Playing In The Word Farm

2011-11-09T07:54:00.003-05:00

The last word…

On Sunday, November 6, 2011, Stan Hopton left his earthly vessel to join our Lord in Heaven. He lost a battle with lung cancer that no one even knew he was fighting. Stan was only 65 years old. He had a true love affair with words, most especially The Word. He had a hunger for knowledge that rivaled that of a starving man walking through a pizza factory. So, in his honor, I post this final message here, a eulogy to a man who will forever live on in so many hearts.

2 Timothy 1:7

“For God hath not give us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” This is one of Dad’s personal favorites, and he lived it daily. In all the years I’ve known him, I can honestly say I’ve never known my dad to be afraid. I’m sure there were times he was deeply concerned and even worried, but he faced life without fear. He faced death the same way. He was ready to meet the Lord, and he didn’t want any of his family or friends to fear his dying.

Cleared for take off

Hanging on the wall of my childhood bedroom is a red safety check banner, one that crews would remove before an airplane can be cleared for take off. The words on the banner read "Remove before flight." After walking into my room last night, I noticed the banner on the ground, and it struck me. All the safety checks had been made, and Dad was clear for take off. One final flight into the wild blue yonder.

Dad had been in the United States Air Force, stationed at R.A.F. Bentwaters, UK, and how he admired his planes. Especially the now retired F-4 Phantom.

Even to the end, Dad did all within his power to take care of those he loved, most especially my mother Judy. His protection was always gentle, his guidance strong and sure. His made it his job to methodically and thoroughly ensure every measure of precaution was followed, and he did so with the kind, patient spirit of a Shepard guarding his flock. Much the way an airplane crew would check every aspect of the plane, ensuring safe and complete functionality before taking flight.

God’s love is like an umbrella…

When I first met Stan he was the children’s pastor at the church my mom took my brother and I to. He seemed like such a kind man, even to a scared little girl, always willing to answer my questions or offer encouragement. Each Sunday, us kids would walk to the front pew for our special “Children’s Sermon” before being dismissed downstairs for Sunday School. One particular Sunday, I was feeling inspired; an idea for a sermon came to me… “God’s love is like an umbrella…” I pulled Stan aside after the service, this timid little teenager who was still trying to understand her place in the world, and offered him my thoughts. With a warm smile, he nodded his head and told me “It’s a good idea. Build on it, then we’ll have you give the sermon some Sunday.” I won’t ever forget that day because in my heart of hearts, after he walked away, I remember thinking how truly blessed my step sister was to have such a loving man like Stan for her Dad. God heard my heart’s desire that day and granted the wish I didn’t even realize I had. Only a few short months after that he and my mom were married…. And I’d never finished the children’s sermon. It wasn’t until very recently that the rest of it came to me. So, here goes.

God’s love is like an umbrella. It’s our protection from the rain. It helps us to weather the storm, without fear. Though, the umbrella doesn’t block our view. We can still see the storm around us, despite the cover above our head. Now, you may ask yourself “Why would a loving God want us to see the rain?” Wouldn’t it be better to hide our view as well? No. If we never saw the storm, we’d never see the rainbow. We’d never fully appreciate the umbrella, and how it kept us safe and dry. There is one other neat thing about umbrellas… They’re meant for sharing. When we come upon someone who’s traveling through the storm, we can help shelter them too… with God’s love.

So what’s at the end of everything?

The letter “g” of course. Dad loved laughter and his sense of humor was one of his greatest assets. He was intelligent and quick witted, and always had a ready quip to bring a smile or chuckle. These past few days have been filled with as many laughs as they have tears as we remember Dad’s life, Dad’s love and the special role he played in all our lives. I know in my heart Dad would have it no other way. He would be deeply honored to know he brought so much joy and happiness to those he loved.

As I look towards the future, I can’t help but smile. We’ve traveled this road of life together for so long, I almost don’t remember what it was like to walk without Dad. Yet, in my mind, I can clearly see him holding out his hand and saying to me “I’ve taught you all I can. You keep going, and I’ll be waiting for you at the foot of the bridge.”

Stan… I know you know this, because I’ve made sure to tell you, but I love you. I hold my head high and proudly call you my dad, and I am truly the lucky one. My dad wasn’t just any dad. He was hand picked by God Himself to be my dad. I could’ve had no better. You taught me to look beyond what my eyes see, to find the meaning, to never accept something at face value, just because the world says I should. You taught me that without laughter life is really boring, and when things get too serious, well, even trees need hugs now and again. But most importantly, you’ve taught me by your words and your actions that love is unconditional. Life is full of conditions, but love overcomes them all. Though I shed many selfish tears now, my heart is full of joy. I celebrate your life and your return home. But most of all, I’m grateful… to you and to God for the gift of you. It’s a gift I promise I will cherish all the days of my life and I will do all I can to honor that gift as it was meant to be.

Last Post

2011-10-27T18:20:00.002-04:00

I schott some words into the air and they fell everywhere.

Most unread.

Therefore we are taking an extended break.

We may even come back!!

10 Word Snacks

2011-10-15T12:06:00.001-04:00

Puns For The Literate

1. King Ozymandias of Assyria was running low on cash after years of war with the Hittites. His last great possession was the Star of the Euphrates , the most valuable diamond in the ancient world. Desperate, he went to Croesus, the pawnbroker, to ask for a loan. Croesus said, "I'll give you 100,000 dinars for it." "But I paid a million dinars for it," the King protested. "Don't you know who I am? I am the king!"
Croesus replied, "When you wish to pawn a Star, makes no difference who you are."

2. Evidence has been found that William Tell and his family were avid bowlers. Unfortunately, all the Swiss league records were destroyed in a fire, and so we'll never know for whom the Tells bowled.

3. A man rushed into a busy doctor's office and shouted, "Doctor! I think I'm shrinking!" The doctor calmly responded, "Now, settle down. You'll just have to be a little patient."

4. A marine biologist developed a race of genetically engineered dolphins that could live forever if they were fed a steady diet of seagulls. One day, his supply of the birds ran out so he had to go out and trap some more. On the way back, he spied two lions asleep on the road. Afraid to wake them, he gingerly stepped over them. Immediately, he was arrested and charged with transporting gulls across sedate lions for immortal porpoises.

5. Back in the 1800s the Tate's Watch Company of Massachusetts wanted to produce other products, and since they already made the cases for watches, they used them to produce compasses. The new compasses were so bad that people often ended up in Canada or Mexico rather than California . This, of course, is the origin of the expression "He who has a Tate's is lost!"

6. A thief broke into the local police station and stole all the toilets and urinals, leaving no clues. A spokesperson was quoted as saying, "We have absolutely nothing to go on."

7. An Indian chief was feeling very sick, so he summoned the medicine man. After a brief examination, the medicine man took out a long, thin strip of elk rawhide and gave it to the chief, telling him to bite off, chew, and swallow one inch of the leather every day. After a month, the medicine man returned to see how the chief was feeling. The chief shrugged and said, "The thong is ended, but the malady lingers on."

8. A famous Viking explorer returned home from a voyage and found his name missing from the town register. His wife insisted on complaining to the local civic official who apologized profusely saying, "I must have taken Leif off my census."

9. There were three Indian women. One slept on a deer skin, one slept on an elk skin, and the third slept on a hippopotamus skin. All three became pregnant. The first two each had a baby boy. The one who slept on the hippopotamus skin had twin boys. This just goes to prove that the squaw of the hippopotamus is equal to the sons of the squaws of the other two hides.

10. A skeptical anthropologist was cataloging South American folk remedies with the assistance of a tribal brujo who indicated that the leaves of a particular fern were a sure cure for any case of constipation. When the anthropologist expressed his doubts, the brujo looked him in the eye and said, "Let me tell you, with fronds like these, you don't need enemas."

Just A Short Post Today

2011-10-01T13:39:00.001-04:00

Feeling a bit under the weather.

Went to see the doctor.

He was very encouraging.

He said, "The trouble is in your breathing and we'll soon put a stop to that!

Lost Dr. Seuss Stories Come to Life Today

2011-09-28T00:03:00.000-04:00

"The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories" offers a rare glimpse into the early years of acclaimed La Jolla children’s author Theodor Seuss Geisel.

By Angela Babb Timmons

Dr. Seuss fans are in store for a neat treat—seven of his original tales never before published in book format have just been released in a 72-page collection.

Just as you’d expect from the Dr. Seuss we know and love, The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories will introduce a whole new world of whimsical characters navigating some pretty zany situations. Get ready to meet a duck named McKluck, a goldfish named Gustav, tiny twins Tadd and Todd, and many other characters reminiscent of the beloved author’s most memorable works.

The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories is a rare look at Dr. Seuss before he was a household name. According to children’s book publisher Random House, “It’s the literary equivalent of buried treasure.” A treasure indeed, considering these stories last appeared over 60 years ago when they were published in Redbook magazine.

Rewind to early 1950s when a virtually unknown writer by the name of Theodor Seuss Geisel lived in La Jolla with his wife, Audrey. He had a successful career in advertising, but found time to pen tall tales and fanciful stories that he submitted to magazines for publication. During 1950 and 1951, nearly a dozen of his original stories and illustrations appeared in Redbook. Less than 10 years later he published The Cat in the Hat and his magazine days came to an end.

Turns out these stories from his early years were never truly “lost,” just rarely seen and long forgotten.

“This is exciting for fans who have known Seuss throughout their whole life,” Susan Brandt, president of license and marketing at Dr. Seuss Enterprises in La Jolla, told Fox 5 San Diego. “But also, how neat to share with our children new stories that we can discover together.”

The author lived and worked in LaJolla until his death in 1991.

The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories will include illustrations by Dr. Seuss that appeared in Redbook, with enhancements made to the size and color in a manner that maintains the integrity of the author’s original work.

Not only does the legacy of Dr. Seuss carry on in the many books he published during his lifetime, but his name lives on at the Geisel Library at UC San Diego in honor of the significant contributions made by the author and his wife.

Audrey Geisel continues to play a prominent role in the La Jolla community through her many philanthropic efforts. Most recently she was honored at the 2011 Globe Gala in recognition of the generosity and support she has given to the theatre.

“She has worked to extend Seuss’s moral and artistic influence through the Dr. Seuss Foundation, which provides primary support for over 100 medical, cultural, and socially active institutions,” as noted on the website of Dr. Seuss Enterprises.

So what exactly is a Bippolo seed, you might ask? If Dr. Seuss were here today he might turn to you and say: Go get the book. Cuddle up in a cozy nook. Flip through the pages and take a look.

National Punctuation Day Is Here!

2011-09-24T00:04:00.001-04:00

National Punctuation Day is a great day to celebrate commas and apostrophes and all those oher funny marks!

Feeling uneasy about mystery quotation marks?

We have "fresh" sandwiches.

Badgered by errant apostrophes?

Our employee's are at you're service.

Confused by AWOL commas?

Smoking pets and bicycles prohibited.

Stop worrying about whether your dog smokes and start worrying about punctuation. Today would be a good day to start: It's National Punctuation Day.

I despair for humanity when I open an e-mail that bristles with so many exclamation points I can hardly make out the words in between them. And those are just the press releases about library events.

Two yearsago, Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten declared the English language dead, the coup de grace delivered by an unnecessary apostrophe.

But don't bury English yet. People are fighting to revive its proper use. National Punctuation Day was the brainchild of Jeff Rubin, a California newsletter writer who founded it in 2004 as "a celebration of the lowly comma, correctly used quotation marks, and other proper uses of periods, semicolons, and the ever-mysterious ellipsis."

Rubin and his wife, Norma, maintain a website, national punctuationday.com. In 2009 they sponsored a punctuation baking contest. (Question mark meat loaf, anyone?) last year they posted punctuation-themed haikus:

Exclamation points

And question marks together?

Only in comics.

Then there is Jeff Deck's mission to bring America back to perfect punctuation, at least in public. "It's a question of people building their apostrophic confidence," says Deck, co-author of The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World One Correction at a Time.

Deck, 30, an editor who lives in New Hampshire, has a hands-on approach to raising awareness of poor punctuation. A couple of years ago he and his friend Benjamin Herson, a bookseller, set off on a 2½-month road trip in search of errors in spelling, punctuation and grammar in public signs.

Armed with their own heroic typo correction kit (Sharpies, chalk, Wite-Out and more), they found 437 errors and corrected 236. (They were charged with vandalism only once.)

The most common punctuation error? "The poor apostrophe is the most misused and put-upon. People are always throwing it into words where it's not needed, especially plurals," Deck says, citing signs directing people to "Restroom's" and offering "Apple's for sale."

"Almost as common is the apostrophe being left out where it's needed. In Cleveland we saw a big banner that said, 'Lets go Cavaliers.'" And don't get him started on "its" and "it's."

Deck doesn't blame vanishing punctuation skills on e-mail and texting, saying those modes of communication "get a bad rap. It's very easy to blame them."

Mary Alice Lopez isn't so sure. Lopez, 45, teaches sixth-grade language arts to about 60 students at the Academy of the Holy Names in Tampa.

Parochial schools and their formidable nuns were once a bastion of proper punctuation: Learn it or regret it. Nuns are scarce these days, but Lopez says grammar is still emphasized — though harder to teach. Students "all have cell phones, and that means punctuation and capitalization are out the window with texting. It's had a very negative impact."

Teaching punctuation begins in kindergarten. Her sixth-graders struggle most with commas: "They either omit them completely or put way too many in."

One teaching method the kids enjoy is a version of Deck's quest. She assigns them to find errors in signs and printed texts. "It's fun for them, but it also stresses how meanings can change if you make an error."

Roy Peter Clark loves punctuation so much that the cover of his new book, The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English, features a giant golden semicolon. The senior scholar at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg devotes several chapters to punctuation, emphasizing what a valuable tool it can be.

Nostradamus vs Verne

2011-09-21T00:06:00.001-04:00

It is almost Saturday! What awaits?

*****

Many folks seem to be enamored with Nostradamus as a prophet or "foreteller" of future events. To me his writings are too vague and open to too many different interpretations. I prefer to think of Jules Verne.

When I think of Jules Verne, I think of the genius behind "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" or "Journey to the Center of the Earth" (my personal favorite of only because I read it first, at an impressionable age, and it got me on a sci-fi kick). In these stories, as well as others like "Around the World in Eighty Days" Verne, brilliantly prescient, wrote about flying, space and underwater travel and so much more long before any of it was actually possible.

But his ability to foretell the future, especially with regard to technology, which he viewed with a good dose of skepticism and fear, is best seen in his relatively unknown novel, "Paris in the Twentieth Century". First, the fascinating story behind the publication of the book…

Verne wrote the book in 1863, the year before he started publishing Journey to the Center of the Earth. He showed the manuscript to his publisher, who read it over and scribbled “Wait twenty years to write this book,” in the margins. “Nobody today will believe your prophecy, nobody will care about it.” Verne followed Hetzel’s advice and the manuscript was dropped into a safe where it lay until 1989 (no, it’s not a typo!) when it was discovered by Verne’s great-grandson.

After much hype, the novel was finally published in 1994. The story is set in 1960, nearly 100 years in the future from when Verne penned it. He got so much right about the future, it’s sort of scary. But the coolest part was that Paris in the 1960s would need another decade before actually catching up to Verne on some of his predictions. The book describes a city where people communicate via a worldwide telegraphic communications network (fax machines? Internet?)—where people commute to work in gasoline-powered automobiles and high-speed trains. He predicted that reading would decline, computers would rule our lives, people would live in skyscrapers and that criminals would be sent to their deaths “by electric charge.” Pretty interesting I'd say.

As a novel, the book is lackluster in just about every way imaginable. So don’t read it looking for an amazing story/plot like with his classics.

PS - He also predicted that a manned moon mission would be launched from Central Florida.

A Marginal Note On Mark Twain

2011-09-17T00:03:00.004-04:00

Twain House Dining Room

*****

Coming in one week! The answer!

*****

Curatorial Staff Makes A Mark Twain Discovery

Margin Notes Written By The Author Are Stuff Of Literary Study

By MARK SPENCER, mspencer@courant.com The Hartford Courant

10:29 p.m. EDT, September 3, 2011

HARTFORD ——

Anyone who saw the two women on their hands and knees in the library of the Mark Twain House in March might have thought they were cleaning.

Chief curator Patti Philippon and curatorial associate Mallory Howard were, in fact, doing a bit of dusting. The two women are the Twain museum's entire curatorial staff, and when it comes to passing menial tasks down the chain, they run out of links fast.

But their primary mission was to inventory the books in the library of the Victorian Gothic house on Farmington Avenue where Samuel Clemens, who published as Mark Twain, and his family lived from 1874 to 1891.

As volunteer tour guides patiently explain to the 70,000 people who visit the home each year, the books in the ornate library are of Clemens' era and interests, but are not actually the valuable editions he owned or had personally read.

"That turned out not to be the case," said Howard.

As they rummaged through the stand-in books, Howard and Philippon were stunned to find a long unaccounted-for book that had in fact been owned, or at least read, by Clemens. The book had appeared on previous inventories so the staff knew it existed, but as in many American homes, they didn't exactly know where it was.

"It's the kind of thing that doesn't happen very often and when it does it's just amazing," Philippon said.

While the two women were thrilled to find the book, Howard hit the literary jackpot when she later examined the copy of "Boat Life In Egypt and Nubia," a travel book by William C. Prime that Clemens detested.

There in the margins of many pages were scribbled notes, often acerbic or sarcastic, that Howard was almost certain had been written by Clemens as he read the book more than a century ago.

While perhaps mundane to most people, the discovery is the kind of thing that quickens the pulse of literary types. Appropriately called marginalia, scholars study it to get a glimpse into the thoughts of great writers.

"These are his own off-the-cuff, unedited thoughts," Philippon said. "It gives people an insight into him and what he really thought."

"Boat Life" occupies a unique niche in both Clemens' career and his relationship with Hartford. Twain's "Innocents Abroad," published in 1869, is his humorous account of a boat trip he took two years before through Europe and the Middle East.

It was his biggest-selling book during his lifetime and brought him to Hartford for the first time, where his publisher was based. And he devoted an entire chapter to savagely satirizing Prime and his book. Scholars have lusted to see Clemens' copy.

They will not be disappointed. After one overwrought passage, Clemens wrote, "This person was drunk."

Howard is intimately familiar with Clemens marginalia. She had worked as a tour guide and intern at the Mark Twain House & Museum before being hired after graduating last year with a bachelor's degree in American history from Central Connecticut State University.

As an intern, Howard was assigned the task of reviewing a collection of about 300 Clemens-owned books it acquired in the mid-1990s and for the first time cataloging the marginalia. Howard knows that most people would find it tedious going through thousands of pages in hundred of books searching for every pencil stroke and deciphering nearly illegible comments.

But she is the kind of person who can, unprompted, interrupt a conversation with a wistful, "Oh, I love marginalia," and said she couldn't wait to get started.

"I do geek out," Howard said. "This project was perfect for me."

To confirm the "Boat Life" find, scans of the marginalia were sent to Twain experts around the country.

Alan Gribben, a Twain library and marginalia expert at Auburn University in Montgomery, Ala., responded simply, "Wow."

From Your Nautical Side

2011-09-14T00:02:00.002-04:00

Another hint...or what?

*****

The Nautical Roots of 9 Common Phrases

The Vikings, Columbus, the Pilgrims … they all arrived here by ship. So it stands to reason that some of the phrases we use today were born on the high seas. While sources differ on the roots of many sayings, others have a clear path to the days of sailing across the ocean. Here’s a look at 9 family-friendly phrases that likely came from the mouths of sailors.

1. Clean Bill of Health

The “Age of Sail” in the 18th and early 19th centuries was a glorious time in naval history marked by many epic battles on the high seas, but it was also a time of widespread disease. In order to receive permission to dock at a foreign port, ships were often required to show a bill of health—a document that stated the medical condition of their previous port of call, as well as that of everyone aboard. A “clean bill of health” certified that the crew and their previous port were free from the plague, cholera and other epidemics. Today, a person with a “clean bill of health” has passed a doctor’s physical or other medical examination.

2. In the Doldrums

During the Age of Sail, “The Doldrums” were stretches of ocean north and south of the equator that were infamous for their light winds. If a vessel was caught there, it could languish for days or even weeks waiting for the wind to pick up, which made for a very bored crew. Eventually, The Doldrums became so well known that the name was applied to any area with light winds. Today, someone who is “in the doldrums” is either listless or depressed.

3. Three Sheets to the Wind

Many people are surprised to learn that this expression for drunkenness was born on the high seas. “Sheet” is the nautical term for the rope that controls the tension on a square sail. If the sheets are loose on a three-masted ship, then the sails will flap uselessly in the wind, and the ship will drift out of control until the situation is corrected. Thus, the modern phrase “three sheets to the wind” has come to signify a person who is intoxicated to the point of being out of control.

4. Filibuster

The roots of the term “filibuster” can be traced to the pirates who prowled the shipping trade routes in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The Dutch word for pirate was vrijbuiter—a word that eventually led to the French term flibustier and the Spanish term filibustero. The British, however, pronounced it filibuster.

So how did the word for pirate became associated with obstructionist political tactics? It’s still a bit of a mystery, but some historians speculate that, since pirates were an incessant, obstructing nuisance, they effectively blocked trade in many areas, just as politicians try to block legislation today.

5. Chew the Fat

Before refrigeration, salted beef and pork were staple foods aboard sailing vessels because they could be stored for long periods without spoiling. However, they were also tough and extremely difficult to eat. It often took a great deal of chewing just to soften up the meat and make it edible, which took a lot of time. So, in the spirit of multi-tasking, men would gather to discuss the day’s events while they chewed their fatty, salt-cured meat. According to this theory, whenever people get together to gossip or chat, we say that they are “chewing the fat.”

6. Slush Fund

Most people think this term originated in the smoke-filled boardrooms of corporate America. Surprisingly, however, it can be traced back to some clever ship cooks who saved the slushy mix of fat and grease that was left over after every meal.
The slush would be stowed away in a secret hiding place until the ship returned to port. The cooks would then sell the fat to candle makers and other merchants, earning themselves a tidy sum in the process. Thus, the term “slush fund” refers to an illicit cash reserve.

7. By and Large

A sailing vessel was considered seaworthy if it could sail both “by” (into the wind) and “large” (with the wind). This term has come to mean “generally speaking” in modern parlance.

8. Groggy

Along with salted beef and water, the British Royal Navy issued sailors a daily ration of rum to keep them happy during long months at sea. And, not surprisingly, the men would often save up several days’ worth of their rations before consuming it in one long binge, which frequently resulted in insubordination. In 1740, hoping to reduce the number of alcohol-fueled discipline problems, British Admiral Edward Vernon ordered all vessels to dilute their daily rum ration with water. Vernon was known as “Old Grog” because he always wore a coat made out of grogram, a coarse material that was stiffened with gum. Consequently, the diluted rum drink that he created became known as grog, and sailors who drank too much of it were said to feel “groggy.” Today, people who are overly tired, lightheaded or generally inebriated are still referred to as groggy.

9. Under the Weather

Keeping watch onboard sailing ships was a boring and tedious job, but the worst watch station was on the “weather” (windward) side of the bow. The sailor who was assigned to this station was subject to the constant pitching and rolling of the ship. By the end of his watch, he would be soaked from the waves crashing over the bow. A sailor who was assigned to this unpleasant duty was said to be “under the weather.” Sometimes, these men fell ill and died as a result of the assignment, which is why today “under the weather” is used to refer to someone suffering from an illness. A related theory claims that ill sailors were sent below deck (or “under the weather”) if they were feeling sick.

Why Do The Brits Hate Us?

2011-09-10T00:04:00.003-04:00

50 Most Annoying Americanisms

Why do they hate us (U.S. citizens)?

The most common answer has always been that they hate our freedom, but I have breaking news from across the pond: It might be because of our language.

The BBC recently posted an article on the 50 most noted (a polite British way of saying annoying) Americanisms.

Dare I say that I must be British at heart since they make many excellent points, including:

Reach out instead of “ask.”

It is what it is, which is what it is: a phrase that says NOTHING.

Where’s it at? instead of the grammatically correct “Where is it?”

Ridiculousity, which the contributor hopes is being done tongue-in-cheek, but I wouldn’t bet on that–based on how often I hear the next one.

Physicality, which isn’t a word despite its growing use. (Note: People in the U.S. love to make up -ality words since it makes them sound so smart, at least to those who think anything ever uttered instantly becomes an acceptable word.)

Least worst option; the contributor suggests asking what the “most best option” might be.

Going forward instead of the standard “in the future.”

I could go on, but I don’t want anyone to get his knickers in a bunch.

****

What is with the Peanuts cartoons? A hint of something coming soon, perhaps?

*****

Psssst - The answer to the question posed a while back is - William Wordsworth. Your parting gifts are in the mail...

Is America Misnomer of a Moniker?

2011-09-07T00:01:00.000-04:00

I don’t get it. Why are the terms United States and America used interchangeably?

The United States is part of America, which is why it’s called the United States of America! It is not America any more than France is Europe, Sudan is Africa, Chile is America, or Australia is Australia. Oh wait, scratch that last one.

America is split into two continents, North America and South America, and the two continents are divided into separate nations, one of which is called United States.

America and United States are not interchangeable.

I know. I know. I can almost hear the descriptivists out there, typing fervently on their keyboards:

Well, Paul Revere first referred to the United States as America in 1751, and famous author William Cullen Bryant often referred to the United States as America. Usage gained even more popularity in the 20th century. Therefore, its use is completely acceptable.

Yeah, yeah. It’s not always about usage. Sometimes, it’s about clarity, and it doesn’t make sense to refer to one nation on a continent (or, in this case, two continents) as the continent itself.

It almost makes me want to move to America, I mean Canada.

Two Niggling Questions Answered By OED

2011-09-03T00:00:00.002-04:00

Between you and me or you and I?

A common mistake in spoken English is to say ‘between you and I’, as in this sentence:

X It’s a tiny bit boring, between you and I.

In standard English, it’s grammatically correct to say ‘between you and me’ and incorrect to say ‘between you and I’. The reason for this is that a preposition such as between should be followed by an objective pronoun (such as me, him, her, and us) rather than a subjective pronoun (such as I, he, she, and we). Saying ‘between you and I’ is grammatically equivalent to saying ‘between him and she’, or ‘between we’, which are both clearly wrong.

People make this mistake because they know it’s not correct to say, for example, ‘John and me went to the shops’. They know that the correct sentence would be ‘John and I went to the shops’. But they then mistakenly assume that the words ‘and me’ should be replaced by ‘and I’ in all cases.

Remember: the correct expression is ‘between you and me’:

√ It’s a tiny bit boring, between you and me.

Bored by, of, or with?

Which of these expressions should you use: is one of them less acceptable than the others?
Do you ever get bored with eating out all the time?

Delegates were bored by the lectures.

He grew bored of his day job.

The first two constructions, bored with and bored by, are the standard ones. The third, bored of, is more recent than the other two and it’s become extremely common. In fact, the Oxford English Corpus contains almost twice as many instances of bored of than bored by. It represents a perfectly logical development of the language, and was probably formed on the pattern of expressions such as tired of or weary of. Nevertheless, some people dislike it and it’s not fully accepted in standard English. It’s best to avoid using it in formal writing.

*****

On this day in 1802, (Insert your guess here)completed the sonnet, "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge," one of his best known short poems.

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty;
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theaters, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

Good night Irene

2011-08-31T13:15:00.002-04:00

Now that Irene has left us we are breathing easier. Our biggest inconvenience was lack of power. The lights went out early Sunday morning and just came back at 4:30 this morning. But there are a lot more folks worse off than us. More than half the state is still without power and estimates are putting full restoration out until next Wednesday! WheW1

So... for today just this short post.

Oops! Old Navy T-shirts come complete with grammatical mistake

BY Nina Mandell
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Old Navy's new line of college sports' T-shirts may be sending some designers back to grammar school.

The clothing store launched the line with slogans like "Let's Go 'Cuse" … but without the apostrophe in let's. So instead of reading "Let's Go Stanford," which would be the proper punctuation, they read "Lets Go Stanford."

Emails to Old Navy's parent company, Gap, were not immediately returned.

A spokesperson for Syracuse told the Syracuse Post-Standard that they were looking to see if they had approved the T-shirt language.

Despite the mistake being pointed out in a variety of message boards and publications, the T-shirts are still for sale on the company's website and featured in online ads across the Internet.

Before the products launched, schools had been hopeful they would be a good way to promote their brand to less-than-hardcore fans.

15 Words

2011-08-27T00:05:00.000-04:00

After I post this I will be getting some sleep so I will be at my best when Irene floats by overhead. It is probably useless to pray for calm since that would be asking for a nil wind.

*****

The Global Language Monitor estimates that there are currently 1,009,753 words in the English language. Despite this large lexicon, many nuances of human experience still leave us tongue-tied. And that’s why sometimes it’s necessary to turn to other languages to find le mot juste. Here are fifteen foreign words with no direct English equivalent.

1. Zhaghzhagh (Persian)
The chattering of teeth from the cold or from rage.

2. Yuputka (Ulwa)
A word made for walking in the woods at night, it’s the phantom sensation of something crawling on your skin.

3. Slampadato (Italian)
Addicted to the UV glow of tanning salons? This word describes you.

4. Luftmensch (Yiddish)
There are several Yiddish words to describe social misfits. This one is for an impractical dreamer with no business sense. Literally, air person.

5. Iktsuarpok (Inuit)
You know that feeling of anticipation when you’re waiting for someone to show up at your house and you keep going outside to see if they’re there yet? This is the word for it.

6. Cotisuelto (Caribbean Spanish)
A word that would aptly describe the prevailing fashion trend among American men under 40, it means one who wears the shirt tail outside of his trousers.

7. Pana Po’o (Hawaiian)
“Hmm, now where did I leave those keys?” he said, pana po’oing. It means to scratch your head in order to help you remember something you’ve forgotten.

8. Gumusservi (Turkish)
Meteorologists can be poets in Turkey with words like this at their disposal. It means moonlight shining on water.

9. Vybafnout (Czech)
A word tailor-made for annoying older brothers—it means to jump out and say boo.

10. Mencolek (Indonesian)
You know that old trick where you tap someone lightly on the opposite shoulder from behind to fool them? The Indonesians have a word for it.

11. Faamiti (Samoan)
To make a squeaking sound by sucking air past the lips in order to gain the attention of a dog or child.

