American english pronunciation by region

I found a fascinating article on how the pronunciation for the same word will vary depending on where in America you live. Not that this will be a surprise to anyone, but Joshua Katz, a PhD student in statistics at North Carolina State University, has done a study and mapped those differences.

Not only is are language patterns interesting, but as a New Zealander, I enjoyed see where out language matched - if it matched at all. New Zealand is fascinating because it is so influenced by both British & American english. We're a British colony, so obvious influence there, plus we had many immigrants from Ireland and Scotland. The American influence on the other hand is newer, but pervasive, coming as it does through TV and movies.

This map looks at drinking fountain (blue) vs water fountain (red). Interesting little blip is bubbler (green) in Wisconsin & Rhode Island. In NZ drinking fountain would dominate.

 Generic term for sweetened carbonated beverage. Soda (red), pop (blue), coke (green) or soft drink (yellow). In NZ it'd be a soft drink or fizzy drink.

Generic term for rubber-soled shoes worn in gym class. Tennis shoes (red), sneakers (green), gymshoes (green). In NZ they would be sneakers, and we would wear them in PE class, (and as a side note in South Africa they would be takkies).

 



A few others that interested me listed below (for these maps & others go o Mr Katz's study.)

Pronunciation of 'Route', to rhyme with 'out' or said like 'root'?
In NZ this would be a bit of a mix of both, some of that would be driven by age, & some by usage. Route is pretty much consistently used in IT, but when plotting a journey there is more of a mix. However this is a word that should be used with care in NZ as 'root' it is also a slang term for having sex :)

Nickname for your paternal grandmother (is there a distinction)?
In NZ there is generally a split between the maternal and paternal, one being nana, the other grandma. I however, grew up with a granny. My maternal grandmother didn't comply with any traditional names - I called her Moo, a childish corruption of her given name which was Muriel.

What do you call the wheeled contraption you carry your groceries in at the supermarket? A shopping cart, grocery cart, or buggy. In NZ the option would be other, we call it a trolly. A buggy, on the other hand, is what you push babies around in.

Trash can or garbage can? In NZ it's a rubbish bin.

Take out or carry out?  In NZ it's take away.

I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did, and if you're not a Kiwi I hope it was a little window into the world down-under :)

Marriage Proposals

A little while ago I posted a fun marriage proposal, I thought it would be nice to post a few more.

In game love:

When the movies come to life:

Super sweet:

The Evolution of Type

We had one artist last week, this week I thought I would look at another: Andreas Scheiger. Artist Andreas Scheiger has created a wonderful exhibition in honour of type/lettering (call it what you will), the medium through which so many have communicated their ideas through the years. That allows us to preserve our history and separates from our pre-literate ancestors.

From his Exhibition:
"Of all the achievements of the human mind, the birth of the alphabet is the most momentous. Letters, like men, have now an ancestry, and the ancestry of words, as of men, is often a very noble possession, making them capable of great things. indeed, it has been said that the invention of writing is more important than all the victories ever won or constitutions devised by man. The history of writing is, in a way, the history of the human race, since in it are bound up, severally and together, the development of thought, of expression, of art, of intercommunication, and of mechanical invention.(...) A letter should possess an esthetic quality that is organic, an essential of the form itself and not the result of mere additions to its fundamental form nor to meaningless variations of it."

When my eyes crossed this excerpt of famous type designer Frederic W. Goudy´s "The Alphabet and Elements of Lettering" (1918) suddenly letters full of life showed in my mind´s eye. Letters are organisms and typefaces are the species, all classified similar to biological taxonomy! I drafted this cognition in a chart for print and in order to prove my finding to the interested audience I took one step further. I surgically opened the letters S, Z, S, A, W and how contented I was to discover muscles, veins, tendons and bone just like the ones shared by so many living creatures.

Below are some of his wonderful sculptures that give a visceral evolution to letters.
You can see more here.

Book Art

Books are a wonderful. They are a place to escape to, a place to learn, and an outlet for creativity. Sometimes however that outlet is not just for the author - sometimes it's for sculptors. It's true this use of books is not the conventional one, and it's not one of which everyone approves (involving as it does the destruction of the book in its current form).

While I could never use one of my books quite like this, I can't help but admire the creativity of these sculptures. These particular specimens were left anonymously around Edinburgh.

  

For more + closeups go here

Cover trends

A couple of weeks ago I did a post on how covers are developed. A good link to that is Linnea from Cover Cafe (they bring us the best/worst competition each year), who has nice post on cover trends she's noticed creeping in for 2013. She was nice enough to gather examples (more in her post)

In summary, there appear to be 3 main trends.

1) staircases

2) Dress that go on forever

3) Fences 

Yes, I know on the last ones you've got to blink past the hot guys, but the fences are there.

Atoms and eyes

It's been a little while since I've done a technology post, so here are two cool snippets:

1) Atomic level movie

IBM have created the smallest movie ever by manipulating the atoms on a copper surface.
I know, crazy!
They've called it A Boy and his Atom, and it's essentially stop motion on a teeny tiny scale. "It would take about 1,000 of the frames of the film laid side by side to span a single human hair."
Andreas Heinrich says: "The atoms hold still in their new positions because they form chemical bonds to the copper atoms in hte surface underneath, and that lets us take an image of the whole frame of the film. Between frames we carefully move around the atoms to their new positions, and take another image."       To see click image.

2) Scientists have made a camera that works on the same principle as an insect eye.

This digital camera utilises the ideas behind an insects compound eye. Compared to normal cameras it has a great depth of field and is wide-angle without the usual distortion.
"The development team, led from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, US, believes its new imaging system could eventually find uses in surveillance and for endoscopic investigations of the human body."

How covers are made

I've talked about elements of book design before, like here where an artists talked about creating cover art, but what about the process from the publishers point of view. Below is a great little video on the process of making a book cover.

What I thought was interesting was that when the publisher is talking about the collaborative process behind cover design, the author is listed last, almost as an afterthought  This, unfortunately for the author, is very much the way things work.

I fill out a cover sheet at the beginning of the process (basic info like descriptions of hero/heroine, and a make a note of a few important elements of the story), that's basically it until the cover is complete. Only very famous authors get more say on their covers. The feeling within publishing is that authors know how to write, but publishers are the experts at marketing that book (sometime this is true and sometimes it's not).

I think a quote from Ilona Andrew is apt (unfortunately I can't find it, so I'll paraphrase). Basically someone was complaining that they didn't think the girl on the cover looked like they thought she should. Ms Andrews said that when readers see certain things on covers it gives them cues as to what sort of book it's going to be (romance/ fantasy/ thriller). The publishers understand those cue consciously  authors may not. Of course that's not to say publishers always get it right.

The other thing to bare in mind is that authors can moan like drains about their covers, but they are going to have to have a very, very good reason, because changing covers costs money.

Click the image & enjoy the video: