meish dot org: life, unfolding

Part of my tenth blogiversary series.

1. Reverse-chronological (unless I was Benjamin Button)
2. Permalink (I think Prolific invented or at least named these, didn’t she?)
3. Archives (unless I was a librarian)
4. Publish (unless I was Rupert Murdoch)
5. Blogroll (I don’t have one, though)
6. Blogring (remember them?)
7. Post (unless I worked for Royal Mail)
8. After the jump (unless I worked for the Samaritans)
9. Pingbacks (unless I was Brian Eno)
10. Plugins (unless I was an automaton sexbot)

Addendum: Things I do not say, even though I have a blog

1. Blogosphere, because it’s stupid
2. Blog when I mean blogpost because it’s just WRONG

(In this scale good = “Blimey, I didn’t know they were British” and bad = “A British equivalent of Dick Van Dyke”)

John Mahoney (Frasier) Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Without a Trace) Ed Westwick (Gossip Girl) Idris Elba (The Wire) Damien Lewis (Life) Joely Richardson (Nip/Tuck) Jamie Bamber (Battlestar Galactica) Hugh Laurie (House, MD) Robert Pattinson (Twilight) Gabrielle Anwar (Burn Notice) Joseph Fiennes (Flash Forward) Ian McShane (Deadwood) Anna Friel (Pushing Daisies) Louise Lombard (CSI) Minnie Driver (The Riches) Dominic West (The Wire) Kevin McKidd (Grey’s Anatomy) Michelle Ryan (Bionic Woman) Kevin McKidd (Journeyman) Eddie Izzard (The Riches) Mark Addy (Still Standing)

Of course, it’s not for a British person to say whether a fake American accent is convincing or not, because we don’t have the natural ear, so this is more of a list of British actors playing Americans on TV ranked in order of whether their accent is convincing enough to the non-native ear to suspend belief or confound expectations of an audience who have previously heard them speaking in a different way during a performance. See: Lovejoy, a bit of Fry & Laurie, Eastenders.

Reading the G2 guide to regional English dialects at lunchtime (and particularly the A-Z at the end), I found myself pondering how much regional slang and dialect I use, and how perfect it is - I can’t imagine using any other word, in many cases.

This is probably the best side-effect of coming from a pan-Britannic family, having strongly-spoken friends from all over the shop and having lived, studied and worked myself in a dozen (or more) places in the UK for significant amounts of time - long enough, at least, for certain bits of local language to have rubbed off.

So with that in mind, here’s my personal list of word, possibly regional in origin (but not sure where in all cases) which I frequently use in everyday conversation, and which more than once have caused someone to say “you what?”

What regionally-odd words do you use? Or do you use any other words for these things or ideas?

Look, I don’t want to tell anyone how Twitter should be used - each to their own; it’s a big web and there’s room for lots of different experiences, so please yourself and all that.

However, that being said, it’s my web experience as well, so as a point of reference, it may be worth mentioning that there are a few things/habits/behaviours on Twitter which are pretty much guaranteed to make me unfollow you - temporarily or permanently - and that’s my right, too.

UPDATE, because people keep reading and linking to this as RULES FOR HOW TO USE TWITTER: These are not rules for how to use Twitter. Use it however you want. This is simply a list of habits that bother me - in varying amounts and at various times - when other people do them a lot. This is a list of things that might make me switch off from following someone, just as certain formats or personalities on the television bother me and make me more likely to switch off from watching.

You may not agree. You don’t have to agree. You don’t even have to stop doing them. If you like doing any of the below, or think they’re completely fine to do, then great; please carry on. No-one’s judging you, and most of all, no-one’s telling you what you should or shouldn’t do. Use Twitter however you want.

(For the record, I don’t much like celery, either. If you do like it, then great. I’m not judging you on your celery consumption, I don’t think you’re a horrible, person, or an idiot, and I certainly wouldn’t dream of stopping you eating crunchy vegetables, because that would be weird and inappropriate. But if you invite me over for dinner, and tell me you’re going to be serving celery stew followed by celery pate with a celery gravy, you’ll understand if I don’t eat much, or choose not to come, or maybe just meet you for drinks later, yes?)

