What's up with further vs farther?

Yeah, I know it's been a while since I posted, and I've kinda let this blog die off, but I figure, better late than never, right?

So, to start with just a random thought: Why is it that "farther" seems to be the only word we can't use figuratively? The standard explanation is that "farther" is only used for literal distance, while "further" can be used in a figurative sense.

What's up with that? What other word do we have this rule for? As I understand it, you get to use any word you want in a figurative or metaphorical sense. Why not "farther" as well? (I guess the one other example would be "literal", which I oppose the figurative use of, since, ya know, it's the one word that's supposed to actually distinguish the two cases, and without which we can't even speak of the difference.)

It just doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

[Insert usual remark about how I composed this entire post, including navigating to and copying the link, without the mouse or trackpad.]

Setting naming conventions for international audiences straight.

So the place in Budapest where I'm staying is called the K9 Residence.  What I need to say next depends on your native language.  Please skip to the subheading that best describes you.

Native English Speakers

No, the place doesn't have anything to do with dogs, nor can one jokingly say that they "treat you like one".  The name comes from how it's number 9 on the street Karoly Korut, and no one ever alerted them, apparently, that K9 is a common shorthand for "dog" in English.  (Or perhaps they did learn that much, but deemed it too late to change.)

Non-Native English Speakers

Hey, did you know that in English, K9 is a common symbol or abbreviation for "dog"?  Yeah, it comes from how it's pronounced like "canine", the adjective for dog based on its Latin root canis.  Remember that movie K-9?  Yeah, kinda like that.

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Anyway, I don't expect all of this internationalization to go perfectly for everyone, but, well, y'all could have saved me from having to explain stuff to a lot of people of different native tongues...

Verb regularization sighted

You may have heard of the paper published about a year ago modeling when and why verbs regularize, that is, stop having irregular past tenses. (take->took is irregular, while jump->jumped is not) The basic idea is that the less frequently a verb is used, especially its past tense forms, the quicker speakers are to stop using the irregular form. Which makes sense, because those verbs are much easier for people to forget, and much easier for editors not to notice.

Well, in all the turmoil of this week's financial markets, what catches my attention the most? This:

Lending has grinded to a virtual standstill in the wake of the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers... [emphasis mine]

Now, maybe I've been living in a cave, but that's the first time I'd seen "grinded" instead of "ground" for the past tense in writing. Looks like that one's on the way out!

Oh, and I hope you got out of U.S. stocks and own some gold.

UPDATE: What a crock! They fundamentally revised the article at the link, removing even the sentence that I quoted. I didn't know I was linking to the Department of History Alteration or whatever Orwellian agency it is...

How to get women into video games: a suggestion

Tyler Cowen's post about what makes a game good got me to thinking about why there has long existed a difference in popularity of video/computer games between men and women, and what it would take to change that.

(Digression: of course, the Wii has made a lot of progress, and I've known women who started playing because of their brothers, but hasn't had the kind of addictive capacity it's had for men).

So see if my thinking is right here: a game becomes addicting because it stimulates your brain in a way that you want to get more of it. So, if games have historically appealed to males and not females, it must be because they have historically challenged a part of the brain that is more pronounced for men than women. Fortunately, brain researchers know exactly which areas these are: women have a more pronounced Broca's area and Wernicke's area, which are vital for the use and processing of language (damage to them can cause inability to coherently use language), while men have more pronounced brain areas for detecting motion (more specific names forthcoming).

So, for games to appeal to women in the same way that they have appealed to men, they would have to require you to notice and respond to subtleties of language -- perhaps you'd need to be able to infer mood, deception, hesitation, etc. from others' speech in order to advance. In other words, situate you in the middle of a Jane Austen novel in which you have to navigate human interaction with something like the same complexity that exists in human interaction.

And in fact, it does appear to me as if that attribute has been lacking in any game that's not online, and probably because it's so hard to program.

Just a thought.