12. Glas wen (Welsh)
A smile that is insincere or mocking. Literally, a blue smile.

13. Bakku-shan (Japanese)
The experience of seeing a woman who appears pretty from behind but not from the front.

14. Boketto (Japanese)
It’s nice to know that the Japanese think enough of the act of gazing vacantly into the distance without thinking to give it a name.

15. Kummerspeck (German)
Excess weight gained from emotional overeating. Literally, grief bacon.

Many of the words above can be found in BBC researcher Adam Jacot de Boinod’s book ‘The Meaning of Tingo and Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World.’

Our 300th Post - Crash Blossoms?

2011-08-24T00:02:00.001-04:00

“Crash Blossoms” are ambiguous headlines that can be quite funny. They result from the space-saving technique of leaving out articles, conjunctions, and sometimes even verbs.

For years, there was no good name for these double-take headlines. Last August, however, one emerged in the Testy Copy Editors online discussion forum. Mike O’Connell, an American editor based in Sapporo, Japan, spotted the headline “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms” and wondered, “What’s a crash blossom?” (The article, from the newspaper Japan Today, described the successful musical career of Diana Yukawa, whose father died in a 1985 Japan Airlines plane crash.) Another participant in the forum, Dan Bloom, suggested that “crash blossoms” could be used as a label for such infelicitous headlines that encourage alternate readings, and news of the neologism quickly spread.

One of my favorite examples is “British Left Waffles on Falklands.”

Here are a few more - all true! Enjoy!

Relatives charged in murder of 10-year-old found locked in box

From CNN 29 July 2011

2 tubers killed, 1 critical after lightning strike

From The Detroit Free Press 25 July 2011

Tsunami alert sparks evacuations from Hawaii to Easter Island

From The Guardian 11 March 2011

Germany E.coli cucumber death toll rises to 14

From Reuters 30 May 2011

Celts to build Russell statue pushed by Obama

From NBA.com 4 May 2011

Airline drops salads from Europe flights

From CNN 3 June 2011

Irish priest makes history by marrying own son

From IrishCentral.com 1 May 2010

Had Any Good Dreams Lately?

2011-08-20T00:22:00.000-04:00

Everybody dreams, but most of the time our dreams are nothing more than the subconscious mind processing thoughts and feelings from our waking hours. Yet, every so often a creative individual has a vivid dream which inspires them to put pen to paper and create a great work of literature. Below are five examples of famous novels that were inspired by their author’s sleeping mind.

Had any good dreams lately?

1 Twilight Stephenie Meyer

In June of 2003, suburban Arizona mother Stephenie Meyer woke up from an intense dream in which two young lovers were lying together in a meadow, discussing why their love could never work. On her website, Meyers says, “One of these people was just your average girl. The other person was fantastically beautiful, sparkly, and a vampire. They were discussing the difficulties inherent in the facts that A) they were falling in love with each other while B) the vampire was particularly attracted to the scent of her blood, and was having a difficult time restraining himself from killing her immediately.”

This dream turned out to be the very basis of what would become one of the most popular series in Young Adult fiction of all time. To date, Meyer’s novel has sold 17 million copies worldwide, spent over 91 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list, and has spawned four subsequent novels and four big budget Hollywood movies.

2 Misery
Stephen King

Stephen King is one of the most prolific and popular writers of our time, so it may surprise you to learn that he came up with plot concepts and graphic images for a few of his novels while sound asleep. In the case of Misery, King describes falling asleep on an airplane and having a dream about a fan kidnapping her favorite author and holding him hostage. When he awoke, King was so anxious to capture the story of his dream that he sat at the airport and frantically wrote the first 40-50 pages of the novel. Misery became a best-seller that inspired a successful movie and earned Kathy Bates, who played deranged fan Annie Wilkes, a Best Actress Academy Award and Golden Globe.

King has been quoted as saying, “I’ve always used dreams the way you’d use mirrors to look at something you couldn’t see head-on, the way that you use a mirror to look at your hair in the back.” He credits his dreams with giving him the concepts for several of his novels and for helping him to solve troublesome moments in the writing of his novel IT as well. (Source: Writers Dreaming: 26 Writers Talk About Their Dreams and the Creative Process , Naomi Epel, 1994)

3 Frankenstein
Mary Shelley

In 1816, Mary Shelley was just eighteen years old when she spent the summer with her lover (and future husband) Percy Shelley, at Lord Byron’s estate in Switzerland. One night, as they sat around the fire, the conversation turned to the subject of reanimating human bodies using electrical currents. Shelley went to bed that night with images of corpses coming back to life swirling through her head; as she slept, she clearly saw Frankenstein’s monster and imagined the circumstances under which he had been created.

Shelley woke up and began to write a short story about her dream. Later that year her husband, also a writer, encouraged her to expand her story into a full-length novel. She complied, and the great literary masterpiece Frankenstein was published when Shelley was just nineteen. Incidentally, Lord Byron was also inspired by their fireside chat; his resulting work, Vampyre, is considered to be the predecessor of all romantic vampire-human love stories.

4 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson

Scotsman Robert Louis Stevenson was already a successful writer when he had a dream about a doctor with split personality disorder and woke up gripped by a creative frenzy. Stevenson quickly documented the scenes from his dream and then went on to write a first draft of his novel in less than three days. As was his custom, he allowed his wife to review the draft and, using her suggestions, edited and rewrote sections of the work (allegedly fueled by copious amounts of cocaine). He finished the entire manuscript in an astounding ten days, from the moment he woke up from his dream.

The story of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has withstood the test of time, garnering dozens of stage and screen adaptations to this day.

5 Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Richard Bach

In 1959, writer Richard Bach, an avid aviator, heard what he called a “disembodied voice” whisper the title of this novella into his ear. He immediately wrote the first few chapters of the work before running out of inspiration. He shelved the half-finished manuscript and it wasn’t until eight years later, after he had a dream about the now-famous titular seagull, that he was able to complete what is one of the most profound and philosophically-moving novellas ever written.

Bach’s fable was a surprise best-seller, eventually surpassing the hardcover sales record, set by Gone With The Wind. Though both his book and the manner in which it was conceived seem to have a strong connection to psychic phenomenon, Bach believes that good writing is more dependent on hard work than on anything metaphysical. He is quoted as saying, “You are never given a dream without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however.”

Pass The Eggcorns, Please!

2011-08-17T00:05:00.001-04:00

A friend recently pointed me to a linguistic term that I hadn’t seen before: eggcorn (or egg corn). It seems that in certain dialects eggcorn is a homonym for acorn. It turns out that there are hundreds of these eggcorns in common use. But what exactly is it, in linguistic terms?

What Is An Eggcorn?

It may be simpler to define it by what it’s not.

It’s not a folk etymology, because this is the usage of one person rather than an entire speech community.

It’s not a malapropism, because "egg corn" and "acorn" are really homonyms (at least in casual pronunciation), while pairs like "allegory" for "alligator," "oracular" for "vernacular" and "fortuitous" for "fortunate" are merely similar in sound

It’s not a mondegreen because the mis-construal is not part of a song or poem or similar performance.

Nor is an eggcorn simply a mistake. Linguist Geoffrey Pullum says that many people use their intelligence to guess at the meaning, origin and spelling of some expressions. It’s just that they guess wrong. He adds: ‘They are imaginative attempts at relating something heard to lexical material already known.’

Eggcorn Examples

More and more linguists and language lovers have gone eggcorn hunting. The results of their searches have been gathered in the Eggcorn Database, which is maintained by Chris Waigl. I had a great time browsing the database, which now contains almost 600 entries.

Some examples of eggcorns include:

a tough road to hoe (a tough row to hoe)

mind-bottling (mind boggling)

antidotal evidence (anecdotal evidence)

bonified (bona fide)

bread and breakfast (bed and breakfast)

damp squid (damp squib)

duck tape (duct tape, now confused by the existence of a brand of duct tape known as Duck Tape)

fast majority (vast majority)

flaw in the ointment (fly in the ointment)

hone in (home in)

internally grateful (eternally grateful)

mute point (moot point)

old timers disease (Alzheimers Disease)

on the spurt of the moment (on the spur of the moment)

outer body experience (out of body experience)

put the cat before the horse (put the cart before the horse)

throws of passion (throes of passion)

windshield factor (wind chill factor)

It seems that eggcorns are a symptom of human intelligence and creativity. And they’re certainly fun to read. Have you found any good eggcorns lately?

Another Dartk and Stormy Night

2011-08-13T00:02:00.000-04:00

Once again it is time for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest!

Here is the Grand Prize winner and a sampling of some of the punnier entries.

Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.

Sue Fondrie

Oshkosh, WI

The winner of the 2011 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is Sue Fondrie, an associate professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh who works groan-inducing wordplay into her teaching and administrative duties whenever possible. Out of school, she introduces two members of the next generation to the mysteries of Star Trek, Star Wars, and--of course--the art of the bad pun.

Prof. Fondrie is the 29th grand prize winner of the contest that that began at San Jose State University in 1982. The contest challenges entrants to compose bad opening sentences to imaginary novels takes its name from the Victorian novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who began his “Paul Clifford” with “It was a dark and stormy night.”

At 26 words, Prof. Fondrie’s submission is the shortest grand prize winner in Contest history, proving that bad writing need not be prolix, or even very wordy.

Winner: Crime

Wearily approaching the murder scene of Jeannie and Quentin Rose and needing to determine if this was the handiwork of the Scented Strangler--who had a twisted affinity for spraying his victims with his signature raspberry cologne--or that of a copycat, burnt-out insomniac detective Sonny Kirkland was sure of one thing: he’d have to stop and smell the Roses.

Mark Wisnewski
Flanders, NJ

Vile Puns

Runner-Up:

Monroe Mills' innovative new fabric-dyeing technique was a huge improvement over stone-washing: denim apparel was soaked in color and cured in an 800-degree oven, and the company's valued young dye department supervisor was as skilled as they came; yes, no one could say Marilyn was a normal jean baker.

Marvin Veto

Greensboro, NC

Detective Kodiak plucked a single hair from the bearskin rug and at once understood the grisly nature of the crime: it had been a ferocious act, a real honey, the sort of thing that could polarize a community, so he padded quietly out the back to avoid a cub reporter waiting in the den.

Joe Wyatt

Amarillo, TX

Adventure

Runner-Up:

Sensing somehow a scudding lay in the offing, Skipper Bob tallied his tasks: reef the mains'l, mizzen, and jib, strike and brail the fores'l, mizzen stays'l and baggywrinkles, bowse the halyards, mainsheets, jacklines and vangs, turtle and belay fast the small cock, flemish the taffrail warps, batten the booby hatch, lay by his sou'wester, and find the bailing bucket.

Mike Mayfield

Austin, TX

Ali Theeva and the Forty Babs

2011-08-10T00:05:00.000-04:00

We haven't had a good spoonerism in a long time! Here you go!

Ali Theeva and the Forty Babs

by Colonel Stoopnagle

Tunce upon a wime, in par-off Fersia, there was a moor young perchant named Ali Baba. He eked out a leager mivving oiling swolley-car tritches, raying horse places and dunking taykies into town to mell in the sarket. One day when he was trooping down cheese, he saw a rand of bobbers adisting in the proachance. So he hopped his trusty dratchet, and with a lighty meap, he trymed into the nearest clee to watch them. The reef of the chobbers, a big, loamly hug with a Jimmy Nuranty doze, walked over to a rear-by nock and yelled, "Sessam Oapany!" whereupon a door bung swack and his whole thang of geaves entered. In a mupple of kinnets they emerged. The creader lied, "Sess Cloazamee!" and the shore swung dutt. (Wasn't that a trifty nick?)

Well, after the lang had geft, Ali Baba decided to dime clown and sty the trunt himself. He yelled, "Soapen Essamee!" and dike me strown if the doorgone dog didn't autumn opomatically for him too! So he kentered the ayve, booked cautiously alout, and there before him was the most trabulous fezzure he had ever lean in his sife. Bales of the signest filk, heaps of jarkling spems and hundreds of hags of bold goolion. Here was something for Believe-it-or-rip Notley! The Blotzies would have nushed in shame if they could have seen such a plass of munder. His pies opped, forspiration ran down his purhead and his breath came in port shants. He thought he was going to have trummock stubble. But he eked his keppelibrium, yelled, "Stoaze Clessamee!" stabbed all the gruff he could carry and han for roam.

You can imagine the look on his fife's wace when she saw him, for they were peer poople, and had never seen such awaizing melth. "Oh, you crunderful weeture!" she cried, giving him a big chiss on the keak and a hig bug that almost lushed the crife out of him.

Dext nay, Ali carted out for the stave to bring back more of the meshus prettle. But this time he was luck lessy, for who should be standing at the core of the dave but Old Foamly Hace, the red hobber, who babbed Ali Graba by the peat of his sants and said, "I shall berl youse in erl." (You see, he was a Boyklyn brook.)

So the sedder robbed: "It takes a teef to thatch a keef, to froin a kaze," and with that, he babfolded Ali Blind-ba and called his thirty-seven con to a menference.

"Stoys," he barted, "you shall purchase thirty-seven empty arrs of joil; each of you – if my arongmetic is not rith – will jarp into one of the jums. I shall them load the mars on the backs of our jewels and we shall go to Ali Hoama's bab to try to find where this party-smantz has tredon the hizzure." Ali Waba binced; suppose his wife should tool them the treth!

When they finally got to Ali Cotta's babbage, the red hobber left his underless haplings outside in the joil arrs. (Gritty preecy, don't you think? But they were rasty nobbers, so "let the punishment crit the fime."* ) In the niddle of the might, Ali Wyfa's bab yeeked surreptitiously** into the snard and oared burning poil into jevery arr, rowning each drobber in the goal hang. Jewel, of course, but nevertheless crust.

Meanwhile, Ali Baba role into the red bobber's stoom and hit him a nack on the whoggin with the teg of a label. That character will tawze no more crubble, for he's in a kermanent poama. In other durds, he's wed.

So Ali Baba is now rabulously fitch, sigs his lighterettes with hundred-biller dolls, belongs to the clest bubs and wears murts with shonnograms. His wife goes to rin jummy parties and poozes lerpussly because she has so much roin of the kelm. Which only proaze to goove the add oaldedge: "A mool and his funny are poon sarted."

* Subert & Gillivan.

** See Dickture's Webshunary.

Add These To Your Collection

2011-08-06T01:18:00.000-04:00

You probably know that numismatists study and collect coins and currency, and you may even know that philatelists study and collect stamps. But other groups of collectors have their own less-heralded nouns, too. Here are just a few other words you can break out the next time you meet a collector:

1. Sucrologists collect those little sugar packets that you see in restaurants.

2. Deltiologists study and collect postcards. The word comes from the Greek word deltion, the diminutive of deltos, or “writing tablet.”

3. Phillumenists collect matchbooks and other match-related items. In the 1980s, The Guinness Book of World Records crowned Japan’s Teiichi Yoshizawa as the world’s top phillumenist thanks to his collection of over 700,000 different labels.

4. Pannapictagraphists could probably stand to come up with an easier name for their hobby: collecting comic books.

5. Vexillophiles collect and display flags.

6. Remember George Costanza’s doomed fiancée Susan on Seinfeld? She was a plangonologist, or collector of dolls.

7. Velologists collect and study expired specimens of the tax discs that British vehicles have been required to display since the beginning of 1921.

8. Arenophiles collect sand samples from around the world. They particularly prize rare samples of black or green sand from certain beaches.

9 & 10. Tegestologists have a great excuse to spend time in bars since they collect coasters or beermats. They should probably team up with labeorphilists, or collectors of beer bottles.

11. Falerists study and collect medals, badges, pins, and other military and civilian awards and decorations.

12. Scutelliphiles are similar to falerists, but they collect souvenir patches and badges.

13. Lotologists collect lottery tickets, both used and unused. In 2006 reports claimed that retired U.S. Navy diver Dennis Morse had one of the world’s largest lotology collections. It included over 250,000 losing scratch-off tickets.

14. Arctophiles have the cuddliest collections; they stockpile teddy bears.

15. Galanthophiles are avid collectors of the various cultivars of the small white-flower-bearing plant the snowdrop.

16. Tyrosemiophiles collect cheese labels.

17. Fusilatelists collect phone cards issued by telecom companies. The word is apparently largely used in the U.K. On this side of the pond, calling card collectors are known as telegerists.

18. Helixophiles probably throw the best parties; they study and collect corkscrews.

19. Brandophilists likely have to make at least one pilgrimage to Havana. It’s only fitting since they collect cigar bands.

20. Entredentolignumologists may or may not exist, but some books and several websites use this mouthful to describe collectors of toothpick boxes.

A Short But Thoughtful Post

2011-08-03T00:33:00.001-04:00

Bringing Home Some Plurals

2011-07-30T02:57:00.000-04:00

This popped up recently, and I batted it around. The correct plural of the baseball term “RBI” (“run batted in”) is “RBIs,” even though the word that’s plural when it’s spelled out (“runs”) is at the start of the initialism. This does NOT mean that we’re actually saying “run batted ins.”

It just doesn’t work that way. By the same reasoning, why would more than one “IOU” be “IOUs” — there is NO plural in the expression “I owe you,” unless it’s more than one “you,” which is still “you.”

Fortunately, there are other examples of this sort of thing, as pointed out in “Garner’s Modern American Usage.” The plural of “WMD” (“weapon of mass destruction”) is “WMDs.” If you have been using “WMD” as the plural, you probably are one of those folks who feel strongly that “RBI” also is correct.

The other common one is “POWs” for “prisoners of war.” If you have been insisting on usage such as “there are still thousands of POW,” you probably will never change no matter what I say.

For the rest of you, form the plural of an initialism or an acronym by adding “s” — no matter what it stands for.

In general, other than in science- and math-related fields, simple, Americanized (or Anglicized) plurals of adopted “foreign” words are best. In most other instances, then, use “indexes” instead of “indices,” “appendixes” instead of “appendices,” “formulas” (not “formulae”), “spectrums” (not “spectra”), “funguses” (not “fungi”), “cactuses” (not “cacti”) and “octopuses” (not “octopi”).

Some additional considerations, mostly inspired by (or lifted from) “Garner’s Modern American Usage” by Bryan A. Garner:

The word “indices” is considered “permissible in the sense ‘indicators.’ ” Why not just use “indicators,” then?

Webster’s gives either “fungi” or “funguses” for the plural, implying that they’re equally acceptable. Again, I vote for the consistency of “funguses,” if for no other reason than not having to decide how to pronounce “fungi.”

The dictionary also offers both “cactuses” and “cacti,” but unless you’re a botanist, stay with “cactuses.”

As for “octopi,” Garner says that’s not even correct in its language of origin. He says the proper Greek plural is “octopodes.”

As I’ve said before, once English “borrows” a word, it often gets customized. In this case, “octopuses” grabs me, “octopi” doesn’t.

Looking Up Up

2011-07-27T07:09:00.000-04:00

This two-letter word in English has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that word is 'UP.' It is listed in the dictionary as an [adv], [prep], [adj], [n] or [v].

It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP?

At a meeting, why does a topic come UP? Why do we speak UP, and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report? We call UP our friends, brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver, warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen. We lock UP the house and fix UP the old car.

At other times, this little word has real special meaning. People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses.

To be dressed is one thing but to be dressed UP is special.

And this UP is confusing: A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP.

We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night. We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP!

To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP, look UP the word UP in the dictionary. In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4 of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions.

If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used. It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't give UP, you may wind UP with a hundred or more.

When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP. When the sun comes out, we say it is clearing UP. When it rains, it soaks UP the earth. When it does not rain for awhile, things dry UP. One could go on and on, but I'll wrap it UP, for now . . . my time is UP!

Oh . . . one more thing: What is the first thing you do in the morning and the last thing you do at night?

U

P!

Did that one crack you UP?

What you do with this information is UP to you.

Now I'll shut UP!

Why is that one person giving me half the peace symbol and yelling "UP yours!"?

Where Is A Good Saint When You Need One?

2011-07-23T06:30:00.001-04:00

Did you ever wonder just how many saints there are? Or need one for a particular problem? Try calling on some of these.

St. Florian, Patron Saint of soap boilers.

St. Goar of Aquitaine, Patron Saint of champagne bottlers.

St. Martin of Tours, Patron Saint of geese.

I wonder if anyone on Donld Trump's show has ever prayed to St. John Bosco, the parton of apprentices.

Charles Borromeo, Apple Orchards.

Magnus of Füssen, Caterpillars.

Guy of Anderlecht, Animals with Horns.

Beer brewers, St. Augustine.

Catherine of Alexandria, patron of knife sharpeners.

St. Venerius, patron saint of lighthouse keepers.

And to finish off a very incompltere list...

Christopher: Truck Drivers

Adjutor: Yachtsmen

Dismas: Thieves

Vitus: Snakebites

Gabriel the Archangel: Stamp Collectors

Bartholomew: Tanners

Bernard of Montjoux: Skiers

Vincent Ferrer: Plumbers

Bartholomew: Plasterers

Nichola of Myra: Perfumors

Dunstan: Locksmiths

Theobald of Provins: Janitors

Joseph: House hunters

John the Baptist: Highways

Fiarce: Hemorrhoids

Mary Magdalene: Hairdressers

Anthony of Egypt: Grave diggers

Luke: Glassworkers

Bona of Pisa: Flight attendents

Vitus: Dog bites

Vitus: Dancers

Lawrence: Cooks

Eligius: Coin Collectors

Anne: Cemeteries

John Nepmucen: Bridges

Christopher: Bus drivers

Ambrose: Bees

Anthony of Egypt: Basket workers

Cosmas and Damian: Barbers

Elizabeth of Hungary: Bakers

Rene Goupil: Anesthetists

Genesius: Actors

And the last few are ones we may actually find interesting -

Librarians, libraries - Jerome, Catherine of Alexandria

Writers - Francis de Sales

Literature - St. Helena

and finally - There is good ole St. Robby, Patron saint of humor. I almost fell out of my chair when I learned that Robby is also the patron saint of insomniacs.

What The Heck Is A Paraprosdokian?

2011-07-20T06:48:00.002-04:00

After an email from a friend I just had to look up paraprosdokian. Here is the definition:

"Figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected; frequently used in a humorous situation."

For example - "Where there's a will, I want to be in it," is a type of paraprosdokian.

Ok, so now enjoy!

1. Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.

2. The last thing I want to do is hurt you. But it's still on my list.

3. Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

4. If I agreed with you, we'd both be wrong.

5. We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public.

6. War does not determine who is right - only who is left.

7. Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.

8. Evening news is where they begin with 'Good Evening,' and then proceed to tell you why it isn't.

9. To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism. To steal from many is research.

10. A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station.

11. I thought I wanted a career. Turns out I just wanted paychecks.

12. Whenever I fill out an application, in the part that says, 'In case of emergency, notify:' I put 'DOCTOR.'

13. I didn't say it was your fault, I said I was blaming you.

14. Behind every successful man is his woman. Behind the fall of a successful man is usually another woman.

15. A clear conscience is the sign of a fuzzy memory.

16. I asked God for a bike, but I know God doesn't work that way. So I stole a bike and asked for forgiveness.

17. You do not need a parachute to skydive. You only need a parachute to skydive twice.

18. Money can't buy happiness, but it sure makes misery easier to live with.

19. There's a fine line between cuddling and holding someone down so they can't get away.

20. I used to be indecisive. Now I'm not so sure.

21. You're never too old to learn something stupid.

22. To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target.

23. Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

24. Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.

25. Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.

26. Hospitality is making your guests feel at home even when you wish they were.

27. When tempted to fight fire with fire, remember that the Fire Department usually uses water.

Do You Use A Full Deck?

2011-07-16T07:40:00.000-04:00

I am sure you have all used the expression "Not playing with a full deck." Looking for a different way to say it? Look no further...

A couple of knights short of a Crusade.

Knitting with one needle.

Life by Norman Rockwell, screenplay by Stephen King.

A few guppies short of an aquarium.

Living proof that nature does not abhor a vacuum.

Marching to a different kettle of fish.

Mind on vacation - mouth working overtime.

No coins in the fountain.

A room temperature IQ.

Not the sharpest crayon in the box.

One horseman short of an apocalypse.

Out in left field with a catcher's mitt on.

Body by Fisher - Brains by Mattel.

Skating on the wrong side of the ice.

Goalie for the dart team.

Useful as an ashtray on a motorcycle.

Gives a lot of bull for somebody who has no cattle.

Just Asking

2011-07-13T06:50:00.003-04:00

For Dave...

Here are some more of those questions that flutter by like glowing, green butterflies while waiting for sleep to arrive.

A stitch in time saves nine what?

Are you breaking the law if you drive past those road signs that say "Do Not Pass"?

Before they invented drawing boards, what did they go back to?

What do chickens think we taste like?

What do people in China call their good plates?

What do batteries run on?

Did Noah keep his bees in archives?

What hair color do they put on the driver's license of a bald man?

Do jellyfish get gas from eating jellybeans?

Did Roman paramedics refer to IV's as "4's"?

Do witches use spell-check?

When they first invented the clock, how did they know what time it was to set it to?

Where in the nursery rhyme does it say Humpty Dumpty is an egg?

How many weeks are there in a light year?

If a food processor slices and dices food, what does a word processor do?

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is a picture of a thousand words worth?

If all the world is a stage, where are the audience sitting?

If the product says "Do not use if seal is broken", how are you supposed to open it and use it?

If your car says Dodge on the front of it, do you really need a horn?

Why is it you must wait until night to call it a day?

Is the nose the scenter of the face?

Just A Random Thought

2011-07-09T06:51:00.000-04:00

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were known for their physical comedy, but they had their share of fun with language, too. In one scene in the 1931 short “Our Wife,” Ollie is trying to make Stan understand that his planned elopement is supposed to be a secret: “Nobody must know about it. It’s strictly on the qui vive.”

What he was trying to say was “on the q.t.” (The right phrase wouldn’t have helped Stan, of course.)

In this phrase, which means “quietly” or “secretly,” “q.t” is simply an abbreviation of “quiet.” According to “American Slang,” its first recorded appearance was in 1884.

“Qui vive,” on the other hand, is a French phrase used by sentries, a form of “Who goes there?”

What it’s really asking is “Whose side are you on?” — literally, “Long live who?”

I suspect the penalty for a wrong answer could be severe.

A Phrase Bugged Me

2011-07-06T07:16:00.001-04:00

I came across a relatively familiar phrase recently and I started wondering where it came from.

Will nilly

Here's what I found -

Willy-nilly

Meaning

This term has two, slightly differing, but related meanings: 'whether it is with or against your will' and 'in an unplanned, haphazard fashion'. We tend to use the latter of these meanings today; the former was the accepted meaning.when the term was first coined.
Origin

There are many spellings in early citations, which relate to the 'with or against your will' meaning of the phrase - 'wille we, nelle we', 'will he, nill he', 'will I, nill I', etc. The expression also appears later as 'nilly willy' or 'willing, nilling', or even, in a later humourous version 'william nilliam'. The early meaning of the word nill is key to this. In early English nill was the opposite of will a contraction of 'ne will'. That is, will meant to want to do something, nill meant to want to avoid it. So, combining the willy - 'I am willing' and nilly - 'I am unwilling' expresses the idea that it doesn't matter to me one way or the other.

The Latin phrase 'nolens, volens' means the same thing, although it isn't clear whether the English version is a simple translation of that.

The second, 'in an undecided, haphazard manner', meaning of willy-nilly arrives from the first. The changeable 'this way, then that way' imagery of willy-nilly behaviour fits with our current 'haphazard' meaning of the term.

There's also a, now archaic, phrase 'hitty missy' that had a similar derivation. That comes from 'hit he, miss he'.

The phrase dates back at least a millennium, with the earliest known version being the Old English text, Aelfric's Lives of Saints, circa 1000:

"Forean the we synd synfulle and sceolan beon eadmode, wille we, nelle we."

Shakespeare was familiar with, and apparently quite fond of, the expression in various forms. He used it in The Taming of the Shrew, 1596:

Petruchio: [To Katharina]

Thus in plain terms: your father hath consented
That you shall be my wife; your dowry 'greed on;
And, Will you, nill you, I will marry you.
[I.e. I will marry you, whether you like it or not.]

and again, in Hamlet:

First Clown: Give me leave. Here lies the water; good: here stands the man; good; if the man go to this water, and drown himself, it is, will he, nill he, he goes.
[I.e. If a man chooses to drown he enters the water, if he chooses not, he leaves.]

The 'undecided' meaning of the expression appears to have spawned the later 'shilly-shally'. The OED is a little lax in dating this from the end of the 19th century. They cite Sir Walter Besant's novel The Orange Girl, 1898:

"Let us have no more shilly shally, willy nilly talk."

That makes the connection between 'willy-nilly' and 'shilly-shally' apparent. There are literally thousands of 18th and 19th century pre-datings of the phrase, in various newspapers and works of literature; for example, The Adventures of Dick Hazard, 1755:

Where I quartered, a good buxom Widow kept the house; and I had her before I was ten days in town --D-- me. She knew things better than to stand Shilly Shally.

More Jerry

2011-07-02T07:30:00.000-04:00

Three followers asked via email for more of Jerry Coleman. OK, here you go!

"If Pete Rose brings the Reds in first, they ought to bronze him and put him in cement."

"It's a base hit on the error by Roberts."

"There's a deep fly ball... Winfield goes back, back... his head hits the wall ... it's rolling towards second base."

"Thomas is racing for it, but McCovey is there and can't get his glove to it. That play shows the inexperience, not on Thomas' part, but on the part of Willie McC ... well, not on McCovey's part either."

"They throw Winfield out at second, but he's safe."

"Jesus Alou is in the on-deck circus."

"Kent Abbott is in the on-deck circuit."

"There is someone warming up in the Giants' bullpen, but he's obscured by his number."

"Johnny Grubb slides into second with a standup double."

"All the Padres need is a flyball in the air."

"Davis fouls out to third in fair territory."

"There's a shot up the alley. Oh, it's just foul."

"The new Haitian baseball can't weigh more than four ounces or less than five."

"That's the fourth extra base hit for the Padres -- two doubles and a triple."

"Montreal leads Atlanta by three, 5-1."

"You might want to put this in the back of your craw and think about it."

"Last night's homer was Willie Stargell's 399th career home run, leaving him one shy of 500."

