Well, hello stranger…

meaning of life

Pic by Patrick Hoesly (zooboing) @ Flickr

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Crash Blossoms

crash blossoms

Pic by DRB62 @ Flickr

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Daphne Does Dictionaries

scrabble board

Pic by garlandcannon @ Flickr

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Krazy Keltic or Silly Seltic?

soccer ball

Pic by Ontzy @ sxc.hu

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Word Herd

Rounding up this week’s mystery words

tadpole, tad

image courtesy of gumdropgas @ flickr

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Missing Letters

No, this is not a post about absentee landlords.

OK, two resolutions for the new year. First, post more on Word du Jour, second, stop the crap jokes. Anyone care to take bets on which one collapses first?

The idea for this post comes from my curiosity about why the name Dalziel is pronounced ‘Dee-ell’ in English. On my way to uncovering this mystery, I was reminded of other things, and thought “hello, why not make a post of it?” So here it is, a small introduction to some letters formerly used in the English alphabet. In truth, the alphabets vary from Saxon to Middle English to (mainly) Old English, but if you don’t mind me mixing and matching, I’ll continue.

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It’s Whaturday?

3  320x240 calendar Its Whaturday? Another post following a conversation in which I tried to be smug and clever and failed. Everyone knows where the days of the week get their names, right? I thought I did, but became hopelessly lost on definitions for Tuesday and Friday. So, it was a little like naming the seven dwarves: Grumpy, Sneezy, Doc, and the other four. In order to save you, dear reader, the ignominy of starting out clever and ending up looking – as the colloquial term would have it – a right dick, I present for you now the origins of names for days of the week.

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Onoes! Meme haz gon too far

2  320x240 oh hai Onoes! Meme haz gon too far Indulge me here, dear reader (you know who you are) while I regale you with a story of how a joke can be pushed a little too far – even on the internet, where the boundaries of taste and other things differ wildly from real life.

Lolcats – and lolcat speak – thatz liek soooo last year. What started off as an internet meme on message boards like 4Chan (caveat lector), and was popularized further by the big hitters in internet time-wasting, Digg and Reddit is now being written about in major publications. OK, they think it’s a new thing, and there are probably many slow news days, who am I to cast the first stone? Lolcat speak is a combination of purposely misspelled words and phrases, and the baby talk some people use when talking to their cats. In case you are reading this and haven’t had access to the internet for a couple of years, it can be best explained visually, here.

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Absolutely ages

…that’s how long it’s been since I posted anything.  Well, I’ve been busy, what with one thing and another, you know.

Nothing too weighty this time around – just a bit of fun. I must admit to having been quite stumped when asked by Madame Joad (who considers me something of an authority on English colloquialisms) what the ‘H’ in ‘Jesus H Christ’ stood for. My initial guess (wrong) was that it was there purely for emphasis, something like tmesis. I decided to research it on the oracle of all that is true and 100 per cent correct, the internet. To my utter surprise, several of the top Google hits put forward a very reasonable and plausible theory as to how the H got there. My favourite, not least because of the reference to the Lord’s Prayer: “Our father, who art in heaven, Harold be thy name”, is this site, which provides a very interesting and believable etymology for the origins of this whimsical piece of blasphemy.

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Loosing my patience

It’s a funny thing, language. I am guilty of defending the usage of the English language and its grammar (if ‘guilty’ is the correct term), but I am also prepared to concede that the reason English has become the worldwide lingua franca is entirely due to its malleability and adaptability. Let’s face it, the Aussies and Kiwis use it, and it’s still recognizeable – barely. I don’t even have a huge problem with our American cousins and their kooky ways of spelling things. Hmmm. Wait – on second thoughts, that’d be most things. Color and thru are still wrong, and happy holidays means nothing at all. It’s Christmas, my US chums – Christmas. You are a Christian country (yes, I know, secular society, church and state, blah blah), so please feel free to use the name, for Bhudda’s sake. Where was I? Oh yes – tangental ranting aside, the horrible truth is that the inhabitants in those most united of states have good reason for ‘-izing’ everything. I will not regurgitate all the arguments why, because all you need to know is right here. It’s well worth a read, I assure you.

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