Comments on: Transliteracy and Chess-Playing Bears

By: walt

walt — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 01:12:33 +0000

You’re probably right, and I probably shouldn’t have made the correction to chess-playing bears. Still, what’s done is done. Hmm: A tic-tac-toe-playing chicken? Might be possible to defeat one.

And I find Bing only has this post as #3 in its hit parade for the phrase “chess-playing bear.” Such is fame, or lack thereof.

Oh, look at that: I’ve used “chess-playing bear” before, in an October 2006 post about Datapoint.

By: Seth Finkelstein

Seth Finkelstein — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 01:07:21 +0000

I think part of the appeal of the phrase “dancing bear” is related to such things really existing – so it has the connotation of something which is possible and can be exhibited, but strange and difficult.

There are allegedly chickens which have been trained to play tic-tac-toe, but this doesn’t seem to have inspired any turns of phrase.

By: walt

walt — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 18:49:23 +0000

Seth: Shows what an aging memory will do. After I wrote the original item, it struck me that there have been a number of examples of actual trained dancing bears, making that less of a marvel. A chess-playing bear, or even a checkers-playing one, would indeed be a marvel.

As for this post now being a first Google result: Perhaps not too surprising. Google Page Rank 6 isn’t anything to make money from, but it presumably boosts Google ratings a fair amount. (109 of the 1,304 liblogs I’ve identified have GPR 6, so it’s not *that* exclusive a club–while the 23 with GPR 7, well, that’s a different matter. No liblog has GPR 8 or 9, not surprisingly.)

By: Seth Finkelstein

Seth Finkelstein — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 12:43:09 +0000

Hmm? The expression for “the marvel isn’t that it’s done well but that it’s done at all” is indeed “dancing bear”. I’ve never heard “chess-playing bear”. Indeed, a Google search shows the latter to be a very uncommon expression, with approximately 80 hits for the quoted phrase. Many are for a toy, another refers to Russia.

Amusingly, this post is now the first Google result for the phrase “chess-playing bear”.