Lavengro

Unpublished

You might think that an unpublished book was one that had never been presented to the public. And if so you’d be right, for the Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines the word as:

adj. (of a work) not published. > (of an author) having no writings published.

and the Oxford English Dictionary has:

1.a Not made generally known or accessible, esp. in print.

1.b Of an author: having had no writings published.

2 Not divulged or disclosed.

Neither dictionary offers any other meaning. However, Amazon (and possibly other publishers) have given it a new meaning: removal from sale of a book that has already been published. That is to say, first it is published and then it is unpublished.

 

 

It occurs to me that the prefix un- does have two meanings. This use in unpublished is the same as unplugged and untied, where something that has been done in undone and is different from unknown and unwritten, where something has not yet been done.

 

 

German type sexual harassment

Victor Mair explains this on the Language Log.

The BBC and the garden path

The BBC’s UK news page says:

Memorial for stab death teacher

Tributes are paid to a teacher who was stabbed to death at a school in Leeds by her family, friends and civic dignitaries at a memorial service attended by hundreds.

Sans serif confusion again

I have mentioned a problem with sans serif fonts. I have found it again. The Islamic State (IS in English) is el Estado Islámico in Spanish, which has the abbreviation EI. However, in a sans serif font, as us used by El País for example, this is virtually indistinguishable from the definite article El, which precedes it. The fist image is clipped from Firefox at maximum size.

I saved that image and then increased it to 1200%. There is a very slight visible difference at this magnification but nothing like enough to be seen when read in normal size. So readers have El EI written confusingly as two identical words.Click to enlarge.

 

Bing strikes again!

Beyond my ken!

Click to enlarge.

Homophonia

The Independent reports:

Tim Torkildson ... said he was removed from his role as head of social media because his boss believed that his post about homophones might give off the impression that the school promoted homosexuality.

What can one say, except that the blog post was obviously all Greek to the school's owners?

Happy Christmas!

As Brazil prepares for the World Cup …

Of arms and anuses

The Guardian reports this and other similar gems of OCR scanning:

"Mrs. Tipton went over to him and put her anus around his neck. " My dear," she said, rapturously. " I have been hoping for years that you would talk that way to me."

Not being able to tell your arm from your anus may seem an amusing misfortune, but one great advantage of digitising books is the ability to search the text. This ability is lost if instead of being carefully scanned they are carcfully scannod.

The curious antics of the Norwegian police

The Independent reports on ‘a man discovered in a [Norwegian] city in December, in the midst of a snow drift, suffering from total amnesia.’

John Smith’ found in Norway by police with amnesia in the middle of a snowdrift.

Independent crash blossom

(Click to enlarge.)

It's good to know that fewer nurses are endangering patients' lives, whether or not they have university degrees.

The question of why the Independent chooses to illustrate this with a photo of a nurse’s bosom is, fortunately, not one for this blog.