double duty words

I really like nouns that are also verbs, as illustrated in the sentence I just said to our receptionist whilst giving her my netflix envelope and letter for the postman: “I forgot to mail my mail this morning.”

chopsticks are fun!

Here’s a chop stick wrapper I got the other day:

Allow me to call your attention to the prose:

Click to enlarge

The translators did much better on the instructions on the flipside.

Click to enlarge

But, when I went back to that restaurant recently, they seem to have switched brands, offering these clearly inferior picture only instructions which are unclear at best and also no fun. Sigh…

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Things I’ve Learned: Bespoke

Bespoke is the British equivalent of “custom made”. You can get bespoke shoes, or bespoke suits (ideally from Savile Row), or bespoke software. Excellent term.

Overheard…

On sports radio, discussing college signing day:

"This isn't horseshoes, second doesn't count."

Umm…it's "close" that doesn't count in horseshoes, not "second"

Sent from my iPhone

The proper method for dealing with bad grammar

So I finally watched the “Lois kills Stewie” episode of Family Guy (not to be confused with the “Stewie Kills Lois” episode that came before it.) I watch Family Guy sporadically, usually on Cartoon Network rather than Fox. That show kind of grows on you, I like it much more now than I did before.

Anyway, in this ep, Stewie becomes President of the World. One of the laws he passes is that “anyone using the words ‘irregardless,’ ‘a whole nother,’ or ‘all of the sudden’ will be taken to work camps.” I am down with this, except for “a whole nother”, which I say alarmingly often. I also agree that work camps are generally a fair punishment for bad grammar.

Is it wrong that I would prefer Stewie as president to the majority of the republican candidates?

Also, every time I see the clip of Chris saying “I’m so hungry, I could ride a horse”, I laugh uncontrollably. Every. Single. Time.

What rhymes with orange?

So I learned today that the term for words that have no rhyme is “refractory rhyme”, which I kind of like because the definition of “refractory” is: stubbornly disobedient; unmanageable. Anyway, I always heard “orange” used as the classic example of a word without a rhyme, but there are actually a lot of others. Among the words listed, I find it interesting that silver and purple are also on the list…what’s up with the non-rhyming colors? That seems odd.

I also particularly like the following sentence, used to illustrate that although there is no perfect rhyme for the word “engine”, there are a number of near rhymes: “To my chagrin I said to my conjoined twin: ‘the tin engine caused quite a din as the wheels did spin, screeching like a violin.’”

On another, tangentially related note…when writing the above I was once again annoyed by the issues raised when using quotation marks and commas/periods. In the first sentence above, for example, should it be “refractory rhyme”, or “refractory rhyme,” ? The answer seems to be that in the US, it should be the later, but the UK advocates the former. Since I have always thought that the comma/period inside the quotation marks 1) makes no sense and 2) disturbs by sense of symmetry, I am going with the other side of the pond on this one. It was their language first, you know…

What the hell is going on up there?

So, this has been bugging me for a while. Did you know that the earth has another moon? Yeah, it’s a shocker. That’s like your parents suddenly revealing that they have another child. You know, one they just never really got around to ever mentioning to you…

So this moon, or rather “moon” since there’s some debate over the terminology—and I’ll get to that in an moment—is called Cruithne (also known as asteroid 3753). I don’t remember where I actually heard about this second moon, although it was probably on NPR since that is where the majority of my information seems to filter in from. Anyway, I thought I would look into it…

Here are the findings: First off, it seems that Cruithne is not really a moon, because Earth and Cruithne are not gravitationally bound. A moon would actually orbit the planet, while Cruithne just shares the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. It was discovered in 1986, although it took until the late nineties to figure out its orbit. Apparently, it’s up there careening around in some sort of crazy horseshoe pattern. Cruithne’s orbit will not cause it to crash into the earth. I find this reassuring.

