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Randall Munroe, the xkcd.com cartoonist, has updated his Map of Online Communities to Spring-Summer 2010. (http://xkcd.com/802/) (Compare to his map only three years ago. Wickedly different. Diminution of Yahoo, AOL, Windows Live, and MySpace, for starters.)
Remember to hover over the image to see the tooltip, and to click on it the map to see a very much enlarged version. It's kind of fractal. You can see the shape of the online world in one screen, then look at the large version and see myriad details and in-jokes only hinted at in the smaller version.
See where People You Can't Unfriend go. Cross the Sea of Memes. See the last of the IRC Isles. Cross the Gulf of China, where everything is QQ. (simultaneously meaning to Quit, Crying, and a Chinese brand. Kind of like the Chinese character for crisis.) Over on MMO island, Runescape = Farmland? The liberal and conservative blogs are separated by the Bay of Flame, and Paul Krugman has his own island near, but offshore, from the liberal blogs. Tongues WAY in cheek.
I thought everyone would get a kick of seeing the Bay of Grammar Pedantry. (I know we're just talking about getting pedantic, but every time I see that phrase I think of doing bad things to children using grammar. And how does ped come to mean feet and minors at the same time?) As you go southwest of Twitter, across the Sea of Opinions to the far side of the Blogosphere, there is an island of Diary and Writing/Poetry Blogs, separated by the Bay of Grammar Pedantry from the Fandom Blogs. (The Religious, Gossip, Political and other blogs are even *farther* away!) One of the unnamed islands in that Bay must be AWWW Isle! (Stop and stay awwwhile!) Too funny not to share with you all here.
Reassuringly, Facebook < Email < Spoken Language...
…how does ped come to mean feet and minors at the same time?
Being a pedant myself, I can answer this one: There are two different roots, one in Latin and one in Greek.
Ped- means "foot" in Latin. Technically, if you know what's meant by "declension", that's pes, pedis. And if you don't, trust me, you don't need to; feel free to stick to "ped- means 'foot' in Latin".
In Greek, paidos (παιδός, rhymes with "my dose") means "child". We should spell it "paidantry", then, not "pedantry", but for two reasons we don't. 1) The Romans conquered Greece, brought home a lot of Greek prisoners of war (pronounced "slaves", in that age) and became great admirers of Greek culture and language. As a consequence they adopted lots of Greek words into their own language, and for a while it was even fashionable to speak Greek around the Empire. And 2) for more than a thousand years after that, Europeans used Latin as the common language when writing for an audience outside one's own country. (Nowadays most people use English for that purpose; before that it was French, and for a while in diplomatic circles it was Russian. These things change from time to time.) So most Greek words that we use in English nowadays are spelled not like Greek but as though they came to us through Latin first—which for the most part they did. Greek had a letter 'f' (φ), but the Romans didn't, so they spelled that letter "ph"; nowadays we write "telephone", not "telefon". The Greeks spelled the 's' sound with 'c' and the 'k' sound with 'k', but in Latin they spelt 'k' with the letter 'c', so today we write "cactus" rather than "kaktos". (Note that even the Greek -os ending changes to the Latin -us; all those centuries of writing scholarly treatises in Latin, so they could be understood by others, made lots of Greek look like Latin.) And nowadays in English the letter 'c' can be pronounced like 's' as well as like 'k', so we pronounce caesar "SEE-zerr", instead of "KIE-zerr" as the Germans and Russians do (and the Romans did), and Cicero we say "SISS-er-o" instead of "KEE-ker-o", etc.
And the diphthong that we pronounce "eye" was spelled "ai" in Greek but "ae" in Latin. But over the centuries, Europeans' pronunciation of Latin changed and "ae" began to be pronounced "ee" instead of "eye". Then the spelling of it started to be simplified as well; so instead of the old "anæsthetic" we now write "anesthetic", and "pædagogue" is just "pedagogue". And the old "pædantry" is now "pedantry".
I'll bet THAT'S a lot more information than you wanted.
I wanted to check out the "ae", so, I immediately searched for a great British dictionary online. What I found instead was Macmillan, which allows a setting for British or American English, but there must be better, because it has words, but is hugely lacking in definitions (brief or missin) and entirely missing etymology. Luckily I knew the meanings. They do have some interesting things, like identifying whether a noun is countable or not. They also have a great preview of potential words as you type in the search window.)
(By the way, I was told in England that there is no such thing as "British English", it's just "English", and it's not what Americans speak. I also learned that no American can correct the English of the English, even when they're wrong. We're ineligible.)
So, here is what MacMillan has for "ped" and "paed" words ("ae" as a digraph; they don't have it as the combined graph):
Foot roots:
pedestal
pedestrian -ise -ize -ization
pedicure -ist
pedigree
pediment
pedometer
Child roots:
pedagogic -al -ly
pedagogue
pedagogy
pedant -ic -ally
pederast paederast
pediatrician paediatrician
pediatric -s paediatric -s
pedophile paedophile
pedophilia paedophilia
Interesting that the British setting still showed the American ped- versions too. The American setting showed paed- versions, except, interestingly, paederast. The British showed both -ise and -ize for pedestrianise.
Clearly shows the distinction between the foot words with just ped- and the child words with paed-. EXCEPT - for pedant & pedagogue, which come from paedagogus, paidagogos, but don't have the paed- prefix options currently.
Oxford at least offers origins.
pedagogue
Origin: late Middle English: via Latin from Greek paidagÅgos, denoting a slave who accompanied a child to school (from pais, paid- 'boy' + agÅgos 'guide')
I most enjoyed discovering the "foot" origin of pedigree:
Origin: late Middle English: from Anglo-Norman French pé de grue 'crane's foot', a mark used to denote succession in pedigrees
Surely, though, the Greeks spelled the 's' sound not with 'c' but with sigma, right?
Yes and no. Yes, they spelled it with sigma. Yes, they spelled it with 'c'—because sigma, in the Greek of that period, is alone of all their letters in having two different lower-case forms:
The capital letter is Σ.
The usual lower-case form of sigma is σ. For example, the Greek word for "savior" is σωτηÏ, which in English letters looks like "soter". (I forget the accent; I'm pretty sure it was accented on the first syllable, the omega, but I don't remember whether it was an acute accent (σώτηÏ) or a circumflex (σῶτηÏ). I can still read it, but it's been a few decades since I had to spell in it.)
But if the sigma came at the end of the word, it looked like this instead: Ï‚. It's a 'c' with a little tail underneath it, which in handwritten manuscripts is missing the tail so it just looks like a 'c'. Thus the word στÏατηγός starts with a sigma and ends with a sigma ("strategos"), but they're two different forms of the sigma. It was the latter form that I meant when I said Greek spells their 's' sound with a 'c' and the 'k' sound with a 'k'—which, incidentally, Russian does too. Those jackets the Sov athletes wore to the Olympic games all said CCCP, which in the Cyrillic alphabet meant SSSR, which in Russian stood for "Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics". Or so I was told, knowing almost no Russian myself.
Your statement about Russian is spot on. By the way, the words for the r and two of the s letters are close Russian equivalents to Soviet, Socialist, Republic. The remaining s is, then, the word for Union which, some might recall from the joint space project with Apollo, is transcribed as Soyuz.
Союз СоветÑких СоциалиÑтичеÑких РеÑпублик (transcribed: Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik)
The Cyrillic similarity to the Greek alphabet isn't coincidental. The monks who developed the writing system for the Cyrillic languages based the letters largely on the biblical Greek and Hebrew alphabets.
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