JoelNothman.com

Welcome all to my new home on the web, and its obligatory blog. Of course, some will remember I wrote a few blog posts on my site in 2001. But in those days we called them “web logs”… or even by that stage one word: “weblog”. The geeks had the fashion first, and then the rest of the world joined them and made it sound cool when they circumcised it and named this honourable practice “to blog”.

Funny word, “blog”. It rhymes with all sorts of important slang words like “bog”, “grog”, “slog”, “snog”, even ”smog”- and then a bunch of animals: the dog, frog and hog. There is something in the texture of the word (in the back, round vowel, and the voiced consonants) that makes it sound—despite the frog—big, heavy, lumpy. And really, “blog” doesn’t fit to that pattern, but I think it’s too late to change that.

One guy in my Semantics and Pragmatics class last semester made an interesting presentation on ideophones, which relate to onomatopoeia and synaesthesia, all of which describe the idea that words can have a natural feel about them. Maybe this feel is language dependent, or maybe it’s something more universal, but it’s definitely something to think about — why a word sounds like it does, and how it gets its vibe. Go take a look at this picture, and decide for yourself- which is “kiki” and which is “booba”?

So I welcome you to my big, heavy, lumpy blog. I’ll be ranting here about all sorts of mixed pieces of my life and adventures, as well as bits of language, technology, language technology, music, education and current affairs, when I come to feel a passion for something. I hope to see you round!