Called Canon customer support just now for a camera question. Their automated phone-answering system wanted to know how to direct my call, and I thought it said “You can just sing your answer.” I imagine it really said “say your answer.” But I like the way I heard it better.
The language I have learnt these forty years, my native English, now I must forgo; and now my tongue’s use is to me no more than an unstringèd viol or a harp, or like a cunning instrument cased up, or, being open, put into his hands that knows no touch to tune the harmony. Within my mouth you have enjailed my tongue, doubly portcullised with my teeth and lips, and dull unfeeling barren ignorance is made my jailor to attend on me.
A slow cooker cooks slowly, but a slow cook cooks poorly.
Latest in the annals of nonprofits making odd UI choices in their donation forms: The nonprofit I’m about to donate to has a name-suffix field. I got curious and looked at it. Here are the values provided in the dropdown menu: Jr. Sr. II III IV V VI VII CPA DDS ED.D Esq. J.D. J.D. […]
Another garden path sentence, this one from a TechCrunch headline: Did unicorns like Lyft and Uber wait too long? I misread the first several words of that as asking about how unicorns feel about ridesharing companies.
Best new-to-me words I encountered today, in very different contexts: Lappity-toppity box: apparently means “laptop.” Oasty toasty warm: apparently means “very warm.”
Catoptric means “being or using a mirror to focus light,” according to MW11. I may have encountered it before, but I don’t think I knew what it meant.
I was vaguely aware of the word struthious as relating to ostriches, but I don’t think I had previously encountered it used metaphorically. Damon Knight, in his essay in Clarion II, wrote: Wollheim alludes to this episode in a typically struthious way[…] From context, I’m assuming that Knight meant that Wollheim had his head in […]
Leon Rosselson's song “Flying High, Flying Free” came on, and I don’t know the song, so at the end of these lines: Butterfly, dragonfly, salmon and seal, whale and reindeer, cuckoo and eel, each of them doing the migration dance I just naturally assumed that the next line would be: and I’d do it too […]
I knew there was one t, but not y. Er, why.