Coffee Klatch

This summer, when attending Renaissance Faires, medieval reenactments, or just looking for creative ways to insult someone else, use the following:

Combine one word from each of the three columns below, prefaced with “Thou”:

One of my pet peeves is misuse of percentages. When talking about personal effort or certainty or whatever, you can’t have more than 100%, can you? It’s just basic logic. One hundred percent is the most possible. You can’t give 110% because it’s more than it’s possible to give. If you can give more than you used to, it’s either because you weren’t giving 100% before or your capacity has increased. Make sense?

There’s a similar misuse that I really find revolting. People using higher numbers to say that they’re MORE sure of something than the other person. Example: “You’re 100% sure of it? Well, I’m 200% sure it’s not!”

The other day I came home from work and decided to see what was on TV, since I don’t usually watch it when I come home. I happened to hit the “Maury” show. The only thing greater than my repulsion of the show is my hilarity at the stupid people that go on the show! There was a paternity question (seems like that’s most of what happens on those kinds of shows, but that’s a topic for another day) and the guy said he was 200% sure the child was not his. Then the girl said she was 300% sure the child WAS. Then the guy said he was 1000% percent sure it wasn’t. I shook my head, lamenting both their lack of logic and their tragic lifestyles, and turned the channel.

You’ve probably heard of Tag Clouds by now. This morning I read on Michael Stephens’ blog about a site called Wordle. It’s a similar idea to that of tag clouds, but instead of collecting the tags that have been applied to something and visually displaying their popularity, Wordle looks at all the words in any text you provide and creates a cloud based on the most commonly used words in the text. It doesn’t look like there’s much of a word limit in this Java-based application. I was able to copy and paste a 15-page paper and generate the cloud from it and Michael’s example was the first two chapters of his dissertation. You can either save your resulting image to their Wordle Gallery or else save the screenshot by hitting Print-Screen and pasting it into Paint, MS Word, Adobe Photoshop or Acrobat or whatever.

One very cool thing about this program (apart from its existence) is that the “cloud” not only has the words in different sizes, but different colors, fonts, and alignments. Some words are vertical and some are horizontal, with the resulting image being a mishmash of words in different directions, sizes, and colors. You can even customize the layout and choose “mostly vertical,” “all horizontal,” or even “every which way.” Pretty cool!

I often hear people say that something was decimated. It seems to be used when a building or a town or a large group of people (army, community, etc.) is severely damaged, totally ruined, or having lots of people killed. Just this morning I heard it again on the news, talking about a factory that was totally destroyed by fire, and saying that the building had been “decimated.”

Originally, the word was decimare (deci- is the prefix for ten), which referred to the Roman custom of punishing mutinous legions by standing them all up and killing every tenth soldier.

While I still think of the original definition by default, the American Heritage Dictionary says that 66% of their panel accepted the definition of the killing of a large proportion of a group. But that’s specifically referring to killing. When the definition is expanded to include destruction that isn’t killing, only 26% of their panel said that was appropriate.

Current music: Neroli, by Brian Eno

[If you’re having a hard time figuring this one out, try reading it aloud.]

Wants pawn term dare worsted ladle gull hoe lift wetter murder inner ladle cordage honor itch offer ledge dock florist. Disc ladle gull orphan worry ladle rat cluck wetter putty ladle rat hut, end fur disc raisin pimple cauldron ladle rat rotten hut.

Wan moaning, rat rotten hut’s murder colder inset. “Ladle rat rotten hut, heresy ladle basking winsome burden barter end shirker cockles. Tick disc ladle basking Tudor cordage offer groin murder, hoe lifts honor udder site other florist. Shaker lake, done stopper laundry wrote, end yonder nor sorghum stenches done stopper torque wet strainers.”

“Hoe cake, murder,” resplendent ladle rat rotten hut. Den sea ticker ladle basking an stuttered oft. Honor wrote Tudor cordage offer groin murder, ladle rat rotten hut mitten anomalous woof.

“Wail, wail, wail,” set disc wicket woof. “Effervescent ladle rat rotten hut! Wares or putty ladle gull goring wizard ladle basking?”

“Aroma goring tumor groin murder’s,” reprisal ladle gull. “Grammar’s seeking bet. Armor ticking arson burden barter end shirker cockles.”

“Oh, hoe! Heifer peasant woke,” setter wicket woof. Butter taught tomb shelf, “Oil tickle shirt court Tudor cordage offer groin murder. Oil ketchup wetter letter, end den oh bore!”

Soda wicket woof tucker shirt court, end whinney retched a cordage offer groin murder, picket inner winnow end sore debtor pore oil worming worse lion inner bet. Inner flesh disc abdominal woof lipped honor betting adder rope. Zany pool dawn a groin murder’s nut cup and gnat gun, any curdle dope inner bet.

Inner ladle wile, ladle rat rotten hut a raft adder cordage an ranker dough ball.

