Archive for 3: llowercase 2
Piggledy-higgledy, William A. Spooner was known for his penchant for mixing things up. When hungry, the Reverend ate mobster in lint sauce; when thirsty, he drank from an old cuter pup. —JEH Reverend William A. Spooner was at one time the Dean of New College, Oxford. He occasionally mixed up words, or parts of words, […]
Further notes about Graffiti: Palm PDAs come with a little card showing how to draw Graffiti characters; you can see a version of the Graffiti card online if you're curious and don't have access to a Graffiti-capable PDA. If you try the Graffiti applet on that page, note that you need to draw really slowly […]
"'It seems very pretty,' she said when she had finished it, 'but it's rather hard to understand!' (You see she didn't like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn't make it out at all.)" —Lewis Carroll I'm sure that people have been tempted to write directly on their computer screens for almost as long […]
Everyone's heard of Quetzalcoatl, the winged-snake god of the Toltecs and Aztecs. And many have heard of Popocatepetl, a volcano in Mexico. But not everyone knows that that funny-looking "tl" at the end of each of those words is the transliteration of a single letter of the Aztec language Nahuatl. (My dictionary says that's pronounced […]
Ilana Stern points out that there's an online magnetic poetry set written in Java. Ilana also provides a pointer to a poem that uses the entire set. I mentioned that one of my favorite refrigerator poems had been destroyed before I could copy it down; months later, I discovered a slip of paper on which […]
By now everyone is familiar with magnetic poetry kits, the craze that's hit half the refrigerators in America. There are dozens of specialized magnetic sets: computer terms, words from Shakespearean love poems, Shakespearean insults, Yiddish words, proverbs, and the International Phonetic Alphabet, among many others. When I was first given a magnetic poetry set, my […]
Sometime around seventh grade, my English teacher taught us a set of mnemonics for remembering the parts of speech. First she told us to visualize a gigantic capital N, made of solid gold: a noun. Next came a pair of Ps for pronouns (I've forgotten the mnemonic here, alas). The verb was represented by a […]
I just came across a resource and a name that are both cool enough to be worth adding a comment here. The resource is the Real Names of Famous Folk site, which lists lots and lots of pseudonyms of all varieties. The name is (are you ready for this?): Ramon Felipe San Juan Mario Silvio […]
"'We name our fondlings in alphabetical order. The last was a S—Swubble, I named him. This was T—Twist, I named him. The next one as comes will be Unwin, and the next Vilkins. I have got names ready made to the end of the alphabet, and all the way through again when we come to […]
[Enter Virginia and Wesley.] Virginia: What's a malapropism? Wesley: It's when you accidentally replete a word with another word that sounds somewhat simian, often with comic effect. Virginia: And polarity ensues. Wesley: Something like that. It's best when the replacement word is somehow revenant to the situation. It's named after Mrs. Malaprop, from Sheridan's The […]