The Boss Button isn't some really fine button. It's an insurance policy that helps you maximize the amount of time you spend on Wordie, and minimize the consequences of getting nothing else done. Or at least it minimizes your chances of getting caught fecking off. There'll probably still be consequences.

It works like this: You're in your cubicle, half alseep, trying to come up with an amusing outfit for your vergerhade character, and you hear your boss trudging toward you. Casually hit 'Ctl-b' on your keyboard, and the browser window displaying Wordie will instantly go to one of a random assortment of work-appropriate* pages. For further verisimilitude, you can configure the Boss Button to go to a page suitable for your industry or workplace (click 'edit personal preferences' on your profile**).

Work is for suckers. Spend more time on Wordie.

* For the most part. Depends where you work. ymmv.
** I added hcard support to the profiles while I was mucking about. fwiw.

Labels: boss, button, cubicle, fecking, vergerhade

That's the rather sensational headline on the cover of this week's Nature. Inside are two papers on word evolution, with the more staid titles "Frequency of word-use predicts rates of lexical evolution throughout Indo-European history"* and "Linguistics: an Invisible Hand".

The premise of the first is straightforward and rather commonsensical: words that are used a lot don't change much. In other words, the rate at which words tend to morph is in inverse proportion to how often they're used. For example, all Indo-European languages apparently use the same root form for the word "two." It's obviously a widely-used word, and it has evolved hardly at all. The authors do a statistical analysis of four large language corpora (language corpora: the subject of an upcoming post, btw) to back this up. Good stuff. This is apparently the process by which the once little-used "vergerhade" came to be defined as an animatronic groucho marx in a tutu and straitjacket.

Nature's sister site, Nature News, has a good overview of these papers, geared towards a more general audience.

* Nature is trying to charge $18 to download this single article, which is, if you'll pardon my French, fucking nuts, especially given that most of what they publish is publicly funded research--we've already paid for it! So I had one of my spies steal it. You can get the full PDF here.

Labels: evolution, groucho marx, linguistics, nature, vergerhade