dictionnerd

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why glasses suck 

they’re always dirty. like w hat the fuck what is coming into contact with my face? why are they so fucking dirty? wha t the fuck 

3D movies 

dont ever fuckin lose them bc good luck tryin to find ANYTHING without them on 

roller coasters 

idk why but like?? children really like to take them off of you??? and play with them??? wh y 

the rain 

steamy bathrooms/kitchens/anywhere with an unnecessary abundance of steam  

tfw u can feel ur prescription getting weaker on you 

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Stag hunting - thoughts on John Nash and social cooperation

Stag hunt ban - a brief thought on John Nash and social cooperation

The recent shocking news that Nobel prize-winning mathematician John Nash and his wife were killed in a car accident got me thinking about the implications of his work on the theory of social cooperation. I know, join the club, right? John Nash is now most famous for having been played by Russell Crowe in the film A Beautiful Mind, but before that he was most famous for his work in game theory,…

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The #LibDemFightback

My take on the #LibDemFightback

Apparently since the polls closed at 10pm on Thursday, more than 10,000 people have joined the Liberal Democrats.

As part of the Green Surge, I can well believe this. Nothing motivates your latent support like adversity, and activists love underdogs.

And there definitely is latent Lib Dem support.

I myself voted Lib Dem in 2010 (mostly because there was no Green candidate in my constituency, and…

[dictionnerd]

There’s no emotional luggage

Today I used corpus linguistics to demonstrate that, while “baggage” can be figurative, “luggage” is always literal. You don’t normally have “emotional luggage”. 

It started because someone tried to add the figurative sense of luggage to the Collins English Dictionary (http://www.collinsdictionary.com/submission).

One of my recurring jobs is to check new submissions against the Corpus, which is a 4 billion word database of excerpts of real English. 

You can use the Corpus to compare two similar words and find out just how synonymous they really are. 

What I found when I compared “baggage” and “luggage” is that, while either could be modified by the adjectives “lost”, “delayed”, “oversized”, “unaccompanied”, or “unattended”, the adjectives “cultural”, “psychological”, “historical”, and “ideological” were only used with “baggage” and never with “luggage”. 

The key adjective “emotional” was indeed used to modify “luggage” 9 times (out of 32,607 total citations), compared to 599 for “baggage” (out of 24,453 total citations). 

So “emotional luggage” is in a very negligible minority. 

Incidentally I was first inspired to question this usage because of the L7 song “Baggage” (not “Luggage). 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCsiUYR8qHs

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The wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'

So, today was the first day I had to close the curtains behind me because of the sun glare on my laptop. 

This can only mean one thing: winter, your days are numbered!

Actually, because at times I used to work in dank basements or stashed in windowless corners when I was employed, I get a much better view of the changing seasons now that I'm freelance. 

Even more so because of the school run, which gets me out of the house at least twice a day. Except this week, because it's half-term. 

Not that I believe in that sort of thing, but 2 February was a cloudy day here in Edinburgh, so that's also probably a good sign. 

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Why I'm not afraid of a hung parliament

...or any other General Election 2015 scare story.

Firstly, I didn't start this Tumblr to talk about politics, but basically everyone in Scotland has become political so this stuff has been on my mind a lot. And my other blogs (a food blog, a place to post my fiction, and a blog about my daughter learning to talk) are really not the place for politics.

In case you don't live in Scotland, we just had this referendum on becoming an independent country. I voted Yes (that we should). So did just under 45% of the people who voted (nearly 85% turnout). But that means just over 55% voted No (we shouldn't). 

Three Scottish political parties backed a Yes vote: the Scottish National Party (SNP), who currently run the Scottish Government; the Scottish Green Party, who have two Ministers in the Scottish Parliament (MSPs); and the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP). 

The day the No vote was declared, thousands of people started joining these parties. I myself joined the Greens around noon that day, after spending the morning watching coverage of the referendum on repeat. 

I mention this to make the point that politics in Scotland has changed, maybe (hopefully) forever. 

Naturally there's been a lot of talk about how this surge in membership of the three Yes parties is going to affect the General Election. 

Traditionally, we have been told we have to vote "tactically". Vote Labour (or LibDem) even when these parties are terrible, in order to keep out the even more terrible Conservative party (this seems to "work" about half the time; the other half we end up with a Tory government in Westminster anyway). 

Labour does better in Scotland and in the North of England than it does in the rest of England, and it desperately needs its large helping of Scottish Labour MPs (currently 41) if it wants to win a majority and be able to form a government.

Even more importantly, it needs those Scottish MPs to have the right to vote on anything and everything the UK government does, even though English, Welsh, and Northern Irish MPs cannot vote on anything that has been devolved to the Scottish Parliament.

This is why Labour party opposes what is called "English Votes for English Laws" (barring Scottish MPs from voting on matters which are devolved to the Scottish Parliament to compensate for the fact that English MPs cannot vote on those matters in Scotland). 

If this happened, a Labour government could lose its majority on any matter that has been devolved. If you add the concept of "devo-max", which some define as devolving everything except foreign policy and defence to Scotland, that would effectively mean a Labour government can only count on its legislation being passed in those areas. 

(This, btw, is a rough and imprecise definition of devo-max, but I'm not intending to go into specifics here.)