So while I’m looking this up, I discover that there’s a bunch of other crap floating around up there. There are at least four Earth Coorbital Asteroids or “coorbitals” that share Earth’s orbit. They are certainly catchily named: 2003 YN107, 2002 AA29, 2004 GU9, and 2001 GO2. Poetic.

So the best part of the story is that that they thought they found another one called J002E3. Only then they discovered this:

“J002E3’s small size and unusual orbit suggest the object is no asteroid or other natural object, but a piece of man-made “space junk,” possibly a piece of one of the Saturn V rockets that launched American astronauts to the moon during the Apollo program.”

Nice. Yeah, we thought that might be a planet or something, but it turns out that’s its just some trash we didn’t dispose of properly…

So my real problem doesn’t actually have any thing to do with any of that. What I want to know is why do we call the moon the moon? Other planets have moons (and coorbitlas for that matter) and most of them have names. Pretty ones: Triton, Nereid, Phoebe, Titan, Calypso, Ganymede…Jupiter has 39 moons for goodness sake. In fact, as you may note above, even the other stuff orbiting the earth has a name (or at least a number).

So why do we call the big white one up there the moon. That’s like saying, “I have this cat, and we are going to call him ‘the cat’. Now, all these other cats—who you may note are also cats—will have names like Midnight and Socks and Nutmeg and Steve.” What’s that about? Makes no sense.

What do you mean by that?

How much do I love the Urban Dictionary? Quite a bit actually. Granted many, many of the entries seem to have been submitted by people who really only appear to have at best a passing familiarity with the English Language and may in fact be as dumb as a bag of hammers. But really, doesn’t that apply to the internet, and come to think of it the world, as a whole?

My enjoyment of the Urban Dictionary is twofold. First, the word of the day feature is by far the best source for amusing new made-up words to lob randomly into conversations. Here’s a smattering of my recent favorites:

Floordrobe—A form of storage for clothing which requires no hangers, drawers, doors or effort. Simply drop on the floor and you have a floordrobe.

We have a very stylish colonial-style home featuring his and hers walk-on floordrobes.

Accountabilabuddy—A friend, maybe a best friend, who you get into trouble with and who is somewhat responsible for your actions.

Dude, Kyle is totally my accountabilabuddy. Good lookin out Kyle.

Dap and Dip—Making a brief appearance at a party or social function for political purposes. Involves giving “dap” (fist-pound greeting) to the host and other notables, then “dipping” (leaving) shortly thereafter. Sometimes used to describe an event that is not enjoyable and would not be worth attending were it not for the political motive.

Matt: Are we going to Jon’s party?
Darryl: Yeah, but I don’t want to stay long, so let’s make it a dap and dip.

Myspy—when you use myspace to spy on ex-boyfriends, ex-girlfriends, ex-friends or even your ex-boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend’s baby momma.

my boyfriend caught me myspying on my ex-boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend. busted.

couching distance—The distance one can reach without leaving the couch or sofa.

That job is too far; it’s not within couching distance.
I can’t reach the remote control because it’s not in couching distance.

Stripsy—the post-drunken, post-tipsy state at which the removal of clothing begins.

Brian: Jen, where’s your shirt?
Jen: I don’t know; last night I got a little stripsy…

Hip Replacement—The process of introducing a formerly cool person to a product or idea that attempts to make them cool again. Reinventing an individuals public persona through association or action.

Joe just had a hip replacement – he ditched his 20 year old CD Walkman for a new IPod.
Quentin Tarrantino gave John Travolta a ‘hip replacement’ with Pulp Fiction.

I have to stop myself because there are just so very many more. I seriously recommend that you subscribe to their little service that emails one to you everyday. Quite a treat for your inbox.

The other useful aspect of the Urban Dictionary is that if there is any sort of filthy, sexual, or extremely disturbing sounding term that you may have heard in passing but weren’t quite sure what it actually meant…yeah, it’s in there. My my friend the Psych To Be told me that she’s been known to use it to look up prisoner lingo she hears while attending to incarcerated wayward youth. Fun and educational.