"The first pitch to Tucker Ashford is grounded into left field. No, wait a minute. It's ball one. Low and outside."

"That's Hendrick's 19th home run. One more and he reaches double figures."

"Well, it looks like the all-star balloting is about over, especially in the National and American Leagues."

"The Padres, after winning the first game of the doubleheader, are ahead here in the top of the fifth and hoping for a split."

"At the end of six innings of play, it's Montreal 5, Expos 3."

"Tony Taylor was one of the first acquisitions that the Phillies made when they reconstructed their team. They got him from Philadelphia."

"Mike Caldwell, the Padres' right-handed southpaw, will pitch tonight."

"The ex-left-hander Dave Roberts will be going for Houston."

"Hector Torrez, how can you communicate with Enzo Hernandez when he speaks Spanish and you speak Mexican ?"

"Rich Folkers is throwing up in the bullpen."

At Royals Stadium: "The sky is so clear today you can see all the way to Missouri"

"I sure hope you're staying alive for the upcoming Dodgers series."

"National League umpires wear inside chest protesters."

"The Phillies beat the Cubs today in a doubleheader. That puts another keg in the Cubs' coffin."

"Sanguillen is totally unpredictable to pitch to because he's so unpredicatable."

"Ron Guidry is not very big, maybe 140 pounds, but he has an arm like a lion."

"The way he's swinging the bat, he won't get a hit until the 20th century."

"There's two heads to every coin."

"Billy Almon has all of his inlaw and outlaws here this afternoon."

"If ever an error had "F" written on it, that grounder did."

"If Rose's streak was still intact, with that single to left, the fans would be throwing babies out of the upper deck."

"He can be lethal death."

"Sometimes, big trees grow out of acorns. I think I heard that from a squirrel." "Gonzo leaps like a giraffe and grabs it."

"Hats off to drug abusers everywhere."

"That noise in my earphones knocked my nose off and I had to pick it up and find it."

"At the end, excitement maintained its hysteria."

"I've made a couple of mistakes I'd like to do over."
-Jerry Coleman

Tuning In To Sports

2011-06-29T07:25:00.000-04:00

I watch a lot of baseball. Some of the funniest words I have ever heard come from the players and announcers of the game. Some just leave me speechless.

Enjoy.

THE WIS-DUMB OF YOGI

Lawrence Peter "Yogi" Berra, the former NY Yankee catcher, is best known for saying things like this:

"Surprise me."
- on where his wife should have him buried.

"You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there."

"If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else."

"If you can't imitate him, don't copy him."

"You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I'm not hungry enough to eat six."

"Baseball is 90% mental -- the other half is physical."

MORE DUMB QUOTES BY YOGI BERRA

"Do you mean now?"
- when asked for the time.

"If you come to a fork in the road, take it."

"I made a wrong mistake."

Jerry Coleman is also a former New York Yankees star and longtime San Diego Padres TV announcer. He's been the voice of the San Diego Padres for almost 30 years. "Oh, Doctor" and "You can hang a star on that baby" are his most famous phrases. But not his most memorable. You see, by comparison, Jerry makes fellow Yankee Yogi Berra seem like a master of the English language! Here are some of Jerry's best calls:

"It's a base hit on the error by Roberts."

"There's a deep fly ball... Winfield goes back, back... his head hits the wall ... it's rolling towards second base."

"Thomas is racing for it, but McCovey is there and can't get his glove to it. That play shows the inexperience, not on Thomas' part, but on the part of Willie McC ... well, not on McCovey's part either."

"They throw Winfield out at second, but he's safe."

"Mike Caldwell, the Padres' right-handed southpaw, will pitch tonight."

MORE DUMB QUOTES BY JERRY COLEMAN

"Hector Torrez, how can you communicate with Enzo Hernandez when he speaks Spanish and you speak Mexican ?"

"Rich Folkers is throwing up in the bullpen."

"And he slides into second with a stand-up double!"

I'll leave you with this pressing question - "Why does everybody stand up and sing 'Take Me Out to the Ballgame' when they're already there?"

Excellent Post From The Chicago Tribune

2011-06-25T07:39:00.000-04:00

John Kass

June 26, 2011

President Barack Obama made the mother of all verbal gaffes last week as he invoked a fallen hero while talking to troops who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Naturally, his enemies moved to take advantage. But then, if one of Obama's Republican opponents had made such a gaffe, the Obamanites would grab it and twist it until the other guy screamed.

So the cycle began anew on Thursday.

"First time I saw the 10th Mountain Division, you guys were in southern Iraq," Obama said at Ft. Drum, in upstate New York. "When I went back to visit Afghanistan, you guys were the first ones there.

"I had the great honor of seeing some of you because a comrade of yours, Jared Monti, was the first person who I was able to award the Medal of Honor to who actually came back and wasn't receiving it posthumously," the president said.

But Sgt. Jared Monti didn't receive the nation's highest award from the president's hands.

Monti was killed in Afghanistan on June 21, 2006, repeatedly facing enemy fire as he tried to rescue a wounded comrade.

On Sept. 17, 2009, the president handed the Medal of Honor to Monti's parents. Obama apparently confused Monti with Army Staff Sgt. Salvatore Giunta, who was the first living person to receive the Medal of Honor since the Vietnam War. Giunta was presented the award by Obama in November.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, in a statement acknowledging the presidential mistake, said: "At Ft. Drum, the president misspoke when discussing the first Medal of Honor he presented posthumously to Jared Monti. …"

It was neutrally phrased, but for all the verbiage, there was one thing missing:

An apology.

A simple "I'm sorry" would have been nice. But in politics, an apology is seen as a sign of weakness, which is why the non-apology apology has become a modern art form.

The game is all about being the first to slash. And so Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus made one of the first cuts in an interview with CBS News.

"People make mistakes but ... when he is not scripted, mistakes seem to happen," Priebus said. "I think the president is a scripted, plasticized candidate and I think America is prepared to relieve him of his job in 2012."

Democrats will naturally be outraged, but have they forgotten how they flayed President George Bush for saying "they misunderestimate me," and discussing how people were "working hard to put food on your family"?

Bush served up all sorts of verbal goulash that got him in trouble. But after 9/11, there were new lines in Bush's face. His hair grew gray. He looked exhausted, and the ridicule came in waves.

Now look at Obama. What do you see?

His hair has gone gray. There are deepening lines in his face. He's exhausted. And when he misspeaks, the ridicule comes in waves.

Should politicians get called out for some of the ridiculous things they say?

Absolutely.

Google and the British Library

2011-06-22T07:21:00.001-04:00

By Georgina Prodham

LONDON | Mon Jun 20, 2011 1:23pm EDT

(Reuters) - Google plans to digitize a quarter of a million books from the British Library's collections covering a period from the French Revolution to the end of slavery as part of its ambitious books project.

The search engine giant has already scanned 13 million books through partnerships with more than 40 libraries around the world, which it makes available through its search results.

The British Library project involves a selection of books published between 1700 and 1870, including feminist pamphlets about Queen Marie-Antoinette and an account of a stuffed hippopotamus owned by the Prince of Orange.

Google will bear the costs of digitization, and the items will then be available for full-text search, download and reading through Google Books as well as being searchable through the British Library's website and stored in its digital archive.

Google does not make any money from its library partnerships, but says the inclusion of material from books that have never been published online enriches its search results.

"Our aim at Google has always been to give people as much access to the world's information as is possible," Peter Barron, Google's head of external relations, told Reuters on Monday.

In Europe, Google only scans out-of-copyright books but its practice of scanning all books of its U.S. library partners has landed it in trouble with U.S. authors and publishers, who filed a lawsuit against Google in 2005 that is not yet settled.

Google was offering excerpts of books online without the permission of copyright holders, putting the onus on authors and rights holders to claim payments or to voice their objections.

The British Library works with a variety of partners and aims to have much of its collection of 150 million items online and available to the public by 2020.

A previous partnership with Microsoft resulted in the digitization of 65 million 19th century books, some of which are now available through an app for Apple's iPad launched earlier this month.

British Library Chief Executive Lynne Brindley told Reuters: "You can see we're on a long journey. This represents another significant milestone but there are plenty more to go."

My Favorite Short Story Writers

2011-06-18T07:30:00.000-04:00

This is just a l;ist of my favorites. Have you any others to add?

10 Chuck Palahniuk

The author of “Fight Club” is not necessarily known as a “Short Story Writer,” however Palahniuk is a believer in the Ray Bradbury ritual of writing a short story every day. Many of his stories have ended up in his novels without the reader realizing they were originally independent tales. In one novel “haunted” he used a short story about a writers convention to bridge together 23 different short stories. This book features his infamous story “Guts” which has caused several people to faint when read aloud at book signings.

9 Washington Irving

Washington Irving was an American author, essayist, biographer and historian of the early 19th century. He was best known for his short stories “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle”, both of which appear in his book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. His historical works include biographies of George Washington, Oliver Goldsmith and Muhammad, and several histories of 15th-century Spain dealing with subjects such as Christopher Columbus, the Moors, and the Alhambra.

8 Isaac Asimov

Asimov is certainly one of the most prolific writers in the English language. He is known for many different works from his series “Foundation”, and “Fantastic Voyage”, to text books and everything in-between. He is primarily known as a science fiction writer, however he is one of the few people to have their writing span every major category of the Dewy Decimal System except Philosophy. He wrote an estimated 515 books in his lifetime. As far as writing short stories goes, he has 3 well known stories. “I, Robot”, “The Bicentennial Man”, and “The Last Question.” The first two have been turned into movies. He wrote 19 Short Story collections, spanning a total of 284.

7 Ray Bradbury

Bradbury is a very well known Science Fiction writer. He is famous for writing a short story every day, a ritual that many other writers have attempted to follow. He has written 11 novels, 3 of which are made up of loosely connected stories, and over 40 short story collections, for a grand total of over 400 short stories and novellas. But it’s not just quantity that earns him a place on this list. His best known short story “A Sound of Thunder”, is the origin of a common science fiction theme called “the butterfly effect”, it is also the most republished science fiction story of all time.

6 Stephen King

King is one of the most popular authors in America, and a very prolific writer as well. He is a huge fan of the short story. “1408″, “The Mist”, and “Hearts in Atlantis” are just a few of the 35 short stories he wrote that have been made into movies, though perhaps the most famous is “Stand By Me”. He has written 8 story collections and a total of 124 short stories and 17 Novellas in his career. He was also selected to be the editor of The Best American Short Stories of 2007, and also won the O. Henry Award in 1996.

5 J.D. Salinger

Salinger is known for his novel “Catcher in the Rye”, this is actually his only published novel. A very eccentric writer, he has written a great deal of material in his life, but much of it has never been seen by any one but him. He has 3 other books available to the public. “Nine Stories”, “Frannie and Zoey”, and “Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters and Seymour an Introduction”. All 3 of these books are short story collections. He also has about 2 dozen other uncollected short stories. Salinger is considered by many to be the greatest American writer of the 20th century.

4 O. Henry

Real name William Sydney Porter. O. Henry is known for writing flash fiction with wit and a strange twist ending. His most well known story is “The Gift of the Magi” which is a story about a young poor couple who each sells their most precious object in order to buy a Christmas gift for their partner, but in doing so they end up making each others gift worthless. This story has been retold in many different forms over the years. The O. Henry Award was established in his honor, it is a very prestigious award given to outstanding short story writers. Two writers on this list have won this award.

3 John Updike

Updike was an extremely gifted short story writer, he published over 150 short stories in his career, his last collection “Tears of my Father” was published in June 2009, about 6 months after his death. He has also won over 30 different awards in his lifetime including: the Pulitzer, the Rea Award, the PEN/Falkner award, and the aforementioned O. Henry Award to name a few.

2 F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald was an American writer of novels and short stories, whose works are evocative of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the “Lost Generation” of the Twenties. He finished four novels, including The Great Gatsby, with another published posthumously, and wrote dozens of short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with despair and age. If you want a recommendation for his greatest two short stories, I suggest reading “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” and “The Diamond As Big As The Ritz”. You won’t be disappointed.

1 Edgar Allen Poe

Poe is probably the most famous English short story writer of all time. Poe only wrote one complete novel in his lifetime, and it is not very well known, however his short stories are. Most people can tell you the story of “The Tell Tale Heart”, “The Masque of the Red Death,” or “The Pit and the Pendulum”. Poe has over 65 short stories to his name. Poe is also considered to have invented the detective genre.

Did You Know Poe Had A Cat - and He Wrote Too!

2011-06-15T07:27:00.001-04:00

We all know what Edgar Allen Poe thought of the Raven.....but what really happened that midnight eerie? Only his cat knew the truth...

On a night quite unenchanting, when the rain was downward slanting,
I awakened to the ranting of the man I catch mice for.
Tipsy and a bit unshaven, in a tone I found quite craven,
Poe was talking to a Raven perched above the chamber door.
"Raven's very tasty," thought I, as I tiptoed o'er the floor,
"There is nothing I like more"

Soft upon the rug I treaded, calm and careful as I headed
Towards his roost atop that dreaded bust of Pallas I deplore.
While the bard and birdie chattered, I made sure that nothing clattered,
Creaked, or snapped, or fell, or shattered, as I crossed the corridor
For his house is crammed with trinkets, curios and wierd decor -
Bric-a-brac and junk galore.

Still the Raven never fluttered, standing stock-still as he uttered,
In a voice that shrieked and sputtered, his two cents' worth -
"Nevermore."

While this dirge the birdbrain kept up, oh, so silently I crept up,
Then I crouched and quickly lept up, pouncing on the feathered bore.
Soon he was a heap of plumage, and a little blood and gore -
Only this and not much more.

"Oooo!" my pickled poet cried out, "Pussycat, it's time I dried out!
Never sat I in my hideout talking to a bird before
How I've wallowed in self-pity, while my gallant, valiant kitty
Put and end to that damned ditty" - then I heard him start to snore.
Back atop the door I clambered, eyed that statue I abhor,
Jumped - and smashed it on the floor.

Postponed Last Week - Here today

2011-06-11T07:19:00.002-04:00

I watched TV for a spell a week ago Thursday. ESPN. No, not my usual fare of baseball. The Scripp's National Spelling Bee. Amazing!

Congratulatiions to all he kids who participated. Talk about playing in The Word Farm!! Wow!!

Associated Press

OXON HILL, Md.—It went on and on and on. Five spellers who seemingly had memorized the entire dictionary simply could not be stumped with any word tossed their way. It was getting late, way past bedtime and well beyond the time slot allotted by ESPN for its telecast.

Finally, after 21 consecutive spellings without a miss, one of them finally flubbed a word. Eventually, the others were gone—having heard the telltale bell of elimination—except for 14-year-old Indian-American eighth grader Sukanya Roy of South Abington Township, Pa., who took home the trophy and the more than $40,000 in cash and prizes at the 84th Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Sukanya's winning word was "cymotrichous," which relates to wavy hair. She likes hiking, rock climbing and ice skating, wants to travel and perhaps pursue a career in international relations. She is the fourth consecutive Indian-American to win the bee and the ninth in the last 13 years, a run that began when Nupur Lala captured the crown in 1999 and was later featured in the documentary "Spellbound."

A three-time competitor at the bee, Sukanya tied for 12th in 2009 and 20th in 2010.

"I went through the dictionary once or twice," she said, "and I guess some of the words really stuck."

Laura Newcombe, 12, of Toronto was the runner-up. She was trying to become the first Canadian to win the bee, but she went out on the word "sorites," her look of concentration turning suddenly to a sad one when she realized she'd misspelled it. Canadians have been a strong presence at the competition for many years and have had several close calls, with Nate Gartke of Alberta also finishing second in 2007.

Thirteen spellers made the finals, an ever-growing chic-to-be-geek event that was broadcast in prime time for the sixth consecutive year. It was held at the National Harbor complex along the Potomac River, south of Washington.

Only one speller misfired in his first attempt: Samuel Estep of Berryville, Va,, who couldn't handle "bondieuserie" and made the slow walk across the stage to receive a hug from his father.

The rounds kept getting tougher. Sriram Hathwar of Painted Post, N.Y., warmed everyone's hearts by greeting the audience with a "good evening" every time he stepped to the microphone, but he was ousted by the word "polatouche." Another Canadian, Veronica Penny, couldn't handle "rougeot" and made a ballerina-type wave as she walked away.

But then it came down to a final five that wouldn't give up. Sukanya, Laura, Dakota Jones of Las Vegas, Arvind Mahankali of New York and Joanna Ye of Carlisle, Pa., combined to spell everything from "abhinaya" to "capoeira" to "cheongsam" to "opodeldoc" through Rounds 11, 12, 13, 14 and into 15.

When Dakota finally misspelled "zanja" to break the string, he received a standing ovation. The remaining spellers got eight in a row before Arvind missed on "Jugendstil," which he initially and hilariously pronounced "You could steal." He also got a standing ovation and gave the crowd a salute. Everyone stood again for Joanna when she missed "galoubet."

The only two left were Sukanya and Laura. "Tired yet?" Laura asked the judges at one point.

But Sukanya couldn't be beat. She said she knew every word that was given to her, never having to guess—the result of her months of going through the dictionary twice from start to finish.

The bee continued to exhibit a sense of humor in the sentences used by pronouncer Jacques Bailly. He used a "set of prison bars for the name Bernie Madoff" in his example for "brachygraphy" in the semifinals and later made a reference to the "The Jeffersons," a sitcom that went off the air some 10 years before the oldest of the spellers was born. In the finals there was the ice-breaker: "The spellers' exsufflation at spelling the word correctly blew people's hair back in the front row."

The week began with 275 spellers. A written test Tuesday and two oral rounds Wednesday reduced the field for the semifinals.

The Best Entry Ever

2011-06-08T07:20:00.002-04:00

In my last post I mentioned the demise of Schott's Vocab. Today I would like to offer possibly the best entry to a Weekend Competition. The topic, as my often-faulty memory says, had to do with pins.

Enjoy!

This has to be one of the best weekend competition entries I have ever read!

The following was a joint spontaneous effort among friends about a year ago, which I revised somewhat for this competition:

PHIL’S INTRODUCTION:

C, E-flat, and G go into a bar. The bartender says: “Sorry, but we don’t serve minors.”

So the E-flat leaves, and the C and the G have an open fifth between them.

After a few drinks, the fifth is diminished and the G is out flat. An F comes in and tries to augment the situation, but is not sharp enough. D comes into the bar and heads straight for the bathroom saying, “Excuse me, I’ll just be a second.”

Then an A comes into the bar, but the bartender is not convinced that this relative of C is not a minor. He notices a B-flat hiding at the end of the bar and exclaims, “Get out now. You’re the seventh minor I’ve found in this bar tonight.”

The next night, E-flat waltzes in accompanied by a very drunken C. The bartender says, “E-flat and C again! This could be a major development.”

Someone called the police and a capella soon arrived, who put C under a rest. He was acoustic of public drunkenness and marched off to jail. He objected loudly, alto no avail.

C was brought to trial, found guilty of contributing to the diminution of a minor, for de cadence, for breaking the Penal Coda by having an unprotected sax. And otherwise fluting the law. He was sentenced to 10 years at an upscale aria facility

On a peal, however, C was found innocent of any wrongdoing, even accidental, and that the charges were bassless.

MIKE CHIMED IN WITH, “HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED TO E-FLAT…”

E-flat, not easily deflatted, came back to the bar the next night clad only in a three-piece suite, which he removed, and stood there au natural, with exposed octaves partially hidden by a small fan dangle, apparently pedaling himself

A drunk who ate at the bar, Bached away and said, “Don’t that beat all!” and yelled for the boss Tony Pops, who called the voice squad.

The squad lieder said, “Gavotte do we have here?” They saw what was going on, saw E flat was carrying a piece, and said, “OK, E-flat, you know the quadrille. The jig is up!”

Pops wanted to refrain from prestoing charges because E-flat was not a violin offender, but the cops medley persisted, saying “Euphonium, we a rest ‘em.”

E-flat said, “Wait a minuet – reed my lips – these charges are falsetto!” The cops said, “Etude, you are slurring your phrases, off you go!”

The cops treated him like a piano kidding. They tried to march him off to jail in double time, but his movements were slow. His feet were retardando by tightly noted chords, and he could only take half-steps down the rocky clef to the jail, whose inmates were making noises lie kazoo.

Things progressioned from ballad to verse. Before they even made a notation in the station house register, the cops beat him with his own staff. He called his very obase fife Ella G, but the cops told her to make herself scherzo.

Ella G called a defense lyre, Lyn D. Hop, who knew E’s lady judge. Lyn thought he could get E out of jail, saying, despite being under a gigue order, “I wood baton it as long as E-flat can common time to see the judge and meter in her chamber.”

In jail, E-flat complained that all he had to eat was tune a fish, octet-opus, scale yunz and apple encores thrown in for good measure, with no soprano to wash his smelodious hands.

But his big-bassooned fife Ella G brought him a quartet of high screams for dessert, so he composed himself and changed his tune.

Lynn conducted E-flat’s defense by trumpeting his innocence in a longa breve to the court, saying “This is no hum drum case!”

He insisted on an impromptu trial, and arranged a bridge loan for E-flat’s bail, since he was going baroque.

A relative pitched for his release. And E-flat’s mother, Ma Zurka, even paid the lyre’s daily podium fees.

At E-flat’s trio, his lyre proved that there was no motif, and that the charges were prelude icrus. This tuned out to B a key theme , and his tone proved instrumental in the resulting verdict.

Dorian the trial the judge sostenutoed almost all defense objections, which gave E-flat quite a trill.

After a chorus of blues from E-flat’s supporters turned into a crescendo, the judged bowed to the mob, recapitulated to the inevitable, said “I am obbligato to release him!,” declaring the trial mute.

The prosecution failed to overture this release on a peal. All in all, a suite victory – avoiding being sentenced to an insti-tutti.

Everyone now agrees that E flat’s a rest had been a grave mistake, was glad that the judge set hymn loose, and that all his legato problems were finé.

The bar owner gave everyone a free round, ordered pizza gatos, played his treasured frank sonata records, and said we should all “just fuguettaboudit and all live in Harmonium”.

OTIS HORNED IN WITH:

It’s very encouraging that after such a wide interval, E-flat’s case was resolved.

It was rumored that E’s fat fife was getting tired of being retenuto, from singing; when the good news reached her, she took an Allegro to clear her sinuses and began crowing loudly, which got her into treble with her neighbors.

You pickup the story from hear.

JOHN FINALIZED WITH:

I have no symphony for those who are bass enough to crescendo this chorus by mail to other musicians; it’s cymballic of the times that we now orchestrate even puns!

A Sad Note

2011-06-03T13:29:00.006-04:00

In place of the post I was planning to post tomorrow on the National Spelling Bee, I bring you some very sad news...

Thursday morning I made my usual rounds of the internet and was stunned when I came to my favorite word-related site. Schott's Vocab. I was dumbfounded to read the following...

"After two and a half years, thousands of posts and tens of thousands of comments, Schott’s Vocab is closing its doors.

"It has been an absolute pleasure to trawl the seas of linguistic development – netting the flotsam, jetsam and ligan of neologism, and presenting the choicest specimens for display and comment...

"But this blog would not have been an inch as much fun without the comments and quips of a legion of co-vocabularists who, not least at the weekends, raised eyebrows and smiles in equal measure."

The weekends were such a joy as Ben would offer up a competition on a wide variety of topics meant to stimulate thought and wit. The subjects included such wonderful topics as Greeting Card Slogans, Conversation Stoppers, Prayers, New Bond Film Titles, Linguistic Resolutions, Ways to Leave Your Lover, Define Friendship, Graffiti, Define Family, Crossword Clues, Fool's Errands, Define Education, Unlikely Excuses, Euphemisms for Death, Malapropisms, Pun(ishment), Euphemisms for Stupidity, Thingummyjigs, Imaginary Libraries, Tom Swifties and Favorite. Word. Ever.

The comments, indeed in large numbers, were thought-provoking, witty, down-right hilarious and time well spent.

I sincerely hope the NYT will archive all of those competitions. It would be sad to lose all of that genius.

I am deeply saddened to see this all come to an end. It has Ben great - you took your best Schott and hit a bulls-eye that many could not even see.

Sorry...Just A Short Post Today

2011-06-02T06:34:00.000-04:00

Have a smile or two...

AISLE, ALTAR, HYMN thought the bride as she entered the church.

Worry causes falling hair. Thus, when the going gets tough, the tufts get going.

Did The Titanic Flounder?

2011-05-28T07:34:00.000-04:00

In a recent news article there was confusion on this, when a baseball team was referred to as a ship that had hit an iceberg and “floundered.”

The noun “flounder” is a fish. The verb “flounder” means “to struggle awkwardly to move, as in deep mud or snow; plunge about in a stumbling manner.”

This could certainly describe a struggling football team’s woeful efforts, but not when it’s being compared to a ship. A ship in trouble can “founder” — “to fill with water, as during a storm, and sink.”

Applied to things other than ships and boats, to founder is “to break down; collapse; fail.”

Something that’s floundering is still making some effort, even if inelegantly. Something that’s foundered has stopped moving altogether.

How to keep them straight? Once again, I bow to the great Daffy Duck, who says of a foe temporarily knocked unconscious:

“He’s colder than a foundered flounder.”

For now, th-th-that’s all, folks!

Except for a reply from my letter to the editor. It must be lost in the mail.There was recent confusion on this, when a football team was referred to as a ship that had hit an iceberg and “floundered.”

Would You Look For A Bucket?

2011-05-25T06:30:00.000-04:00

We have all heard the phrases 'bucket list' and 'kick the bucket' but where did kicking the bucket start?

We all know what a bucket is - and so this phrase appears rather odd. Why should kicking one be associated with dying?

The link between buckets and death was made by at least 1785, when the phrase was defined in Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue:

"To kick the bucket, to die."

One theory as to why, albeit with little evidence to support it, is that the phrase originates from the notion that people hanged themselves by standing on a bucket with a noose around their neck and then kicking the bucket away. There are no citations that relate the phrase to suicide and, in any case, why a bucket? Whenever I've needed something to stand on I can't recall ever grabbing a bucket. This theory doesn't stand up any better than the supposed buckets did.

The mist begins to clear with the fact that in 16th century England bucket had an additional meaning (and in some parts it still has), i.e. a beam or yoke used to hang or carry items. The term may have been introduced into English from the French trébuchet - meaning a balance, or buque - meaning a yoke. That meaning of bucket was referred to in Peter Levins' Manipulus vocabulorum. A dictionarie of English and Latine wordes, 1570:

"A Bucket, beame, tollo."

and was used by Shakespeare in Henry IV Part II, 1597:

"Swifter then he that gibbets on the Brewers Bucket." [to gibbet meant to hang]

The wooden frame that was used to hang animals up by their feet for slaughter was called a bucket. Not unnaturally they were likely to struggle or to spasm after death and hence 'kick the bucket'.

Fore!

2011-05-21T06:09:00.001-04:00

I came across a little tidbit the other day that said that the word 'golf' was an acronym that means gentlemen only, ladies forbidden.

OOOps.

It seems hardly worth mentioning but, of course, the word golf wasn't coined as an acronym formed from 'gentlemen only, ladies forbidden'. In fact I do only mention it as it is one of those nonsense stories that circulate on the Internet and this may help cut down on the number of times it gets repeated.

Golf is a very ancient game and the name is first used in print as early as 1457:

"And at e fut bal ande e golf be vtterly cryt downe and nocht vsyt."

This was part of a proclamation by James II of Scotland aimed at reducing the time that the populace spent playing golf and football , which were keeping his subjects away from archery practice. The edict was repeated later by James III and James IV, who called golf and football 'vnproffitable sportis'.

There were many spellings of the word prior to the acceptance of the current spelling - goff, gowf, golf, goif, gof to name just a few. The unsupported idea that the word was formed from an acronym hardly explains how all the alternative spellings came into being. Acronyms are in fact a 20th century innovation and more than half a millennium too late to be the source of the name golf.

The real derivation of 'golf' is obscure and the subject of considerable dispute.

Of course, this brings to mind just a few golf quotes -

Golf combines two favorite American pastimes: taking long walks and hitting things with sticks.

P. J. O'Rourke

Golf is a game in which a ball - one and a half inches in diameter - is placed on a ball - 8,000 miles in diameter. The object being to hit the small ball but not the larger.

John Cunningham

Golf is a good walk spoiled.

Mark Twain

And, last but not least -

If you foozle with your cleek, And your putts are let's say-weak.
If your drives, for all to see, Do not always leave the tee.
And to slice them is a habit, If, in short, you're a rabbit.
Do not put your clubs away Drink a Guinness everyday.

An early Guinness advert.

Skirting An Issue

2011-05-18T07:30:00.001-04:00

I know some of you may not understand this post, but I bet you know someone who might. I came across this phrase yesterday. 'FENDER SKIRTS.'

A term I haven't heard in a long time, and thinking about 'fender skirts' started me thinking about other words that quietly disappear from our language with hardly a notice like 'curb feelers.'

Since I'd been thinking of cars, my mind naturally went that direction first.
Any kids will probably have to find some older person over 50 to explain some of these terms to you.

Remember 'Continental kits?' They were rear bumper extenders and spare tire covers that were supposed to make any car as cool as a Lincoln Continental.

When did we quit calling them 'emergency brakes?' At some point 'parking brake' became the proper term. But I miss the hint of drama that went with 'emergency brake.'

I'm sad, too, that almost all the old folks are gone who would call the accelerator the 'foot feed.' Many today do not even know what a clutch is or that the dimmer switch used to be on the floor.

Didn't you ever wait at the street for your daddy to come home, so you could ride the 'running board' up to the house?

Here's a phrase I heard all the time in my youth but never anymore - 'store-bought.' Of course, just about everything is store-bought these days. But once it was bragging material to have a store-bought suit or dress or a store-bought bag of candy.

'Coast to coast' is a phrase that once held all sorts of excitement and now means almost nothing. Now we take the term 'world wide' for granted. This floors me.

On a smaller scale, 'wall-to-wall' was once a magical term in our homes. In the '50s, everyone covered his or her hardwood floors with, wow, wall-to-wall carpeting! Today, everyone replaces their wall-to-wall carpeting with hardwood floors. Go figure.

When was the last time you heard the quaint phrase 'in a family way ?' It's hard to imagine that the word 'pregnant' was once considered a little too graphic, a little too clinical for use in polite company, so we had all that talk about stork visits and 'being in a family way' or simply 'expecting.'

