old times

i was digging through old links and found these two pages, fantastic in different ways, and both funny as hell.

the music nerd test, mostly for contemporary/modern music fans though (sorry dave, but give it a shot!), at which i scored "54.34783% - Super Music Nerd". part of me wants to score higher, but parts of me realizes that i'm still not socially inept so scoring somewhat high but not, you know, HIGH is actually a good thing. the girl who's created the test, and the site, has the good taste to really like douglas coupland (url is couplandesque.net) and it's from her i learned that the word couplandesque is actually used! i love coupland's books, but that's for another entry.

a person paper on purity of language is a great satirical text dealing with inconsistencies, prejudice and bias in the english language. to make a point about how excluding expressions and grammatical rules are for women he exchanges women for blacks and men for whites and the effect is obvious. one thing that's really great is that he uses the same argument as the defenders of the generic he does (i've read a lot of texts about that..) which only makes me think less of it (not the text that is). i found it while studying english linguistics a few years ago and doing a thesis on language and gender. it's a great read; eyeopening and funny, and not just for language geeks such as myself.