DailyDirt: Bullet The Blue

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

When people talk about colorful language, they're usually referring to foul language. But more literally, words for colors in our language(s) can affect how we perceive and react to colors. The word for blue is particularly interesting due to its surprisingly infrequent use in older texts. Here are just a few links relating colors and words.

• Different languages describe colors in ways that sometimes can't be translated exactly, and these linguistic definitions can affect how people perceive colors. The Russian language has very specific words for different shades of "blue" (and no term for "blue" in general), and Russians have distinctly different reactions to blue than English speakers do. [url]
• A color-coded analysis of various English texts according to word origins can show some interesting patterns that could be unique to certain genres of writing. British literature has more words from Anglo-Saxon origins, but other kinds of writing has different mixtures... if only spam were easily identified by this kind of analysis. [url]
• Ancient greeks wouldn't have described the sky as blue.... Homer did not use "blue" at all, and maybe Greeks didn't see colors the same way we do today. But other ancient civilizations didn't use blue in their written languages, either. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: blue, colors, english, greek, homer, language, russian

Chinese Newspaper Uses Homer Simpson 'X-Ray' To Illustrate Article On Multiple Sclerosis Discovery

from the whooops dept

You may remember back in 2002, when the Beijing Evening News accidentally believed a story from The Onion and wrote up a whole article (apparently without a single fact check) about how Congress was threatening to move away from Washington DC unless they were given a new capitol building with a retractable dome. For a while, the paper denied that it had simply copied the story and not done any fact checking, until it realized that it was too difficult to deny. Then it issued a hilarious non-apology, basically blaming The Onion for purposely tricking the reporters in an effort to make money ("Some small American newspapers frequently fabricate offbeat news to trick people into noticing them, with the aim of making money. This is what the Onion does... According to congressional workers, the Onion is a publication that never ceases making up false reports."). It appears that there's still some sloppy reporting going on over in China. The English-language Xinhuanet has a story up about the discovery of two genes that may lead to multiple sclerosis. However, the image they used (which they've since taken down) to illustrate this finding happens to be an amusing drawing of an "x-ray" of beloved cartoon character Homer Simpson's head. Now, obviously, there have been a ton of promotional tie-ins with the new Simpson Movie, but somehow we doubt this was done on purpose. We can't wait to see if the news agency figures out a way to blame this one on the Simpsons as well.

Filed Under: china, homer, simpsons