In an old entry, life in translation mentions the problem of keeping -or and -ee apart, for example, writing lessor instead of lessee. It’s surprisingly easy to confuse parties in documents, and lawyers do it as well as translators.

Then there are difficult words like mortgagor (Hypothekenschuldner) and mortgagee (Hypothekengläubiger).

It’s not as simple as active and passive (employer, employee; divorcee (used some years ago for women)). So I can’t logically complain about attendees. There’s been a discussion on the Lexicography List. Urdang, I gather, also mentioned amputee (recipient of the result of an action), patentee (a person furnished with the thing named by the root) and escapee (a person performing the action named by the root).

There’s a paper on the topic, entitled Episodic -ee in English:
A thematic role constraint on new word formation
Chris Barker
University of California, San Diego

Some superfluous EEs gathering in Kensington (near ITI conference, April 2007):

Ausschnitt aus ARD Morgenmagazin: Kinder fragen Politiker zu ihren Computern. Mit erstaunlich schwachen Antworten.

Markus Trapp introduces a video clip (in German) from a German breakfast TV show, in which children interview German politicians on their computer use, and the politicians are not very well informed.

Since I have been too busy to post, and everyone else in Fürth is doing HDR pictures, here’s a picture of the flowers I was given near Staffelstein:

The leaves came out very well. The subtle apricot background is a darker orange wall, the windowless side wall of a back building.

The TLS – unfortunately only the print edition – is soliciting Poems for Tony. It tantalizes with snippets from a poem by Penelope Shuttleworth entitled ‘On the Silence of Tony Blair, Following the Execution of Saddam Hussein’, which ends with words given to Blair, ‘I’ll just say, as one power-star to another, / Farewell and Hail, / I just know we shall see your like again’. The whole thing is apparently in the spring edition of The Rialto.

The TLS also recommends She Literally Exploded: The “Daily Telegraph” Infuriating Phrasebook, by Christopher Howse and Richard Preston. To quote the publisher’s blurb on amazon.co.uk:

I’ll let you go now – But you’ll buttonhole me later.
Inappropriate – Used by officials who want to blame people for behaviour that is not illegal or forbidden. The patient used an inappropriate tone when raising issues around ward cleanliness.
Jus – gravy.
Pan-fried – instead of being fried in an old dustbin-lid.
Serving suggestion – On the label of a prepared meal, a warning that the plate, tablecloth, and accompanying boar’s head shown in the picture are not included in the small plastic container.

To translate languages by machine is a little less easy than falling off a log, but the need is so great that in less than a decade since it was first seriously suggested many groups of people have gone to work on the problem.

So writes Scientific American in an article headed Translation by Machine, in January 1956, when I was only nine and wanted to be an entomologist (where did it all go wrong?)

Some years ago there was considerable worry about whether a computer could have a large enough memory to store all the stems, plus the various endings, plus the irregular words, plus the grammar rules, plus the programming instructions. But it looks now as though computers will soon have plenty of fast storage capacity in the form of magnetic drums, tape or photographic film.

IBM 350, first hard disk, September 1956:

Thanks to kalebeul.