1. Endless retweeting without adding any value or original thought in between. Or at all. If you retweet more than once a day, especially from the same source(s), I’ll likely dump you and follow them instead. NB, this is even more irritating when I already follow the person you’re retweeting.
2. Posting link after link after link even if they’re to really interesting articles and sites and things you’ve spotted on the web. I appreciate that this is a retro thing to say these days, but: Get a blog.
3. Saying good morning, hello, good night to your followers. This is not your personal radio show. This is not an AOL chatroom from 1995. We’ll know when you’ve woken up, because you’ll start twittering. We’ll know when you’ve gone up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire because you’ll have gone quiet, or possibly will have indicated something circumstantially relevant before you went (e.g. “Bugger this, there’s nothing on television: I’m going to bed”). Even though your mother brought you up well and it’s good manners generally, there really is no need to say “good night”. Except if you’re @JohnBoyWalton.
4. Going to an event and liveblogging it via Twitter. Does what you’re communicating need to be communicated to this group of people, immediately? If not, then you could probably use a blog, and twitter once to say you’re covering it over there. NB This behaviour marks an interesting shift in people using Twitter as communication medium with known group to people using it as a microblog, so I see why it’s increasingly happening - but it’s infernally spammy if you’re not interested.
5. Using it to organise an event or rendezvous with other people who happen to be in your twitter list. Use email. Use direct messages. Use the telephone. Or invite everyone. But using a public medium for a private conversation is most vexatious and supererogatory.
6. Flooding the screen by updating 84 times in rapid succession. This matters, when you’re abroad and paying for every bit of data downloaded. A stream-hog is like a roadhog: inconsiderate and difficult to ignore.
7. Referring to people as “tweeple” or “tweeps”, questions as “twestions” or “twask”, adding someone to your list as a “twadd”, use of “tweet” or any other kind of meaningless derivative which is wholly unnecessary and infantile. People are still people, even if they’re on twitter. Questions are still questions. I realise that language evolves and new words are constantly being coined, but this stuff just makes me want to tweam and tweam and tweam until I’m twick.

Also, there are four things (features?) I’d dearly love to see implemented somewhere, which would help to manage some of the above and some additional twirratations (gah! I’m doing it now!):

1. When someone (public) replies to my (private) Twitter stream, please don’t show it in the search, dearest darling Twitter.
2. Let me put people on pause, occasionally - or rate limit them. Sometimes you need a holiday from your friends.
3. If I’m private, let me shout (public message) as well as talk to people I know. Or if I’m public, let me whisper (to an identified group of followers). Call it semi public/semi private.
4. Let me ignore (or opt into) following particular hashtags. If someone twitters something including “#guardiancommunity”, I want to know about it, even if I’m not following them - let it break through into my consciousness. On the other hand, even if my closest friends twitter using a hashtag like “#spurs” don’t show it to me. I love them dearly, and value their friendship, but I’m just not interested in the topic.

I’ve touched on some of this stuff before, as Twitter has evolved over the last three years or so:

• Breaking the news: Dear Twitter friend
• Twitter ye not: further thoughts on an evolving medium
• Twit by name
• Musings on Twitter
• The seven deadly sins of Twitter

Interesting (to me at least) to note how the “sins” in the latter link there have mostly been resolved by people adapting to the tool, but that new behaviours and rather annoying tics have taken their place (see above).

Incidentally, you can find my public twitter stream at twitter.com/megpickard. I have a private one, too - but that’s mostly for people I know in person, have ranted with in pubs, and for whom the conversation is off-the-record. It’s never that juicy, though. (Sorry).

You know when someone goes to the doctor in a movie, or in real life, and s/he looks gravely at the nervous patient and tells them he’s got some bad news and then describes the size of it and it’s always the size of a soft fruit. And as with tumours, cysts and other noxious swellings, so with babies.

And then when certain news organisations write stories about deforestation, oil slicks or similar, they compare the rate of loss with leisure facilities, principalities, or small nations.

