Wired for Sound
No, not an announcement of FFB podcasting--although that day will come. Just a quick note on a party I went to last night. There was a guy there, I talked to, who had to be the odd-est guy I've talked to in a long time. And I talk to CL about every other week, so that tells you something.
I mentioned Wikipedia--which I'm a big fan of, btw. This guy got very interested. Apparently, he's a big-time Wikipedia "editor," and he feels it's his obligation to police incorrect language usage on Wikipedia. Oh, this story gets even better. He told me how yesterday he spent a good part of the day sorting out the use and misuse of the word "epicenter" in 50-some entries. Apparently, many people misuse the term "epicenter" to mean, well, "center." As in "the epicenter of bluegrass." This is a no-no, I guess. But the worst use of "epicenter," I was told, was this: "The epicenter of the Kobe earthquake was 10 km below the surface." Why? Because I didn't know this, but an "epicenter" must be a point on the surface (that's what the "epi" means). When I asked why the sentence in question was incorrect, I got a "Are you kidding me?" response. Oh, I was kind of kidding him, actually. But I played along.
OK, this little story says one thing: The party did not rock (although a good time was had by all). And this guy, while odd, is actually a good guy.
posted by Number Three @ 11:45 AM
1 Comments:
Guy sounds like a language nazi who thinks each word should have one, rigid meaning -- I find folks like that so annoying because they think they're somehow smart if they learn a few simple rules and everyone else is dumb or morally inferior who doesn't follow "the rules". We wouldn't want to be decadent and metaphorically extend a word's meaning now, would we?
PS -- Your new friend should be told that while the preposition "epi" had the basic spatial meaning of "upon", hence its use in epi-center, even the Greeks used it in all sorts of surprising and imprecise ways with just about any case (genitive, dative, accusative) yet somehow they managed to understand each other.
Example with the genitive:
epi Periklous archontos = "during the archonship of Perikles" [this is, during the one-year period Perikles served as archon]
Why they used the idea of "upon" for our idea of "during" in this phrase, who the Hades knows? It's just accidence -- there can't be some compelling spatial reason for it over, say, "en" = "in", especially when they have another word that more normally expressed the temporal idea of "during".
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