I was talking with a friend recently and this happened.
Showing posts with label *language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label *language. Show all posts
Mean and Done
If you’ve ever left a comment on a blog, you may very well have come across
“word” verification.
On blogs hosted by Blogger, as elsewhere, the author can select an option asking
people commenting to type a seemingly random bunch of letters to prove that they’re actual humans rather than automated envoys of mischief or malevolence. This used to take the form of a single nonsense string that almost always could be a real word, but wasn’t; then, last year, the hosting service joined the ranks of websites using heinously jumbled-up, visually skewed mixes of characters. Previously the nonsense “words” tended to have vowels and consonants placed in such an order that they were pronounceable, leading me to invent definitions for them based on actual words, morphemes, and phrases they suggested.
Meaning Less
Yesterday the can of Campbell’s soup went up in the sidebar to signify that posts
are backed up and slow with the going. I’ve been under the weather and less productive than usual lately, perhaps as a cosmic reminder not to make grand plans. On top of that, my Internet connection turned equally lethargic today.
So while things will hopefully get up to speed again soon I wanted to at least publish this note as preamble to a batch of word-verification definitions. Faithful readers are familiar with the exercise; anyone who isn’t can find an explanation in a page on the blog collecting all such entries to date.
As suggested by my title, I’m running out of content for these posts, largely because of Blogger’s switch earlier this year to a different verification mechanism that prompts fewer imagined definitions from me. The next installment in this series will probably
be the last.
• assfu — [ass foo] n. Martial art based on literally kicking your opponent’s butt.
• bininsic — [bin in sik] phr. Quick explanation for lack of activity outside the home.
• compery — [kom puh ree] n. Rackin’ up freebies.
• dectus — [dek tuss] n. A catcus as big as ten normal cacti.
• Essencei™ — [eh sen say] The cologne for hard-working dojo masters. “You chop the sandalwood in half. We combine its fragrant oil with hints of strawberry and musk. Essencei.”
The Meaning of It All
I’ll have legally been 42 for 24 hours at the stroke of midnight. Regular visitors here
will recognize this post’s title as referring not just to my age, per an earlier post today, but fitting the pattern of my occasional volleys of word-verification definitions (collected and explained for the uninitiated at that link). I’ve taken to publishing these when I expect the blog to lie fallow for a spell, as well as simply when the mood strikes, but while I can see some things getting in the way of new posts over the next couple of weeks I confess that I’m not yet sure to which scenario this entry applies.
• androjor — [an dro jor] n. Robot duplicate of Superman’s Kryptonian father.
• bucritas — [buh kree tahss] pl. n. A Mexican dish made from pirate meat.
• cobside — [kob syd] adj. Near an ear of corn.
• dingdoc — [ding dok] n. Popular subgenre in Australian cinema of nature films featuring wild dogs.
• entheist (1) — [en thee ist] n. One who worships the 14th letter of the English alphabet.
Midsummer’s Meaning
With new posts being sparse here lately and several months having passed since my
last volley of word-verification definitions, I think it’s time for another.
The backlog is growing short, as I wrote earlier this year, thanks to Blogger’s switch
in formats yielding less choice material. I’ll probably close the door on this series after
a few more installments, based on current reserves and the sluggish pace at which new entires are added to my stockpile, whereas for quite some time after I began the well was replenished at a strong, steady pace. You are hereby referred to my stand-alone page collecting past entries, where this phenomenon is explained, if it’s unfamiliar to you.
• agamsee — [uh gam see] phr. Edward G. Robinson pointing out some dame’s leg.
• clonyma — [kloh nee mah] n. Your mother’s genetically engineered duplicate.
• counduct — [kown dukt] n. How Dracula behaves.
• daymews — [day myooz] pl.n. My cat’s morning wake-up sounds.
S Is for...
… Sonja from Sweden — the latest citizen curator of the official @Sweden Twitter account — who last week twitted out some controversial questions and comments on a certain subject that have spurred me to share a short soliloquy about schmutz.
I can’t use the verb (or noun) “tweet” unless we’re talking about birds. Call your
service Tweeter if you want “tweets” to be “tweeted”. If it’s Twitter, the gerund is either “Twittering” or the backwards formation “twitting” and the messages are Twits. Since Twitter and other social-media platforms that encourage short bursts of prose or graphics are considered “microblogging” that would make the entries “microposts”.