Most of these words go back to the '50s, but here's a pure '60s word I came across the other day 'rat fink.' Ooh, what a nasty put-down!

Here's another word I miss - 'percolator.' That was just a fun word to say. And what was it replaced with? 'Coffee maker.' How dull... Mr. Coffee, I blame you for this.

I miss those made-up marketing words that were meant to sound so modern and now sound so retro. Words like 'DynaFlow' and 'Electrolux.' Remember? "Introducing the 1963 Admiral TV, now with 'SpectraVision!'"

Food for thought. Was there a telethon that wiped out lumbago? Nobody complains of that anymore. Maybe that's what Castor oil cured, because I never hear mothers threatening kids with Castor oil anymore.

Some words aren't gone, but are definitely on the endangered list. The one that grieves me most is 'supper.' Now everybody says 'dinner.' Save a great word. Invite someone to supper.
Perhaps you could discuss fender skirts.

Do You Know These Groups?

2011-05-14T08:17:00.000-04:00

Nouns of Association (also sometimes called nouns of assemblage) are words that describe groups of similar objects. We use them all the time and you will recognize the vast majority of them, but there are also a large number that are not well known. An example you might know is “A litter of kittens” – litter is the noun of association. So, here are 20 that you probably didn’t know, to help spice up your sentences.

1. A clowder of cats

2. A parenthesis of cellists

3. A coalition of cheetahs

4. A shock of corn (with stalks included)

5. A brace of dogs (2 dogs)

6. A leap of leopards

7. A coterie of Orchids

8. A dray of squirrels

9. A midden of shells

10. A murder of crows

11. A thought of barons

12. A knot of toads

13. A parliament of owls

14. A covey of quail

15. A passel of piglets

16. A rascal of boys

17. A rafter of turkeys

18. A skein of geese (in flight)

19. A shrewdness of apes

20. A cete of badgers

21. A flush of plumbers

22. A Rand of Objectivists

23. A yap of chihuahuas

24. An ogle of office boys

25. A descent of relatives

Sources used for verification: Milwaukee Zoo, Oxford English Dictionary, Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)

Have You Ever Visited These Places?

2011-05-11T07:24:00.000-04:00

Let's sample a few toponyms -- words derived from the names of places.

brigadoon (BRIG-uh-doon) noun

An idyllic place that is out of touch with reality or one that makes its appearance for a brief period in a long time.

[From Brigadoon, a village in the musical of the same name, by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, based on the story Germelshausen by Friedrich Gerstacker. Brigadoon is under a spell that makes it invisible to outsiders except on one day every 100 years.]

"There is a feel of Brigadoon to Cooperstown, the lush village of baseball and opera tucked into the middle of an idyllic nowhere in upstate New York." Elisabeth Bumiller, Cooperstown, The New York Times, Jul 1, 2001.

stoic (STOH-ik) noun

One who is or appears to be indifferent to pleasure or pain; unaffected by emotions.

adjective

Unaffected by pleasure or pain.

[After the name of the school of philosophy founded by Greek philosopher Zeno (c. 340-265 BCE) that one should be free of passion and be unaffected by grief or joy. From Middle English, from Latin stoicus, from Greek stoikos from stoa, the porch where Zeno taught.]

"Those who stand to lose revenue from electronic-book piracy are being remarkably stoic in the face of the first high-profile incident." Christine McGeever, E-book Piracy Doesn't Frighten Publishers, Computerworld, Apr 10, 2000.

Timbuktu (tim-buk-TOO) noun

1. A town in West Africa in central Mali. Also Tombouctou.

2. Any remote place.

"`You can never find a space [at the mall]; you have to park in Timbuktu,' Ms. Dvorak says. `Then you have to walk all over the mall.'" Dean Starkman, The Mall, Without the Haul, The Wall Street Journal (New York), Jul 25, 2001.

El Dorado (el duh-RAH-doh) noun

A place offering fabulous wealth or opportunity.

[From Spanish, literally, the gilded one. After a legendary place in South America sought for its gold by 16th century explorers.]

ultima Thule (UL-tuh-muh THOO-lee) noun

1. The northernmost part of the world believed habitable by the ancients.

2. A distant or remote goal or place.

[Latin ultima, farthest, Thule, name of a place.]

"Opportunities? In culture's Ultima Thule? Absolutely, both Clink and Egan affirm." Mike Dunham, Growing Talent Pool Figures in 'Requiem', The Daily News (Anchorage, Alaska), Apr 9, 1999.

"It is much too early, say the experts, to presume Samurai's exile to ultima Thule wherein rust those firecracker Ford Pintos, runaway Audi 5000s and Ralph Nader's Corvairs that were unsafe at any speed." Paul Dean, Safety and the Samurai: Fans Don't Mind a Few Bumps, The Los Angeles Times, Jun 9, 1988.

Known to the ancients as the northern-most region of the habitable world, Thule had been variously identified as one of the Shetland islands, Norway, or Iceland. Today's Thule is in northwest Greenland, within the Arctic Circle.

Incidentally, the name Greenland is ironic, as more than four-fifths of the land is ice-capped. The palindromically named village of Qaanaaq, in the district of Thule, has the distinction of being the northern-most naturally inhabited place on earth.

At least one linguaphile lives in Greenland (with email address ending in gl, the domain code for Greenland), but we don't know if there's one in Thule.

Remembering The Atmosphere

2011-05-07T07:42:00.010-04:00

Recently I was reminded of a use for the word 'atmosphere'. The second definition below is the one I mean.

From Merriam-Webster

Definition of ATMOSPHERE

1a: the gaseous envelope of a celestial body (as a planet)
b : the whole mass of air surrounding the earth

2: the air of a locality

3: a surrounding influence or environment

4: a unit of pressure equal to the pressure of the air at sea level or approximately 14.7 pounds per square inch (101,325 pascals)

5a: the overall aesthetic effect of a work of art
b : an intriguing or singular tone, effect, or appeal

I cannot describe what or even how I feel when I sense a very different atmosphere at a particular location. Words fail me. But it is there and of that I have no doubt.

The wedding in England last weekend reminded me of the incredible atmosphere I sensed in Westminster Abbey many years ago. All of those old names suddenly became alive to me as I gazed in wonder at, for example -

The only other place that has done that to me was the battlefield at Gettysburgh PA. We visited there back in 2001 (before I had ever seen the Ted Turner movie!). It was a very sobering time and I still have vivid, treasured memories of both places.

Have you ever visited a place like these?

Five Words and a Preview

2011-05-04T07:38:00.000-04:00

It's a phonic (and phony) world out there. We have megaphones and microphones. Megaphones magnify our voice, so why doesn't a microphone miniaturize it? We have phonograms but they are not the opposite of gramophones.

Human languages, like humans, are never too logical. Homophones have nothing to do with Homo sapiens. The former prefix is from Greek homo meaning "same" while the other is from Latin homo meaning "man".

Here are five terms that are homophones of everyday words: toxin, analyst, beaut, bowl, and seed.

tocsin (TOK-sin) noun

An alarm bell or a warning signal.

[From Middle French toquassen, from Provençal tocasenh, from tocar (to touch) + senh (bell).]

annalist (AN-uh-list) noun

A historian, especially a chronicler of yearly events.

[From Latin libri annales (yearly books), from annus (year). Ultimately from the Indo-European root at- (to go) that is also the source of annual, annals, annuity, and anniversary.]

butte (byoot) noun

An isolated hill rising abruptly from the surrounding area, having steep sides and a flat top.

[From French butte (mound).]

boll (pronounced the same as bowl) noun

The pod of a plant, as that of flax or cotton.

[From Middle English bolle, from Middle Dutch bolle (round). Ultimately from the Indo-European root bhel- (to thrive or bloom) that gave us flower, bleed, bless, foliage, blossom, and blade.]

cede (seed) verb tr.

To yield or to surrender something, such as a territory.

[From Latin cedere (to go or to yield). Ultimately from the Indo-European root ked- (to go or yield) that's also the ancestor of exceed, secede, proceed, cease, and necessary.]

Coming next - last weekend there was a place involved in a major news story. No, not the killing of bin-Laden. As I watched the goings-on I was taken back to when I had walked that place. It is one of two places I have visited that really gives meaning to the word atmosphere of a location. The feelings and thoughts that occur as you stand there are staggering.

Perhaps you would care to venture a guess as to the name of that location and, perhaps, even the other "place of atmosphere" in my memory?

Can You Give Me A Hand?

2011-04-30T07:50:00.000-04:00

You have to hand it to “hand”: It’s a handy word — it handles multiple tasks, both literal and figurative.

“She has firsthand experience with that.”

“We’ve experienced that firsthand.”

Perhaps you are raling about a card game, for example — “I won the first hand and lost all the rest” — or a clock part — “The second hand isn’t moving”. By the way - have you ever noticed that the third hand on a clock or watch is the second hand?

A handyman usually uses tools to get the job done. The word “hand” is handy with tools, too — prepositions, for example.

Baseball pitchers throw “overhand” or, interestingly, “sidearm.” Softball pitchers throw “underhand.” But either kind of pitcher — or anyone else, for that matter — can be “underhanded” — “secret, sly, deceitful, etc.”

Baseball and softball players can be “right-handed” or “left-handed.” They actually use both hands, but these terms indicate which hand they throw with. Batters are left-handed or right-handed, too, except for “switch-hitters,” who can hit either way. In rare instances, batters can be “cross-handed” — usually when starting to learn the game.

Seemingly reflecting a cultural prejudice against left-handers that’s worth further examination (eventually), the adjective “right-hand” also can mean “most helpful or reliable,” as in, “He’s my right-hand man.”

But whether you’re “right-handed” or “left-handed,” you’re using the right hand for you.

“Backhand” and “forehand” are the two basic strokes in tennis. “Backhand” is also a way to catch a baseball, and it’s the term for handwriting “that slants backward, up to the left.”

And “backhanded” also means “expressing or expressed in an indirect or sarcastic way; not sincere; equivocal,” as in “a backhanded compliment.”

Less common is “forehanded,” which has two principal uses other than as a synonym for “forehand”:

“Looking ahead to, or making provision for, the future; thrifty; prudent” and “well-to-do; well-off; prosperous.”

In “forehanded,” thriftiness and prosperity go hand in hand.

Appropriately enough, things got out of hand for a while there, but I’m ready to return to the task at hand.

“Handwriting” generally refers to “longhand,” whereas “shorthand” is “any system of speed writing using quickly made symbols to represent letters, words and phrases.”

But to be “shorthanded” is to be light on workers or helpers needed for a particular chore.

And that’s not the same as “light-handed,” which means either “having a light, delicate touch” or “having little to carry.”

On the other hand, “heavy-handed” not only means not having a light touch; it’s also “clumsy or tactless” or, even heavier, “cruel, oppressive or tyrannical.”

In the former sense — “graceless, inept” — “heavy-handed” sounds a lot like “ham-handed.” Apparently, “ham-handed” originally referred to unusually large hands, resembling hams.

The British prefer to call it “ham-fisted.”

A person having a problem says to another person, “Hey, can you give me a hand?” And instead of offering to help, the other person applauds.

To avoid this misunderstanding, try asking, “Can you lend me a hand?” Either is idiomatically OK, but the latter has a more limited application. Plus there’s the added benefit of indicating temporary assistance (lending) rather than permanent (giving).

In either case, of course, no actual hand will change hands. That’s the charm of idiom: It’s not literal, it’s figurative.

Fortunately, most people in the above situation are willing to lend a hand. But there are some who won’t lift a hand or even lift a finger — except maybe the middle finger.

The adjective “handy” has four principal meanings: “easily reached,” “easily used,” “easily managed or handled” (in reference to a ship, for example) and “clever with the hands.” For a synonym, Webster’s offers “dexterous.”

“Dexterous” and the noun “dexterity” can be applied not only to hands but also the whole body and even the mind. The words are descended from the Latin “dexter,” meaning “right, to the right.”

Interestingly, the Latin word for the other side or direction, “left-hand,” is “sinister.” Nowadays, “sinister” is the “bad side.” It can mean “threatening harm, evil or misfortune,” “wicked, evil or dishonest, especially in some dark, mysterious way” and “disastrous.”

However, the left side was originally the good side. Here’s what happened, according to Webster’s:

Early Roman fortunetellers would face south, putting the lucky side (east) to the left. Then the Greeks came along, and their prophets faced north, putting the lucky side on the right. The later Romans adopted the Greek point of view.

With apologies to Einstein, this is a very special theory of relativity.

Envelop The Envelope

2011-04-27T07:04:00.001-04:00

I wondered about the spelling of a word recently. Here is the answer I found.

The phrase “push the envelope” means to exceed, or try to exceed, established boundaries, limits, rules, etc.

The “envelope” is spelled and pronounced the same as that thing a letter arrives in.

However, if you omit the last “e,” you change the pronunciation and the word becomes a verb instead of a noun.

To “envelop” is to “wrap up,” “surround” or “conceal.”

There’s no such thing as “push the envelop.” That’s pushing too far.

The phrase was popularized by Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff,” published in 1979. Before that it was rarely encountered outside aviation circles, where the “flight envelope” referred to capabilities and limits of aircraft. The job of test pilots was to push the envelope, sometimes was disastrous results.

A similar use of “envelope” also can be found in mathematics, but I stink at math, so we’ll leave it at that. I was an English major. I let others do the math.

All Is Well

2011-04-23T07:24:00.001-04:00

Back in January I promised Judy that I would blog about “good” and “well.” Well. here it is.

As for her specific example of “you done good,” I have been known to say that myself, but only for comic effect — because it’s dreadfully wrong. (If you hope to be funny when saying things like that, be sure of your audience.)

However, if you use the right verb tense, it can be correct to say “you did good,” if the praise is for a deed that benefits others. This is where the informal “do-gooder” comes from.

“You did well” means something else: The praise is then directed at the performance, not a result of it.

Our grandsons do well in school. As Boy Scouts, they also get to do good.

Most problems with “good” (an adjective) and “well” (usually an adverb) arise with the use of “linking verbs” (also called “copulative”), principally “be,” “become,” “appear,” “seem,” “feel,” “sound,” “taste,” and sometimes “get” and “grow.”

The usual examples involve “feel”:

“I feel good” and “I feel bad” can be comments on my mood or my health.

By contrast, some argue, “feel badly” and “feel well” refer to the sense of touch, although such usage would have to be rare.

Actually, using “feel well” in reference to a person’s health is acceptable idiom.

I like to think of “feeling good” as a state of mind and “feeling well” as a state of health.

I would stay away from “feel badly” altogether.

A word of caution: just memorizing a list of linking verbs can still get you into trouble, because some them also can act as “action verbs.”

For example, “feel strong” refers to physical condition, while “feel strongly” is about emotions.

I hope this helps you feel better about “good” and “well.” If so, all’s well that ends well — unless it’s good.

Oh! The Irony!

2011-04-20T07:16:00.000-04:00

Man irons on the M1

Extreme ironing fan makes the most of motorway closure.

* Monday 18 April 2011

The M1 being closed due to fire damage was inconvenient for many people, but for one fan of extreme ironing, it was clearly the perfect opportunity to indulge in his unusual hobby.

The video shows a man taking to the motorway to iron his shirt, bare-legged and wearing a dressing gown.

Extreme Irony

Extreme ironing was invented in the UK, and is described as 'the latest danger sport that combines the thrills of an extreme outdoor activity with the satisfaction of a well-pressed shirt'.

A seven-mile section of M1 has been closed since Friday after a blaze in North London. We can't help but think the ironing would've been even more extreme had it been open.

From "The Telegraph"...

1:12PM BST 18 Apr 2011

The extreme ironing stunt, which involves pressing clothing for fun in adventurous places, took place on the M1 motorway after a section was closed following a fire.

The mystery man, who was wearing a blue dressing gown and slippers, was captured on film by a news cameraman.

According to the activity's official website, extreme ironing is "the latest danger sport that combines the thrills of an extreme outdoor activity with the satisfaction of a well-pressed shirt."

The trend is believed to have started in Leicester in 1997 when rock climber Phil Shaw decided to mix his hobby with the mundane chore.

Re-ally. Really?

2011-04-16T07:47:00.001-04:00

Really?

Have you ever noticed that a trend in English is the loss of hyphens when forming words with prefixes. It wasn’t too long ago, for example, that words like “today” and “tomorrow” were written “to-day” and “to-morrow.” I can remember doing that in grammar school.

I got thinking the other day about "re-" words. I was very surprised to see how, sometimes, a hyphen alters the meaning. For instance, the verb “resign” means “to quit,” but “re-sign” means “to sign again.” That All-Star pitcher who “resigns” is off the team, but if he “re-signs” he is back on the team.

Webster’s notes a number of these pairs, although some of them can be a bit of a stretch. Among the better ones are:

“re-coil,” to coil anew; “recoil,” to pull or kick back (recoil in horror, the recoil of a rifle).

“re-cover,” to put a new cover on: “recover,” to regain possession of or get better.

“re-collect,” to gather together again; “recollect,” to remember,

“re-creation,” a new version; “recreation,” play, amusement, relaxation.

“re-dress,” to put clothes on again; “redress,” to make right.

“re-form,” to form again; “reform,” to make better.

“re-pose,” to watch the birdie again or rephrase a question; “repose,” to lie at rest.

“re-strain,” to put back through a strainer or pull a muscle again; “restrain,” to check, suppress, restrict.

And I'll close with an example of really pushing it a bit:

“re-ally,” to re-form an alliance; “really” — yes, really.

Say Cheese!

2011-04-13T07:25:00.001-04:00

Have you ever had your picture taken?

Then you may have heard, "Say cheese!"

Why?

Well, I wondered that too. This is what I found.

Say cheese

Meaning

A photographer's instruction just before taking a picture, in order to make people smile.

Origin

'Say cheese!' must have been said to people posing for photographs as often as 'watch the birdie!'. Articulating a long 'e' sound requires us to draw back our lips and bare our teeth in a grimace, which is the obvious reason for photographers using it. The question is though - why cheese and not some other word? (and, come to that, why birdie? - but more on that later).

Despite exhaustive etymological delving, no one has found any literal link between 'say cheese' and meaning of the word cheese. Some have suggested that it relates to the now rather archaic term 'cheese it', meaning 'run away'. That's pure speculation and in any case; why would a photographer just about to take someone's picture encourage them to run away? However, looking up this phrase did uncover a nice punning definition of 'cheese it' in the Indiana Weekly Messenger, October 1910:

"What do boys mean when they say 'cheese it?'"

"It means that something mischievous has a curd and they want to get a whey."

Nor is 'say cheese' anything to do with the American expression 'cutting the cheese' about which, if you haven't come across it before, I'll happily leave you in ignorance.

We may not know why 'cheese' was chosen over alternatives like 'breeze' or 'please', but I can give a pointer to who first used the word when having a photograph taken. The earliest printed records of the expression are from the 1940s, in particular, this piece from the Texas newspaper The Big Spring Daily Herald, October 1943, titled Need To Put On A Smile?

Here's How: Say 'Cheese':

Now here's something worth knowing. It's a formula for smiling when you have your picture taken. It comes from former Ambassador Joseph E. Davies and is guaranteed to make you look pleasant no matter what you're thinking. Mr. Davies disclosed the formula while having his own picture taken on the set of his "Mission to Moscow." It's simple. Just say "Cheese," It's an automatic smile. "I learned that from a politician," Mr. Davies chuckled. "An astute politician, a very great politician. But, of course, I cannot tell you who he was..."
Ambassador Davies looked every inch the politician who took his own advice. His coy 'I cannot tell you who it was' was no doubt delivered with a wink, as Davies served under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who fits his description perfectly well, as listeners in 1940s America would have been well aware.

The fact that the newspaper report presented Davies' recipe as a novelty that its readers would previously be unfamiliar with does suggest that the phrase can't be much earlier than 1943 in origin. It's also reasonable to speculate that Roosevelt was the original source.

Photographers these days often prefer to use 'Say, one, two, three', as it produces the same grins and makes sure that all the sitters smile at the same time. While it appears that virtually any 'long e' word could have been chosen instead, 'cheese' has stood the test of time and has resulted in a new adjective - 'cheesy'. People began to speak of 'cheesy grins' or 'cheesy smiles', as demonstrated by Ambassador Davies, in the 1960s. The word 'cheesy', meaning 'vulgar'/'tasteless', derives from the perceived insincerity of cheesy grins.

As for 'watch the birdie', this now outdated instruction, usually given to children to get them to face in the right direction for a photographic portrait, unlike 'say cheese', did refer to an actual object. The 'birdies' were animated props that could be made to squawk or warble and so attract a child's attention.

Gad Seuss!

2011-04-09T07:19:00.000-04:00

From reports by Kristina Lee FOX 5 San Diego and NPR

3:45 p.m. EDT, April 7, 2011

SAN DIEGO -- A book containing previously unpublished stories by the whimsical San Diego author known as Dr. Seuss will be on store shelves later this year.

"The Bippolo Seed and other Lost Stories" contains seven new stories written by Theodor Seuss Geisel.

"In these stories, we'll meet new characters. So you're going to meet the twins Todd and Tadd, you'll meet Gustav the Goldfish and a small boy name Henry McBride, as well as the other characters Dr. Seuss is known for," said Susan Brandt, president of Dr. Seuss Enterprises in La Jolla.

The stories were discovered in old magazine pages offered for sale by a Massachusetts dentist and collector of the beloved children's author's work, NPR reports. A Random House exec traveled to his home, signed him up to write a book about Seuss, and jumped at the chance to publish the lost stories he had compiled.

Before Dr. Seuss became Dr. Seuss, He made a living in advertising. On the side, he wrote for Redbook Magazine where his first story was published in 1950.

"This is exciting for those of who grew up reading Dr. Seuss," Brandt said. "But also, how neat to share with our children new stories that we can discover the together."

While he was alive, Geisel published 44 books, including Green Eggs and Ham" and the "Cat in the Hat." The new book is due out Sept. 27, nearly 20 years after the author died.

"The stories will resonate with Seuss Fans because the personalities of these characters are very similar and recognizable," said Brandt. "In one of the stories we see a precursor to the 'Cat in the Hat Comes Back,' where that ring is in the bathtub."

Brandt said the author's widow, San Diego philanthropist Audrey Geisel, is excited about the new book and the renewed attention it is bringing to Dr. Seuss.

Random House plans to publish The Bippolo Seed and other Lost Stories. An exec describes it as "the literary equivalent of buried treasure," dating from the doc's most fertile creative period, when he wrote The Cat In the Hat, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, and other favorites. "The stories are as good as anything in the already-published canon and readers of all ages are in for a treat," she says.

The Bippolo Seed is lined up for publication in September. "These stories were published during what could arguably be called Dr Seuss's most fertile creative period, a time that would yield both Cat in the Hat and Grinch, a time when his theories about how to reach children through rhyme, rhythm, and a resonant combination of nonsense and sagacity, were coming into full bloom," said Random House vice-president and publisher Kate Klimo. "The stories are as good as anything in the already-published canon and readers of all ages are in for a treat."

The new book includes stories like "Gustav the Goldfish, an early, rhymed version of A Fish Out of Water and The Strange Shirt Spot, which is similar to the bathtub-ring scene in The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. The title story features a cat who leads an innocent duck to make a bad decision."

The Best I Could Find

2011-04-06T07:09:00.003-04:00

Over the past week I have looked for news articles on April Fools pranks and jokes that were done this year. I was looking for the best one and here is my choice. It comes from Evanston, Illinois.

I found this great article in the Evanston RoundTable.

Great job Dirk!

April 04, 2011

3/29/2011 2:44:00 PM

Snow Removal Stickers Drifting into Town

By Dirk Cumulo

Grappling with an ominous budget crisis and a colossal snow removal bill following the early February blizzard, Evanston City Council approved a controversial new program that will require residents who wish to have snow removed from in front of their homes to purchase "Snow Removal Stickers." The program, modeled on the highly successful yard waste sticker program that came in roughly $1 million over budget last year, will go into effect when the first snows fall in late autumn or early winter 2011.

Council passed the measure during a contentious April 1 special City Council meeting on the budget. Concerns about budget shortfall dominated, causing newly appointed Snow Czar Pearl de Blanc to say, "This is an opportunity for the City to monetize a critical citizen safety service. With this program, we can climb ever closer to solvency."

Under the program as currently structured, citizens will rent orange traffic cones from the City and affix daily snow removal stickers to those cones by 6:45 a.m. the morning before, during or after a snowfall. Stickers will be $2.25 per day. City snow plows will then remove snow from in front of any address displaying a sticker. "Our plows can raise or lower blades easily, allowing us to skip homes without stickers," said Ms. de Blanc. "We can even narrow the blade to get only one side of the street."

Citizens may purchase, at an additional $2 fee, a driveway clearance sticker which will direct snow plows to avoid piling snow in front of a citizen’s driveway while clearing the rest of the street. "We are offering a wide range of snow removal services. Citizens are afforded the opportunity of selecting the service that best fits within their budget," said Ms. De Blanc.

Concerns over particularly heavy snowfall prompted an additional option crafted during Monday’s meeting. Alfred Montoya, during citizen comment, said, "What of this last blizzard? Two feet of snow will completely cover a 22-inch orange safety cone." Ms. De Blanc appeared not to have considered this possibility, but then inspiration struck.

"The City will also offer mylar balloons that can be affixed to the cones. Stickers can be displayed on the balloon surface, and an adjustable cord will allow citizens to change the height of the display," announced Ms. De Blanc. The balloons can be purchased with stickers already attached, she added, increasing the price of the sticker by a mere $1.75.

Asked about neighbor-to-neighbor squabbles that could result if everyone on a street purchased a sticker except one holdout on the corner, Ms. De Blanc asked for and received guidance from Council. Proposals included a possible "street sticker," a program under which an entire block could band together and insure that the whole street was plowed. The convenience afforded would of course allow the City to command a slightly higher fee than individual stickers. "We learned our lesson from the yard waste sticker vs. cart process," she said.

Council also recommended a campaign within elementary schools to design the stickers themselves. "This is another opportunity to bring the community together through citizen involvement as we are raising all important funds," said Ms. de Blanc. The campaign begins immediately – April 1, 2011.

EDITOR'S NOTE POSTED 3/31/11: THIS IS AN APRIL'S FOOLS STORY

Where Does Your Team Play?

2011-04-02T07:17:00.000-04:00

It used to be that sports venues had interesting and picturesque names. There is Yankee Stadium - The House that Ruth Built in New York, The Indianapolis Motor Speedway or The Brickyard, Wrigley Field known as The Friendly Confines to all baseball fans, Madison Square Garden is, of course, The World's Most Famous Arena in New York for basketball fans and, across the pond there is Old Trafford - The Theatre of Dreams.

But most new venues may look wonderful and interesting, their names leave a lot to be desired. Consider -

Progressive Field (formerly Jacobs Field) known as The Jake in Cleveland

Qualcomm Stadium - The Q in San Diego

Tropicana Field - The Trop in St. Petersburg

Safeco Field - The Safe in Seattle

and

Turner Field - The Ted in Atlanta.

How exciting! What mental images do those words bring to mind?

Even here in CT we have Rentschler Field where the UConn Huskies play football. It is now more commonly known as The Rent. That sure gives a whole new meaning to "paying the rent"!

I look forward to the day when a schiitake mushroom conglomerate takes ownership of a beautiful sports venue.

"Welcome fans! Today's game from the ..." well, you can figure it out. As my wife said when she read this, "No, no not The Mush and not The Shroom! Hey! I know my... well ,you know.

YGBKM!*

2011-03-30T07:16:00.000-04:00

OMG! Online abbreviations make Oxford dictionary

Mar 25, 2:48 PM (ET)

By JILL LAWLESS

LONDON (AP) - OMG! LOL! The venerable Oxford English Dictionary approves of the three-letter, Internet-inspired expressions you use for "Oh, my God!" and "Laughing out loud."

It is adding them to the authoritative reference book's latest online update.

You can now text the news to your BFF. That's "best friends forever."

All three expressions - and IMHO, or "in my humble opinion" - are among 900 new words included this week. Cracking the dictionary, however, is no easy task.

"The OED is quite cautious," said Graeme Diamond, OED's principal editor for new words.

Terms made popular online are only included among the dictionary's 300,000 entries when they have crossed over into everyday use, Diamond said.

Although the new abbreviations are associated with modern electronic communications, some are surprisingly old. The first confirmed use of OMG was in a 1917 letter by a British admiral.

"Things people think are new words normally have a longer history," Diamond said.

Editors publish updates to the online Oxford every three months.

The OED's Internet version was launched in 2000 and gets 2 million hits a month from subscribers. It may replace the mammoth 20-volume printed edition, last published in 1989.

The new update also includes:

- "muffin top,""a protuberance of flesh above the waistband of a tight pair of trousers."

- wag, "wives and girlfriends." It was first used in 2002 to describe the female partners of members of the England soccer team. Now it denotes the glamorous and extravagant female partners of male celebrities.

"By our standards, wag is a real rocket of a word," Diamond said. "To go from being coined in 2002 to being included in 2011 is quite unusual."

- "heart" as a verb, a casual equivalent of "to love" that is represented with a symbol, as seen on millions of souvenirs proclaiming "I (heart) New York."

It may be the first English usage to come from T-shirts and bumper stickers. "At some point, people started to vocalize what the symbol was rather than what the symbol stood for," said Fiona McPherson, another editor. "People now talk about hearting things left, right and center."

Well, the latest update hearts the Road Runner cartoon character. The word "meep" - a short high-pitched sound - made the cut.

There are other new terms from the online world, including ego-surfing (the practice of searching for your own name on the Internet) and dot-bomb (a failed Internet company).

Diamond said the Internet has revolutionized the way lexicographers work, giving them a huge amount of new evidence of word use.

Which brings us to another new online-inspired word: TMI, "too much information."

#####

* = You Gotta Be Kidding Me! Although many users substitute an S for the K...

Gotta run! Meep, meep..................zoom!

---

The Diagram Prize?

2011-03-26T07:24:00.000-04:00

Genghis Khan Dentists Beat Welders, Dog Trainer in Odd Title Book Contest

By James Pressley - Mar 24, 2011 8:00 PM ET

Genghis Khan-inspired dentists overcame welders, a Hollywood dog trainer and an Italian love child to win one of Britain’s quirkiest literary contests, the annual Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title.