So, the general election approaches, and Scotland is now not only more politically engaged than it was, but has shown unprecedented support for parties outside the mainstream. What's going to happen on polling day?

Some still say we need to "get over it" ("it" presumably meaning the referendum) and vote tactically to keep out the Tories. This presumably means voting Labour. After all, why would anyone vote LibDem ever again? Even Nick Clegg must be having second thoughts. 

But as the saying goes, Ah'm gaunnae no dae that. 

I never voted Labour before. I certainly ain't gonna start now. And it's not because I'm not left-wing (I joined the Greens, after all). It's because I don't think Labour are. 

I fully understand that in the first-past-the-post system of Westminster, if we send lots of small bunches of MPs from minor parties instead of a lot of Labour MPs, the Conservatives could still form a government, perhaps in coalition with UKIP. I admit that's a terrifying thought. But it's still not enough to make me vote Labour. 

Labour are a party that don't know who they are or what they stand for, and as a result, neither do I. The last time they seemed clear and on message, they were telling me to vote No, and I disagreed with them. What else have they got? Nothing the Greens can't do better (and more genuinely). 

The other brand of tactical voting comes from Yes voters who say that no matter what we have to vote SNP as they're the only party that stands a chance of winning a large number of seats. 

The Greens have swelled their ranks from less than 2,000 to more than 7,000, but that's nothing compared to the SNP surge. Apparently 1 in 50 adults in Scotland is a member of the SNP. 

So, yeah, they do stand the best chance of winning the most seats. And I can fully appreciate the political significance of that, including the hypothetical but certainly possible scenarios of them winning high-profile seats like Douglas Alexander's or Alistair Darling's, or of Labour needing to form a coalition with them (I still think these scenarios are highly unlikely, btw).

But if I wanted to vote SNP I would have joined the SNP. I have nothing against them as a party, and I have good friends in the SNP. I will even admit that I prefer them to certain other parties. But it's the Greens whose policies and ethos won my political heart, and I'm sticking with them.

Plus, I don't see myself voting in 2015 to "punish" any party the way some people seem to want to punish Labour. 

But by ruling out both these courses of action I run the risk that either Labour will get in anyway or the Conservatives will stay in. 

Let's be clear, I don't want either of these things to happen. I want at least one Scottish Green MP, more if possible and I want the English Greens to increase their share of MPs as well. 

I want a fairer, greener, more democratic UK with a progressive tax system and a welfare system that really provides for people's welfare.

I want a ban on fracking and unconventional oil and gas and a phasing out of nuclear and fossil-fuel-based energy. I want increased investment in clean and renewable energy and serious steps to tackling emissions.

I want electoral reform and democratic reform of the House of Lords. I want the UK to become a republic with a democratically elected Head of State. 

All of this will take time and effort, lots of it. I am willing to put in that time and effort, even if it means suffering through another Conservative government. 

Once again, I voted Yes. I voted Yes because I hoped for a fairer, greener Scotland. If Yes had won, it would have been the beginning of a long, hard struggle to make that dream country come true. I was willing to put in that hard work and effort then. Why wouldn't I be willing to do it now?

So bring on your scare tactics. In 2015 I'm voting my conscience and my principles, and I still hope more than I fear. 

[dictionnerd]

I would recommend NOT defining it as "indy by the back door", because that's just bollocks.

[dictionnerd]

Lunch

When I'm the only one in the house for lunch, I find myself eating a random combination of things that are about to hit their Use By date - or in some cases are one or two days past it. 

This is a combination of being frugal and green. I can only bring myself to throw food away if it actually has something visibly growing on it. 

I should mention that I'd never serve this stuff to anyone else. 

So if I'm ever a no-show when it's time to collect the kids from school or nursery, it's probably because I poisoned myself at lunch. 

A close second likely explanation would be caffeine overdose. 

[dictionnerd]

What did we google in August?

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More fruits of my day-job.

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"I need a seat by the window because this flower is wilting."

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The Most Used Words in English

We all get irritated by over-used words, but before you claim that “x” is “the most used word in the English language”, remember that, statistically, “the” is actually the most used word in English, followed by:

to

of

and

a

it

for

is

that

on

I know this sounds boring, but without these “nuts and bolts” of language, we wouldn’t really be able to say anything. 

In English at least.

[dictionnerd]

This won't mean anything to any of you, but the outro to Bathory's "Home of Once Brave" sounds just like the outro to Metallica's "For Whom the Bell Tolls".

[dictionnerd]

Ethan Hawke, lexicographer

elephantiasis (ˌɛlɪfənˈtaɪəsɪs) n pathol when something gets bald and ugly, like your ass

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Coining a new word - what not to do 2

If you haven't heard back about that word you submitted the dictionary yet, the best thing to do is submit it again. And again. And again. 

We love that. It especially helps us with the backlog of new word submissions that was keeping us from responding to you in the first place.

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This one time the Ramones were playing a gig and Joey said "This next one is I Don't Wanna Go Down to the Basement", but Tommy said "Wait, let's do Loudmouth". Then DeeDee said " No, I wanna do I Don't Wanna Go Down to the Basement too. I really do". Then Johnny said "Fuck it, fuck it”. So Joey said " That's three against one so you lose". Tommy said ”Fuck you all". But they played I Don't Wanna Go Down to the Basement.