Not Just Sausage

The questions came via email. "What are your favorite links?" "Where do you spend the most time on the web?"

By links I am assuming the writer is not referring to sausage even though I love sausage and spend some quality time with sausage quite often.


Click on the following and have some fun!



Schott's Vocab. A miscellany of modern words and phrases. This is Ben Schott's daily column on modern words and usage. But it is on the weekends that this site really shines. The Weekend Competitions are great fun and mental exercise. I urge you to partake of one next weekend. I also suggest you take a look at the past competitions just to get a feel for what fun is there to be enjoyed.


SPOGG. The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar. SPOGG is for people who crave good, clean English — sentences cast well and punctuated correctly. It's about clarity. SPOGG is the proud founder of National Grammar Day, which happens every year on March 4.


A Walk In The WoRds. A linguistic tour for people who love having fun with words and language. A place to share interesting linguistic observations regarding sound, meaning and structure. A place to share linguistic rants and raves. A place to walk in the words.


There are two blogs written by dear friends that I frequent frequently -


In My Shoes

and

Sassy Lass


Two excellent reference sites, two fun sites and a parting shot of great humor -


Online Etymology Dictionary. This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. Etymologies are not definitions; they're explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago. I love this site when the question pops in my head, "Where the heck did THAT word come from?"



The Ref Desk is a wonderful site to at least begin to look up almost anything. In most cases there will be the one link you need to start your hunt. From dictionaries and news to history and people and everything in between, this is a rich resource.


Listverse is a daily list of a wide variety of subjects such as books, movioes, historical events, famous people and on and on. Wandering through the past lists is a fascinting time.



Mental Floss is, as the website says, "Where Knowledge Junkies Get Their Fix".



Finally, if you love improvisational humor and enjoy watching people laugh you really need to visit Improv Everywhere. Improv Everywhere causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places. Grocery Store Musical is the latest offering. Please click on such scenes as Frozen Grand Central, Suicide Jumper, Circle Line Tours and The Moebius. But if you only check one of their improvs watch Best Game Ever. It is a little league game you will never forget.



Enjoy!!

How Punny Are You?

It happens to all of us. You are sitting with a group of friends and all of a sudden you are overwhelmed by the urge to tell a long somewhat improbable story that ends with a pun. Loud groans are made and you are pelted with pillows, cushions, paper, garbage and anything else that comes to hand. Why does this happen, and why do certain people seem to be more likely to be
stricken with this dread disease.

Dubbed SPS (Shaggy Pun Syndrome) by prominent psychologists, this illness has baffled scientists. What causes it; love of groaning sounds, subconscious desires to be hit with loose objects in the room, or some deeper cause such as becoming fixated at the silly phase. Whatever the cause, SPS can become a serious mental illness, and if unchecked in its early phases, can result in minor injury (from beatings), major injury (from worse beatings), and even death (from still worse beatings).

Don't despair, treatment is becoming available, ranging from oral counseling, to gags, to tongue removal. As an early warning device the SPT (Shaggy Pun Test) has been developed, based on the idea that retention of puns can lead to SPS the SPT is a collection of "punch lines" from said stories, recognition of over a critical number can indicate serious potential for SPS. If caught early enough it is hoped that the puns maybe removed by surgical means.

To take the SPT merely make an x beside each punch line that you either remember or that you can easily build a story to fit. Remember a score of 100% is not necessarily desirable.

