Category: language

A is for Alphabet


My wife went to Ukraine in the summer of 2002 – the preparation for which was complicated by a bat in our home. A couple years later, a friend of hers made the same teaching trip and gave our newborn daughter an alphabet book from there. The title appears to be AbETKA – it’s the B-looking letter that’s the second, rather than the third letter of the Cyrillic alphabet.

This alphabet was not entirely foreign to me. I grew up in a city called Binghamton, NY, an upstate New York locale with a number of eastern Europeans. The Russians and the Ukrainian churches, primarily Eastern Orthodox in faith, sometimes used both Cyrillic and Latin/Roman.

As for the latter, it has some variety among the many languages in which it appears, such as accented letters (á, è, î), extra letters, and ligatures (two or three letters joined together – æ, e.g). this page has links how to type special letters in Windows, MAC, and HTML,m plus much more.

A recent Final JEOPARDY!: 2009-01-09 ALPHABETS: In the phonetic alphabet used by the U.S. military, it’s the only letter that has the same name as a warrior people.

Ending up with the Jack Kirby alphabet and a couple of Sesame Street pieces:

LINK

LINK

JEOPARDY! – What is Zulu?

ROG

Words

I’ve inadverently borrowed from Eddie in that most of the posts this week were ones I had started, even finished, some time ago in Blogger but for some reason never posted. Those of you using Blogger to write posts can understand this: Blogger date-stamps the written entry, and unless you change it, it’ll stay there with that date from a couple months ago.

So I went through my unpublished entries for the past few months and decided to post them this week, including thaty one on autism that I thought I had published. Why is that, you may ask? Because I was away on a trip to Williamsburg, VA. More about that anon.

Anyway, thanks to the masked blogger who posted for me these past four days.
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The Annual Mensa Invitational was a couple months ago, for all of you wordies. I really do love this stuff:

Here is the Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational which once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are the winners:

1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.

2. Ignoranus : A person who’s both stupid and an a**hole.

3. Intaxication : Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.

4. Reintarnation : Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

5. Bozone ( n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

6. Foreploy : Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.

7. Giraffiti : Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

8. Sarchasm : The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the Person who doesn’t get it.

9. Inoculatte : To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

10. Osteopornosis : A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)

11. Karmageddon : It’s like, when everybody is sending off all these really
bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s like, a serious bummer.

12. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

13. Glibido : All talk and no action.

14. Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

15. Arachnoleptic Fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.

16. Beelzebug (n.) : Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

17. Caterpallor ( n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you’re eating.

The Washington Post has also published the winning submissions to its
yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for
common words. And the winners are:

1. Coffee , n. The person upon whom one coughs.

2. Flabbergasted , adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained.

3. Abdicate , v. To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

4. Esplanade , v. To attempt an explanation while drunk.

5. Willy-nilly , adj. Impotent.

6. Negligent , adj. Absentmindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown.

7. Lymph , v. To walk with a lisp.

8. Gargoyle , n. Olive-flavored mouthwash.

9. Flatulence , n. Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller.

10. Balderdash , n. A rapidly receding hairline.

11. Testicle , n. A humorous question on an exam.

12. Rectitude , n. The formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.

13. Pokemon , n. A Rastafarian proctologist.

14. Oyster , n. A person who sprinkles his conversation with yiddishisms.

15. Frisbeetarianism , n. The belief that,after death, the soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.

16. Circumvent , n. An opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.

ROG

ROG

The Lydster, Part 47: "Hey, Guys!"


One of the things we’ve learned as parents is that there are lots of tricks of the trade, but that sometimes, they don’t work.

For instance, some kind parents suggested that, in order to save precious time in the morning, we pick out Lydia’s clothes the night before. That only works when she doesn’t change her mind in the morning. But thanks anyway.

But it’s not just the suggestions that are at issue; it’s how they are presented. For example, Lydia needed to take an oral medicine that she did not like for an infection.
Good way to give advice: Have you tried putting it in yogurt or ice cream?
Bad way to give advice: Why don’t you just put it in yogurt or ice cream?
The second way is bad because it suggests, more in the accompanying tone than in the content, that hadn’t even thought of it, and that we’re totally incompetent parental rubes. (I may be, but I certainly don’t need you to TELL me so.)