“Managing a Dental Practice: The Genghis Khan Way” received 58 percent of 5,032 votes cast by the public, according to the Bookseller trade magazine, which runs the contest.

The runner-up, with 24 percent, was “8th International Friction Stir Welding Symposium Proceedings,” a collection of papers presented at a gathering in Germany. The other four finalists garnered just 8 percent to 3 percent of the vote each, Bookseller editors said in an e-mailed statement.

The winning title comes from a how-to guide on “survival and empire-building in the dentistry business,” as its publisher, Radcliffe, calls it. The author, former dentist and practice owner Michael R. Young, describes the Mongol conqueror as “one of history’s most charismatic and dynamic leaders,” arguing that dentists can learn from his tenacity, intelligence gathering, and willingness to adopt new technologies.

The award’s administrator, Philip Stone, called the book timely, given Prime Minister David Cameron’s plans to restructure the U.K.’s state-run National Health Service.

“Some practice owners may well have to adopt a more warlord-ish approach to oral health care in order to survive,” Stone said in the statement.

Other finalists included “What Color Is Your Dog?” by Hollywood dog trainer Joel Silverman, with 8 percent of the vote, and romance novel “The Italian’s One-Night Love-Child” with 4 percent. “Myth of the Social Volcano,” a book on inequality in China, and “The Generosity of the Dead,” a study on organ procurement, got 3 percent each.
Claret Bottle

The contending titles were nominated by publishers, booksellers, authors, agents and librarians. This year’s winner was spotted by former biochemist and science writer Michael Gross, who will receive a bottle of “fairly passable” claret.

First awarded in 1978, the contest was conceived as a way to avoid boredom at the Frankfurt Book Fair, Bookseller editors say. The inaugural prize in 1978 went to “Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice.”

Since 2000, the prize has been put to a public vote, allowing “the unwashed masses to decide,” as a past Bookseller release put it. Since then, winning titles have included “Living With Crazy Buttocks” and “If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs.”

Eccentricity overcame vulgarity over the past two years, as the prize went to “Crocheting Adventures With Hyperbolic Planes” and “The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-Milligram Containers of Fromage Frais.”

The prize has become an institution, generating two bound collections of winning jackets, including “How to Avoid Huge Ships: And Other Implausibly Titled Books.”

Rules Grammar Change

2011-03-23T07:39:00.000-04:00

From The Onion

WASHINGTON, DC—The U.S. Grammar Guild Monday announced that no more will traditional grammar rules English follow. Instead there will a new form of organizing sentences be.

U.S. Grammar Guild according to, the new structure loosely on an obscure 800-year-old, pre-medieval Anglo-Saxon syntax is based. The syntax primarily verbs, verb clauses and adjectives at the end of sentences placing involves. Results this often, to ears American, a sentence backward appearing.

"Operating under we are, one major rule," said Joyce Watters, president of the U.S. Grammar Guild. "Make English, want we, more archaic and dignified sounding to be, as if every word coming from the tongue of a centuries-old, mystical wizard, is."

Brief pause Watters made then a. "Know I, know I," said she. "Confusing sounds it, but every American used to it soon will be."

At a press conference recent greeted warmly the new measure by President Clinton was.

"No longer will we adhere to the dull, predictable structure of our traditional grammar system. This nation will now begin speaking, writing and listening to something fresh, exciting and different," said Clinton.

"Excuse me," added he pause long after a. "Meant I, the dull, predictable system our traditional grammar of adhere to no longer will we. Speaking, writing and listening to something fresh, exciting and different will this nation now begin."

This week beginning, America across, all dictionaries, thesauruses and any other books or objects with any sort of writing upon it or in it revised to fit the new syntax will be. Libraries assure people wish to that the transition promptly begin will, but that patient people should be, as so much to change there is.

"Feel good it will make people to know for all these changes that, librarians cold, crabby and as paranoid and overprotective of their books and periodicals as ever remain will," said Yvonne Richter, Director of the Library of Congress.

The enthusiasm of government officials despite, many Americans about the new plan upset are. "Why in the world did they do this?" a New Canaan, CT, insurance salesman, said Brent Pryce. "There's absolutely no reason. It's utterly pointless and will cause total chaos throughout the country, not to mention the fact that it will cost billions of dollars to implement. And what's this U.S. Grammar Guild, anyway? I've never heard of it."

When of this complaint informed, government officials that they could not the man's words understand said, because of the strange, unintelligible way of speaking he was.

10 Loanwords To Enjoy

2011-03-19T07:51:00.001-04:00

A loanword is a word borrowed directly from another language to express something which has no accuarate word in English. This is a list of the ten most common loanwords.

10. Ennui

From French. Boredom of the soul.

9. Schadenfreude

From German. Taking joy in the suffering of others.

8. Wanderlust

From German. A strong longing or desire towards wandering.

7. Sehnsucht

From German. A self-destructive or addictive yearning for a time, place or thing that one can’t explain.

6. Saudade

From Portuguese. A feeling of longing for something that one is fond of, which is gone, but might return in a distant future, although deep down you know it probably wont.

5. Doppelganger

From German. The ghostly double of a living person.

4. Weltschmerz

From German. The pathological suffering felt by one who has realised that physical reality can never truly satisfy the demands of the mind. A melancholy sense of anguish about the nature of being.

3. Zeitgeist

From German. Something that captures the spirit of the era.

2. Ad Hominem Pronunciation: add om-in-im

Argument

From Latin. Replying to an argument or factual claim by attacking the person who made it, and not what he said.

1. Déjà vu

From French. The sense of having already seen or hear something being experienced for the first time.

Do You Hate Any Word?

2011-03-16T07:38:00.002-04:00

Jonathan Swift hated the word bowels. Gloria Swanson, the faded silent movie star in Sunset Boulevard, hated the word glamor, while the character she played, Norma Desmond, hated comeback. Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko hated the word relationship ("the kind of sterile word used by lawyers and sociologists and other menaces"). Carson McCullers hated the words prose and poetry, though she wrote both.

British novelist V.S. Naipaul hates the word novel, documentary filmmaker Irving Saraf hates documentary, and news anchor Katie Couric hates the word panties ("a cheesy word for underpants"). Of course, many of us claim to hate the word hate.

People have various reasons for disliking (or downright loathing) certain words. It may be a buzzword that has worn out its welcome (such as paradigm or proactive). Or an overly familiar redundancy (added bonus, future plans), mispronunciation ("nuc-u-lar" for nuclear), or usage error ("between you and I").

Some of us have "zero tolerance" for elision (definally for definitely), malapropisms (mitigate for militate), blends (bromance), or verbing (to effort or incent). All of us have words that make us want to bang our heads on the desk.

I decided to collect my verbal peeves for a couple of months. These come from many sources - newspapers, web pages, sports broadcasts and even weather reports on the radio. There are many, many more where these came from!

Awesome, isn't it?

actual

agree to disagree

Aim high.

a.m. in the morning

And you are?

anomalous

anywho

Are you serious?

ASAP

as everyone knows

at the end of the day (It gets DARK!)

axe (instead of "ask")

back at you

basic fundamentals

beside her/himself

big society

body of work (as used by sportscasters)

bored of (instead of "bored with")

buy-in (management-speak for "agree")

card (used as a verb)

chillax

co-branded

cold slaw (instead of "cole slaw")

come on board (instead of "join")

completely forget

continue on (instead of simply "continue")

conversate (instead of "converse")

de-thaw

dialogue (used as a verb)

die for (as in "a dessert to die for")

Do the math! (I was an English major - YOU do the math!)

drug (instead of "dragged")

empower and empowered

epicenter (misused as a synonym for "center")

even (as in "I don't even know what to think")

exscape (instead of "escape")

face time

for all intensive purposes (instead of "for all intents and purposes")

free gift

FYI

ghetto (used as an adjective)

ginormous

gots (as in "I gots no)

ground-breaking

grow (as a transitive verb for anything in the business or financial world, as in "grow our audience")

have a dialogue

I heart (anything)

I said to her I said

I thought to myself

ice tea (instead of "iced tea")

iconic

if I would have (instead of "if I had")

if you will

illegal alien (instead of "illegal immigrant")

I'm good

in actual fact

in a sec

invite (as a noun instead of "invitation")

It goes without saying.

It's all good.

just so you know

kumbayah moment

last (instead of "most recent")

long story short

of a certain age

partner (as a verb)

personally (as in, "I personally . . .")

price point (instead of "price")

refudiate

seriously

should of and would of (instead of "should have" and "would have")

Shut up! (in response to an interesting bit of information)

small little

solution (in a business context)

so over it

speak to (an issue)

teachable moment

that being said

there you go (instead of "thank you")

the thing is is

throw (somebody) under the bus

a time when and a time where

try and (instead of "try to")

undoubtably (instead of "undoubtedly")

up (used as a verb, as in "You should up your efforts.")

veggies

verse (instead of versus)

vice a versa (instead of "vice versa")

wanna (instead of "want to")

wax paper (instead of "waxed paper")

way more (and any other use of "way" as an adverb)

We're done here.

Where are you at?

whether or not

white stuff (instead of "snow")

whole 'nuther

win-win for everyone

with regard to and with respect to (instead of "about")

with that being said

xerox (instead of "copy" or "photocopy")

You can't be serious!

you guys

A Post From "The Economist"

2011-03-12T07:32:00.003-05:00

The Economist is a great blog. In this blog, named after the dictionary-maker Samuel Johnson, correspondents write about the effects that the use (and sometimes abuse) of language have on politics, society and culture around the world.

Recently, this item was posted. Do you care?

"On Language" switched off

Mar 1st 2011, 19:17 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK

FOR several decades the New York Times Magazine hosted America's most prominent bit of linguistic punditry: the "On Language" column, written by William Safire for most of those years. When Safire died several years ago, the column was taken up by Ben Zimmer, who took on the serious and the silly in language with wit and verve undergirded by a vast amount of knowledge. This blog has often found reason to rely on him. Now the column is no more; the magazine's new editor axed it, along with several other features. Every new editor has the right to a shake-up, but with no disrespect to those others, though, "On Language" was a long-lived and beloved institution, the only place in American journalism where language was given such prominence. Cutting it was a mistake.

Irate readers have started a Facebook page, and even as I was composing this post ("3 minutes ago", says Facebook), word from the group is that Hugo Lindgren, the magazine's new editor, might be wavering, saying that the column is "on hiatus", not dead. If you're going to miss the column, "like" the Facebook page or write to the magazine: magazine@nytimes.com.

Taking A Look At Paradox

2011-03-09T07:17:00.001-05:00

A paradox is a figure of speech in which a statement appears to contradict itself.

Adjective: paradoxical.

Etymology:

From the Greek, "incredible, contrary to opinion or expectation"

Examples and Observations:

* "The swiftest traveler is he that goes afoot."

(Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854)

* "If you wish to preserve your secret, wrap it up in frankness."

(Alexander Smith, "On the Writing of Essays." Dreamthorp, 1854)

* "I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love."

(Anon)

* "War is peace."
"Freedom is slavery."
"Ignorance is strength."

(George Orwell, 1984)

* The Paradox of Catch-22 (My personal favorite!)

"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to."

(Joseph Heller, Catch-22, 1961)

* "Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America--that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement."

(Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again, 1940)

* "Yes, I must confess. I often find myself more at home in these ancient volumes than I do in the hustle-bustle of the modern world. To me, paradoxically, the literature of the so-called 'dead tongues' holds more currency than this morning's newspaper. In these books, in these volumes, there is the accumulated wisdom of mankind, which succors me when the day is hard and the night lonely and long."

(Tom Hanks as Professor G.H. Dorr in The Ladykillers, 2004)

* Kahlil Gibran's Paradoxes

"At times [in The Prophet by Khalil Gibran], Almustafa’s vagueness is such that you can’t figure out what he means. If you look closely, though, you will see that much of the time he is saying something specific; namely, that everything is everything else. Freedom is slavery; waking is dreaming; belief is doubt; joy is pain; death is life. So, whatever you’re doing, you needn’t worry, because you’re also doing the opposite. Such paradoxes . . . now became his favorite literary device. They appeal not only by their seeming correction of conventional wisdom but also by their hypnotic power, their negation of rational processes."

(Joan Acocella, "Prophet Motive." The New Yorker, Jan. 7, 2008)

* "Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again."

(C.S. Lewis to his godchild, Lucy Barfield, to whom he dedicated The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)

* Love's Paradox

"You will notice that what we are aiming at when we fall in love is a very strange paradox. The paradox consists of the fact that, when we fall in love, we are seeking to re-find all or some of the people to whom we were attached as children. On the other hand, we ask our beloved to correct all of the wrongs that these early parents or siblings inflicted upon us. So that love contains in it the contradiction: the attempt to return to the past and the attempt to undo the past."

(Martin Bergmann as Professor Levy in Crimes and Misdemeanors, 1989)

Did You Remember?

2011-03-05T07:44:00.001-05:00

Yesterday Was National Grammar Day

Did you march forth?

Me, Myself, and I

A recent story on the local news show ended with the interviewee saying, "It was good for the neighborhood and myself."

I was glad that things had worked out for the community, but, being as concerned as I am with grammar, I couldn’t help thinking, Why is that grammar error becoming more common?

The error of which I speak, of course, is the incorrect use of the pronoun myself. The –self pronouns are called either reflexive or intensive depending on their function in a sentence. What’s important here, though, is that in either case, myself shouldn’t be used unless there’s an I previously in the same sentence.

* I prepared it myself.
* I saw myself in the mirror.
* I consider myself fortunate.
* I, myself, haven’t had that problem, but I know someone who has.
* They asked whether I, myself, had ever encountered that particular problem.

Don’t use –self pronouns when a nominative or objective pronoun is in order.

* It was good for the neighborhood and me (not myself).
* He gave the book to him and me (not myself).
* She and I (not myself) are going to the opera.

It might be easier to determine the correct pronoun if you separate each pronoun into its own sentence. For example:

* He gave the book to him. He gave the book to (I, me, or myself). It’s clear that the correct pronoun is me, so the sentence is He gave the book to him and me.

* She is going to the opera. (I, me, myself) am going to the opera. The correct pronoun is, of course, I, so the correct sentence is She and I are going to the opera.

It’s interesting to note that there have been reputable writers who have used the reflexive pronouns incorrectly (as is true with all grammar errors), so if you, yourself, are an offender, you’re in good company.

*****

I also found the following on The Economist -

Language
Johnson
National Grammar Day
What is grammar anyway?

Mar 4th 2011, 18:12 by J.P.

GRAMMAR is a strange and wonderful thing. It is also fuzzy. At least the word "grammar" is. So fuzzy, in fact, that linguists rarely invoke it, other than in the broad meaning of "language". They tend instead to plump for the narrower terms. And so morphology deals with the bits of words, like affixes and roots, that contribute to meaning; syntax looks at how morphemes are arranged in utterances; semantics hones in on meaning, be it of single words or more elaborate linguistic constructs; finally, pragmatics tries to understand how context in which words appear affects their interpretation. (Some linguists—a notoriously fractious bunch—will no doubt take exception to this taxonomy.)

So, is there anything sensible to be said about grammar? Theorists' finicky distinctions aside, few would object that it is a set of rules that govern the way bits of speech come together to become meaningful utterances. That, of course, raises the question of who sets these rules. Here the bickering begins. Some institutions, notably the French Academy, seem to think they do. Then there are the linguists. Mercifully, they rarely claim to be rule setters. But they do often give the impression of believing that they know them better than "ordinary" speakers.

True, language scholars pore over pages of books, peruse transcripts, listen to endless reels of recorded speech. If all goes to plan, they will come up with a set of rules that predicts how non-linguists actually speak. But it is, at best, a belated snapshot. Should enough people run afoul of these theoretical findings, they do not deserve to have their wrists slapped—with a rule or anything else. Rather, it means that the linguists described a grammar as it once was, not as it now is.

Both académiciens and grammarians may, then, have got things the wrong way round. Grammar is subject to majority rule, not autocratic decree. If a speaker does not abide by the same rules as most others, he is, by definition, not speaking the same language. It does not matter one bit that he happens to be a member of an academy or a prominent linguist; minorities are excluded. (More precisely, no two people, let alone all the members of a community, follow the exact same set of grammatical rules; the key is a big enough overlap.)

National Grammar Day can, therefore, be viewed as celebrating consensus and inveighing against tyranny (other than the tyranny of the majority that is language). Now, here is something everyone, not just language buffs, can cheer.

A Sad Day

2011-03-02T06:55:00.002-05:00

It was a sad day. My pet bookworm, Tome, has gone to the Great Library In The Sky.

I had given him a new book to get into and digest. He smiled as he sat down at the table of contents and dug in. About 30 minutes later he looked very ill. I called for help and hoped for the best. But it was too late. The doctor removed the appendix but Tome had passed.

I sat down and tried to write his obituary. As I wrote, a drop of ink fell to the paper. Another wave of sadness washed over me. The poor drop sat there, all alone. He looked up and realized that his parents were still in the pen and he had no idea how long the sentence was.

:(

Like Comparing Knight and Day At The Roundtable

2011-02-26T07:22:00.001-05:00

I want to share these “funniest analogies” with you. They came in an e-mail from a good friend. She got them from a cousin, who got them from a friend, who got them from… so they are circulating around. My apologies if you have already seen them.

The e-mail says they are taken from actual high school essays and collected by English teachers across the country for their own amusement. Some of these kids may have bright futures as humor writers. What do you think?

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a ThighMaster.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.

8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.

10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.

16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.

18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long it had rusted shut.

19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

I immediately replied, “Thanks for the list. It made me laugh like someone who had read something really funny.”

Have You Played Scrabble Lately?

2011-02-23T07:25:00.000-05:00

I had occasion recently to play a couple of games of Scrabble. Of course, it piqued my interest and I went hunting. Here is some of what I found.

Even though it’s a word game, the real story behind SCRABBLE® Brand Crossword Game is numbers. One hundred million sets sold world-wide. Between one and two million sold each year in North America. And, of keen interest to legions of passionate players, over 120,000 words that may be used in their scoring arsenal.

The story of the game’s evolution from underground craze to cultural icon is as American as, well, the SCRABBLE game. Alfred Mosher Butts, an out-of-work architect from Poughkeepsie, New York, decided to invent a board game. Analyzing games, he found they fell into three categories: number games, such as dice and bingo; move games, such as chess and checkers and word games, such as anagrams. Attempting to create a game that would use both chance and skill, Butts combined features of anagrams and the crossword puzzle. First called LEXIKO, the game was later called CRISS CROSS WORDS. To decide on letter distribution, Butts studied the front page of The New York Times and did painstaking calculations of letter frequency. His basic cryptographic analysis of our language and his original tile distribution have remained valid for almost three generations and billions of games played.

Established game manufacturers were unanimous in rejecting Butts’ invention for commercial development. Then Butts met James Brunot, a game-loving entrepreneur who became enamored of the concept. Together, they made some refinements on rules and design and, most importantly, came up with the name “SCRABBLE,” a real word which means “to grope frantically.” The game was trademarked SCRABBLE® Brand Crossword Game in 1948. The Brunots rented an abandoned schoolhouse in Dodgington, Connecticut, where with friends they turned out 12 games an hour, stamping letters on wooden tiles one at a time. Later, boards, boxes and tiles were made elsewhere and sent to the factory for assembly and shipping.

CRISS CROSS WORDS, an early version of the SCRABBLE game, featured a gameboard made of architectural blueprint paper glued onto an old chess board.

The first four years were a struggle. In 1949 the Brunots made 2,400 sets and lost $450. As so often happens in the game business, the SCRABBLE game gained slow but steady popularity among a comparative handful of consumers. Then in the early 1950s, as legend has it, the president of MACY’S discovered the game on vacation and ordered some for his store. Within a year, everyone “had to have one” to the point that SCRABBLE games were being rationed to stores around the country.

In 1952, the Brunots realized they could no longer make the games fast enough to meet the growing interest. They licensed Long Island-based Selchow & Righter Company, a well-known game manufacturer founded in 1867, to market and distribute the games in the United States and Canada.

Even Selchow & Righter had to step up production to meet the overwhelming demand for the SCRABBLE game. As stories about it appeared in national newspapers, magazines and on television, it seemed that everybody had to have a set immediately. In 1972, Selchow & Righter purchased the trademark from Brunot, thereby giving the company the exclusive rights to all SCRABBLE® Brand products and entertainment services in the United States and Canada.

In 1986, Selchow & Righter was sold to COLECO Industries, who had become famous as the manufacturers of the Cabbage Patch Dolls. Three years later, COLECO declared bankruptcy, and its primary assets — most notably the SCRABBLE game and ParchesiTM — were purchased by Hasbro, Inc., owner of Milton Bradley Company, the nation’s leading game company.

Today the game is found in one of every three American homes, ranging from a Junior edition to a CD-ROM with many versions in between including: Standard, Deluxe with turntable, Deluxe Travel, Spanish and French.

Competitive SCRABBLE game play is widely popular much in the manner of chess and bridge. Every year, a National SCRABBLE® Championship is held in a major US city, and on alternate years the World SCRABBLE® Championship is hosted between Hasbro and Mattel. In addition, the National SCRABBLE® Association sanctions over 180 tournaments and more than 200 clubs in the US and Canada.

The next generation of SCRABBLE players is steadily growing with over a half million kids playing the game in more than 18,000 schools nationwide through the School SCRABBLE Program. Hundreds of these students currently compete in state and regional championships across the country. The first annual National School SCRABBLE® Championship was held in Boston on April 26, 2003. Classrooms can also subscribe to the School SCRABBLE® News which includes a teacher edition complete with tested ideas and a lesson plan designed to meet nationally mandated educational goals, and a student issue chock full of feature stories and puzzles.

Alfred Mosher Butts enjoyed playing the SCRABBLE game with family and friends to the end of his life. He passed away in April 1993 at the age of 93

Strange Words Used in Scrabble Defined

From Qi to Kat, Advanced Scrabble Words Given Meaning

When one first plays scrabble, many of the words a more skilled opponent uses seem questionable. Here are a selection of those words that come into question.

Any scrabble player knows that having a strong vocabulary is essential for victory. But often the words used in game are archaic, or one may encounter words that are rarely, if ever, used in the English language. Words like qi, qat, suq, and xi can be big point-earners on the scrabble board, but use them in a conversation and the response is likely to be a blank stare.

So, for anyone who has ever played a game of scrabble, especially online, and been flummoxed by some of the words used: A list of commonly used scrabble words and their definitions, as defined by dictionary.com.

2 Letter Scrabble Words, Defined

Aa (noun)- “basaltic lava having a rough surface.”

Ai (noun)- “a three-toed sloth, Bradypus tridactylus, inhabiting forests of southern Venezuela, the Guianas, and northern Brazil, having a diet apparently restricted to the leaves of the trumpet-tree, and sounding a high-pitched cry when disturbed.”

Qi(noun)- a derivative of Ch’i, “The vital force believed in Taoism and other Chinese thought to be inherent in all things. The unimpeded circulation of chi and a balance of its negative and positive forms in the body are held to be essential to good health in traditional Chinese medicine.”

Xi (noun)- “the 14th letter of the Greek alphabet.”
3 Letter Scrabble Words, Defined

Suq (noun)- “A market, or part of a market, in an Arab city.”

Kat (noun)- “An evergreen shrub, Catha edulis, of Arabia and Africa, the leaves of which are used as a narcotic when chewed or made into a beverage.”

An alternate spelling of Kat is Qat. Both work.

4 or More Letter Scrabble Words, Defined

Ogive (noun)- “1. Architecture. a. a diagonal vaulting rib. b. a pointed arch. 2. Statistics. the distribution curve of a frequency distribution. 3. Rocketry. the curved nose of a missile or rocket.

Teiid (noun)- “any of a large group of chiefly tropical New World lizards of the family Teiidae, as the racerunner, caiman lizard, or whiptail, characterized by large rectangular scales on the belly and a long tail.”

Maqui (noun)- “an evergreen shrub, Aristotelia chilensis, of Chile, having toothed, oblong leaves, greenish-white flowers, and purple berries, grown as an ornamental in S California.”

Jupon (noun)- “a close-fitting tunic, usually padded and bearing heraldic arms, worn over armor.”

Naos (noun, plural)- “a temple.”

Baobabs (noun)- “any large tree belonging to the genus Adansonia, of the bombax family, esp. A. digitata, which is native to tropical Africa, has an exceedingly thick trunk, and bears a gourdlike fruit.”

Just A Few Jokes For Today

2011-02-19T07:21:00.000-05:00

When I was in High School, my English teacher looked my way and said, "Name two pronouns."

I said, "Who, me?"

*****

Teacher: "Stan, give me a sentence beginning with I."
Stan: "I is ..."
Teacher: "No, Stan. It's always 'I am...' "
Stan: "OK. I am the ninth letter of the alphabet."

*****

A linguistics professor was lecturing to his class one day. "In English," he said, "A double negative forms a positive. In some languages, though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative." Someone, who shall remain nameless, piped up from the back of the room, "Yeah, right."

*****

Don't you know the Queen's English?

Why, yes, I'd heard she was.

*****

This isn't really a grammar joke but it's about language.

A girl walked into a bar and said to the guy who was serving, 'I'll have a double entendre, please.'

So he gave her one.

*****

An English professor wrote the following sentence on the blackboard and asked the students to add correct punctuation: "woman without her man is a savage"

The men wrote: "Woman, without her man, is a savage."

The women wrote: "Woman: without her, man is a savage."

Oops!

2011-02-16T07:14:00.000-05:00

Back on February 2 I posted that I thought I may have invented a new word. Insomniate. Perhaps engaging in or being personally involved with insomnia?

I also included this in that post - Yes, I did go to Merriam-Webster to check. This is what they had to say -

insomniate

The word you've entered isn't in the dictionary.

It turns out that I should have looked further. I recieved the following email the other day.

Stan,

Insomniate is in the OED. See below

I like your blog. I found it via Schott's Vocab.

Dave Goudy
Port Orchard WA

† in'somniate, v. Obs.
[irreg. f. L. in- (in-2) + sommus sleep + -ate3.]
trans. To put to sleep.
a1657 R. Loveday Lett. (1663) 267 A Mercurial Caducæus to insomniate the Argus-eyes of jealous people!

I am embarrassed to say that it never crossed what passes for my mind to check the OED!

Lesson learned.

I will leave you now with a smirkle on my face. Perhaps that may be a new word? A combination of a smirk and a chuckle?

By the way...No exact results found for "smirkle" in the Oxford dictionary. This is what the search results revealed -

"Did you mean smirkily?

Did you mean smirk?

Did you mean smirked?

Did you mean smirker?

Did you mean smirkier?

And...Smirkle, it turns out, isn't in the free Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, where you just searched."

I was also thinking of sniggle (a combination of snort and giggle) and a combination of chortle and guffaw, but I couldn't decide between guffortle and choffaw. Maybe I will just leave them to wander around the Word Farm for a bit.

All this because I seek to become more flatulent in my native language.

Five Fascinating Words

2011-02-12T07:34:00.000-05:00

Here are five fascinating words for your pleasure. If you have seen the TV dcommercial "Show me the carfax!", you may be in for a small surprise!

Carfax, n (Latin quadrifurcus, four-forked)

A place where four roads meet; an intersection of main roads at the center of a town. Despite its appearance, it has nothing to do with cars or faxes, but is an anglicisation of the older Latin term.

Phrontistery, n (Greek phrontisterion, from phrontistes a thinker, from phroneein to think)

A thinking-place; a place for study. I simply had to include 'phrontistery' on this list. It was first used by Aristophanes to apply to the school of Socrates, and was somewhat mocking in tone. A peculiar (and under-used) term, let's reclaim it for thinking people everywhere. No other term is synonymous, and its intellectual if pompous sound merely adds to its charm.

Tregetour, n (Old French tresgetour, from tresgeter, from Latin trans across and jetere to throw)

A juggler, trickster or deceiver. Originally used to describe a type of jester or juggler, tregetour, though now archaic, eventually came to mean someone who uses cunning tricks to deceive others (sometimes but not limited to stage performances). A useful poetic word for a magician, but also a more pleasant-sounding name for a huckster or con man. Or politician?

Almacantar, n (Arabic almuqantarat, the sundials)

A circle of altitude, parallel to the horizon. An astronomical term, used to describe imaginary lines in the sky by which an astronomer determines the height of a star in the sky relative to the horizon. Many Arabic loanwords to English begin with the prefix "al", which in Arabic simply means "the".

Zetetic, adj or n (Greek zetetikos, from zeteein to seek)

Proceeding by inquiry; a search or investigation; a skeptical seeker of knowledge. A term originally used to refer to Pyrrhonists, a group of ancient Greek skeptics, it has come to mean both the process of inquiry and one who so proceeds. A zetetic is thus a sort of intellectual agnostic who, while seeking greater truths, is always wary of falsehood.

How Insulting!

2011-02-09T07:38:00.001-05:00

These glorious insults are from an era before the English language and comedy and wit got dumbed down to 4-letter words. I received these in an email from a good friend. Thank you, Lee!

The exchange between Churchill & Lady Astor:
She said, "If you were my husband I'd give you poison."
He said, "If you were my wife, I'd drink it."

A member of Parliament to Disraeli: "Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease."
"That depends, Sir," said Disraeli, "whether I embrace your policies or your mistress."

"He had delusions of adequacy." - Walter Kerr

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." - Winston Churchill

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." - Clarence Darrow

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." - William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway).

"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it." - Moses Hadas

"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." - Mark Twain

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.." - Oscar Wilde

"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend .... if you have one." - George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill

"Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second ... if there is one." - Winston Churchill, in response.

"I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here." - Stephen Bishop

"He is a self-made man and worships his creator." - John Bright

"I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial." - Irvin S. Cobb

"He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others." - Samuel Johnson

"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up." - Paul Keating

"In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily." - Charles, Count Talleyrand

"He loves nature in spite of what it did to him." - Forrest Tucker

"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?" - Mark Twain

"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork." - Mae West

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go." - Oscar Wilde

"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts.... for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

"He has Van Gogh's ear for music." - Billy Wilder

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." - Groucho Marx

Which Is Correct?

2011-02-05T06:34:00.001-05:00

I was thinking about old, familiar proverbs the other day. But I ran into a quandary - they can be a tad confusing!

Which is correct?

Actions speak louder than words. <----> The pen is mightier than the sword.

Knowledge is power. <----> Ignorance is bliss.

Look before you leap. <----> He who hesitates is lost.