__1. The squire on the hippopotamus is equal to the sons of the
other two squires.
__2. Two obese Patties / special Ross / Lester Cheese picking
bunions / on a Sesame Street bus!
__3. MORAL: Let your pages do the walking through the yellow
fingers.
__4. MORAL: People who live in grass houses shouldn't stow
thrones.
__5. MORAL: Don't hatchet your counts before they chicken.
__6. Gladly, my cross-eyed bear.
__7. Super California Mystic Expert Halitosis
__8. I wouldn't send a knight out on a dog like this.
__9. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's chess nuts boasting
in an open foyer.
_10. I left my harp in Sam Clam's Disco.
_11. MORAL: A niche in time saves Stein.
_12. There must be fifty ways to love your lever.
_13. Well, there's something about an aqua volvo, man...
_14. MORAL: A washed pot never oils.
_15. Transporting mynas over sedate lions for immortal porpoises.
[Other version of the punch line: Carrying gulls across a
staid lion for immortal porpoises.]
_16. It's a long way to tip a Raree.
_17. Rudolph, the Red, knows rain, dear.
_18. For making an obscene clone fall.
_19. Doctor, the thong is ended, but the malady lingers on!
_20. Where were you when the fit hit the Shan?
_21. ... They had left no tern unstoned.
_22. ... Abscess make the fart go HONDA!
_23. Silly Rabbi, kicks are for Trids!
_24. These are the 'times' that dry men's soles. [Alternate:
These are the soles that time men's tries]
_25. And he served the first chicken catch a Tory dinner.
_26. The next day, the headline in the paper read "Peter Viper
wrecks a truck of pickled Steppers".
_27. Ike's Aunt gets nose hat is fact, son
_28. Dee, who flaps last, flaps left
_29. That's the beer that made Mel Famie walk us.
_30. The first time a reign was called on account of the game.
_31. Opporknockity tunes but once. [Alternate: O'Pernokkety tunes
but once.]
_32. Because Herman the German was used to hard ships.
_33. Hugh, and only Hugh, can prevent florist friars!
_34. No, I'm a frayed knot.
_35. You fools! We have ways to make you tock!
_36. Which just goes to show that, a Benny shaved is a Benny
urned.
_37. Pardon me Roy, is that the cat who chewed your new shoes?
_38. We have come to seize your berries, not to appraise them.
_39. When you're out of slits, you're out of pier!
_40. We can't have archaic and edict, too.
_41. Contributing to the delinquency of a miner!
_42. I'm booking over that 4 clove leaver, though I've overcooked
before!
_43. Knick Knack, Paddy Whack. Give the frog a loan.
_44. Another case where the spirit was willing but the flush was
weak.
_45. Time's fun when your having flies.
_46. A fiery "stead with the spite of Leed, A clout of dust And a
hearty "Buy old Silver!"
_47. It's a rambling rack from George the Turk with an elephant
engineer!
_48. All of Hing's courses and all of Ming's ken couldn't get gum
tea to feather a hen.
_49. I don't know, but he's a dead ringer for his brother.
_50. ... Stilling two birds with one's cone.
_51. General Minh prefer bronze.
_52. With fronds like these, who needs anemones?
_53. Repaint! Repaint! And thin no more!
_54. Better Nate than Lever.
_55. The hills are alive with the hounds of Munich.
_56. He who has a Tate's is lost.
_57. Artie chokes 3 for a dollar at local market.
_58. MORAL: A stolen roan gathers no moose.
_59. ... but actually mah hammered alley is really cashews clay.
_60. ... but of course, the Czech is always in the male.
_61. The star mangled spanner.
_62. See! Even adders can multiply on a log table.
_63. MORAL: You can't have your kayak and heat it too.



Scoring:
0 - 10 No danger (healthy)
11 - 25 Minor SPS (Recommend therapy)
26 - 40 Moderate SPS (Recommend gag)
41 - 52 Punster -- major SPS (Recommend tongue removal)
53 - 63 Paronomisiac -- extreme SPS (Recommend lobotomy)

Brain Itch

We have all had this happen -

Research in the US has found that songs get stuck in our heads because they create a "brain itch" that can only be scratched by repeating the tune over and over.

In Germany, this type of song is known as an "ohrwurm" - an earworm - and typically has a high, upbeat melody and repetitive lyrics that verge between catchy and annoying.

