It’s 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.
Read MoreOnoes! 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.
Read MoreAbsolutely 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.
Read MoreLoosing 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.
Read MoreHaving a ball
Those of you who are both English and easily offended may look away now. Everyone else, welcome. If I were childish and silly enough to pick a favourite swear word – and luckily I am, or this would be a very short post – it would have to be ‘bollocks’. It’s just one of those words you can use when really nothing else will do. It can be said with such vitriol or mirth that it makes it useful for any situation where an expletive is called for, except maybe for christenings and bar mitzvahs.
Read MoreOdds and Sods
I have happened upon a number of interesting word-related thingies over the past week or so. As it’s been a while since I posted anything, I’ll share them with you here.
New words(?)
Merriam-Webster, regarded by many as the US dictionary has published its new edition, and has added some 100 new words. Naturally, some of these have a definite US bias, but many are to be found in use in international or UK English. A few examples:
Read MoreigPay atinLay
While looking through the latest collection of toys to add to my web site, I came across something I thought to be intrinsically useless – a program to change all the text of a page into pig latin. It was supposed to be an easy way to tell which parts of a web page would be translated by an automated translation service (Google or Babelfish for example). I don’t really see why you couldn’t just translate it into a similarly bizarre and strange language, like French, for example.
Read MoreFrom my RSS feeds
Warning: The opening paragraph contains references to RSS. If you have no idea what this is, you could do worse than read this simple explanation. If you like the sound of it, you’ll be pleased to know you can follow my updates via RSS as well as Twitter – just click here.
Read MoreIt’s not a dictionary
Well, they say it isn’t anyway. Before I go any further, here’s the link. This will take you to Wordnik, the latest online collaborative, er, dictionary on the internet. Is it any good? Well, sort of. Like anything hip and happening these days, it’s a wiki-like thing, something that anyone may edit and change as they see fit, which also displays auto-generated content from various ‘social’ sites, and definitions from dictionaries on your chosen word.
Read MoreStan the Man – Deep Thorkus
Are you all sitting cumftibold two-square on your botty? Then I’ll begin…
I have fond memories of watching (and listening) to the work of Mr Stanley Unwin. He was a very interesting entertainer, even though he only did one thing, which was to talk nonsense. So, although it’s not strictly a ‘word’ du jour, I thought I’d include a little fan piece of my own, as it’s my site and I can do what I like!
Read More