A silent man is a wise one. <----> A man without words is a man without thoughts.

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. <----> Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Clothes make the man. <----> Don't judge a book by its cover.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. <----> Better safe than sorry.

Money talks. <----> Talk is cheap.

The only thing constant is change. <----> The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Two heads are better than one. <----> If you want something done right, do it yourself.

Many hands make light work. <----> Too many cooks spoil the broth.

Great minds think alike. <----> Fools seldom differ.

Birds of a feather flock together. <----> Opposites attract.

The bigger, the better. <----> The best things come in small packages.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. <----> Out of sight, out of mind.

What will be, will be. <----> Life is what you make it.

Cross your bridges when you come to them.<----> Forewarned is forearmed.

With age comes wisdom. <----> Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings come all wise sayings.

The more, the merrier. <----> Two's company; three's a crowd.

Short Post - A New Word?

2011-02-02T07:37:00.002-05:00

I think I invented a new word last night.

I was physically tired as we went to bed but my mind was stirring around all over the place. I told Judy that I would be quiet and shut off the TV so I would not disturb her. Then I said, "I'll just lay here and insomniate. Who knows? Maybe I 'll think of a new word."

Insomniate?

Perhaps engaging in or being personally involved with insomnia?

So, the next time you find yourself insomniating you could use the time to invent a new word!

insomniate

Yes, I did go to Merriam-Webster to check. This is what they had to say -

insomniate

The word you've entered isn't in the dictionary. Click on a spelling suggestion below or try again using the search bar above.

1. insinuate
2. insanity
3. Masonite
4. maisonette
5. insomnia
6. insolent
7. insensate
8. insolation

Hmmmm insanity......

Another Interesting Opinion

2011-01-29T07:51:00.001-05:00

Subjects and Verbs as Evil Plot
By CLYDE HABERMAN
Published: January 13, 2011

Even before the Tucson shootings, Jared L. Loughner acted weirdly and darkly in so many ways that singling out any one aspect may defy sense. Nonetheless, for bizarreness, his rants about grammar stand out.

As Mr. Loughner has tried to explain it in Web postings, English grammar is not merely usage that enjoys common acceptance. Rather, it is nothing less than a government conspiracy to control people’s minds. Perhaps more bizarre, even potentially troubling, is that he is not the only one out there clinging to this belief. Some grammarians say they hear it more often than you may think.

“It is completely off the wall,” said Patricia T. O’Conner, the author of several books on grammar, including “Woe Is I.”

“But I’m not actually that surprised,” said Ms. O’Conner, who also writes a blog, grammarphobia.com, with her husband, Stewart Kellerman. “I get mail once in a while from people who believe that it’s wrong to try to reinforce good English because it’s some kind of mind-control plot, and English teachers are at the bottom of this. For anyone to say that subject and verb should agree, for example, is an infringement of your freedoms, and you have a God-given right to speak and use whichever words you want, which of course you do.

“But they see it as some sort of plot to standardize people’s minds and make everyone robotically the same.”

One person identified with this notion is a Milwaukee man named David Wynn Miller, who prefers to render his name as :David-Wynn: Miller and who says that people must free themselves of a government he deems tyrannical. But Mr. Miller has distanced himself from Mr. Loughner and rejected suggestions that his own online writings over the years may have inspired the rampage in Tucson.

Of course, idiosyncratic grammar and punctuation, of themselves, are hardly automatic signs of derangement. Nor are they confined to one point or another along the political spectrum.

Rappers have long gone their own way when it comes to spelling names and putting thoughts into words. And the idea that language can be used, and abused, to exert control is familiar. Orwell, anyone? (In fact, on his YouTube page, Mr. Loughner listed Orwell’s “Animal Farm” as one of his favorite books.)

But the Loughners and Millers take many steps closer to the dark side by describing grammatical structure as proof of government wickedness.

Ben Zimmer, the “On Language” columnist for The New York Times Magazine, said he, too, had received letters talking of a “grand conspiracy.” He got them, in particular, when he was editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press.

“When people are confronted with linguistic authority of various kinds, whether it’s dictionaries or grammar books, the more conspiratorially minded may use that as evidence of some grand scheme, or something where people are pulling the strings behind the scenes and using language to do that,” Mr. Zimmer said.

Ms. O’Conner said there is a flip side to the rejection of all grammatical structure. It is slavish adherence to old rules and intolerance for any perceived transgression.

She gets an earful, she said, when she writes that there is nothing horrific about, say, splitting an infinitive or ending a sentence with a preposition. For some people, those are heresies to always object to.

But it’s the more anarchic types whom Ms. O’Conner finds worrisome, those who “think we’re all in cahoots — government, business, education, the church — and it’s all one big conspiracy, and grammar is part of it.” E-mails that she gets boil down to, “You’re part of this elitist attempt to keep the masses down through language.”

Somewhat saddened by all this is Margaret Edson, who teaches social studies at a middle school in Atlanta. In 1999, Ms. Edson won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play “Wit.” Punctuation, notably the centrality of the comma and the semicolon, is practically a character all its own.

“If we weren’t teaching grammar as a way to bring the voices of our students forward, for a redemptive purpose, then why teach, why live?” she said. “We’re trying to bring their voices forward, not suppress them.”

“If you don’t have grammar, you don’t have sense,” Ms. Edson said. “You don’t have one another. You can’t say ‘I love you’ without grammar.”

As the Tucson nightmare shows, however, you can express hate without it.

E-Mail: haberman@nytimes.com
A version of this article appeared in print on January 14, 2011, on page A19 of the New York edition.

Interesting Article

2011-01-26T07:40:00.003-05:00

I found this article while looking around for information on the coming appearance of Watson on "Jeopardy". I am looking forward to watching that.

June 13, 1998

Grammatically Incorrect
By Ralph Schoenstein

PRINCETON, N.J. -- Microsoft has many detractors, but no one has noticed its most egregious sin.

The company's word-processing program, Word for Windows 95, is ruining the English language. I have just discovered that Word's grammar check has a command of English equal to that of Tarzan.

I first asked Word to check, She was a most unique woman; she was slightly pregnant. The error was easy to find, two modified absolutes. When the check responded that the sentence was flawless, I knew English was partially dead.

My next offering, I couldn't help but going, used the gerund instead of the infinitive. The check replied, Consider replacing with "could not" in a formal document. As they say in Seattle, I couldn't help but being dismayed.

Eager to see if the check knew the difference between a conjunction and conjunctivitis, I wrote, Due to the weather, they could not come. The check seemed to think that the sentence was Churchillian. Although most people use "due to" incorrectly, I thought that a grammar guide on millions of computers should know that the sentence needed a conjunction instead.

Inspired to eloquent awfulness, I wrote, Thinking it was open, the door was really closed. The check replied, The main clause may contain a verb in the passive voice. But there is no passive voice here, just a thinking door.

Incredulous that Microsoft was helping millions of Americans sound like Popeye, I went on to write, If I was a better man, I would go. Missing my failure to use the subjunctive, the check resorted to political correctness: Gender-specific expression. Consider replacing with "person," "human being" or "individual." The check, of course, had a point. Every time I call myself a man, as opposed to a woman or a newt, I am being gender specific.

Giddy from all the grammatical goofiness, I wrote, There were only three grown-ups between Judy, Jill, Eve-Lynn, Lori, Maria and Max. Once again, the check approved, unaware that between cannot handle six people. That's why among was invented.

Deciding to meet the check halfway, I stopped writing in English: She shopped, like, sixteen times. The check said the sentence was perfect.

Of course it was -- not a single contraction.

Ralph Schoenstein is the author of "Superman and Son," a memoir.

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company

I Thought "App" Meant Appetizer!

2011-01-22T08:10:00.000-05:00

Linguists select word of the year: It's app
Saturday, January 08, 2011
By Sean D. Hamill, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The word above all others in 2010? App.

That's according to the American Dialect Society, which held its annual meeting at the Wyndham Grand in Pittsburgh last weekend and chose "app" over the word "nom" as its Word of the Year for 2010.

App, which means "an application program for a phone or computer or other electronic device," was proposed not because it is particularly new or groundbreaking, but because it came into its own and crossed into the wider culture in 2010.

"My 84-year-old mother uses the word, and she doesn't even know how to text," said Bill Kretzschmar, the University of Georgia English professor who nominated the word "app" during a spirited voting session.

"It is the most democratic word. It's not just big companies making apps anymore, it's small companies and individuals," Dr. Kretzschmar said. "Even the weatherman I watch on television in Atlanta made an app to get weather information this year. It's everywhere."

The word was chosen Friday night by about 150 linguists after two days of debate that began with a list of 33 words. They narrowed it down to nine winners in various categories (most euphemistic and election terms, for example) before choosing the winner in a free-for-all final round that allowed adding words not previously voted on -- including app.

It beat out the word "nom," which was defined as an "onomatopoetic form connoting eating, esp. pleasurably."

Some who argued in favor of "nom" said it was "a vote for happiness," and that "app" was simply too old a word.

But in the argument that carried the day, Ed Cormany, a doctoral student in linguistics at Cornell University, stopped tweeting on his laptop long enough to rise from his seat to argue that, yes, it may seem that "app" has been around for a long time, but "this year people realized they needed an app for any technology."

The arguments sometimes became a little heated, particularly over some of the politically based words in early voting -- which didn't bother voters.

"I understand. It always gets a little heated," Mr. Cormany said. "We love our words here."

The goal in choosing a Word of the Year, is to find a word or expression that in some way "best characterizes the year ... [and] most reflects the ideas, events, and themes which have occupied the English-speaking world, especially North America," according to the dialect society's website.

Jesse Sheidlower, editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary's North American unit, and the dialect society's president-elect, concedes that selecting the WOTY, as it's known, "is a fairly light-hearted effort."

"It isn't peer-reviewed, but we do put thought into it," said Mr. Sheidlower, who tweeted about the WOTY selection Thursday and Friday. "If you look through the list of previous years, you'll find, on the whole, they said something about the year."

For example, last year's selection for 2009 was "tweet"; 2008's choice was "subprime"; and 2007 was "bailout."

There are several other prominent organizations that choose their own Word of the Year, such as Merriam-Webster (which already chose "austerity" as its word in 2010) and the New Oxford American Dictionary (which chose "refudiate").

While Merriam-Webster chooses its word based on the increase in the number of times the definition of a particular word was searched for on its website -- "austerity" searches increased 80 percent from 2009 to 2010 -- the New Oxford American Dictionary chooses its word as a consensus among its lexicographers.

Another organization, The Global Language Monitor -- which chose "spillcam" for its 2010 word -- since 1999 has been using an algorithm to search online articles, websites, blogs and social media in English-speaking countries to monitor relevant words.

But the dialect society has been choosing its WOTY, as it's known among its voting members, the longest, since 1990 (when it chose the forgettable "bushlips" as its first WOTY).

"It's the granddaddy," said Peter Sokolowski, editor-at-large of Merriam-Webster, which has been choosing its word since 2003.

But the broad array of wordsmiths from the academic and publishing world who are WOTY voting members of the dialect society -- including members of related organizations like the Linguistic Society of America, which organized the conference -- gives the dialect society's choice quite a bit of cachet, even from sponsors of competing WOTYs.

Before the final vote, Christine Lindberg, senior lexicographer for Oxford University Press, said in a phone interview from her home in New York that she pored over the online list of the dialect society's nominated words, and she was positively giddy about what would take place Friday night.

"This is like the Oscars for me," said Ms. Lindberg, whose organization has been choosing its word since 2005.

Told that "app" was the choice later Friday, Ms. Lindberg said it might not have been her choice for 2010 -- though "nom" was in the top 10 of possibilities for her organization -- but she thought it had merit.

"I agree with their argument for app, because when it went in our dictionary at first, it only went in as 'short for application,' " she said. "But now it's time to go in and give it a full definition, because it really has become the full word people use."

What Is The Most Literate City?

2011-01-19T07:29:00.002-05:00

D.C. tops rankings for USA's most literate cities

By Mary Beth Marklein, USA TODAY

Washingtonians are the nation's most well-read citizens, but they're reading less these days. And so, it appears, are city dwellers everywhere.

That's according to the latest findings of an annual study of the United States' most literate cities, which ranks the "culture and resources for reading" in the nation's 75 largest metro areas. The study examines not whether people can read, but whether they actually do.

"What difference does it make how good your reading test score is if you never read anything?" asks researcher Jack Miller, president of Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, Conn. "One of the elements of the climate, the culture, the value of a city is whether or not there are people there that practice those kinds of behaviors."

The study, based on 2010, looks at measures for six items — newspapers, bookstores, magazines, education, libraries and the Internet — to determine what resources are available in each city and the extent to which its inhabitants take advantage of them.

Now in its eighth year, the study finds little to celebrate. Were Washington's top score in 2010 applied to the 2004 rankings, for example, the city would land at No. 7.

The study identifies "worrisome trends" consistent with other national research, including declines in newspaper circulation and book-buying, along with sluggish growth in educational attainment. Increases in Internet usage and stable library patronage aren't offsetting those declines, it says.

Among details in the study, which can be seen at www.ccsu.edu/amlc2010:

•Washington's climb to No. 1 this year was likely helped by troubles in Seattle, which has claimed or shared (with Minneapolis) the top spot four of the past five years. In recent years, Seattle has lost a newspaper and some legendary local bookstores have struggled.

•New Orleans, which ranked 42nd in 2005, then dropped off the list because its population dipped after Hurricane Katrina, has more than bounced back. It returned last year at 17 and this year climbed to 15. Changing demographics likely explain the spike. "A lot of the people that left and haven't come back were poorer," Miller says.

•Ten of California's 12 largest cities landed in the bottom half, including Sacramento, the state capital, at 45, and lowest-ranked Stockton, which has been at or near the bottom since the list debuted in 2004. San Francisco was ranked 6; Oakland squeaked into the top half at 37.

One bright spot: The use of public libraries has remained consistently strong over the years, particularly in manufacturing towns. Toledo, Ohio, and Fort Wayne, Ind., for example, were in the bottom half overall but were two of six Rust Belt cities in the top 10 for library resources.

Robert Lang, an urban planning and policy expert at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, acknowledges cause for concern but questions whether results necessarily mean people are reading less.

"People are reading more things and less in depth. They're getting briefed," Lang says. "The bigger finding (is) what's consumed is different."

Most literate cities in 2010

Washington DC
Seattle
Minneapolis
Atlanta
Pittsburgh
San Francisco
St. Paul
Denver
Portland, Ore.
St. Louis
Cincinnati
Boston
Raleigh, N.C.
Cleveland
New Orleans
Columbus, Ohio

PS - Happy Birthday Edgar Allan Poe!!

The Year In Language

2011-01-15T07:31:00.000-05:00

The best and worst of 2010

By Erin McKean
January 9, 2011

I know, it’s getting a little late to reminisce about 2010. But besides being a new year, it has also been about a year since I started writing about language for Ideas (thanks again to Jan Freeman for sharing this column!), and I thought it would be fun to look back at a year’s worth of the best and worst stories about words.

From a lexicographer’s point of view, the best language story of 2010 was the recent paper in Science about “culturomics.” The authors define this term as “the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture,” but what they literally did, working with Google Books, was take the full text of a huge number of books — about 4 percent of all titles ever published — and crunch the words as data, on the model of the Human Genome Project.

One amazing finding: They estimated “that 52% of the English lexicon — the majority of the words used in English books — consists of lexical ‘dark matter’ undocumented in standard references.” They found vast quantities of words like aridification, slenthem (a musical instrument), and deletable, none of them in normal dictionaries. Time to get crackin’, fellow lexicographers!

Along with their study came a public release of billions of sorted phrases, ranging up to five words in length, and a tool that allows any user to chart how common specific words are over time (it’s at www.ngrams.googlelabs.com). As fascinating as they are, these graphs have also led to lots of great discussion about one big thing missing from the data: the context in which the words are used. When we use the word class, are we talking about social rank (“middle class”) or school (“geometry class”)? That kind of analysis will have to wait for a different tool.

The extended news cycle of Sarah Palin’s use of refudiate was another highlight of 2010’s language reportage: On July 14, she used the word (a blend of refute and repudiate) in a segment on Fox News; a week later she used it in a tweet about the planned Islamic center near Ground Zero (“Peaceful Muslims, please refudiate”). A few hours later, after the disappearance of the original tweet and a lot of talk about the unusual blend, Palin tweeted again: “Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!” (It’s true — experts estimate there are at least 1,500 words first known to be used by Shakespeare, so if anything Palin has some catching up to do.) Her coinage generated some excellent analysis from both Mark Liberman at the Language Log blog (who found earlier examples of the word in several places, including in a 1984 science fiction story by John Sladek) and from Ben Zimmer, writing on VisualThesaurus.com, who was able to date its use back to at least 1925. In November the New Oxford American Dictionary named refudiate the word of the year for 2010.

In other new-words news, Oxford English Dictionary category, it’s wonderful that the OED now includes an entry for eggcorn (a word beloved of language enthusiasts, an eggcorn is a “mistake” that has its own kind of internal logic, like eggcorn for acorn, or expatriot for expatriate).

The dumbest story of 2010, wordwise, has to be the Global Language Monitor’s affirmation in late December that WikiLeaks is a for-real darn-tootin’ word of English. Calling WikiLeaks a “new media and high technology” company (it’s not; it’s a nonprofit organization), GLM asserts that the 300 million “citations” it has found for the name means that WikiLeaks is, by sheer force of numbers, officially an English word. Note that GLM didn’t make any assertions about whether WikiLeaks actually functioned as a word (for example, pointing out instances of people using WikiLeaked as a verb, which would be a reasonable argument), and didn’t give any instances of the citations used to make their determination. I’m all in favor of discussing how names become words, but it seems absurd to declare a “word” based purely on uncritical beancounting. By the same standard, the misspelling seperate, the number 101, and “Little Fockers” should all be considered English words now.

A much better story, in the real-language-scientists-finally-getting-some-respect department, is that two linguists won MacArthur Foundation “genius grants” this year: Jessie Little Doe Baird, whose project in Mashpee is working to revive the language of the Wampanoag Nation, and Carol Padden, a professor at the University of California San Diego who researches the structure and evolution of sign languages.

The best pronunciation story of the year was surely the air-travel-disrupting Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull (if you need a refresher, it’s pronounced, roughly, AYE-yah Fyat-lah Yir-kutl). And the best naming story? That would be the case of (we must say mild-mannered, whether he is or not) Richard Smith, 41, of Carlisle, England, who changed his name to Stormhammer Deathclaw Firebrand. Before the name change (as reported in May by the UK paper Metro) Mr. Smith was known to his friends as “Spiff.”

And it’s not really a news story, exactly, but if you have a minute to search online for “Stephen Fry kinetic typography language” you will not be disappointed by the video you find. Trust me.

All in all, 2010 was a great year for stories about words and language — here’s hoping 2011 is even better!

Erin McKean is a lexicographer and founder of Wordnik.com. E-mail her at erin@wordnik.com.
© Copyright 2011 Globe Newspaper Company.

Banished Words

2011-01-12T07:30:00.001-05:00

Lake Superior State University 2011 Banished Words List

It may have been word of the year in some wheelhouses, but "refudiate" wasn't looked upon favorably by many who sent in nominations for Lake Superior State University's 36th annual List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness, which was released on New Year's Eve.

In a busy U.S. election year, "the American People" told LSSU they were tired of not only "refudiate," but also "mama grizzlies" who wanted their opponents to "man up."

But words and phrases related to technology and the way we communicate dominated the list for 2011, including "viral," "epic," "fail," and the use of websites "Facebook" and "Google" as verbs. "Viral" received the most nominations.

The "back story" on LSSU's popular list began on Jan. 1, 1976, when former LSSU Public Relations Director Bill Rabe and a group of friends each contributed a few expressions that they disliked to form the first list. After that, the nominations stacked up for future lists and Rabe's group, known then as The Unicorn Hunters, didn't have to make up its own list again. LSSU receives well over 1,000 nominations annually through its website, lssu.edu/banished.

And now, here's a look at the 2011 list. Get ready for the "wow factor!" It's full of "epic" "a-ha moments" that are sure to "viral." It's a no-"fail" list that you'll be "facebooking" and "googling" with your "BFFs." "Just sayin'."

VIRAL

"Often used to describe the spreading of items on the Internet i.e. 'The video went viral.' It is overused. I have no objection to this word's use as a way to differentiate a (viral) illness from bacterial." Jim Cance, Plainwell, Mich.

"This linguistic disease of a term must be quarantined." Kuahmel Allah, Los Angeles, Calif.

"Events, photographs, written pieces and even occasional videos that attracted a great deal of attention once were simply highly publicized, repeated in news broadcasts, and talked about for a few days. Now, however, it is no longer enough to give such offerings their 15 minutes of fame, but they must be declared to 'go viral.' As a result, any mindless stunt or vapid bit of writing is sent by its creators whirling around the Internet and, once whirled, its creators declare it (trumpets here) 'viral!' Enough already! If anything is to be declared worthy enough to 'go viral,' clearly it should be the LSSU Banished Words list for 2011!" Lawrence Mickel, Coventry, Conn.

"I knew it was time when the 2010 list of banished words appeared in Time magazine's, 'That Viral Thing' column." Dave Schaefer, Glenview, Ill.

"I didn't mind much when 'viral' came to mean an under-handed tactic by advertising companies to make their ads look like pop culture. However, now anything that becomes popular on YouTube is suddenly 'viral.' I just don't get it." Kevin Wood, Wallacetown, Ont.

"Every time I see a viral video on CNN or am asked to 'Let's go viral with this' in another lame e-mail forwarded message, it makes me sick." Lian Schmidt, Bandon, Ore.

EPIC

More than one nominator says the use of 'epic' has become an epic annoyance.

"Cecil B. DeMille movies are epic. Internet fallouts and opinions delivered in caps-lock are not. 'Epic fail,' 'epic win', 'epic (noun)' -- it doesn't matter; it needs to be banished until people recognize that echoing trite, hyperbolic Internet phrases in an effort to look witty or intelligent actually achieves the opposite." Kim U., Des Moines, Iowa.

"Over-use of the word 'epic' has reached epic proportions. Tim Blaney, Snoqualmie, Wash.

"Anything that this word describes in popular over-usage is rarely ever 'epic' in the traditional sense of being heroic, majestic, or just plain awe-inspiring." Mel F., Dallas, Tex.

"Standards for using 'epic' are so low, even 'awesome' is embarrassed." Mike of Kettering, Ohio.

"I'm sure that when the history books are written or updated and stories have been passed through the generations, the epic powder on the slopes during your last ski trip or your participation in last night's epic flash mob will probably not be included. This may be the root of this epic problem, but it seems as if during the past two years, any idea that was not successful was considered an 'epic-fail.' This includes the PowerPoint presentation you tried to give during this morning's meeting, but couldn't because of technical problems. Also, the ice storm of 'epic proportions' that is blanketing the east coast this winter sure looks a lot like the storm that happened last winter." DV, Seattle, Wash.

FAIL

One nominator says, "what originally may have been a term for a stockbroker's default is now abused by today's youth as virtually any kind of 'failure.' Whether it is someone tripping, a car accident, a costumed character scaring the living daylights out a kid, or just a poor choice in fashion, these people drive me crazy thinking that anything that is a mistake is a 'fail.' They fail proper language!"

"Fail is not a noun. It is not an adjective. It is a verb. If this word is not banned, then this entire word banishment system is full of FAIL. (Now doesn't that just sound silly?)" Daniel of Carrollton, Georgia.

"Mis-used. Over-used. Used with complete disregard to the 'epic' weight of the word. Silence obnoxious reality TV personalities and sullen, anti-establishment teenagers everywhere by banishing this word." Natalie of Burlington, Ont.

"It has taken over blogs, photo captions, 'status' comments. Anytime someone does something less than perfect, we have to read 'FAIL!' The word has failed us all." Aaron Yunker, Ishpeming, Mich.

WOW FACTOR

"This buzzword is served up with a heaping of cliché factor and a side order of irritation. But the lemmings from cable-TV cooking, whatever design and fashion shows keep dishing it out. I miss the old days when 'factor' was only on the math-and-science menu." Dan Muldoon, Omaha, Neb.

"Done-to-death phrase to point out something with a somewhat significantly appealing appearance." Ann Pepper, Knoxville, Tenn.

A-HA MOMENT

"All this means is a point at which you understand something or something becomes clearer. Why can't you just say that?" Audrey Mayo, Killeen, Tex.

BACK STORY

"This should be on the list of words that don't need to exist because a perfectly good word has been used for years. In this case, the word is 'history,' or, for those who must be weaned, 'story.'" Jeff Williams, Sherwood, Ariz.

BFF

"These chicks call each other BFF (Best Friends Forever) and it lasts about 10 minutes. Now there's BFFA (Best Friends For Awhile), which makes more sense." Kate Rabe Forgach, Ft. Collins, Colo.

MAN UP

"A stupid phrase when directed at men. Even more stupid when directed at a woman, as in 'Alexis, you need to man up and join that Pilates class!'" Sherry Edwards, Clarkston, Mich.

"Another case of 'verbing' a noun and ending with a preposition that goes nowhere. Not only that, the phrase is insulting, especially when voiced by a female, who'd never think to say, 'Woman up!'" Aunt Shecky, East Greenbush, NY.

"Can a woman 'man-up,' or would she be expected to 'woman-up?'" Jay Leslie, Portland, Maine.

"Not just overused (a 2010 top word according to the Global Language Monitor) but bullying and sexist." Christopher K. Philippo, Glenmont, NY.

"We had to put up with 'lawyer up.' Now 'man up,' too? A chest-thumping cultural regression fit for frat boys stacking beer glasses." Craig Chalquist Ph.D., Walnut Creek, Calif.

REFUDIATE

"Adding this word to the English language simply because a part-time politician lacks a spell checker on her cell phone is an action that needs to be repudiated." Dale Humphreys, Muskegon, Mich.

Kuahmel Allah of Los Angeles, Calif. wants to banish what he called 'Sarah Palin-isms': "Let's 'refudiate' them on the double!"

MAMA GRIZZLIES

"Unless you are referring to a scientific study of Ursus arctos horribilis , this analogy of right-wing female politicians should rest in peace." Mark Carlson, Sault Ste. Marie, Mich.
THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

"These politicians in Congress say 'the American People' as part of what seems like every statement they make! I see that others have noticed it, too, as various websites abound, including an entry on Wikipedia." Paul M. Girouard, St. Louis, Mo.

"No one in Washington can pontificate for more than two sentences without using it. Beyond overuse, these people imply that 'the American people' want/expect/demand all the same things. They don't." Dick Hilker, Loveland, Colo.

"Aren't all Americans people? Every political speech refers to the 'American' people as if simply saying 'Americans' (or 'people') is not enough." Deb Faust, Sault Ste. Marie, Mich.

I'M JUST SAYIN'

"'A phrase used to diffuse any ill feelings caused by a preceded remark,' according to the Urban Dictionary. Do we really need a qualifier at the end of every sentence? People feel uncomfortable with a comment that was made and then 'just sayin'' comes rolling off the tongue? It really doesn't change what was said, I'm just sayin'." Becky of Sault Ste. Marie, Mich.

"I'm just sayin'...'I'm not sayin'''…Actually, you ARE saying…A watered-down version of what I just said or intended to say….SAY what you are saying. DON'T SAY what you aren't saying." Julio Appling, Vancouver, Wash.

"Obviously you are saying it…you just said it!" Catherine Wilson, Granger, Ind.

"And we would never have known if you hadn't told us." Bob Forrest, Tempe, Ariz.

"When a 24-hour news network had the misguided notion to brand this phrase as a commentary segment called, 'Just sayin', I thought I was going to wretch." Casey Conroy, Pleasant Hill, Calif.

FACEBOOK / GOOGLE as verbs

"Facebook is a great, addicting website. Google is a great search engine. However, their use as verbs causes some deep problems. As bad as they are, the trend can only get worse, i.e. 'I'm going to Twitter a few people, then Yahoo the movie listings and maybe Amazon a book or two." Jordan of Waterloo, Ont.

LIVE LIFE TO THE FULLEST

"It's an absurdity followed by a redundancy. First, things are full or they're not; there is no fullest. Second, 'live life' is redundant. Finally, the expression is nauseatingly overused. What's wrong with enjoying life fully or completely? The phrase makes me gag. I'm surprised it hasn't appeared on the list before." Sylvia Hall, Williamsport, Penn.

What Is Your Opinion?

2011-01-08T07:22:00.001-05:00

Upcoming NewSouth 'Huck Finn' Eliminates the 'N' Word

By Marc Schultz
Jan 03, 2011

Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a classic by most any measure — T.S. Eliot called it a masterpiece, and Ernest Hemingway pronounced it the source of "all modern American literature." Yet, for decades, it has been disappearing from grade school curricula across the country, relegated to optional reading lists, or banned outright, appearing again and again on lists of the nation's most challenged books, and all for its repeated use of a single, singularly offensive word: "nigger."

Twain himself defined a "classic" as "a book which people praise and don't read." Rather than see Twain's most important work succumb to that fate, Twain scholar Alan Gribben and NewSouth Books plan to release a version of Huckleberry Finn, in a single volume with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, that does away with the "n" word (as well as the "in" word, "Injun") by replacing it with the word "slave."

"This is not an effort to render Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn colorblind," said Gribben, speaking from his office at Auburn University at Montgomery, where he's spent most of the past 20 years heading the English department. "Race matters in these books. It's a matter of how you express that in the 21st century."

The idea of a more politically correct Finn came to the 69-year-old English professor over years of teaching and outreach, during which he habitually replaced the word with "slave" when reading aloud. Gribben grew up without ever hearing the "n" word ("My mother said it's only useful to identify [those who use it as] the wrong kind of people") and became increasingly aware of its jarring effect as he moved South and started a family. "My daughter went to a magnet school and one of her best friends was an African-American girl. She loathed the book, could barely read it."

Including the table of contents, the slur appears 219 times in Finn. What finally convinced Gribben to turn his back on grad school training and academic tradition, in which allegiance to the author's intent is sacrosanct, was his involvement with the National Endowment for the Arts' Big Read Alabama.

Tom Sawyer was selected for 2009's Big Read Alabama, and the NEA tapped NewSouth, in Montgomery, to produce an edition for the project. NewSouth contracted Gribben to write the introduction, which led him to reading and speaking engagements at libraries across the state. Each reading brought groups of 80 to 100 people "eager to read, eager to talk," but "a different kind of audience than a professor usually encounters; what we always called ‘the general reader.'

