S is a little bit more work, but not bad; 7 for T is moving into advanced math territory — parsable by the seasoned leet reader but probably a bit boggling without explanation to the uninitiated.

There’s arguments in both directions, so I decided to build a small spectrum of lists and leave it at that. The leet list includes a moderate collection of substitutions: 1 = I, 2 = Z, 5 = S, 6 = G, 0 = O. (The use of G I’m wavering on a bit, but what they heck; the budding vocabularist can use their aesthetic discretion in picking words from the list).

The leeter list adds 7 = T, 1 = L. T is a common letter, so this tends to really break up the readibility of the list; likewise with L (or, really, lowercase l as the justification for the replacement, despite my uppercase rendering of the output strings), and the further ambiguity between 1 = I and 1 = L mucks things up as well. Still, this is a much larger list than the ‘leet’ version, so aggressive pickers-and-choosers may want to work with this.

Finally, the leetcore list is a concession to the truly obnoxious — it’s the same list as ‘leeter’, but includes substitutions for 4 = A, 3 = E, and 8 = B. The list is less readable but no more expansive. Niche product.

How this was generated:

I threw together a perl script that reads in a word list (in this case, the /usr/share/dict/american-english file on my Dreamhost server), strips out words of more or less than 6 characters, and then rejects anything that doesn’t fit the specific profile being run against (alpha, leet, leeter). It then does substitutions according to profile, and chucks out the final list with hexified and original word pairs, as in the above example for the “alpha” profile.

Pretty simple stuff, in the end — it’s no histogram steganography, certainly — but a fun little Saturday morning project. Thanks for the fun, Mr. Huff!

That’s an exciting statistic, boy howdy. 

Don’t you agree, newscaster guy?

I see that you do.

(Screencapped from this video, via this turkey roundup, via metafilter.)