It's been a while since we saw a list of wacky referring searches.

Huh. That's useful. Good to know.

BitchPhD
Ogged
apostropher
w-lfs-n

Pah, I thought you meant intra-word wildcards. That would have been news.

It's been a while since we saw a list of wacky referring searches.

Someone just searched for child "real doll".

Had enough?

The "Worth a Shot" thread is going to bring in some interesting referrals.

I bet the Johnny Depp search was the second trial, after you searched for "woman * dog dick."

Wildcards can also go within words. Scary, huh?

Here's a fun one.

Oh, f*ck.

Boss!

Or maybe they can't. I could've sworn they did. Anyway, they've had the feature for more than a year now.

Too many options

Here's another one.

It seems like putting a wildcard at the beginning and end of a search shouldn't be any different than the same search without wildcards, but in fact it is different. Weird.

14: That is a gold mine.

"My moustache smells like tarter sauce."

This thread reminds me of this other one with amusing google games.

That thread has one of the best Emerson one-liners I've seen.

So by the way, we were covering the cognitive origin and structure of "X is the Y of Z" metaphors today in one of my classes, so I think screwing around in unfogged threads now officially counts as doing my homework.

20: A good name for them is 'snowclones'. Go to the Language Log and search for that term -- they've been discussing them for a couple of years.

As for wildcards, one of my favorite bands (Eagle*Seagull) was so named (I've read) because of the google wildcarding -- I guess they didn't want people to be able to easily find them online? I dunno.

21: I think the literature we're dealing with pretty much compels me to call them "XYZ Metaphors."

In any case we're talking about something somewhat different; a good example would be "consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

Also, the concept being taught is that these types of metaphors reflect something fundamental about the use of analogical reasoning in the brain, so it wouldn't be quite accurate to call them journalistic cliches.

Well, you can call them whatever you like I suppose. I'm pretty sure we're talking about the same thing, though (not 'journalistic cliches'), but ... no worries.

23: I checked out a few of the relevant posts on language log, and I still don't think so: xyz metaphors in this case are a general class of analogy, and aren't tied to a specific form of idiom.

More detail than you'd ever want here or here.

The search linked in the post works better if you enclose the wildcards and the last word in the quotes.

21 - Well, they failed. Maybe they named themselves in the Alta Vista or Webcrawler era.

26 -- it doesn't count if you search for something that isn't the name of the band, and the band comes up. Searching on the name of the band actually brings up (besides references to the band) a bunch of "eagle something something seagull" pages. Which I take was the point? I don't know, I just like their music.

Also, one of the links in 24 leads me to this paragraph:

"In Fauconnier and Turner, 1994, where we introduced the many-space model of metaphor and conceptual integration, we gave a detailed analysis of an example in which a catamaran in 1993 is trying beat the record sailing time from San Francisco to Boston set by a clipper in 1853. A newspaper reports that, as it went to press, the catamaran was "barely maintaining a 4.5 day lead" over the clipper. We showed that this formulation could not refer to either of the actual runs, in 1853 or 1993, but had to combine them in a new counterfactual mental space in which both boats are sailing simultaneously. We called such a space a "blended space." It is only in this blended space that "maintaining a lead" could make sense. In each of the actual runs there was only one boat, and thus not even the possibility of a lead. But in the blend, it does make sense to compare the relative positions of the boats at a single time, and this comparison gives us true information about the two original runs."

And that just makes me wonder how Turner and Fauconnier would analyze the digitally-imposed World-Record lines that always seemed to be touching Michael Phelps's feet in Melbourne a week or two ago. TV is the blended space! Visual metaphors, but with more advertising.

That type of phenomenon is specifically addressed, I believe, in follow-ups to that paper. Certainly, television is a blended space on many axes, not least of which blends your local point of view with that provided by the cameras. Nested blends they call, I think, analogic calculus.

What I'm growing to appreciate about this stuff is that it actually lays claim to a plausible, falsifiable neurological basis. That's what makes the work of rebuilding basic knowledge worth it, in theory.