The thing about all of these things is that they are universal. An apple is an apple is an apple. Everyone knows how big an elephant is. All of these things have a human scale, and can be imagined at will, to make a relevant comparison or to describe something else.

With that in mind, I’ve been trying to come up with a scale for the universal units of measurement (used for everything from foetus growth to tumours to deforestation). These are all things I’ve heard used as a relative size for things, but I’m sure it’s not exhaustive: Please add your own, if you know of others.

• Grain of sand
• Human hair
• Pea
• Fingernail
• Walnut
• Golf ball
• Kiwi fruit
• Apricot
• Avocado
• Fist
• Tennis ball
• Credit card
• Can of Coke
• Pack of cigarettes/Pack of playing cards (in these more enlightened times)
• Grapefruit
• Honeydew melon
• Paperback book
• Brick
• Football/Bowling ball
• Hardback book
• Watermelon
• Shoebox

(big gap)

• Big dog
• Cow
• Family car
• Garden shed
• Elephant
• Double-decker bus
• Nelson’s column
• Football field
• Isle of Wight
• Mount Everest
• Wales
• Belgium
• France
• Texas

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, trying saying the words “..about the size of a…” in front of any of the above.

(your suggestions and other late additions are in italics)

During the course of the last few months, I’ve dealt with and got to know a lot of people from all over the world. Of these, a handful have outrrrrrageously strong accents.

There’s a woman from Spain who espiks ass eef see ees a nestra een a espagetti westerrrn, an’ ees difficul forr joo can’ theeenk off ahnytheeen else.

There’s a man from Germany who hass ze ixact eckzunt zat a perzon frum charmany vood haff in a bad moovi.

There’s a woman from New Zealand who puppuz huh cunvusayshun wuth thuh sungle vuwul thut charucturizuz thut puhtucyuluh way uf speekung.

There’s another woman, from France, ‘ooze voys ‘as zuh mel-odd-yus kaliteh of ‘er ‘omm cowntri in ever-y leetl wohd.

There’s a man from South Africa whu tillz ivrywan thet huz ecksent esn’t thit strong, rilly, uzzit.

There’s also a woman from Australia with quoite the maost trooli umaaayzing ‘dn udderli faahntaaastic grayt bigg raaond vaawls.

The thing is, I’m convinced they’re all making it up. They don’t really talk like that: they’re putting it on, for comic effect. Their accents are just too perfectly characteristic - I’m sure that actually, they’re from (respectively) Dagenham, Slough, Kettering, Cheltenham, Margate and Ruislip.

It must be true.

Me, though, I’m actually from Azerbaijan, though you’d never guess it to hear me speak. It’s taken me years to get this whole well-spoken English thing down pat. It’s involved years of careful study and observation, and nights of listening to recordings of native speakers - newsreaders, actors, minor royals - and repeating, parrot-fashion, what they say.

Actually, saying that, and seriously for a moment, I’m constantly getting asked (by cab drivers, hairdressers etc) if I’m Australian - even by Australians. I’ve never even been to Australia. I don’t think I sound Australian. Do I?

You can hear a snippet of me speaking here, on an interview about the jailing of an Egyptian blogger which I recorded a few weeks ago for the World Service. Judge for yourself.

So the other day, drafting an update presentation about a particular project, I used a made-up html tag in the title.

I’d called the document “[name of project] - what’s going on?” so I naturally added a </marvingaye> tag to the end. Well, wouldn’t you?

But then I sent it out, without removing the tag from the title slide. Cue odd looks from colleagues, some of whom possibly didn’t get the markup reference, others who didn’t get the musical reference, and probably others who thought that brand of silliness didn’t belong on a work document.

*Shrug*

But there are some HTML tags that should exist, dammit. They’d make written business communication much more interesting and relevant, I think. Here are a few:
<blockquote>
<voice of experience>
<wibble>
<unnecessary caveat>
<sarcasm>
</the lesson>
<better described via whiteboard>

…there must be more.