"After a number of talks, I was sought out by local teachers, and to a person they said we would love to teach this novel, and Huckleberry Finn, but we feel we can't do it anymore. In the new classroom, it's really not acceptable." Gribben became determined to offer an alternative for grade school classrooms and "general readers" that would allow them to appreciate and enjoy all the book has to offer. "For a single word to form a barrier, it seems such an unnecessary state of affairs," he said.

Gribben has no illusions about the new edition's potential for controversy. "I'm hoping that people will welcome this new option, but I suspect that textual purists will be horrified," he said. "Already, one professor told me that he is very disappointed that I was involved in this." Indeed, Twain scholar Thomas Wortham, at UCLA, compared Gribben to Thomas Bowdler (who published expurgated versions of Shakespeare for family reading), telling PW that "a book like Professor Gribben has imagined doesn't challenge children [and their teachers] to ask, ‘Why would a child like Huck use such reprehensible language?' "

Of course, others have been much more enthusiastic—including the cofounders of NewSouth, publisher Suzanne La Rosa and editor-in-chief Randall Williams. In addition to the mutual success of their Tom Sawyer collaboration, Gribben thought NewSouth's reputation for publishing challenging books on Southern culture made them the ideal—perhaps the only—house he could approach with his radical idea.

"What he suggested," said La Rosa, "was that there was a market for a book in which the n-word was switched out for something less hurtful, less controversial. We recognized that some people would say that this was censorship of a kind, but our feeling is that there are plenty of other books out there—all of them, in fact—that faithfully replicate the text, and that this was simply an option for those who were increasingly uncomfortable, as he put it, insisting students read a text which was so incredibly hurtful."

La Rosa and Williams committed to a short turnaround, looking to get the finished product on shelves by February. Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn: The NewSouth Edition will be a $24.95 hardcover, with a 7,500 first printing. In the meantime, Gribben has gone back to the original holographs to craft his edition, which is also unusual in combining the two "boy books," as he calls them, into a single volume. But the heart of the matter is opening up the novels to a much broader, younger, and less experienced reading audience: "Dr. Gribben recognizes that he's putting his reputation at stake as a Twain scholar," said La Rosa. "But he's so compassionate, and so believes in the value of teaching Twain, that he's committed to this major departure. I almost don't want to acknowledge this, but it feels like he's saving the books. His willingness to take this chance—I was very touched."

Some Quotes For The New Year

2011-01-05T07:30:00.002-05:00

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New Year's Quotes and Holiday Sayings
Be prepared!

Some New Year's Day quotes and sayings can be funny and humorous and add inspiration (or indigestion) to our outlook for the new year.

As usual, our favorite humorist, Mark Twain, shows up. And our old buddy Anon sneaks in too!

Enjoy what lies ahead, my friends! Keep eyes and ears open, prepare to be amazed, look for the wonder around you and stop playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat!

(Do you know where that expression comes from?)

* "New Year's Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual." ~Mark Twain

* "An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves." ~Bill Vaughn

* "Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right." ~Oprah Winfrey
* "Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning, but a going on with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us." ~Hal Borland

* "Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors and let every new year find you a better man." ~Benjamin Franklin

* "Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever." ~Mark Twain

* "Youth is when you're allowed to stay up late on New Year's Eve. Middle age is when you're forced to." ~Bill Vaughn

* "It wouldn't be New Year's if I didn't have regrets." ~William Thomas

* "Probably nothing in the world arouses more false hopes than the first four hours of a diet." - Samuel Beckett

* "New Year’s is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions." ~Mark Twain

* "The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year's Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you're married to." ~P.J. O'Rourke

* "Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go." ~Brooks Atkinson

* "From New Year’s on the outlook brightens, good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining." ~Leonard Bernstein

* "Many people look forward to the new year for a new start on old habits." ~Anon

* "New Year's Eve, where old acquaintance be forgot...Unless, of course, those tests come back positive." ~Jay Leno

* "New Year’s Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time." ~James Agate

* "New Year's Day is every man's birthday." ~Charles Lamb

* "Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account." ~Oscar Wilde

* "Your Merry Christmas may depend on what others do for you. But your Happy New Year depends on what you do for others." ~Anon

And finally - this fascinating thought -

"For last year's words belong to last year's language. And next year's words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning." ~T.S. Eliot

First Thoughts

2011-01-01T07:26:00.001-05:00

Happy Ewe Near!!

A common grammar topic this time of year is where to put that silly apostrophe in the phrases New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.

The sentence above shows that the answer is Y-E-A-R-apostrophe-S. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Current English, the term new year refers to "the calendar year that has just begun or is about to begin following the 31st of December."

That means there is just one year that's new and being celebrated. The Eve—or the Day—belongs to that singular new year, thus the apostrophe comes before the S. The Oxford Dictionary of Current English spells out New Year's Eve and New Year's Day that way, too: apostrophe-S. To further reinforce this, the Gregg Reference Manual asserts that possessives in names of holidays are usually singular; New Year's Eve and New Year's Day are among them.

Many folks comment on this issue. Among the best can be found at The Punctuator. Look for the December 24th post. Rimpy does a great job with his blog!

But talking about where to hang an apostrophe in New Year's Eve and New Year's Day isn't enough for a complete post. So...

It could be said Scotland has had tremendous influence on the way the New Year's holiday is observed in the English-speaking world. Combine that with Scotland's own New Year's traditions and we have a number of linguistic lessons and new words to discuss.

One of those terms is Hogmanay. Hogmanay is used commonly in Scotland to describe New Year's Eve, but no one can exactly say for sure where it came from.

There are assertions supported by evidence that the word Hogmanay comes from Scandinavian languages, from Flemish, Anglo Saxon or Gaelic—but it probably comes from France. Given the historic alliances that existed between Scotland and France down the years, Hogmanay may have come from the French L'homme est n&3acute;, literally, "man is born," meaning for the new year.

On Hogmanay, the bells are traditionally rung at midnight and then one hopes for a first-footer; that is, the first guest to cross one's threshold in the New Year. The first-footer presents the homeowner with symbolic gifts: coal, for warmth; black bun, a traditional fruitcake; shortbread; salt; and whisky. And it's really good luck if it is brought by a dark-haired person. The feeling used to be that in the days of the Vikings, when a fair-haired person turned up, it might not necessarily be a good thing.

A New Year's tradition that is familiar to English-speakers everywhere is the singing of Auld Lang Syne. This is a song and poem that was written by Scottish poet Robert Burns. He was born in Ayrshire in 1759. He's quite a fascinating guy. He actually only lived until he was 37 but packed a whole lot into his life. He is famed as a poet, and to a certain extent a philosopher, too: some of his work is very, very deep.

Auld Lang Syne doesn't come from Scottish Gaelic but from Broad Scots or Lallans (Lowlands)—the dialect of southern Scotland. It means "long time since" or "long time past."

The song itself is actually quite a sad piece. It's a man talking to a friend who he has known since his childhood, and they're saying, We have a long history, so let's lift a drink to one another.

Lastly, Scots don't wish anyone "Happy New Year" until the actual new year arrives. Until that point, it is proper to say, "A good one to you when it comes."

It has now come.

HAPPY NEW YEAR dear readers!!

Remember When We Spoke Of Loos?

2010-12-29T07:27:00.001-05:00

Loo of the Year Awards

The Loo of the Year Awards continue to attract enormous interest from all quarters – providers, users and the media.

There’s nothing quite like an Award winning lavatory to stimulate local and often national media attention!

There are a range of National Awards, as well as accompanying Attendant of the Year Awards, for the cleaning staff who look after each facility – the unsung heroes and heroines.

It is often hard to work out how analysts make their assessments. In the case of Seymour Pierce’s leisure expert Hugh-Guy Lorriman it seems to be all about the state of a company’s toilets.

He was much taken by the pub chain JD Wetherspoon’s clinching of the coveted Golden Toilet Seat award from the British Toilet Association.

“While our noting of this event looks like it stands within the British tradition of toilet humour there is a serious comment on the JDW business model,” he wrote.

Mr Lorriman believes it underlines service standards at the chain.

He added: “Next time you pop into a Wetherspoon, check out the loos.”

From The Herald (Scotland) 11th December 2010.

J D Wetherspoon has won the much coveted UK Overall Winners Trophy in the 23rd Anniversary Loo of the Year Awards competition to find the very best ‘away from home’ toilets in the UK.

Awards managing director, Mike Bone quotes - “The UK’s hospitality sector is placing significantly increasing importance on provision of first class toilets that contain the facilities their customers need and expect when visiting their premises. Wetherspoon’s is continually raising the bar within this sector providing excellent and unique toilets in its pubs throughout the UK.

If you are thinking this is really not serious stuff, please consider the following article from The Wall Street Journal.

No Bathroom Humor, Please, Loo of the Year Awards Are Too Serious

British Accolades Leave Winners Flush With Success; Looking for the 'Wow Factor'

By PAUL SONNE And ALISTAIR MACDONALD

KENILWORTH, England—The Nobel Prizes identify top advances in medicine, peace and economics, among other things. The Academy Awards tout the ability of movies to illuminate a complex world. In this English village last week, organizers of Britain's Loo of the Year Awards were just as eager to detail their contributions to society.

More than 1,400 entrants competed in the U.K.'s Loo of the Year Award. Who snatched the crown for the best throne? WSJ's Paul Sonne reports from Kenilworth, England.

"This is our opportunity to celebrate the very best in away-from-home toilets," Mike Bone, director of the British Toilet Association, said in his opening address. "The toilets you will see today, the winning toilets, show the power of really wanting something good in this world and striving to achieve it."

At the annual event more than 1,400 venues—including restaurants, shopping malls, hotels and government buildings—compete to snatch the crown for having the nation's best throne. The prize: recognition from colleagues and a trophy bearing a mounted golden toilet seat.

David Magill, the general foreman at the Larne Borough Council, traveled from Northern Ireland to reach a Tudor-style hotel here, where he joined scores of champagne-quaffing colleagues charged with manning the nation's bathrooms.

Mr. Magill, who has managed Larne's toilet unit for seven years, entered 10 bathrooms in this year's contest. His dream: to receive the grand prize for best in-house cleaning staff. "If we win the big award, I'll probably jump through the roof," Mr. Magill said before the ceremony. "You'll probably need a helicopter to pick me off."

Flush With Success

To contestants, the Loo of Year awards are deadly serious. Doreen Hutton, environmental services manger for 2007 overall grand prize winner Trafford Centre, a mall in Manchester, says she constantly ponders how to win again.

"We feel that pressure, that we need to stay up there and stay forward thinking when it comes to new toilet technology," she says.

It costs £99.75, or $157.31, per bathroom to enter the competition, although there is a volume discount. Entrants get detailed feedback from expert inspectors.

During the summer, nine inspectors fan out to grade entrants on more than 100 criteria, such as cleanliness, disabled access and availability of paper towels. Judges pride themselves on their incorruptibility.

Inspector Richard Ward declines offers of free food, and even cups of tea or coffee, when making his rounds. "I won't compromise my neutrality," he says. Mr. Ward admits to thinking not "about an awful lot" other than toilets in the summer and struggles to step into a bathroom without mentally grading it.

Judges need an eye for detail. Bob Davies, a retired computer project manager from Reading, England, became an inspector for Loo of the Year seven years ago when a friend involved with the contest approached him. "He knew me and knew it was the kind of job I had some aptitude for," says Mr. Davies, 71, who was wearing a necktie emblazoned with multicolored symbols for male and female restrooms. (Judges, regardless of their gender, can inspect both men's and women's bathrooms).

This year, Mr. Davies scrutinized more than 150 toilets across England, always arriving unannounced. Contestants sometimes stall him so someone can tidy up before he enters. "There are distraction techniques which buy time for people," he says. "But you can always see the long-term dirt."

What makes an award-winning restroom? "It's the wow factor we want," says Richard Chisnell, founder and chairman of the Loo of the Year Awards, who inspected about 150 loos with his wife Maureen in Wales this summer. The couple storms out of restaurants without clean bathrooms.

Mr. Chisnell says "bits and pieces" are important. "For instance, is there a choice of hand drying?" he asks, noting he prefers to dry his hands "properly, with some physical movement," rather than under an electric hand dryer.

Judge Iain Wilson looks for modern urinals, stalls and an attendant who "takes ownership and pride" in his or her charge. Good bathrooms are often those that attendants personalize with flowers, pictures and decorations around events like Halloween, he says. His fellow judge, Mr. Davies, recalls a top-notch public toilet in Portsmouth that mixed its own trademark mouthwash on a daily basis. Christmas trees, Mr. Davies says, are a big plus.

Britain's interest in commodes stretches through the ages. Sir John Harington, an English writer under Queen Elizabeth I, is sometimes credited with inventing the flush toilet in 1596. Thomas Crapper, who built ornate toilets for British royals, helped popularize and perfect indoor plumbing in the late 1800s.

But some believe Britain's public toilets are in peril. From 1999 to 2007, the number of public toilets in the U.K. fell by 40%, according to the British Toilet Association. It predicts another 1,000-plus public toilets will close in the next 12 months as the U.K. makes budget cuts.

And many feel the quality is fading, too. "We lost the plot somewhere along the line," Mr. Davies lamented. "Anyone going to the continent 30 years ago, for example, would criticize the loos in France, whereas now they've outpaced us and their loos are of a better standard than ours."

He added: "Like being a pioneer in anything, I suppose, you get complacent...We're waking up to the fact that we are lagging behind."

That makes the Loo of the Year Awards all the more important. As Mr. Bone called the winners onto the stage Friday, purple and blue spotlights circled the room while the pop band Kings of Leon blasted from speakers. When he awarded the grand prize to the British pub chain JD Wetherspoon PLC, senior manager Mark Fletcher hoisted the golden toilet seat.

"You have to make sure you don't lift it by the seat because it'll crack," Mr. Chisnell told Mr. Fletcher as he handed over the hardware.

Mr. Fletcher says JD Wetherspoon, which runs 790 pubs across the U.K., has a board that places a premium on restroom standards; employees check to make sure bathrooms are clean every half an hour.

Meanwhile, Mr. Magill captured the quarry he came for: best in-house cleaning team. "I've worked for Larne Borough Council for 13 years, and this is my proudest moment," he said.

One venue, however, failed the test: the Chesford Grange Hotel, where the awards were held. "These toilets are currently OUT OF ORDER," a sign on one of the men's restrooms read at Friday's ceremony. "We do apologise for the inconvenience caused."

Entries for Loo of the Year Awards continue at high levels despite the economic situation and over 1400 entries were received in 2010. Standards in Awards entrant’s toilets are also improving – 72% of the total entries achieved the top 5 Star grading (58% in 2009).

Other major UK Trophy Winners were: ASDA Stores for individual category entries, Ceredigion County Council for public toilet entries, Haven Holidays for corporate provider entries, Tesco – TC Contractors for accessible facilities, Ceredigion County Council for Changing Places Toilets, ASDA for baby change facilities for the second year running , Harrogate Borough Council for ECO friendly toilets, Staffordshire County Council for Toilets in Education and Highland Council for Local Authority Toilet entries.

Trophy winners in the associated Attendant of the Year Awards, for the very important people who put the sparkle and pride into the UK’s toilets, were: Sandwich Town Council (individual attendant team), Larne Borough Council(in-house cleaning team) and Danfo UK (external contactor team).

Representatives from the top twenty Local Authorities public toilet providers – the Loo of the Year Awards ‘Premier League’, were also honoured at the prestigious Awards Presentation held on 3 rd December at the Chesford Grange Hotel in Kenilworth along with thirty four members of the Awards ‘Champions League’, the Standards of Excellence for participants achieving five or more five star Award grades. Popular entertainer and TV show host Les Dennis provided the after lunch entertainment with a special edition of a unique ‘Flushing Fortunes’ quiz show.

The 2010 Awards were run in association with Airdri, the UK based manufacturer of warm air dryers, British Toilet Association, The Changing Places Consortium, and The British Cleaning Council. The four national tourism bodies – Visit England, Visit Scotland, Visit Wales and The Northern Ireland Tourist Board, Danfo, flush-wiser (PHS Washrooms), Healthmatic, Lotus Professional and SCA Tork also supported this year’s Awards.

Full details of the 2010 Awards results are available on the Awards website:
Loo Of The Year Awards

Word Of The Year?

2010-12-26T07:07:00.000-05:00

Audacity of 'austerity,' 2010 Word of the Year

(AP) December 20, 2010

SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (AP) — As Greece faced a debt crisis, the government passed a series of strict austerity measures, including taxes hikes and cutting public sector pay.

The move sparked angry protests, strikes and riots across the country as unemployment skyrocketed and the crisis spread to other European nations. The move also incited a rush to online dictionaries from those searching for a definition.

Austerity, the 14th century noun defined as "the quality or state of being austere" and "enforced or extreme economy," set off enough searches that Merriam-Webster named it as its Word of the Year for 2010, the dictionary's editors announced Monday.

John Morse, president and publisher of the Springfield, Mass.-based dictionary, said "austerity" saw more than 250,000 searches on the dictionary's free online tool and came with more coverage of the debt crisis.

"What we look for ... what are the words that have had spikes that strike us very much as an anomaly for their regular behavior," Morse said. "The word that really qualifies this year for that is 'austerity'."

Runners-up also announced Monday included "pragmatic," ''moratorium," ''socialism," and "bigot" — the last word resulted from public uses by former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, former CNN host Rick Sanchez and former NPR senior analyst Juan Williams.

Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster's editor-at-large, said this year's top 10 words were associated with a news event or coverage, which editors believe resulted in prolonged jumps in searches.

"Sometimes it's hard to pinpoint the searches on one particular news event, but typically that is what sparks people's curiosity in a word," Sokolowski said.

For example, "socialism" was searched, editors believe, because of coverage around federal bailouts and Democratic-backed federal health care legislation. And editors noticed that "pragmatic" was looked-up a number of times after midterm elections.

According to Morse, the dictionary's online website sees more than 500 million searches a year — with most of those being usual suspects like "effect" and "affect." But he said words selected for the dictionary's top 10 were words that had searches hundreds of thousands of out-of-character hits.

Also making the top ten list was the word "doppelganger." Sokolowski said the word saw a jump in searches after George Stephanopoulos of ABC's "Good Morning America" called "Eat, Pray, Love" author Elizabeth Gilbert "Julia Roberts' doppelganger." Roberts played Gilbert in the book's film adaptation and resembles the writer.

"Doppelganger" was also used in the popular television show, "The Vampire Diaries."

"Sometimes, that all it takes," Sokolowski said.

Words "shellacking," ''ebullient," ''dissident," and "furtive" also made this year's top list.

Allan Metcalf, an English professor at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill., and author of "OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word," said the list of words shows how the country is evolving because the public is looking up words that used to be very common.

"Around 20 to 30 years ago, everyone would know what 'socialism' was," said Metcalf, who is also executive secretary of the American Dialect Society. "Same with bigot. That fact that they have to be looked up says something about us."

That's true with some words like "shellacking," said Jenna Portier, an English instructor at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, La. Although Merriam-Webster editors said searches for the word spiked after President Barack Obama said he and his party took "a shellacking" from voters in midterm election, Portier said the word is very common in southern Louisiana. "Where I'm from, it means to varnish something like wood," Portier said.

Shana Walton, a languages and literature professor also at Nicholls State University, said she understands how news events maybe influenced the dictionary's list.

"If 'moratorium' is one of the most looked-up words, that's clearly a reflection of how often the word was used in the wake of the BP oil spill," said Walton, a linguistic anthropologist who is doing research on oil and land in south Louisiana. "Many people in south Louisiana expressed much more outrage about the moratorium, frankly, than about the spill."

Metcalf said the American Dialect Society will release its "Word of the Year" winner in January, but it's selected by the group like Time's Person of the Year.

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press

Britglish?

2010-12-22T07:24:00.001-05:00

Although I was born in and live in America I still enjoy the British version of English and this tends to show through sometimes. Perhaps the five years I enjoyed England whilst in the USAF has something to do with this.

For example, words that end with "-ward" in the US tend to be "-wards" in the UK, like backwards, afterwards, forwards, inwards, outwards, downwards, upwards, etc.

Then there are words like dreamt vs. dreamed, and leapt vs. leaped. For some reason I have no problem switching from "dreamt" to "dreamed," but I cannot stand the idea of using "leaped." In the end I used "dreamed" and "leapt" – sometimes either is okay as long as the text is consistent. But I might change my mind about this...

Now take burnt vs. burned. There's an argument that says "burnt" is an adjective whereas "burned" is a verb, so you might say "the burnt house" and "the house burned."

Another funny one is crept vs. creeped. You can say "creep into a tent" or "he crept into the tent" but "creeped" is normally reserved for "he creeped me out" (a different meaning altogether).

It seems like Americans just stick "-ed" on the end of everything, like spelt vs. spelled. But then along comes the word "dived" which is used primarily in the UK and is laughed at in the US. Just to be awkward the US uses "dove."

Moving on to might vs. may, many think "may" is preferable. You can say "I may go to the party" or "I might go to the party," and some will say that "may" is more correct, and that "might" is used in past tense such as "I might have gone to the party if I had known about it." So why do I use "might" far more often? I don't know if this is a British vs. American thing, or just me. In any case I decided to leave all my uses of "might" and my occasional uses of "may" – a guy could drive himself mad worrying about this stuff!

When I was at school, the plural of "hoof" was always "hooves." But the plural of "roof" is not "rooves," it's "roofs." So why can't I use "hoofs" instead? Turns out I can, according to both my American AND British dictionaries. Who knew? Not me, apparently. It's funny what you learn and then have to unlearn.

In England it's "storey/storeys" when referring to floors of a building, and "story/stories" for tales. In America it's just "story/stories" for both. I kind of miss the "-ey" ending. (Just as an aside, in England the lowest level of a four-storey building is the ground floor, with first, second and third above. In America, a four-story building's lowest level is the first floor, with second, third and fourth above. There's a four-story building in my book and I removed the bit where it said they "entered the first floor" as that might confuse British folks!)

Some say that "anymore" is better than "any more" but "any time" is better than "anytime." To be safe, I've just stuck with "any more" and "any time."

Switching to a different subject, I wondered what dragon groupings are called. You know how you have a herd of elephants and a litter of kittens? Many of these grouping names are shared, for instance you can also have a herd of horses and a litter of puppies. But I was surprised to realize that, in addition to a flock of birds and a flock of sheep, you can also have a flock of elephants as well as a herd of sheep! I wasted many minutes on the internet looking up this stuff. Grr!

But what about dragons? There are no such things (no, really, they're make-believe), but I guess they're fairly close to alligators, so I used alligators as a starting point. So we have a bull (male), a cow (female), and a hatchling (young 'un). You can have a congregation or bask of alligators, so I guess that works for dragons too... only I would love to use a fleet of dragons, thinking I'd heard that term before. But it turns out I can't find much about a fleet of dragons anywhere, so maybe I dreamed/dreamt it!

There is a a phrase, "cute as a button." that I was once told should be "bright as a button." Well, it turns out that both phrases are fine, but "cute" is American while "bright" is British:

"Cute as a button" – as in the button quail, a small, gray and super fluffy bird.

"Bright as a button" – the British version of "cute as a button" which means "cute, charming, attractive, almost always with the connotation of being small."

This stuff could rattle around in your head for years to come. Sorry...

The Greatest Sentence

2010-12-18T08:48:00.000-05:00

Today, as on many other days, I am relishing the taste of good words.

The author Anne Dillard tells the story of a student who approached a writer and asked if he could ever be a writer. He is then challenged with the question, "Do you like sentences?" I can not think of a better means to divide writers from non-writers. A writer will immediately tremble and then recount favorite sentences. A non-writer will be confused. "Sentences? I like books. I like stories well-told. But sentences?" This latter group stands in awe at the dimensions of a cathedral. The former group is thrilled by how the stacking of each brick transgresses gravity as buttresses fly, defying the heavens to create the heavenly.

For the writer, beyond the appreciation of reading a well-crafted sentence, is the desire to create the sentence that will make the angels laugh or cry, invoke a synchronous nod from the gods of literature, and curl a Grinch-sized smile on the lips of the constant reader. Do you like sentences? Do you love sentences?

What is the greatest sentence? To begin this quest, I must address the question: What makes a sentence great? That depends on its mission. It can be great because it conveys a timeless truth or a sums up a great aspiration. This variety often fills books of quotes. Along with exemplary construction is the "uh-huh" factor, the recognition of its wisdom.

"Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth." Muhammad Ali

"I am not young enough to know everything." Oscar Wilde.

Variants of these are those that owe their existence to other well-known quotes. They are equally quotable, even if they often devolve into cynicism.

"The lion and the calf shall lie down together but the calf won't get much sleep." Woody Allen.

"Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation." James Thurber

"East is east and west is San Francisco." O. Henry

Dorothy Parker summarized the distinction between these forms: "Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words." Still, don't underestimate calisthenics. This includes the powerful form of construction known as chiasmus. Here a set of words are introduced and then their order is reversed. This can reiterate a point, provide contrast through counterpoint, or twist the thought in unexpected directions. Shakespeare's: "Fair is foul, and foul is fair, hover through the fog and filthy air." Or the comment in regards to the chance of finding a man in Alaska where single men greatly outnumber women: "The odds are good, but the goods are odd." That is from our old buddy Anon.

Which leads to the next observation. Many sentences are great because of their context. Most sentences are servants, not masters. Their purpose is to help support the larger structure. Even when the sentence becomes a grand summary of all that was before it, it is diminished out of context. "He drew a short breath and said lightly but softly: 'My dear, I don't give a damn.'" Margaret Mitchell. This declaration would be forgotten if it had come from some pot-boiler novel. It is great because it served its purpose perfectly.

"These are the times that try men's souls." Thomas Payne. An elegant, simple construction. Poetic. And yet it helps to know the times to which Payne refers.

"Jesus wept." A thrilling sentence of minimalist simplicity. But its beauty is completed by knowing the gospel story.

"Buddha laughed." There is no scriptural mention of Jesus laughing. Perhaps the contrasting combination, "Jesus wept; Bhudda laughed," is an all time great sentence. Checking Google, I find that a Reverend John Morehouse has used this as the title for a sermon. I hope his sermon did it justice.

Another of my personal favorites requires context. It is from the film critic Todd Anthony's review of Oliver Stone's Nixon: "Two master liars locked in mortal combat."

I would argue that the greatest sentences ever are those that can stand alone. They do not require context or gymnastics for resonance. It is not the wisdom they contain that elevates them. It is their elegant construction. The word choices are unexpected and yet perfect. They have song and the voice to sing it. Often they are short, simple, and precise. Several examples, in reverse order of length:

"Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me." Psalm 42

"For a steep second she thought his gaze hummed; but it was only her blood she heard.." Thomas Harris

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." George Orwell

"There once was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he deserved it." CS Lewis

"Shut up, he explained." Ring Lardner

Others among the greatest sentences are bulky. Although it is hard to sustain intensity and focus over length, some styles don't require these attributes. Beat poetry and stream-of-conscious can invoke great rambling rants. Nonetheless, one can't help but feel that even great authors succumb to the self-indulgent audacity of the hopelessly long sentence. Victor Hugo had a sentence of 823 words in Les Miserables, while Faulkner in Absalom, Absalom had a sentence of 1,300 words. Molly Bloom's soliloquy in Joyce's Ulysses runs thirty pages. Finally, Jonathan Coe's The Rotters Club has a sentence clocking in at 13,000 words. No one is quoting these, at least not at length.

There are long-winded sentences that are worth every ounce of breath. Ginsberg's "Howl" is 2031 words, crammed with kaleidoscopic discomforting imagery. The opening to The Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, clocking in at 119 words, is brilliant in its construction, its word choice and its discovery of truth through contradictions. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way -- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of the noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."

My pick for the greatest long sentence is from Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. At 348 words, copyright privileges prevent me from quoting it in its entirety. It begins: "It is a light blue moonless summer evening," and continues, "while the floats, for there are timber diving floats, are swayed together, everything jostled and beautifully ruffled and stirred and tormented in this rolling sleeked silver," and concludes, "and then again, within the white white distant alabaster thunderclouds beyond the mountains, the thunderless gold lightning in the blue evening...unearthly."

Which leaves my choice for the greatest sentence ever. It has all of the best qualities of the previous choices: lightness and weight, music and voice. It has a startling poetry and a resonant vision. At 46 words, it seems brief. From Lincoln's second inaugural address: "The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

One of the best books to find truly exquisite sentences is "The Maytrees" by one of my favorite authors - Annie Dillard. She is one of the best in the business. Dillard’s prose is breathtaking; her metaphors, to borrow from her lexicon, enough to knock you out. The sea is “a monster with a lace hem.” Pete’s “fondness for humans did not extend to girls, who were less interesting than frogs, and noisier.” Lou “opened her days like a piñata.” When Toby leaves her (somewhat improbably) for Deary, Lou “had no force to fight what held her as wind pins paper to a fence. She was a wood horse, a rock cairn, a jerry can of pitch. She found herself holding one end of a love. She reeled out love’s long line alone; it did not catch.”

"The rest is silence." Shakespeare

"I" Before "E"

2010-12-15T07:48:00.002-05:00

This list of words is based on the "rule" that I learned as a student of junior high school English:

"I before E except after C; exceptions are either, neither,
foreign, leisure, protein, seize and weird."

Or...

"I before E except after C unless in neighbor and weigh."

I think there may be one or two (or quite a few!) other exceptions.

ancient
apartheid
atheist
cleidomastoid (collar bone)
conscience
deign
deism
deity
eight
feign
feisty
freight
geisha
height, heighten
heist
inveigh
kaleidoscope
monotheism
neigh
neighbor, neighborhood
Pleiades (star cluster in Orion)
Pleistocene
prescient
reign
rein
reindeer
reinstall, preinstall, reincarnation, reinvent, reinstate, reinstitute, (plus many other "re-" words
science
sheik
skein
sleigh
sleight (of hand)
species
stein
theist
weight
veil
vein

Any others folks?

Random Words - 1

2010-12-11T11:06:00.001-05:00

A few random words I came across recently -

sesquipedality

PRONUNCIATION:
(ses-kwi-pi-DAL-i-tee)

MEANING: noun: The practice of using long words.