All I know is that I just refuse to say “tweet”.
Where was I? Oh, right... This:
This was sent out under the aegis of the actual country of Sweden. It was not any random little Twit from a random little twit. Sweden, in a grand experiment with vox populi democracy or individualism or whatever, has been handing over the official Twitter feed of the nation to a different Swede every week. Sonja is a young Swedish woman who seems to think that Jews as well as a select number of sneaky non-Jew decoys have multiple penises.
Spamabit
I don’t usually have much good to say about the service that hosts this blog. To be
fair and give credit where it’s due, I’ll repeat that in addition to being free — without requiring advertising of any kind, a big plus to me — Blogger’s spam filter works very well. Frankly, I can’t recall a single instance of ’bot messages getting through
since I opted to turn off word verification on comments earlier this year in the wake
of the service’s switch to a much uglier, more onerous CAPTCHA format.
While the blog has in fact been getting more spam than it used to, all of that spam is getting queued up in a virtual folder to await my attention as it should. It seems like more spam comments made it through in the past, too, which leads me to suspect that in a rare instance of foresight Blogger worked to shore up its filtering in anticipation
of users ditching verification after the recent change.
Most of what got through were strings of Chinese hànzì characters that translated to
a vaguely poetic phrase and linked to sites featuring images of scantily-clad women if not outright porn. And porn is, no surprise, still the #1 destination for most of the spam that the filter catches, but for every few “comments” that nakedly hawk pics of nude celebrities there’s one that pretends to be actual conversation with poetry of its own — in English; often broken English to be sure, yet therein lies much of the skewed poetry.
“You can definitely see your expertise within the paintings you write,” one especially lyrical slice of spam read. “The world hopes for more passionate writers like you who are not afraid to mention how they believe. All the time go after your heart.”
I was almost touched.
Clean and Mean
The state of the blog is once again a clog, and I have only myself to blame.
While Blogger is highly complicit in making even slightly tricky posts much trickier than they should be, I’m supposed to remember that. Yet here I sit with things backed up in part because I wanted to present some image-heavy offerings before taking the kind of extended break that I so often try to schedule and never really get to follow through on — because an unintentional hiatus manifests first, leaving me with a drive to just get those “last” few efforts published for peace of mind and personal satisfaction.
So I’m riding out the waves of a perfect storm comprising the usual technical snafus
and health issues combined with the prolonged wake of a sad occasion that I’ve been trying and failing to write about, ever more exhausted, producing sentences that run on like Bart Allen after too much Halloween candy and too little patience to suss out a good simile. I therefore, hereby, and forthwith offer up another slice of the vocabularium imaginarium that is my log of word-verification definitions, whose backstory can be found on their dedicated page, with hopes but no promises that posts will resume flowing after some requisite spring cleaning.
• adangst — [ad angst] n. What keeps us tuning in to watch Don Draper.
• barifti — [bar eef tee] pl. n. Ftarbuckf employeef.
• calvic — [kal vik] adj. Having a stuffed tiger that comes to life when nobody else is around.
• chirk — [churk] n. An obnoxiously noisy little bird.
• explo — [eks ploh] n. A dynamite convention.
Late and Mean
While posting here is never easy, at times yet another new Blogger problem crops
up or I forget about an older glitch because I’d been avoiding it for a spell or I just don’t have the patience to deal with the workarounds and troubleshooting, so it seems even harder and plans get kicked down the road again. That’s when I’ll put up the Campbell’s soup can or its associate the bottle of Devil Tylenol from Hell — and when I share another batch of word-verification definitions. I’ve explained the phenomenon before in my first such post and more recently on the dedicated page of this blog that collects them all to date.
• ashible — [ash ih bull] adj. Made of such substance as will be reduced to powder by burning.
• Boxidect™ — [boks ih dekt] It’s ten — ten — ten boxes in one!
• caticeph — [kat ih sef] n. A being with a feline head.
Yucky and Mean
Since I’m under the weather and behind on everything, here’s another batch of the word-verification definitions that I leave when commenting on other blogs. An explanation of what’s going on and a collection of all the definitions to date can be found at the dedicated page I’ve set up for that purpose.
• adynog — [ad ee nahg] n. (Spanglish) Having promotional material in one hand, a traditional Yuletide drink in the other.
