As Sean discussed yesterday, there has been quite a to-do about the New Yorker's current cover. Scot Lehigh weighed in on the issue in today's Globe, using one of my favorite words not once but twice (kerfuffle) and throwing in the gem "foofaraw" to boot. I'm sure Mr. Lehigh made some salient points in the piece, but I was too busy reveling in these great words to notice. Bravo!
I have never wanted to run and eat a chocolate chip cookie more than I do right now, after reading this article (forwarded by Dawn, a fellow chocolatephile).
Actually, make that several chocolate chip cookies. Several dozen. On further reflection, I'll just take the whole batch.
Wow.
So I finally set up an account on Facebook, and then today heard this news on the radio. Hopefully, it's not too good to be true - more free word games?! Alas, just in time for the concept of "spare time" to become a distant memory...
Other thoughts this evening:
Words looked up this week:
hirsute (Which came in handy in a crossword puzzle in my latest issue of Games)
splenetic
I saw this story linked to on Language Log (that was awkwardly worded, huh?)...and I think it's pretty funny (Overlooking, of course, the sad and troubling reason that it happened. An automatic filter???).
My friend Patrick forwarded me this article from Friday's NYT. At least Facebook's grammatical heart is in the right place, though I am still reluctant to set up an account (despite the tempting Scrabulous stat-keeping feature that Ed has mentioned...).
It would be nice to have a good catchall pronoun in some situations, rather than having to rewrite sentences to avoid using language that could be perceived by some as slanted. Then again, maybe I should just be happy that for all of its quirks, English no longer requires (though it once did) what my two years of high school German did - learning the "gender" of every noun. My friends and I who took the class clung to one fall back noun in each (die Torte - f, the cake; das Fenster, n, the window, and der Zimmer, m, the room), so many of our answers involved baking cakes and opening windows in various rooms. If Herr Genis ever caught on to the proliferation of cake-baking references in our answers, he apparently didn't care (he was pretty close to retirement at that point).
Words looked up this week:
hermeneutics (another one that just won't stick)
atavism
mycophagist
Actually, he'd probably go so far as to call it a great movie. Without a speck of irony.
Anyone?
Sean told me the other night how Kevin Millar, having apparently lost a bet to Jason Varitek on the NBA finals, had to sport a new look and new intro song at a game last week. Love it. Which led me to recount how surprised I was to hear the song that currently precedes Manny Ramirez as he struts to the plate - "Zombie" by The Cranberries??? A comment on this blog was the only explanation I found in a quick search, and it seems plausible. I assume it's some sort of inside joke; Manny doesn't strike me as the typical Dolores O'Riordan groupie.
Which got me to thinking about the intro song in general. How does one decide which direction to go in? Powerful music? Meaningful lyrics? Favorite band? Whimsical wordplay?
I need to give this a bit more thought (and install a speaker system here in the ticket office), but I think my intro song for 2008 might be one of the following (basically, all songs that I will blast to obnoxiously high levels whilst driving alone):
1. Baba O'Riley, The Who
2. Paranoid, Ozzy Osbourne
3. Orange Crush, REM
4. Superstition, Stevie Wonder
5. Zero, Smashing Pumpkins (Egads, is this really the video? Creepy.)
I'm pretty sure that Tyler would currently select either "Itsy Bitsy Spider" or "ABC", and I can only imagine what Extreme/Mourning Widows/Satellite Party/Dramagods/Population 1/Tribe of Judah/Van Halen (did I get them all?) melody Sean would pick...yuck!
A couple of our department's interns were in our office yesterday chit-chatting about many things, including the well-traveled terrain of the pop/soda/tonic/Coke debate (as one intern is from Illinois and the other is from Idaho, they were both firmly rooted in the "pop" camp). This led one of them to recount how he'd heard a man yelling at his daughter at the grocery store to "get back in the carriage!" Then he chuckled and said, "Yeah, he actually called a shopping cart a carriage." - like it was the most inane thing he'd ever heard.
Huh. This was news to me. Everyone else in the country doesn't call them carriages? This reminded me of another dictionary that's on my list of things to buy when I win the lottery.
So it's a good thing that I am already scheduled for a c-section, seeing as how yesterday's ultrasound revealed that the baby is breech and at this point (32 weeks) likely to stay put (and I have heard very unpleasant reviews of having the baby "manually" turned around).
It did get me to wondering if the etymologies of "breech" as in the baby's current position and "breach" as in break or gap were the same...
Remember that from the opening of "The Electric Company"? One of my favorite childhood shows (with the "Silent E" song being one of my all-time favorite bits), I was reminded of it after reading Jan Freeman's column in this past Sunday's Globe. I was also reminded of the annoying girl (sorry, woman) in my 20th Century American Social History class at BU who vociferously objected to the term when our professor used it. But I'm sure neither he nor Rita Moreno meant any harm to you, angry blonde in the third row.
Non sequitur - Celtics are currently up by 27, with a little over a minute left in the third quarter. I will certainly be happy for them if they win their 17th NBA title (If they win, Sean has threatened to wreak havoc in Melrose...like overturning our footstool - quietly, so as not to rouse Tyler - and tossing a pillow or two around the living room. Get the pepper spray!), but seeing as how the Celtics have always been fourth out of four when it comes to Boston sports franchises for me, I suppose it would be disingenuous to use a potential victory as an excuse to quaff one of the delicious Harpoons in the fridge. Mmmm, Harpoon.
Words looked up this week:
fungible
panoply
vicissitudes (another word I look up at least once a month)