“Comb ink, sweat hard,” setter wicket woof disgracing is verse. Ladle rat rotten hut entity bet rum, end stud buyer groin murder’s bet.

“Oh, grammar!” crater ladle gull. “Wart bag icer gut! A nervous sausage bag ice!”

“Butter toe lucky chew whiff, doll ink,” whiskered disc ratchet woof wither wicket small.

“Oh, grammar! Water bag noise! A nervous sore suture anomalous prognosis.”

“Butter day small your whiff,” inserter woof, ants mouse worse waddling.

“Oh, grammar! Water bag mousey gut! A nervous sore suture bag mouse!”

Daze worry on forger nut gull’s lest warts. Oil offer sodden trolling offer carvers an sprinkling otter bet, disc curl end bloat Thursday woof ceased pore ladle rat rotten nut an garbled erupt.

Mural: Yonder nor sorghum stenches shut ladle gulls stopper torque wet strainers!

Have you ever wondered how to say “cow” in Sanskrit? Or Cherokee? There’s a website that has a list of the word for “cow” in 539 different languages. Many of the listings have the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) pronunciation of the word as well as some basic information like where the language is/was spoken.

http://www.arrakis.es/~eledu/justcows.htm

(By the way, in Sanskrit it’s “Go” or “Gauh” and in Cherokee it’s “Wahga.”)

Now you know.

Every language has consonants. Some are voiced and some are unvoiced. That means some use the vocal cords and some don’t. I’ve found some interesting ways in which the similarities have been used.

First, a quick refresher. Unvoiced consonants are those like P, T, and S, which make their sound without use of the vocal cords. Which means even someone who is mute could make the sounds. When you use the voice, they come out like B, D, and Z. You can’t use the ‘B’ sound without using the vocal cords.

J.R.R. Tolkien, who was a linguist first and a writer second, used this concept when developing his dwarvish and elvish systems of writing. Voiced and unvoiced consonants of the same “sound” were similar, but voiced consonants had and extra part or stem added on to the runes or letters, indicating they were voiced. The Cirth alphabet is a prime example.

Here’s a quick chart that compares the two types of consonants:

This semester I’m singing with the Butler University Chorale and one of their warmups is an interesting exercise that uses the consonants this way. To warm up everyone’s articulation, they’ll do a rhythmic pattern like this: F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F, V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V, F-V-F-V-F-V-F-V, V-F-V-F-V-F-V-F, and then move on to the next consonant, given them by the director right as the last set ends. It will usually consist of a mixture of four or five of them. So every time I do that particular warmup, I end up thinking of Tolkien’s Cirth alphabet. Kinda funny.

There’s a really funny website that a friend of mine showed me recently. It’s called http://www.engrish.com/ and is just what it sounds like: a collection of photos of mis-translated or otherwise funny English mistakes that appear in Japanese ads and product labels. LOTS of different categories, including candy, menus, instructions, stationery, toiletries, and many more. Many of the pictures have short captions below them, which usually add to the humor or help explain if you don’t get it.

Here are a few examples:

To Drive the Cold Winter Away, by Loreena McKennitt

What do banshees do? According to Irish mythology, the bean sí was a female spirit who was seen as an omen of death, appearing near the house of someone who was about to die and wailing. Apparently their screaming was quite hideous and would drive listeners mad.

So why do so many people attribute different things to banshees? I’ve heard all kinds of verbs attributed to banshees, not just screaming like one. Here’s a post of mine from a couple years ago that quotes from the Dilbert newsletter, talking about how people misuse the term. “Screaming like a banshee” is normal and refers to what banshees do, but anything else is kinda weird. Check out this link. It’s pretty funny and ironic. Ironic Banshees

Well, the first partial week of classes is over and I think I got just about everything caught up. We had three days of classes this week, which meant three days of partially staffing the Reference Desk. We’ll begin our evening desk hours Sunday night. Much of my week was scrambling to make tons of last-minute changes on the library website. Just an extra page here, a few links there… nothing ginormous (yes, that’s officially a word now–gotta love neologisms!) but the cumulative effect was that much of my free time was spent on website changes. That and getting everything ready at the Reference Desk for things like tracking our reference transactions (various types of interactions with people at the desk) and keeping statistics on which books in the Reference collection are getting used (we scan the barcodes in the books and reshelve them ourselves, so I had to get the interface ready for entering that data).

So things are going to start settling into a regular Fall routine this next week. Preliminary stuff is out of the way, we begin evening Ref. Desk hours next week, and we’ve got students using the library again. It’s always nice to have them back and see the library busy and being used!

On a personal note, my three boys all finished their first full week of school now. Things have started settling down for them, too, which is nice. They’re all at new schools and in regular public schools for the first time. Before this, it was either Christian schools or charter schools (which functioned almost like a poor man’s Christian school). Alaric’s in 8th grade now, Blaise is in 5th, and Camber is in 1st, and they’re all riding the bus to school. “The only thing that is constant is change.”