useless as…

I have a fondness for those colorful metaphors that are often Southern American in origin. In fact at one point I was even thinking of compiling a book of them, but there are countless pages on the internet that list them. Some of my favorites include:

As nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs.
As dumb as a bag of rocks. (I use this one often to describe my cat.)
As useless as tits on a bull.

Of course there are hundreds more, and some of them have been around so long the original meaning has become obscured over time. Thusly:

He’d gripe with a ham under each arm.
He’s so windy he could blow up an onion sack.
He’s tighter than a flea’s ass over a rain barrel.

See what I mean? Each one of those produces a rather bewildered “huh?”

“Thick as a whale omelette.” is something I heard the Prince Regent character say in the Blackadder III series. I like it but most Americans don’t know that “thick” is British slang for stupid.

One I made up and use when I’m about to depart is “Well, I’m off like a whore’s panties.”

Bye for now…

Priorities

There’s vacuuming, and dishes,
And laundry to be done,
But it’s hard to motivate yourself
When sitting in the sun.
I know I said I’d do it.
I’d said that I’d get to it.
But it’s Friday and the sun is out,
So I say fucking screw it.

These Allergies!

These allergies! These allergies!
All I do is sneeze and sneeze.
And cough and itch and loudly wheeze.
For some relief I’m begging, please!

I’ve seen the doctor and received,
Some medicine and I believed,
That very soon I’d feel relieved.
Alas, I think I’ve been deceived.

These pills don’t seem to do a thing.
My eyes and nose are still running.
I’m still coughing and still sneezing,
Still itching and still wheezing.

They make me feel so drowsy,
That I’m stumbling and clumsy.
But I’m so stoned and woozy
That forget I’m feeling lousy.

So, for some relief I’m begging, please!
From these allergies! These allergies!
All I do is cough and wheeze,
And…
Wait..I feel another sneeze.

WOTD: pundit, and other loaned words…

The English language is one of the largest languages in the world. Not only is it one of the most commonly learned languages both as a first and second language, it also has an extraordinarily large amount of words. One of the reasons for this is the amount of loaned words (aka loanwords) from other languages. The word smörgåsbord (discussed in a previous post) is an example of a word borrowed from the Swedish language. According to the Oxford Dictionaries website:

The Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries.

That adds up to over 230,000 words, which is huge compared to the number of words in, say, the Swedish language. (Estimated to be around 40,000) Learning English, particularly as a second language, is a monumental undertaking.

Other words loaned from Swedish include: moped, ombudsman, gauntlet and tungsten.

One might be surprised to learn that the word pundit is loaned from the Hindi language. While we think of a pundit as a kind of pompous talking head on the Fox network, the original Hindi word pandit means “learned scholar or priest.” Bill O’Reilly is good example of a pundit, although I don’t think he’s particularly scholarly nor very priestly.

Here are a few other loanwords of interest:

From Arabic: admiral, alcohol, coffee, guitar, lemon, magazine, sofa

From Chinese: ketchup

From Czech: robot, pistol

From Dutch: bazooka, aloof, bluff, coleslaw, cookie, golf, landscape

From French: abandon, bastard, and calorie to name a few. There are approximately 80,000 words of French origin in the English language due to a minor incident that occurred in the year 1066 near the town of Hastings.

From Hebrew: behemoth, canister, jubilee.

From Italian: balcony, figurine

From Turkish: balaclava, lackey, vampire

From Welsh: flummery (the pudding, that is)

Of course there are many (ten of thousands) more, but I think this is a good sample.

Bye for now.

WOTD: balaclava and other confusing words…

For some reason our British cousins have adopted this word, which according to Bill Bryson (author and keen observer of all things British from an American perspective), is a “truly bad word.” The American term is the decidedly less poetic but much clearer ski mask. Its “badness” lies in the fact that it really doesn’t sound like what it is:

“[It] could be almost anything – an obscure root vegetable, a type of geological formation peculiar to the Tibetian steppe, the basic unit of currenty in Albania, the sound of a large load of rocks coming out of the back of a dump truck, almost anything at all. It certainly doesn’t sound like something you would want to put on your head. No, the word you want for a kind of pull-down hat is haggis.”
Excerpt from I’m a Stranger Here Myself

He then goes on to explain that “haggis” has a warm and furry sound to it and that it doesn’t sound at all like a food. Furthermore, anyone who has ever tried it will attest that it doesn’t taste much like a food either.

