Ole, Allah and all

Earlier today I had the chance to watch Elizabeth Gilbert’s lively and interesting TED Talk on nurturing creativity. Her thoughts on the dangers of pinning too much on individual creative ability and ignoring its context (and transience) make good advice for those in creative industries of any kind.

Talking about the creative spark, though, she says:

And when this happened, back then, people knew it for what it was, you know, they called it by its name. They would put their hands together and they would start to chant, ‘Allah, Allah, Allah. God, God, God.’ That’s God, you know. Curious historical footnote – when the Moors invaded southern Spain, they took this custom with them and the pronunciation changed over the centuries from ‘Allah, Allah, Allah’ to ‘Ole, ole, ole’, which you still hear in bullfights and in flamenco dances.

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The Inquiry enquires

An email conversation about the Iraq War Inquiry led to a query about spelling when a friend referred to it as an ‘enquiry’, to which another friend replied that ‘the inquiry enquires’. Does it?

I asked the British National Corpus for an up-to-date view of things (until 1993, anyway).

First, here’s the number of hits for each form of the noun and verb (including all inflections – e.g. inquired, enquiring, inquiries, etc.)

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When do people start planning for Thanksgiving?

Today is Thanksgiving in the USA and for Americans everywhere. So to celebrate, despite the fact that keyword tracking is at the nursery end of computational linguistics, let’s see when people start searching for and talking about Thanksgiving online.

Google searches (suggesting people are getting down to some planning) start to rise in early October, then spike into mid-November. The long view first:

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Climategate and speech communities

Everyone and his grandmother is talking about the emails taken from the UEA Climatic Research Unit. It’s even spawned another member of what word-and-paradigm morphologists would call ‘the class of words in -gate connoting scandal’. Responses vary from the measured to the wry to the foaming. Of over 60MB of emails taken in the hack on the CRU’s machinery, the hot one that’s got most attention is this, from Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. Read the rest of this entry »

A wordcrunching manifesto

There’s been a gap in posting to this blog as I’ve been moving from London to Cape Town. There are also a few changes. From now on, posts will be:

a) shorter;
b) more frequent; and
c) more focused on language and communications.

As well as being a strategic planner, I’m a linguist, so rather than writing Just Another Strategic Planning Blog, I’ll be trying to take a recognisable ‘language angle’ on things.

Other than that, let’s not kid ourselves, it’s still just a blog.

And, in true communications fashion, with the new focus comes a new name. So goodbye Common Parlance, and hello Wordcrunching.