Otterblog

One of the great things about the English language and our highly mobile and interwoven society is the way words and phrases travel and make their way from the sidestream to the mainstream. I was reading a story yesterday in our sports section about an Olympic sprinter and it had this passage:

For sprinter Walter Dix, the epiphany came when he was 9 years old and playing street football.
A “big kid,” four years his senior, challenged him to a race. A mismatch, some figured. Not so much. Dix beat him by a lean, which was the moment that Dix and those in his Fort Lauderdale neighborhood realized just how freakishly fast he was.

Not so much. Everybody is saying it these days. And now it has made its way into the great American newspaper as that most useful of phrases: The quick and snappy transition sentence. It does two things well with only three words. First, it bursts the bubble of the intended outcome. Second, it establishes the writer as a hip person in the know, not a stuffy, tradition-bound, gasp, print journalist,.

Not so much fever, at least in my world, began in earnest after Borat came out. But the phrase has been around a much longer time. Here’s a great piece on the history of not so much. As the story points out, the inflections in the saying have hints of Yiddish, the original language of the smart aleck.

New search engine: Just when Google has invaded every pore and fiber of our being comes a new search engine. One of my co-workers sent me the link to cuil.com last night, and in the interest of research I am going to use it for a few days to see how well it works. Its founders came from Google. And yes, it is pronounced “cool.”

Cuil update. Good-looking, not so good-working. The results don’t seem to jibe with how my brain works (no jokes, please). I think we all want search engines that think how we think. In other words, if we had the brain capacity to store all this info, it would be categorized by our version of the Dewey Decimal system. Case in point. This morning, I was trying to get the conversion from cubic feet to gallons. So I typed in those words to cuil and got page after page of nonsense. Did the same thing with Google. Got a bunch of links that all had the info, as well as a standalone figure. For those playing at home, it’s 7.48 gallons to a cubic foot. With some other searches, I’ve been quite pleased, but many seem to be a bit off the mark. Will keep trying, as I like the way the searches are displayed. Hopefully, the intuitive aspect of it will improve.