• britend — [brit end] n. 1. A bum (not a panhandler; rather, the buttocks region) in Merry Olde England. 2. The farthest point of the United Kingdom’s territorial waters in the English Channel or Atlantic Ocean.
• colifou — [koh ly foo] n. French bacteria strain that takes your sanity.
• copone — 1. [kop wun] v. Get handsy. 2. [koh pohn] v. Make cornbread in tandem.
• Exhiali — [eks hee ah lee] Alien race of heavy breathers.
• Flumenta™ — [floo men tuh] The first FDA-approved treatment for psychic influenza.
• grizato — [grih zah toh] n. Italian ice cream made from brown bears. [No animals were actually harmed in the creation of this definition.]
Old and Mean
I’m not feeling particularly grumpy, nor am I going to wax philosophical about the passage of time here like I did in my last birthday post. Really the title is just to keep up the usual conceit of my word-verification definition offerings. For those not familiar with the phenomenon, I’ve explained it on the dedicated page that collects accumulated entries to date.
• antick — [an tik] n. 1. Ye olde foolish behaviour. 2. Half ant, half tick.
• bledlump — [bled lump] n. A smidge of clotted exsanguination.
• botica — [bah tih kuh] n. The study of ’droids and other ’tomatons.
• Clola™ — [cloh luh] Clam-flavored cola. (Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it.)
(Uh... But don’t try it.)
• derbsaly — [durb suh lee] adv. About or referring to a horse race, or a sporting contest in general. “Derbsaly speaking, Kentucky is my favorite.”
Meaning, Muggled
As you can plainly see, I’ve put the Campbell’s soup can into effect.
I was hoping to have thoughts on the last Harry Potter film up soon, never mind all
the other posts in the pipeline. But of course if wishes were horses I’d be buried under a pile of stallions, mares, foals, ’n’ fillies — and I know too well that just wanting a thing to be does not, in the words of Jean-Luc Picard, to mix my multimedia franchises, make it so. Which brings us to another round of word-verification definitions, those lists of lexicographical alchemy that result from my attempts to conjure a bit of amusing sense from nonsense; for more on the phenomenon, you’re welcome to click through the boldface type above to the page on this blog that explains it and collects the definitions to date, while I try to regroup.
• afenemat — [uh fen uh mat] n. What you lay outside to welcome visitors who insist on entering through the window.
• BenCur — [ben kur] The (sadly unsuccessful) all-dog production of Ben-Hur.
• cacturne — [kak turn] n. Short, romantic piano composition about desert plants.
Def. Jam
I have the blog’s first stand-alone page up, a collection of my word-verification definitions (with an explanation for the uninitiated), so here’s another installment of that series in celebration.
• applayer — [ap play ur] n. Someone hooked on their smartphone games.
• bedness — [bed niss] n. Whedon-esque term for sleeping: “After a night like that, I’m just looking for some quick snackage and the bedness.”
• boation — [bo shun] n. Movement on a seafaring craft.
• cardosm — [kard oz um] n. The result of enjoying shuffling a little too much.
• distendee — [diss ten dee] n. A swelled guy.
• endene — [en deen] n. The last
• exest — [eks est] adj. 1. The most former. 2. (exEST) n. A transplant from the Atlantic coast of North America.
• firefib — [fiyr fib; fiy ur fib] n. Lies about arson.
• Fitican — [fih tih kun] The workout room at the Vatican.
Not Above a Book
So tonight’s episode of How I Met Your Mother revealed that main character Ted Mosby has lived his entire life* pronouncing the world “chameleon” not “kuh-meel-yun” but “tchah-mil-ee-on”. [*Until 2011, anyway. The show is technically one big flashback, with detours, from 2030.]
I bet that many of us have had similar experiences — even the best-educated. Being
an early and voracious reader, in fact, probably makes one more likely to get an erroneous phonetic pronunciation stuck in one’s head, oblivious to how it’s actually pronounced aloud.
My own memorable equivalent of “chameleon” is the word that I pronounced in my head as “eh-pih-tohm” and realized a bit on the late side was the selfsame word as
“uh-pih-tuh-mee”.
Some more examples:
It’s SuperMoon
Full moons have a hold over me, and not just in a vague gravitational sense.
Photo: NASA — Sean Smith
I get entranced by them whether cool silver or fiery gold, low on the horizon or high among the stars — but especially, to echo what I wrote a couple of years ago during a lovely Buck Moon, when they come as the moon is essentially at perigee, its closest point to Earth in its elliptical orbit. (As I’m sure we all learned once upon a time, neither the orbit of our moon around Earth nor that of Earth around the sun is an exact circle; rather, they are very slight ovals.)
