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Cindy Smart Knows Better Than To Say Naughty Words
D'Sphitz writes "Cindy Smart, the first doll in the world to be able to read, tell the time and do sums.
Cindy Smart 'sees' via a camera located under a bee on her overalls and has a computer 'brain' that can recognise more than 600 words and objects, although she refuses to recite certain 4-letter words. 'We don't say those kind of words,' she shrills, refusing to even spell obscenities. 'That's a bad word.'" Sounds like a good candidate for a personality transplant.
There are over 500,000 words in the english language. she recognizes slightly over .1% of them. I give her about 5 minutes reading any book with a decent vocabulary before she craps out. I know this is a toy, but memory isn't that expensive these days.
Help I'm a rock.
Okay, this is cool and all, but this doll can recognize "more than 600 words and objects" (which, as pointed out elsewhere, is not that many), and they used one of them on the German word for bird??
Man it really kills me how words with Germanic roots have gotten such a bad name. Why is 'feces' a more acceptable word than 'shit'? Because it come from the Latin 'faex' rather than the Old English 'scite'?
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Why does 'intelligent' sound more sophisticated than 'smart'? Because it comes directly from french rather than Old English?
Just because our (as in english speakers') priests used to speak Latin while our kings used to speak French does not mean we should favor one part of our language over another. Orwell has a very interesting piece, Politics and the English Language, which deals with this issues.
It pisses me off so much when people try to limit my vocabulary. This is off-topic just a bit, but
I was in a class called 'Images of Africa in Film and Literature.' I read some good books and saw some interesting films. Generally, I was enjoying it. Then one day, someone (maybe me?) refered to native South Africans. The prof got upset. "We just don't use that word," he said. The jist of his argument against the word was that many ignorant people use it to refer to stereotypic, primitive people who live in the jungle, hunt heads and dance around cauldrons.
These stereotypes are, of course, not encouraged by the academic community which studies Africa. But Jesus H. Fucking Christ, native just means someone who was born in a particular place or apeople which has resided in a location for a long time.
After that, I just really lost interest in the class and respect for that prof. I just did enough to get by, and I still got an A.
So in conclusion, thought/word/language police, FUCK OFF!
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
This story is from an AU domain. It talks about the doll being released in Melbourne, and talks about how popular the doll has been here in the U.S. since it was released last November. So had anyone in the U.S. even heard of it before now?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Am I the only person who is reminded of an old scifi short story, about a future utopia where a child's teddy bear would teach the child how to behave? Apparently, one person removed the circuitry of one child's bear, tampered with it, and replaced it, resulting in an adult, apparently normal as everybody else, who was able to kill the world leader, because teddy never taught him that it was bad to kill people.
Is this doll a step in that direction? I sure hope not!
(Aside note - I read that story when I was very young (I was a precocious kid), and it really hurt me to think that *anybody* would take apart a *teddy bear* and make it do evil things. This doll evokes the same sort of feeling in me. )
Lemon curry?
A word's place in a language is how it's used by the speakers.
I can say feces and be unambigous in describing fecal matter to any English speaker.
Shit doesn't always describe animal excretia in English. It also describes a situation or thing which is negative to the point of requiring a word of curse. Much like sex and fuck can refer to the same thing, you don't go up to random people and talk about fucking unless you are very low brow. You can probably talk about sex, though, as long as it's appropriate to the context.
Languages are not logical -- sayings and alternate forms arrise all the time, and are designated as how people use them, not as logic would dictate.
For example, to indicate that someone had revealed a secret, one English expression you might say is, "he let the cat out of the bag." How does that relate to secrets? The french equivalent, "Il a vendu la meche." litterally translates as, "He sold the wick."
How about, "He's as tall as 3 apples." Is that easy to recognize like, "He's knee high to a grasshopper." is?
If you have a problem with the conotations and denotations of the English language, I suggest you learn another one. Then you might appreciate their usage better.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
This phenomenon is not limited to English. Many other languages have the property that foreign imported words are more acceptable in polite company than native words.
For example, in Japanese, there are three major categories of words:
- Native Japanese words, inherited from antiquity
- Chinese words, imported roughly 1000 years ago
- English words, imported since the 20th century and continuing to this day
In almost all cases the more recently imported words are more sophisticated than the older words. For example, the polite way to say restroom in Japanese is either "toire" (derived from the English word toilet) or "otearai" (imported from chinese, literally meaning "hand-wash"). There exist native Japanese words for restroom, but they connote dirtiness and one would never use them in polite company.The three-level categorization of Japanese allows for more interesting observations than English's two level Latin/Germanic split. Note here that the most recent English import "toilet" can be used directly in polite speech, while the older Chinese import requires a euphemism and the original native words cannot be used at all. Compare this to native English, where "toilet" is one of the crudest possible ways to refer to a restroom. Familiarity breeds contempt, in any language.