So, Google launched their Image Labeler game the other day. The format is brilliantly simple: players are assigned a random (unknown) partner, with whom they need to collaborate to agree on tags to describe a particular image. It’s a great way to collect metadata about an image - descriptive tags, if you want to put it like that - because you’ve got an ideal situation: a double blind test.

But I come here not to praise Google…

I’ve been noodling on this since I saw it announced - it reminds me of something else I’ve seen. At first I thought it was Fastr, then possibly Peekaboom, but finally I remembered it.

It seems to me to be almost identical to a Carnegie Mellon project which has been running since 2003, called the ESP Game.

From their synopsis:

Labeling an image means associating word descriptions to it, as shown below. Computer programs can’t yet determine the contents of arbitrary images, but the ESP game provides a novel method of labeling them: players get to have fun as they help us determine their contents. If the ESP game is played as much as other popular online games, we estimate that all the images on the Web can be labeled in a matter of weeks!

Having proper labels associated to each image on the Internet would allow for very accurate image search, would improve the accessibility of the Web (by providing word descriptions of all images to visually impaired individuals), and would help users block inappropriate (e.g., pornographic) images from their computers.

Is it a coincidence that Google’s Image Labeller game is so similar? Are they collaborating with Carnegie Mellon? There’s no mention of ESP on the Google game, as far as I can see…

There are two phrases I hear a lot in the course of my work, which tickle me in some small way. I don’t think they’re perculiar to my workplace or industry, but they certainly seem to be increasing in frequency and breadth over the last few months. I’m as guilty as anyone else of using them, and I wonder if anyone reading this has any experience of them out in the wilds of your workplaces. Do tell…
The first is used when trying to get a little face-time with someone (no, that’s not the phrase, though it’s bad enough in its own way.) I regularly hear people asking:

“Can we sit down later and discuss X?”

or

“Let’s find some time to sit down this week”

or

“I’m going to be sitting down with Y tomorrow, I’ll ask then”

I can’t help being amused by this because when you think about it, it’s a bit ridiculous - especially because in our (mostly sedentary, when we’re not hiking between office buildings or jetting about) daily work we do very little except sit down. We’re sitting down constantly - on commutes, at our desks, in meetings - and so whenever someone asks me if I’ve got time to sit down, I try hard to bite my tongue and refrain from smartarsing that I AM sitting down ALREADY, thankyouverymuch. Silly.

The other phrase, and the one which is sillier still, and yet seems much more prevelent (I’ve just heard Sarah Beeny use it in the course of her Property Stupidity Ladder show) is usually used in the context of people expressing an opinion or making a decision, or reflecting on a situation. They say:

“With your business hat on…”

or

“…with my European hat on, I’d recommend….”

or

“…wearing my technology hat for a minute, it looks like…”

I’ve heard of De Bono’s six thinking hats in creativity and innovation, but these are just ridiculous. The trouble is that all of this brings to my mind an image of actual hats.

In fact, I’m very tempted to make a business hat (bowler?), and a strategy hat (surely something with pockets?), and a European hat, and a consumer experience hat (a panama which always looks good even after a long-haul flight?), and an anthropologist hat (that’s a big one, floppy brim, perhaps with a notebook tucked in the headband?) and a geek hat (I’m picturing a wool beanie here, with a logo of some kind), and a social media hat (probably something hand-knitted from Peru, with earflaps) and in fact a hat for all occasions and roles I’m required to participate in or under, which I would then carry around (perhaps in a big bag) and pop them on whenever I was adopting that particular perspective or authority. That’d leave no room for doubt about which particular hat I was wearing when making any decisions, or attending any meetings, see?
I wonder what a European hat would look like?

Answers on a postcard…

I know that in the US, the phrase means something entirely different, but every time I see/hear it used, I can’t help thinking something very, very bad.

See this headline from Valleywag, Silicon Valley’s Tech Gossip Rag for an example of what I’m talking about.

That headline reads very differently from this side of the pond. That’s some serious gossip, there, if the headline is anything to go by. And then you realise that no, it doesn’t mean that after all, it just means two bits of gossip. Oh.
(don’t want to mention the phrase here, because I get enough pr0n spam already, thankyewverymuch)