Archive for 3: llowercase 2
In a previous column, I discussed the Anglo-Saxon verse form in which each line has four or five stressed syllables, at least two of which start with the same consonant sound. The Anglo-Saxons used this form for verse as short as riddles or as long as Beowulf; presumably it aided in memorization, and Anglo-Saxon verse […]
Peter Fyfe writes: It's not hard to learn a foreign pronunciation, it just requires a little effort. It is also good manners. It also shows you think of someone other than yourself. The down side is that it requires you to listen. How would you like the USA referred to as "mur-ka"? Shame Jed, Shame. […]
As described in an earlier column, a hobson-jobson is what happens when English speakers hear a non-English phrase and analyze it as English. For instance, "mushroom" derives neither from "mush" nor from "room"; it's from French mousseron. There are other foreign phrases whose pronunciation has altered drastically as they became naturalized citizens of English. Most […]
Darren Rigby writes: "I found the anecdote in What Is The Name Of This Book?, and [Smullyan] seems to suggest that it predates him. He also tells the story about Norbert Wiener, not John von Neumann, so you're probably safe. (It's part 228 in that book, if you'd care to check.)" Thanks much for checking […]
Little-girl jokes form a small genre unto themselves. I've always heard these two told about little girls, for some reason, rather than little boys... A prisoner was released on parole after a twenty-year sentence. Elated, he ran down the street yelling, "I'm free! I'm free!" A little girl standing nearby replied, "That's nothing; I'm four." […]
I had already mentioned Roy G. Biv in another column. Oops. I ought to check the index before writing. Maybe I need a mnemonic for remembering what I've written about. Pierre Abbat mentions a recursive acronym he's seen on bumper stickers: "BASS, which stands for Bass Anglers Sportsman Society." Several people wrote in to fill […]
Recall from an earlier column that an initialism is an acronym if it forms a pronounceable word. It's not always obvious, though, what abbreviations are pronounceable. Take "IITYWYBAD?", for instance, a term displayed on a sign in a diner in The Grapes of Wrath. You certainly wouldn't want to have to say each letter, but […]
Elliott points out a linguistic error I made (where C stands for Consonant and V stands for Vowel): The katakana and hiragana aren't quite syllabaries. Each symbol stands not for a syllable, but for part of a syllable called a mora (Latin for "delay"). A mora is famously defined by James McCawley as "that which […]
Refrigerators. Refrigerators are cold. Refrigerators. —unknown In Japanese, two of the character sets are syllabaries, with a single symbol for each syllable found in the language. I always figured that had something to do with the origin of haiku, the unrhymed verse form consisting of three lines, with five syllables in the first and third […]
"...it is a bad method, to start from words to define things..." —Ferdinand de Saussure, as quoted by Ogden and Richards Penny: The gostak distims the doshes. Quentin: What's a gostak? Penny: That's what distims the doshes. Quentin: What's distimming? Penny: It's what the gostak does to the doshes. Quentin: Okay, but what are doshes? […]