Songs such as the Village People's YMCA, Los Del Rio's Macarena, and the Baha Men's Who Let The Dogs Out owe their success to their ability to create a "cognitive itch," according to Professor James Kellaris, of the University of Cincinnati College of Business Administration.

"A cognitive itch is a kind of metaphor that explains how these songs get stuck in our head," Professor Kellaris told BBC World Service's Outlook programme.

"Certain songs have properties that are analogous to histamines that make our brain itch.

"The only way to scratch a cognitive itch is to repeat the offending melody in our minds."

'Insidious and blatant'

Professor Kellaris has presented the early results of his earworm research at a conference on Consumer Psychology.

He said that virtually everyone suffered from a cognitive itch at one time or another.


"Across surveys I found that from 97% to 99% of the population is susceptible to earworms at some time," he stated.

"But certainly some people are more susceptible than others. Women tend to be more susceptible than men, and musicians are more susceptible to them than non-musicians."

The research is of particular interest to both the pop industry - looking to boost sales - and to advertisers, who often use jingles to get their brand name stuck in the head of listeners.

"For both advertising purposes and pop music purposes, you want something that once heard is not forgotten quickly or easily," explained jingle writer Chris Smith, adding that a good earworm was "Insidious - and often quite blatant".

"One of the key elements of an earworm is repetition," he said.

"If you have something with a lot of varied content, it's not so easily assimilated.

"So really, I would have thought that for practical purposes an earworm is really something that people can take on very quickly and then reproduce while walking down the street, much to everybody else's annoyance."

Even the greatest musicians had suffered with earworms, Mr Smith said.

Mozart's children would "infuriate" him by playing melody and scales on the piano below his room - but stopping before completing the tune.

"He would have to rush down and complete the scale because he couldn't bear to listen to an unresolved scale," Mr Smith related.

Professor Kellaris said that his research had shown that there was, however, no standard for creating an earworm - people could react differently to different tunes.

"I compiled a top 10 list of earworms in the US, but the number one item is simply the category 'other' - which means that any tune is prone to become an earworm," he said. "It's highly idiosyncratic."

And he added that there was also no guaranteed way of ever getting the song off the brain.

"Replacement strategies rarely work, because as we search our memories for a replacement tune, we're likely to come up with another earworm," he admitted.

"Some people swear by completion strategies - if you listen through a piece in its entirety, some times that will make it go away."

America vs Britain In Spelling

Americans are embarrassed by poor spelling performance compared to Britons.

Quoted from The Telegraph

By Matthew Moore
Published: 11:59AM GMT 09 Feb 2009



Americans are worse at spelling than Britons, with more than half unable to spell "embarrassed", "liaison" and "millennium".

Despite the popularity of school spelling bee competitions, adults in the US fared poorly in a survey comparing how English speakers on both sides of the Atlantic deal with commonly misspelt words.

Sixty-two per cent of Americans got "embarrassed" wrong, against 54 per cent of Britons who struggled with the word in a survey last year.

Adults in the US performed less well on most of the ten words tested, including millennium (52 per cent wrong, against 43 per cent in UK), liaison (61 per cent to 54 per cent) and "accommodation" (42 per cent to 36 per cent).

Only "definitely" and "friend" were spelt correctly by more Americans.

Professor Edward Baranowski of California State University said that the results reflected the "horrific" drop-out rates of US high schools.

"This certainly puts an eventual strain upon the universities, which must devote lots of resources to remedial education," he said.

Jack Bovill of the Spelling Society, which commissioned the research, said the high inaccuracy rates in both countries showed the need for the English spelling system to be modernised to improve literacy.

"When asked, only a quarter of adults thought they had a problem with spelling. The answers in the test prove that this is far from the case," he said. "What is holding the UK and the USA back is the irregular spelling system."

The Spelling Society wants a cross-party committee of MPs to promote spelling reforms.

The US survey involvING a sample of 1,000 adults was carried out online by Ipsos MORI last month, with the method based on a survey of 1,000 Britons in April last year.