M Is for...
... Meaning, which I tend to use in some form or another to title a list of word-verification definitions, but also mourning and a myriad of other things that have kept me from posting, as well as mulling over how to publish the content currently in the pipeline for this blog.
• actato — n. [ak tay toh] Spud that doth trod the boards.
• CountOG — [kownt oh jee] The rarely seen “original gangsta” version of Sesame Street’s Count von Count.
• eouns — pl. n. [ee ahnz] Variant British spelling of eons: “That is my favourite colour in eouns.”
• eurth — n. [yurth] Ground bordered by the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, Asia, and the Arctic Circle.
• Flutrina™ — [floo tree nuh] Nutritional supplement formulated for wind-instrument players.
Holiday Meaning
The setup of the blog’s new home has been awfully slow going, while posts-to-be are piling up and getting stale, so I’m going to give publishing here another try for a limited run. Perhaps the spirit of the season will pervade even the grinchitude of Blogger’s grinding gears... Of course there’s no better way to kick things off than with a batch of word-verification definitions, collected and explained for the curious at that link.
• apersed — n. [ah pur sed] “&” with a cold.
• brqua — n. [burr kwah] Ice water.
• cesinema — n. [see zin eh muh] The niche film genre concerning movies made about the alkali element Cesium. (It’s rare but it tends to get really big reactions.)
Mean Time
You’re reading this because no other posts have gone up in several days despite my
best efforts and profound desires to the contrary. I haven’t done much commenting on other folks’ blogs lately, either, so the following pretty well exhausts my supply of word-verification witticism for the nonce. Those of you unfamiliar with this exercise are directed to the master list of definitions, which explains the idea and collects the contents of all such material to date.
arrater — [ahr ay tur] n. Someone who decides that movies have too much sex, violence, or profanity for G, PG, or PG-13.
bousnext — [booz nekst] phr. The way the maitre d’ at a tacky Halloween-themed restaurant greets folks in line.
boyawk — [boy awk] n. A young male bird of prey.
cathopi — [kath oh pye] n. A flexible tube 3.14159 mm. in diameter inserted for bladder relief.
conesses — pl. n. 1. [kah neh siz] Lady tricksters. 2. [koh ness iz] Men sharing the lead role in The Untouchables.
dreeabl — [dree ah bul] n. Southern dribble.
Filetro — [fih leh troh] Arch-criminal known for boning his victims. (You know what I mean.)
gewse — [gyoos] n. A very British goose.
Grank — [grank] The 2035 installment of Jason Statham’s Chev Chelios franchise.
One to Tentacle
The plural of “octopus” is not, I was reminded at a recent family gathering, “octopi”.
I’ve written before about how consulting the Dictionary app in my laptop’s “dock”
has become a slight addiction. While I don’t mull over things to look up merely to give
it some exercise, the fact that it’s so handy and that it searches not only The New Oxford English Dictionary but The Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, Apple’s tech dictionary, and Wikipedia (at least if you’re connected to the Internet) means that I do look up more than I need to — and I practically itch to get at it when a question that it could answer pops into my head away from the computer.
Meanwhile
I’m sharing a batch of verification-word definitions again so soon because with July at an end I find myself faced with a meager two posts for the month. One would actually be fine, since there were valid reasons for the lack of blogging — among them my connection problems, which have already pushed the publication of this dispatch past the date stamped on it — but two is just inelegant, so I’m going for three.
August should find renewed activity, with plenty of posts waiting to be fleshed out
or in some cases merely entered online, proofread, and graphicked up. There will be more about comics, finally, as well as some film and TV reviews that I decided to hold back until their video releases or the start of the new season since the posts were no longer timely. Subjects include Avatar, Inception, the Archie multiverse, Batman RIP and beyond, Secret Six, Asterios Polyp, and True Blood, in addition to the afore-mentioned essays on returning TV series that’ll come further down the pike. I’d love
to hear thoughts from the followers that Blogger says I have on which of those posts interest you most.
Here are the latest in my dwindling reserve of definitions, meanwhile. They’re also being added to my omnibus post “The Mean Streak”, where you can find an explanation of just what this is about if you’re new to the concept.