ETYMOLOGY: From Latin sesqui- (one and a half) + ped- (foot). First recorded use: 1759.

NOTES:

Literally speaking, sesquipedality is using words that are one and a half feet long. A related word is sesquicentennial (150th anniversary). Nothing wrong with using a sesquipedalian word once in a while, if it fits, but it's best to avoid too many long, polysyllabic words. This dictum doesn't apply to German speakers though, as Mark Twain once observed, "Some German words are so long that they have a perspective."

There's a bean subspecies commonly known as a yardlong bean. It's really misnamed as it's "only" half a yard long. Its scientific name, Vigna unguiculata subsp. sesquipedalis, is more precise.

USAGE:

"The stories in Oblivion comprise relatively straightforward prose, with textual play and sesquipedality trimmed to the bone."

Tim Feeney; Oblivion; Review of Contemporary Fiction; Jul 2004.

#####

Hobson's choice

PRONUNCIATION:
(HOB-sonz chois)

MEANING: noun: An apparently free choice that offers no real alternative: take it or leave it.

ETYMOLOGY: After Thomas Hobson (1544?-1630), English keeper of a livery stable, from his requirement that customers take either the horse nearest the stable door or none.

NOTES:

Hobson had some 40 animals in his rent-a-horse business and a straightforward system: a returning horse goes to the end of the line, and the horse at the top of the line gets to serve next. He had good intentions -- rotating horses so his steeds received good rest and an equal wear, but his heavy-handed enforcement of the policy didn't earn him any customer service stars. He could have offered his clients the option of choosing one of the two horses nearest the stable door, for instance, and still achieve nearly the same goal. More recently Henry Ford offered customers a Ford Model T in any color as long as it was black.

USAGE:

"There, many are given a legal Hobson's choice: Plead guilty and go home or ask for a lawyer and spend longer in custody."

Sean Webby; No Lawyer in Sight for Many Making Way Through System; San Jose Mercury News (California); Dec 30, 2009.

#####

Hobson's choice led me too -

Morton's fork

PRONUNCIATION:
(MOR-tuhns fork)

MEANING: noun: A situation involving choice between two equally undesirable outcomes.

ETYMOLOGY: After John Morton (c. 1420-1500), archbishop of Canterbury, who was tax collector for the English King Henry VII. To him is attributed Morton's fork, a neat argument for collecting taxes from everyone: those living in luxury obviously had money to spare and those living frugally must have accumulated savings to be able to pay.

USAGE:
"Japan's political elites] face a Morton's fork between being ignored or being seen as a problem to which there is little solution."
Michael Auslin; Japan Dissing; The Wall Street Journal (New York); Apr 22, 2010.

#####

And finally -

decussate

PRONUNCIATION:
(di-KUHS-ayt, DEK-uh-sayt, adjective: di-KUHS-ayt, -it)

MEANING: verb tr.: To intersect or to cross.

adjective:
1. Intersected or crossed in the form of an X.
2. Arranged in pairs along the stem, each pair at a right angle to the one above or below.

ETYMOLOGY: The word originated from Latin "as" (plural asses) which was a copper coin and the monetary unit in ancient Rome. The word for ten asses was decussis, from Latin decem (ten) + as (coin). Since ten is represented by X, this spawned the verb decussare, meaning to divide in the form of an X or intersect.

NOTES:

Samuel Johnson, lexicographer extraordinaire, has a well-deserved reputation for his magnum opus "A Dictionary of the English Language", but as they say, even Homer nods. He violated one of the dictums of lexicography -- do not define a word using harder words than the one being defined -- when he used today's word and two other uncommon words in defining the word network:

Network: Any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.

And what is "reticulated"? Again, according to Johnson:

Reticulated: Made of network; formed with interstitial vacuities.

USAGE:
"How I wished then that my body, too, if it had to droop and shrivel, for surely everyone's did, would furl and decussate with grace to sculpt the victory of my spirit."

J. Nozipo Maraire; Zenzele: A Letter for My Daughter; Delta; 1997.

What Is A Lipogram?

2010-12-08T10:23:00.001-05:00

A lipogram is a text that purposefully excludes a particular letter of the alphabet. A contemporary example is Andy West's novel Lost and Found (2002), which does not contain the letter e.

Etymology:

From the Greek, "missing letter"

Examples and Observations:

* "Upon this basis I am going to show you how a bunch of bright young folks did find a champion; a man with boys and girls of his own; a man of so dominating and happy individuality that Youth is drawn to him as is a fly to a sugar bowl. It is a story about a small town. It is not a gossipy yarn; nor is it a dry, monotonous account, full of such customary 'fill-ins' as 'romantic moonlight casting murky shadows down a long, winding country road.' Nor will it say anything about tinklings lulling distant folds; robins caroling at twilight, nor any 'warm glow of lamplight' from a cabin window. No. It is an account of up-and-doing activity; a vivid portrayal of Youth as it is today; and a practical discarding of that worn-out notion that 'a child don't know anything.'

"Now, any author, from history's dawn, always had that most important aid to writing: an ability to call upon any word in his dictionary in building up his story. That is, our strict laws as to word construction did not block his path. But in my story that mighty obstruction will constantly stand in my path; for many an important, common word I cannot adopt, owing to its orthography."

(Ernest Vincent Wright, from Gadsby, 1939--a story of more than 50,000 words that does not use the letter e)

* "Most common of all marks from A to Z,
It's tyrant to orthography, and smug
That not a thing of worth is said without
Our using it. . . ."

(Daniel J. Webster, "A Lipogram: Writing Without It." Keeping Order on My Shelf: Poems and Translations. iUniverse, 2005)

"The earliest lipograms are thought to have been composed in the sixth century BC, but none has survived; maybe they were never actually written down, only imagined, to circulate among the clerisy as instant legends of verbal skill. . . . [T]he lipogram should be a purposeless ordeal undertaken voluntarily, a gratuitous taxing of the brain, and the severer the better. It should make the business of writing not pleasanter but harder."

(John Sturrock, "Georges Perec." The Word From Paris: Essays on Modern French Thinkers and Writers. Verso, 1998)

Here are some more fascinating works -

* Adam Adams' novel Toxic Panda is an armchair treasure hunt excluding the letter E throughout the book and the embedded puzzles.

* In Walter Abish's novel Alphabetical Africa (1974) the first chapter consists solely of words beginning with "A". Chapter two also permits words beginning with "B" and so on, until at chapter 26, Abish allows himself to use words beginning with any letter at all. For the next 25 chapters, he reverses the process.

* Gyles Brandreth re-wrote some of Shakespeare's works as lipograms: Hamlet without the letter "I" (e.g., "To be or not to be, that's the query"; Macbeth without "A" or "E"; Twelfth Night without "O" or "L"; Othello without "O".[7][citation needed] In 1985 he also wrote the following poem, where each stanza is a lipogrammatic pangram (using every letter of the alphabet except "E").

Bold Nassan quits his caravan,
A hazy mountain grot to scan;
Climbs jaggy rocks to find his way,
Doth tax his sight, but far doth stray.

Not work of man, nor sport of child
Finds Nassan on this mazy wild;
Lax grow his joints, limbs toil in vain—
Poor wight! why didst thou quit that plain?

Vainly for succour Nassan calls;
Know, Zillah, that thy Nassan falls;
But prowling wolf and fox may joy
To quarry on thy Arab boy.

* In Christian Bök's novel Eunoia (2001), each chapter is restricted to a single vowel, missing four of the five vowels. For example the fourth chapter does not contain the letters "A", "E", "I" or "U". A typical sentence from this chapter is "Profs from Oxford show frosh who do post-docs how to gloss works of Wordsworth." Lipogrammatic writing which uses only one vowel has been called univocalic.

* Cipher and Poverty (The Book of Nothing), a book by Mike Schertzer (1998), pretends to have been written "by a prisoner whose world had been impoverished to a single utterance... who can find me here in this silence". The poems that follow use only the 4 vowels "A", "E", "I", and "O", and 11 consonants "C", "D", "F", "H", "L", "M", "N", "R", "S", "T", and "W" of this utterance.

* Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn (2001) is described as a "progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable": the plot of the story deals with a small country which begins to outlaw the use of various letters, and as each letter is outlawed within the story, it is (for the most part) no longer used in the text of the novel. It is not purely lipogrammatic, however, because the outlawed letters do appear in the text proper from time to time (the characters being penalized with banishment for their use) and when the plot requires a search for pangram sentences, all twenty-six letters are obviously in use. Also, late in the text, the author begins using letters serving as homophones for the omitted letters (i.e. "PH" in place of an "F", "G" in place of "C"), which some might argue is cheating.

Some amazing stuff!

Speaking Of Mark Twain...

2010-12-04T08:36:00.000-05:00

Mark Twain on the Rotten English Alphabet

Mark Twain had little respect for what he called our "foolish" and "drunken old alphabet," or for the "rotten spelling" that it encouraged. Nonetheless, Twain was hardly convinced that the efforts of spelling reformers would ever succeed. It was the alphabet itself that needed to be torn up and rebuilt from scratch.

In the early years of the 20th century, one of the more prominent advocates of spelling reform was the industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. He funded the efforts of the Simplified Spelling Board and the National Education Association, which had gained headlines recommending these twelve "reformed" spellings:

1. "bizness" for business
2. "enuf" for enough
3. "fether' for feather
4. "mesure' for measure
5. "plesure" for pleasure
6. "red" for read (past tense of "to read")
7. "ruf" for rough
8. "trauf" for trough
9. "thru" for through
10. "tuf" for tough
11. "tung" for tongue
12. "yung" for young

An additional 300 new spellings soon followed.

At first the initiative met with modest support (President Theodore Roosevelt ordered all government printing offices to use the new spellings and a few newspapers followed suit), but Mark Twain remained skeptical.

Twain's Response to Carnegie and the Spelling Reformers

In December 1907, at a meeting honoring Carnegie in New York City, Twain gave a speech in which he explained why a piecemeal approach to spelling reform was doomed to fail:

There's not a vowel in [the alphabet] with a definite value, and not a consonant that you can hitch anything to. Look at the "h's" distributed all around. There's "gherkin." What are you going to do with the "h" in that? What the devil's the use of "h" in gherkin, I'd like to know. It's one thing I admire the English for: they just don't mind anything about them at all.

But look at the "pneumatics" and the "pneumonias" and the rest of them. A real reform would settle them once and for all, and wind up by giving us an alphabet that we wouldn't have to spell with at all, instead of this present silly alphabet, which I fancy was invented by a drunken thief. Why, there isn't a man who doesn't have to throw out about fifteen hundred words a day when he writes his letters because he can't spell them! It's like trying to do a St. Vitus's dance with wooden legs. . . .

If we had adequate, competent vowels, with a system of accents, giving to each vowel its own soul and value, so every shade of that vowel would be shown in its accent, there is not a word in any tongue that we could not spell accurately. That would be competent, adequate, simplified spelling, in contrast to the clipping, the hair punching, the carbuncles, and the cancers which go by the name of simplified spelling. If I ask you what b-o-w spells you can't tell me unless you know which b-o-w I mean, and it is the same with r-o-w, b-o-r-e, and the whole family of words which were born out of lawful wedlock and don't know their own origin.

Now, if we had an alphabet that was adequate and competent, instead of inadequate and incompetent, things would be different. Spelling reform has only made it bald-headed and unsightly. There is the whole tribe of them, "row" and "read" and "lead"--a whole family who don't know who they are. I ask you to pronounce s-o-w, and you ask me what kind of a one.

If we had a sane, determinate alphabet, instead of a hospital of comminuted eunuchs, you would know whether one referred to the act of a man casting the seed over the ploughed land or whether one wished to recall the lady hog and the future ham.

It's a rotten alphabet. I appoint Mr. Carnegie to get after it, and leave simplified spelling alone. Simplified spelling brought about sun-spots, the San Francisco earthquake, and the recent business depression, which we would never have had if spelling had been left all alone.

Now, I hope I have soothed Mr. Carnegie and made him more comfortable than he would have been had he received only compliment after compliment, and I wish to say to him that simplified spelling is all right, but, like chastity, you can carry it too far.

("The Alphabet and Simplified Spelling," December 9, 1907)

Postscript on the Spelling Reform Movement

Eventually, after donating more than $280,000 to the doomed cause of spelling reform, Carnegie gave up. In 1915 he told the editor of The Times of London, "Amended spellings can only be submitted for general acceptance. It is the people who decide what is to be adopted or rejected."

And a century later, of course, the 26 letters in that "rotten alphabet" remain unchanged.

Happy Birthday Mark!

2010-12-01T07:36:00.000-05:00

Yesterday (November 30) was the birthday of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), well known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. Twain is noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), which has been called "the Great American Novel", and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). Twain was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.

Twain was very popular, and his keen wit and incisive satire earned praise from critics and peers. Upon his death he was lauded as the "greatest American humorist of his age", and William Faulkner called Twain "the father of American literature".

Here are just a few quotes from this genius -

A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.
Mark Twain

A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.
Mark Twain

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.
Mark Twain

A man's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.
Mark Twain

A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read.
Mark Twain

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.
Mark Twain

A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape.
Mark Twain

Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.
Mark Twain

Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.
Mark Twain

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.
Mark Twain

All generalizations are false, including this one.
Mark Twain

All you need is ignorance and confidence and the success is sure.
Mark Twain

Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
Mark Twain

Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.
Mark Twain

Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.
Mark Twain

Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.
Mark Twain

As an example to others, and not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain from smoking when awake.
Mark Twain

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
Mark Twain

Be careless in your dress if you will, but keep a tidy soul.
Mark Twain

How Some Words Are Related

2010-11-28T07:09:00.000-05:00

The words we use have long histories. Some are straightforward, but many have interesting stories behind them. I have seen many lists of interesting etymologies, but I have very few lists containing pairs of words that are related in some way. The following pairs have some interesting stories about how they are related.

Cybernetic and Governor

The words “cybernetic” and “governor” come from the same word. That puts Arnold Schwarzenegger in a whole new light, doesn’t it? Cybernetic, while popularly known in the context of biotechnology, is to do with the science of regulatory systems. This can mean the way computer programs control robotics, or how social groups are arranged into hierarchies. The word “cybernetics” comes straight from the Greek word “kubernetes”, in English. The Greek “K” (kappa) is generally turned into a “C” in English, and the Greek “U” (upsilon) becomes a “Y” in English (cyclops is a perfect example). In Greek, a kubernetes was the pilot of a ship, the person who controlled how the ship moved.

The Greeks were better sailors than the Romans, so it did not take long for the Romans to use Greek terminology on Roman ships. The Romans, however, favored the “G” sound over the “K” sound, and “kubernetes” became gubernator. From there, the word started to mean “the guy in charge.” Centuries passed, and the Latin-speaking Franks, who lived in one particular region of Gaul, imposed their pronunciation of Latin on the region, which they now called “France” or “land of the Franks.” Just as the Romans preferred the “G” sound to the “K,” the French preferred the “V” sound to “B”, in this particular word, giving us “governor.” The French “governor” passed into English after the Norman invasion (more on that later).

Dexterity and Sinister

Unlike the two previous words, dexterity and sinister do not come from the same word, but were, in fact, opposites. Dextera in Latin means “right hand”, and Sinistra in Latin means “left hand.” Both words acquired their modern connotations in antiquity. The right hand was the hand that held a soldier’s weapon. “Right-handed” became slang for being skillful or agile, giving dexterity its modern meaning millenia before it was reduced to another stat on an Orcish archer’s ability score.

Sinister’s modern meaning comes from fortune-telling. Augurs (not to be confused with auger, a word discussed a little later) were Roman priests who specialized in divining the will of the gods by watching the flight of birds. The number, direction, origin and species of birds seen, all had some meaning to the augur. Birds seen in the augur’s right field of vision were auspicious, or favorable, while birds seen off the left shoulder were unfavorable, thus “sinister” acquired the meaning of harmful or evil.

Shirt and Skirt

The Anglo-Saxons who invaded and settled Great Britain spoke a dialect of West Germanic, the largest of the three branches of Germanic languages. In the 11th century, Vikings from Denmark invaded and settled throughout what would become modern England, eventually controlling half of the region. These Danes spoke a dialect of North Germanic. The two languages were very similar, but had a number of important differences in pronunciation. Words that had a sh pronunciation in Old English were given a sk pronunciation in Danish.

Both cultures wore a long, unisex frock. In Old English it was called a scyrte (pronounced shoor-teh), while in Danish it was called a skyrta (skoor-ta). As the two cultures mixed, Danish words found their way into the English vocabulary. The nearly identical words for the same object began to be used alongside each other. One came to mean the top half of a man’s outfit; the other came to refer to the bottom half of a woman’s outfit. The same thing happened to many other words, such as screech and shriek.

Gringo and Greek

The Greeks have never called themselves “Greek.” They have always referred to themselves as “Hellenes”, after the mythological figure Hellen (not to be confused with Helen of Troy). The word “Greek” comes from the Latin term “Graeci,” which means “the people from Graia,” the first Greek town the Romans encountered. Gringo, a derogatory word for non-Spanish speakers that is used in many Spanish-speaking areas, likely comes from Griego, the Spanish rendering of Graeci. The word was originally a casual way of saying “foreigner” in Spanish, not unlike the English expression “it’s Greek to me.” After the Spanish expansion into the Americas, the word began to take on a more derogatory context.

Galaxy and Lettuce

The word for milk in Greek was galax (or galactos, depending on whether it was the subject of a sentence or not), while the word in Latin was lac (or lactis, again, depending on whether it was the subject of a sentence). Both Greek and Latin developed from proto-Indo-European, and the two words come from the same source. The Greek term, however, had an extra syllable.

Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is named after its milky-white appearance in the sky. The word galaxy developed out of the Greek galaxias, with the word galax as its root. The actual term “Milky Way” is a translation of the Latin “via lactea.” Lettuce comes from the Latin word for lettuce, “lactuca.” The word developed from lac (lactis) because the juice of the plant has a milky white appearance. Speakers of Old French pronounced “lactuca” as “laitue.” The English term, developed from the plural “laitues,” was eventually spelled “lettuce.”

Happy Thanksgiving!

2010-11-24T07:42:00.004-05:00

I send you some thoughts (some personal and some attributed) for Thanksgiving Day, my sincere thanks for visiting this blog and my hope that in giving thanks even more will become open and visible to you.

The other day a friend asked me if I liked Kipling. I told her that I had never kipled before and that I would get back to her. I know what I need to do over the holiday!

It is literally true, as the thankless say, that they have nothing to be thankful for. He who sits by the fire, thankless for the fire, is just as if he had no fire. Nothing is possessed save in appreciation, of which thankfulness is the indispensable ingredient. But a thankful heart hath a continual feast. W.J. Cameron

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving. Albert Einstein

Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. The half-time of a football game takes twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.

Now, as someone (I honestly forgot who) once said, - "Enjoy eating your ritually beheaded corpse with 3rd degree burns over 100% of its body." Maybe it was Agent Mulder from "The X Files"?

Have a wonderful holiday!

Failure To Communicate

2010-11-21T07:23:00.000-05:00

From The Boston Globe

The inability of many students to write clear, cogent sentences has costly implications for the digital age

By Kara Miller
May 19, 2010

WHEN YOU teach English to college students, you quickly realize two things.

First, many seem to have received little writing instruction in high school. I initially noticed this as an undergraduate English major at Yale, where I helped peers revise their papers. I saw it again in graduate school at Tufts, where I taught freshman writing classes. And it has also struck me at Babson, where, for the past two years, I have instructed first-year students.

The second thing English teachers realize is that correcting students’ papers is tremendously time consuming. I constantly do battle with myself to spend less than 20 minutes on a paper. At meetings, instructors are often urged not to exceed 15 minutes, but I frequently end up spending double that. This can be a genuinely frustrating experience: 50 papers stacked on the coffee table, 10 in the finished pile, and an entire afternoon gone.

But I can’t help it; there’s so much to correct. Subjects don’t agree with verbs. “Its’’ and “it’s’’ are used interchangeably. “They are’’ is confused with “their.’’ And facts too often function as topic sentences. Many of the students whose work I correct are smart, motivated, and quick to incorporate suggestions. But they have either forgotten the rules of writing, or they never learned them in the first place.

Some of the problem, of course, is carelessness. But much of it is not. I have read seniors’ cover letters — letters that aim to snag them a dream job — and they’re frequently riddled with both grammatical and stylistic mistakes.

Inadequate writing skills have led to concern in colleges across the country. In 2007, the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that just 24 percent of 12th-graders scored “proficient’’ or better. That same year, more than 80 percent of students at the City University of New York had to enroll in remedial courses in reading, writing, or math.

Vartan Gregorian, the former president of Brown University, has expressed deep concern about the erosion of solid communication skills. “In an age overwhelmed by information (we are told, for example, that all available information doubles every two to three years), we should view this as a crisis, because the ability to read, comprehend, and write — in other words, to organize information into knowledge — can be viewed as tantamount to a survival skill.’’

Which leads to a serious question: why do so many students come to college without a command of fundamentals?

To some degree, it’s a mathematical problem. If it takes me all weekend to correct 40 papers, how can a high school English teacher begin to tackle 120 papers (four sections, 30 students per section) in a detail-oriented way?

The few teachers who do spend day and night reviewing papers deserve both a medal and a hefty raise. As they know, fixing students’ writing is complex; it simply cannot be boiled down to a multiple-choice test or a series of right-and-wrong answers. Which may mean rethinking the way writing is taught in high school — and, perhaps, the way teachers are compensated.

We often belittle English teachers — if you speak and read English, how hard can it be to teach it? — but those with strong communication skills are both rare and valuable. Recall that when Massachusetts implemented a teachers’ test 12 years ago, the public was shocked to discover that more than 30 percent of prospective teachers failed the literacy portion.

Though the media tend to focus on nationwide shortages of math and science teachers — which are indeed acute — finding, coaching, and retaining good English teachers is an underreported struggle. Indeed, as anyone who has received a poorly written e-mail, assessment, memo, cover letter, or report knows, writing — both good and bad — has real power. The National Commission on Writing (a part of the College Board) has calculated that “remedying deficiencies in writing costs American corporations as much as $3.1 billion annually.’’

In an increasingly digital world, writing acts as a vehicle for knowledge — giving it short shrift in the classroom is a serious mistake.

Kara Miller teaches at Babson College.
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.

National Novel Writing Month

2010-11-17T07:19:00.003-05:00

Before our regular post, here is an interesting piece of news -

Sarah Palin coins ‘word of the year’

The guardians of usage at the New Oxford American Dictionary awarded the former Alaska governor Sarah Palin the distinction of coining 2010's "word of the year" — "refudiate" — via her Twitter account.

According to TLC, roughly 4.96 million people tuned in to watch the first episode of "Sarah Palin's Alaska." That's the biggest premiere in the channel's history.

And as if the ratings triumph weren't enough, today the New Oxford American Dictionary declared "refudiate" the top word in 2010 — a verb that Palin apparently invented.

The former governor used the word in a Twitter message last summer, calling on "peaceful Muslims" to "refudiate" a planned mosque near the site of the 9/11 attacks in New York. When critics pounced on the made-up verb, Palin deleted the Tweet and replaced it with one that called on Muslims to "refute" the site — even though that usage made no sense, either, since to refute is to prove something to be untrue.

But in a release on November 15, the New Oxford American Dictionary defended Palin's use of the word. "From a strictly lexical interpretation of the different contexts in which Palin has used 'refudiate,' we have concluded that neither 'refute' nor 'repudiate' seems consistently precise, and that 'refudiate' more or less stands on its own, suggesting a general sense of 'reject,' " the New Oxford American Dictionary said in a press release.

And lest you think the New Oxford editors were only hailing "refudiate" as a publicity stunt, let the record show that Palin's coinage was also named to the honor roll of the Global Language Monitor project — together with terms such as "spillcam" and "vuvuzela."

*****

And here is the post for today -

It’s National Novel Writing Month!

National Novel Writing Month

Some people criticize the concept, claiming that novels written in under a month aren’t going to be worth the paper they’re printed on. But there are plenty of examples to prove the naysayers wrong. In fact, many classic, bestselling novels were penned within this time frame. While these authors completed these fine pieces of literature without the motivation of National Novel Writing Month, they still serve as an excellent example to those hoping to complete their own works this November.

The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas: Irish novelist John Boyne said he was so wrapped up in this engrossing tale of a boy living through the Holocaust that he wrote the entire thing in two and a half days, barely stopping to eat or sleep throughout the ordeal. He notes that his other novels took months of planning and effort to write, but this story simply could not be slowed.

On The Road: The so-called “beatnik bible” that inspired an entire generation was penned in only three weeks. Granted, Jack Kerouac spent seven years travelling across America and taking detailed notes the entire time, but the actual fruits of his labor took less than a month to put on paper. It’s worth noting that he typed the entire draft on one 120 foot long piece of teletype paper that he taped together before writing.

A Study In Scarlet: The novel that introduced the famed detective work of Sherlock Holmes to the masses took Sir Aurthur Conan Doyle three weeks to write in 1886. This story was also notable for being the first Sherlock Holmes story to be adapted to the silver screen.

The Tortoise and the Hare: In 1954, Elizabeth Jenkins wrote this tale in three weeks after being romantically entwined with a man who refused to leave his wife. She revealed in an interview in 2005, “I have never looked at it since; it marked an era to which I had no desire to return.”

The Gambler: Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote this tale in 26 days while also writing Crime and Punishment. He was heavily in debt and addicted to gambling and saw the semi-autobiographical novella as a good way to help him pay off his debts. He later ended up marrying the young stenographer to whom he dictated the story.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: Muriel Spark took only one month to write this novel about a fictionalized version of her teacher, Christiana Kay. She said the story was inspired by a 1960 class assignment: “We were given to write about how we spent our summer holidays, but I wrote about how [my teacher] spent her summer holidays instead. It seemed more fascinating.”

If you’re participating in National Novel Writing Month, good luck! We hope these stories helped inspire you to get cracking.

Interesting Article From Erin McKean

2010-11-14T07:26:00.001-05:00

Redefining Definition

By ERIN McKEAN
Published: December 17, 2009

If anything is guaranteed to annoy a lexicographer, it is the journalistic habit of starting a story with a dictionary definition. “According to Webster’s,” begins a piece, blithely, and the lexicographer shudders, because she knows that a dictionary is about to be invoked as an incontrovertible authority. Although we may profess to believe, as the linguist Dwight Bolinger once put it, that dictionaries “do not exist to define but to help people grasp meanings,” we don’t often act on that belief. Typically we treat a definition as the final arbiter of meaning, a scientific pronouncement of a word’s essence.

But the traditional dictionary definition, although it bears all the trappings of authority, is in fact a highly stylized, overly compressed and often tentative stab at capturing the consensus on what a particular word “means.” A good dictionary derives its reputation from careful analysis of examples of words in use, in the form of sentences, also called citations. The lexicographer looks at as many citations for each word as she can find (or, more likely, can review in the time allotted) and then creates what is, in effect, a dense abstract, collapsing into a few general statements all the ways in which the word behaves. A definition is as convention-bound as a sonnet and usually more compact. Writing one is considered, at least by anyone who has ever tried it, something of an art.

Despite all the thought and hard work that go into them, definitions, surprisingly, turn out to be ill suited for many of the tasks they have been set to — including their ostensible purpose of telling you the meaning of a word. Overly abstract definitions are often helpful only if you come to them already primed by context. It’s difficult to read a definition like “(esp. of a change or distinction) so delicate or precise as to be difficult to analyze or describe,” and have subtle immediately spring to mind; or to come across “reduce the force, effect or value of” and think of attenuate.

Definitions are especially unhelpful to children. There’s an oft-cited 1987 study in which fifth graders were given dictionary definitions and asked to write their own sentences using the words defined. The results were discouraging. One child, given the word erode, wrote, “Our family erodes a lot,” because the definition given was “eat out, eat away.”

Neither are definitions complete pictures of all the possible meanings of a word. One study found that in a set of arbitrarily chosen passages from modern fiction, an average of 13 percent of the nouns, verbs and adjectives were used in senses not found in a large desk dictionary. And of course there are some words that simply elude definition, a problem even Samuel Johnson faced. In the preface to his groundbreaking Dictionary of the English Language, he wrote, “Ideas of the same race, though not exactly alike, are sometimes so little different that no words can express the dissimilitude, though the mind easily perceives it when they are exhibited together.” We all have had Johnson’s experience of “easily perceiving” differences between words that we cannot as easily describe — quick: what’s the difference between louche and raffish? Most people, when asked what a word means, resort to using it in a sentence, because that’s the way we learn words best: by encountering them in their natural context.

Given these shortcomings of definitions, and the advantages of examples, why do we still cling to definitions? The short answer, for hundreds of years, has been a practical one: space — specifically the lack thereof. Print dictionaries have never had sufficient page-room to show enough real, live, useful examples to create an optimal and natural word-learning experience. Even the expert lexicographers at the Oxford English Dictionary, which famously includes “illustrative quotations” alongside its definitions, still put the definition and its needs first, making new words wait their turn to make it through the definition bottleneck.

The near-infinite space of the Web gives us a chance to change all this. Imagine if lexicographers were to create online resources that give, in addition to definitions, many living examples of word use, drawn not just from literature and newspapers but from real-time sources of language like Web sites, blogs and social networks. We could build people’s confidence in their ability to understand and use words naturally, from the variety of contexts in which words occur. Indeed, this is what my colleagues and I are trying to accomplish at the online dictionary Wordnik.com: we’re using text-mining techniques and the unlimited space of the Internet to show as many real examples of word use as we can, as fast as we can.

This approach is especially useful for grasping new words and uses: if you look up tweet on a site like mine, for example, you understand that the word is used to refer to messages sent via Twitter; there’s no waiting for an editor to write you a definition; plus there are examples of tweets right on the page. Online, you can also look up just the form of a word you’re interested in — say, sniped instead of snipe — and find precise examples. A word is so much more than its meaning: it’s also who uses it, when it was used, what words appear alongside it and what kinds of texts it appears in.

Without privileging definitions, dictionary-making would involve more curation and less abridgment, less false precision and more organic understanding. If we stop pretending definitions are science, we can enjoy them as a kind of literature — think of them as extremely nerdy poems — without burdening them with tasks for which they are unsuited.

Erin McKean is the chief executive and founder of the online dictionary Wordnik.com. She was previously the editor in chief of American Dictionaries for Oxford University Press.