Someone has decided to do something about this!

Maybe they should think about this over a snack...

Just How Noble Is The Nobel?

With no comment on the current state of the Nobel Prize...


Here are ten authors who should absolutely have won a Nobel prize for their contribution to writing.


Jorge-Luis-Borges

Borges had a good twenty years to be considered for a Nobel, and was hot in the running for one for many years, but the Nobel Committee refused to award it to him because of his support for right-wing dictators like Pinochet. Sounds like someone he shouldn’t have supported, but the Committee routinely awarded the prize to writers who supported left-wing dictators like Joseph Stalin. Pinochet was worse than Stalin?

Borges wrote the finest surreal literature to date, and won the first International Pulitzer Prize. Politics seems a bad subject on which to argue.


Vladimir Nabokov

One of the greatest non-native writers of English. Nabokov’s most famous novel, and his finest, is Lolita. He wrote many more excellent works of fiction and criticism, translations of poetry. He was nominated in 1974, along with Graham Greene (not the actor), and lost to Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson, joint winners. The former was Swedish, and both were members of the Nobel Committee at the time.


W. H. Auden

One of the greatest 20th Century poets in history. He won the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and profoundly influenced all poets, especially English-speaking poets, who have come after him. It is believed that the Committee turned him down because he made errors in a translation of a book by Nobel Peace Prize winner Dag Hammarskjold, and because he suggested that Hammarskjold was homosexual, like Auden.


Robert Frost

The greatest 20th Century American Poet, by far. The Bard of the Northeast. He won 4 (FOUR!) Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry, was awarded over 40 honorary doctorates from Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, and Harvard, among others. The only other winner of four Pulitzers for literature is Eugene O’Neill, who did win a Nobel. Frost’s fourth Pulitzer was awarded 20 years before he died. The Nobel Committee managed to ignore him for those 20 years.


Emile Zola

The greatest exemplar of the French school of literary naturalism. He wrote over 30 novels, and any one of them could have gotten a Pulitzer today, without competition. His 2 chances to win were spoiled for the same reason as the next entry.


Henrik Ibsen

Norway’s greatest author, and one of the finest modern dramatic writers in history. He had 6 chances to win, since the award was begun in 1901, but he lost due to arguments over Alfred Nobel’s eligibility requirements, as laid out in his will. He intended the winners to exhibit “lofty and sound idealism.” But from 1901 to 1912, the Committee believed that he meant “ideal direction.” Apparently Ibsen, the father of modern drama, was not leading the literary world in the ideal direction.


Marcel Proust

The author of the most monumental work of 20th-Century fiction, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, In Search of Lost Time. It’s a 7-volume novel which exhibits one of the first, if not the first, example of stream of consciousness writing. And yet, the Committee award the 1920 prize to Knut Hamsun (Norwegian, which is closer to Swedish than French), for his monumental work, Growth of the Soil. Which one do more people read today? Yep, In Search of Lost Time.


James Joyce

The greatest Irish writer besides W. B. Yeats, who did win the prize. Joyce is also the greatest writer of stream of consciousness fiction in history. He practically invented the modern idea of speculative fiction, with his final work, Finnegans Wake, which is almost unreadable. He considered it his finest work, but is more famous for Ulysses, the Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.


Leo Tolstoy

The greatest exemplar of literary realism in history, and possibly the greatest novelist in history. His two most titanic works, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, would have been more than sufficient to secure Knut Hamsun an award. If only Tolstoy had been born a little closer to Sweden, the Committee might have overlooked their arguable translation of Nobel’s will. Apparently, the Committee did not consider Tolstoy to be leading the modern literary world in “the ideal direction.”


