ON THE SHORES OF A MUDDY RIVER

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On its present course, I think the future looks less like central London, and more like downtown Lagos.

This kind of odd compromise is hardly unprecedented with the Chinese. Taiwan and China avoid war by both claiming to be the legitimate rulers of mainland China, a fiction that has persisted for more than 50 years, even as Taiwan is, in nearly all respects, its own country. But if Taiwan ever does decide to publicly say it is its own country, that’s ground for a Chinese invasion.

[Wired Magazine — Analysis: Google and China Agree on a Fiction]

"Login is (not) a verb"

Idiocy angers me. The only thing that angers me more is idiocy dressed up as self-righteous pseudo-intellectualism written by people with poor language skills.

To wit: ‘login’ is a verb. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that following the Germanic tradition (English being a Germanic languge) of that (super annoying, but quite useful) thing known as a ‘seperable prefix’ verb, ‘login’ is used much the same way. The author of this little piece tries to prove their point by attempting to conjugate the whole word, rather than the root. ‘Log’ is a verb, and conjugates perfectly. Adding the suffix ‘-in’ (derived from the preposition, no longer needing an object and now a part of the compound word) we get forms like ‘I login’ (or ‘I log in’). Also, ‘I logged in’, ‘I was logged in,’ etc. Much the same way modern German describes phone calls with the verb anrufen: ‘Ich rufe an,’ ‘ihr ruft an,’ etc., with the infinitive form always being ‘anrufen.’ Same with ‘to login.’

The same goes for all the other ‘non-verbs’ that get called out (http://notaverb.com/). ‘I checked out,’ ‘I was cut off,’ ‘we picked up,’ ‘the whole place was locked down,’ etc., etc. If the nerdrage here is against common verb-proposition pairings being combined into compound words (or seperable-affix verbs), then that’s moronic prescriptivism, and ignores one of the nicer features of Germanic languages as a whole (also, cf. ‘nevertheless,’ ‘inasmuch’).