Fun with Language

PART THE FIRST

My friend Lucy pointed out the "What Kind of American English Do You Speak" Test.

My results:

• 60% General American English
• 30% Dixie
• 10% Yankee
• 0% Midwestern
• 0% Upper Midwestern

I'm not really sure they had enough questions, but it was an amusing diversion.

PART THE SECOND

Magpie found a color-coded map of English nouns created from the "average color of images found by a search engine." Go see it, it's quite fascinating.

PART THE THIRD

Ping launched his Regender translator on the day of BlogHer, which meant that so many people found out about it that the server gave up a few times. But try it out. Here is his description:

Welcome to a little experiment in webpage translation. Have you ever wondered... What would the world look like if the two sexes switched places? What would it look like if English had genderless pronouns? What would it look like if English identified races the way it identifies gender?

I also loved what ae had to say about it:

I mentioned my new pal Ping's right-on hack Regender a couple of posts below, and I can't say enough about it. I think everyone should read the news through this filter for a couple of days. It's mindboggling. Queen Fahd passes away and a new Princess will be crowned. You read that one story and think, okay, so Queen for King, I get it. But no. Look at page after page, day after day, of news stories all about women, all by women, and you see how gendered "news" POV, authorship, subject matter is. It's enough to make one question patriarchy or something. Hmm. [Ed Note: send Valentine to Ping.]

END NOTE

This will probably not entertain anyone who has not met C-Man, or maybe not even anyone but me:

I showed the Regender hack to C-Man, and since it's a computer thing he had to find out who made it. He spend several minutes reviewing Ping's CV, then gave some of his highest praise: "That kid's really not stupid!"

I just didn't know what to say.