Mark Twain

The inventor of the American Novel, with Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and one of the all-time greatest novelists, humorists, essayists, critics, and all-around authors. Like Tolstoy, he had 10 chances to win, and ten times was passed over, in favor of the following eleven authors:

Sully Prudhomme, Theodor Mommsen, Bjornstjern Bjornson, Frederic Mistral and Jose Echeragay (both in 1904), Henryk Sienkiewicz, Giosue Carducci, Rudyard Kipling, Rudolf Christoph Eucken, Selma Lagerlof, Paul Heyse.

I’m willing to bet you’ve only heard of one of those. I’ve only heard of one of them. I have, however, heard of Mark Twain.

A look at The Pulitzer is coming soon.

Awards - Part 1

The October Apo's Trophy





goes to this sparkling effort-


Ah, what they could have avoided with the use of a well-placed hyphen and some quotation marks!


The October Gramma Dumpstercrumpet Achievement Award


goes to this successful magazine advertisement.




The last of our awards is a positive one and one in search of a name. So far the leader in the naming is The Capital Punishment Award.


The October award goes to -




And we leave you for now with a game that may help pass your time online. Thank you all who have sent pictures and stories! They will appear!


For now, play some Bingo!

The Hyphen Marches On (and Away)

Yes, the English language is an ever-changing thing. Hyphenated word pairs often lose the punctuation and become one word. If only we could lose our pot-belly, er pot belly (or is it potbelly?), as easily...


Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on
Fri Sep 21 20:54:35 UTC 2007

By Simon Rabinovitch
LONDON (Reuters) - About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

Bumble-bee is now bumblebee, ice-cream is ice cream and pot-belly is pot belly.

And if you've got a problem, don't be such a crybaby (formerly cry-baby).

The hyphen has been squeezed as informal ways of communicating, honed in text messages and emails, spread on Web sites and seep into newspapers and books.

"People are not confident about using hyphens anymore, they're not really sure what they are for," said Angus Stevenson, editor of the Shorter OED, the sixth edition of which was published this week.

Another factor in the hyphen's demise is designers' distaste for its ungainly horizontal bulk between words.

"Printed writing is very much design-led these days in adverts and Web sites, and people feel that hyphens mess up the look of a nice bit of typography," he said. "The hyphen is seen as messy looking and old-fashioned."

The team that compiled the Shorter OED, a two-volume tome despite its name, only committed the grammatical amputations after exhaustive research.

"The whole process of changing the spelling of words in the dictionary is all based on our analysis of evidence of language, it's not just what we think looks better," Stevenson said.

Researchers examined a corpus of more than 2 billion words, consisting of full sentences that appeared in newspapers, books, Web sites and blogs from 2000 onwards.

For the most part, the dictionary dropped hyphens from compound nouns, which were unified in a single word (e.g. pigeonhole) or split into two (e.g. test tube).

But hyphens have not lost their place altogether. The Shorter OED editor commended their first-rate service rendered to English in the form of compound adjectives, much like the one in the middle of this sentence.

"There are places where a hyphen is necessary," Stevenson said. "Because you can certainly start to get real ambiguity."

Twenty-odd people came to the party, he said. Or was it twenty odd people?

Some of the 16,000 hyphenation changes in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, sixth edition:

Formerly hyphenated words split in two:
fig leaf
hobby horse
ice cream
pin money
pot belly
test tube
water bed

Formerly hyphenated words unified in one:
bumblebee
chickpea
crybaby
leapfrog
logjam
lowlife
pigeonhole
touchline
waterborne

Awards Announcement

With this entry I am announcing a new occasional series. I will be awarding trophies!

The first will be Apo's Trophy -




awarded to the incorrect usage of punctuation, especially the apostrophe, in various media. Here is the first example -




The second is the Gramma Dumpstercrumpet Achievement Award that rewards things that make me [sic] or are just amazing in a dropped jaw sort of way.



This is one example. Look at this delicious cake! It was ordered from Walmart and the clerk was asked to write “Best Wishes Suzanne” and then underneath that “We will Miss You.”







The last is a positive trophy -





and will reward signs that put a pun to good use. An example is -




If you can think of a good name for this award, please let me know.