As a matter of fact, we HAVE tried to put the medicine in food. She can taste it. (As can I.) But she STILL has to take the antibiotic.

This means, unfortunately, me holding her while her mother administers the medicine. Even before a single drop touches her lips, she struggles and says, “Hey, guys! Hey, gu-u-u-ys!” This is NOT how she usually refers to us. We find it very funny phraseology and have to stifle laughing as we give her the unwanted liquid. She pouts for about two minutes, then seems to forget all about it as she seeks out hugs. Very interesting, this parental trip.

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ROG

The Lydster, Part 40: She Don’t Need No Education


This may be obvious to those of you who have had children, or who have worked with kids, but that wasn’t me. Even with five nieces, I didn’t see them nearly every day, so I’d failed to pick up the subtleties in their changing language skills.
For instance, in the last few months, Lydia has picked up the notion of the past tense. My wife, the English teacher, explained to me that, just by listening, they pick up the general rules, in this case, the -ed suffix. Then later, they, at least native speakers with people around them who give them examples of standard English, will pick up on the nuances in the language. So, I needn’t necessarily correct Lydia when she says throwed when she means threw, except to reply with the proper form. And I’ve noticed that this is working with growed and grew already. An interesting scientific laboratory in the home.
Meanwhile, she’s doing her numbers, though she seems to skip 14, for some reason. And she prints her name. The L she’s got down pat. The Y looks like an I with a little arrow quiver on the top. The D resembles a paramecium. The I is good. The A is fine, too, but then she augments it with little dots; maybe it’s an artistic statement.
As they say, Reading Is Fundamental. And we do read to her a lot. They are often the same stories, so that memorization often takes place. My favorite book to share with her is Madeline:
“In an old yellow house in old Paree”
“Paris!”, I’m corrected.
And later, I read “again” to rhyme with “rain”, and I’m corrected, well, again. One of these days, I’ll get it right. Or maybe not.
ROG

ROG

I Talk Well English

Here’s something that I’ve long found peculiar: people saying to me, to my face, “You don’t sound black.” I know this is going on even when they don’t actually voice it. I’ve talked to folks on the phone, usually for work, and then they meet me and they have that “You’re not at ALL what I expected you to look like” look on their faces. It’s quite entertaining, actually. And I get it from black people as well as with white people, except it’s tinged with, “Oh, you’re a BROTHER” vibe; I’m, to their surprise, part of the fraternity.

First time someone said I didn’t “sound black”, I was deeply offended. OK, first several times. Then I started intellectualizing:
PERSON: You don’t sound black.
ME: Oh, but since I AM black, and this is how I sound, I must sound black.
That always confused them.

Now, I just don’t care. The joy of being of a certain age is that stuff which used to hurt now are just funny. Anyway, I blame my father, who was no friend of what later became known as Ebonics. I talk as I talk, and, in the words of Walter Cronkite, “That’s the way it is.”

Your Linguistic Profile::
55% General American English
35% Yankee
5% Upper Midwestern
0% Dixie
0% Midwestern

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Here’s one of those statistical errors that madden. In reporting on the possible Rudy Guiliani campaign for President this weekend, ABC News’ Geoff Morrell noted that Guiliani was in a “virtual dead heat” with Hillary Clinton (Clinton led 49-47), but that he “beats” Barack Obama, 47-45. Since the margin of error of the survey was plus or minus three points, that race is in a statistical dead heat as well.
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“She tried to warn us: With the publication of Shrub in early 2000, syndicated columnist Molly Ivins detailed George W. Bush’s privileged rise and disastrous reign as governor of Texas in the mid- to late ‘90s.” That’s a great line from the Amazon review of Ms. Ivins‘ follow-up book, Bushwhacked. Unfortunately, Molly Ivins died yesterday of breast cancer at the age of 62.

ROG
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