This got me thinking about how many other words there are in the English language that don’t sound at all like what they are, and how confusing this can be for learners of it as a second language.

For example, why do we drive on the parkway, and park in the driveway?

Why do we say we’re getting ON or OFF the bus/train/plane when we’re really getting IN or OUT of it?

A pineapple is nothing like a pine nor like an apple. It doesn’t even come from a pine tree. How the hell did it get named that? And what about a grapefruit?

I’m sure there are many examples of weird words in Swedish as well, and the one I can think of at the moment is smörgås (sandwich) which translated literally into English means “butter goose.”

Finally, and with apologies for the indelicacy of the following language, why do we say we’re taking a shit when we’re actually LEAVING it?

Feel free to post your own examples of weird or inaccurate words in comments. Until next time…

I need a technological miracle…

I’m slightly inundated.

Apparently, I’m supposed to be in three places at once this afternoon so I’d appreciate any advice or instructions on how to open a rift in the space-time continuum. I need to arrange this for the hour of 16:00 GMT+1 when I’m supposed to be teaching a lesson, offering extra help and tutoring for ninth graders and attending a staff meeting.

I also have a stack of national exams that keeps increasing in size. Right now I have about a hundred exams to grade, but by the end of this week it will have increased to 300. The deadline for getting all these exams graded is the 22nd, but I also have a full time teaching schedule to maintain. Therefore, additionally I’ll need further instructions on how to stop time for at least a week in order to get this done on time.

If you cannot offer me any assistance in breaking the laws of physics then some booze will be greatly appreciated.

‘kthanksbai

Kitties

(To be sung to the tune of “Piggies” by the Beatles.)

Have you seen the little kitties,
Lying on the bed?
And for all the little kitties
Life is getting sad.
Always having beds,
To lie around on.

Have you seen the bigger kitties,
With their scratching posts?
You can see them all day scratching,
With their little toes.
Gripping with their claws,
To make them sharper.

Eating food and without paying,
Human slaves they bring it all to them.
Running, sleeping, licking, playing.
What they need’s a damn good spraying!

Everywhere there’s lots of kitties,
Living kitty lives.
You can see them outside hunting,
Little birds and mice.
Trying to entice,
The little mice in.

WOTD: Agnotology

Here’s a little something off the request line. I’d like to dedicate today’s WOTD to Cissi, Shark and the other upstanding members of Random Misanthrope.

Today’s word is a relatively new discipline, developed in recent years by two historians of science at Stanford University, Robert Proctor and his wife, Londa Schiebinger. Agnotology is defined as of the study of “culturally-induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data.”

There sure is a lot of bullshit masquerading as scientific research these days, which is why I’m not surprised to learn that this is such a new discipline. It used to be that scientific cranks could rarely get anything published because, well, they were hacks and quacks, and everybody knew it. Nowadays, thanks to the internet, just about any nut with any nutty idea can publish that belief for the whole world to see. One can find websites that offer definitive proof that 9/11 was a government plot, the Apollo 11 mission was a hoax, vaccines cause autism, homeopathy can effectively treat any disease including cancer, there are huge and powerful “lasers” currently orbiting the earth, and of course that President Barack Obama was not only born in Kenya, he’s also a Muslim.

Just look around. If you want confirmation for any crackpot idea then the internet will provide it.

My ex was a real tin-foil hat club type who was frequently out of work and spent his days reading about various conspiracies on the internet while I was at the office. One day he arrived to pick me up at work wearing a surgical mask. The explanation he gave was that there were a lot of jets flying over head that day and he read on the internet they were secret government planes generating “chemical trails” which rain down toxic chemicals that penetrate our bodies and control our minds.

I said that if that were really the case, then a surgical mask probably wasn’t going to provide very much in the way of protection.

Until next time…