it's that time again

ever since my casio® digital watch got stuck on the 24-hour clock, so did i. like the american military (and everyone else in the world (including the portugese)) i dig its clarity°. one thing that i have always found confusing is determing if noon is 12:00 am or 12:00 pm. according to sticklers—it isn’t either. noon is the ONLY time on the dial that is neither before nor after midday—it IS midday.

stylewise, if it is not possible to write noon, a preferred way to note this time in the 12-hour system is:

12:00 m.

no joke.

yo looks like a freak

here is some interesting news about kids in baltimore [deflator alert: it has nothing to do with the wire or omar little]. it concerns a grass-roots trend of adopting yo as a gender neutral pronoun.

[The] Street term ‘Yo’ is being used by kids as a gender-neutral replacement for ‘he’ and ‘she’, according to researchers.

Language experts in the US say since at least 2004 students have been saying “yo” as a substitute for gender specific pronouns and the trend is growing. The study, published in this week’s New Scientist, found middle-school and high-school students in Baltimore, Maryland, used the word in sentences such as, “Yo put his foot up” and “Yo looks like a freak”.

Dennis Baron, a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has written extensively about the failure of invented words that have not been picked up as pronoun substitutes. He described the emergence of “yo” as significant because it has not been planted and was a grass-roots phenomenon.
He said: “Most of the gender-neutral pronouns are artificial coinages that are then marketed - unsuccessfully - to users”.

i have not been this jazzed up from the linguistic inventions of children since the genesis of nicaraguan sign language. but then i read the following line WHICH TOTALLY BLEW MY BUZZ:

feminist scholar Brenda Wrigley said “yo” sounds “crass and disrespectful. It is something a younger person would shout down the street as a greeting, but not something I’d like to see used in writing.”

as far as i am concerned: this world needs more innovative baltimorean teenagers and fewer feminist scholar brenda wrigleys.

[source]

tomorrow's to-do list

work the word, ostrobogulous into a conversation of any type. it is used to describe something that is “bizarre, unusual, or interesting.”

if there is such a thing as mouthfeel for word pronunciation, ostrobogulous would rank up there with ineluctable.

diæresis pieces

i think that we can all agree that english is a pretty bitching language and i don’t want to be overly diacritical, but i amn’t alone in wishing that english orthography contained at least a few more interesting characters.

here is a wikipedia list of the small number of english words that actually have diacritical marks. most of these are loan words from klingon and old elvis but a few words like reëlect and blessèd° are ACTUALLY NATIVE ENGLISH WORDS WITH DIACRITICS.

that stooopid grave accent on blessèd is stooopid and deserves to be forgotten about but the diæresis (NOT to be confused with its germanic doppelgänger, the umlaut) on reëlect must be preserved at all costs. and that is why i am instituting this usage as the ragbag house style (i hear that the new yorker may be copycatting me in this nostalgic hypercorrection). here is a list of english language words that are blinged out in diæreses:

• boötes
• continuüm
• coöperate [-ion, -ive]
• coöpt
• coördinate [-ed, -ing, -ion, -or, -ors]
• daïs
• naïf
• naïve
• naïveté
• faïence
• noël
• noöne
• oölogy
• opïum
• preëminent [-ly]
• preëmpt [-ion, -ive]
• reëlect [-ed, -ing]
• reënter [-ed, -ing]
• reëstablish [-ed, -ing]
• residuüm
• zaïre
• zoölogy

if you catch me writing one of these words in the future without the bling, i will abandon vegetarianism for 1 day. also, just for lols i will try and write the following words the way they originally appeared in english: cañón, rôle, piraña, hôtel, élite, and dépôt.

to all aspiring porn bloggers:

• “Lusty” means “brimming with vigor and good health” or “enthusiastic.” Don’t confuse it with “lustful,” which means “filled with sexual desire.”
• “Sensual” usually relates to physical desires and experiences, and often means “sexy.” “Sensuous” is more often used for esthetic pleasures, like “sensuous music.”
• Crevices are by definition tiny. A huge crack in a glacier is given the French spelling: crevasse.

explicit subtext

i’m in a very public location now and there are scads of looker-ons gaping at my laptop screen. this is giving me a kind of blogging paruresis so i figure that now is as good a time as any to establish a code for all future posts so i can say things without actually having to say them (and thus keep the gaping looker-ons in the dark).

• if the amount of e’s in a post is a prime number greater than 101: that means that i am blogging under duress and whatever i write IS NEVER to be trusted.
  • i will use the keyword, borborygmi, if the nature of the duress is the threat of physical harm.
  • i will use the keyword, pope calixtus iii, if the nature of the duress is blackmail and most likely involves someone threatening to release an incriminating picture of me and a she-wolf named marla.
  • if the amount of e’s is a prime number greater than 101 plus or minus 1, that means i am being a filthy attention whore.
• if i ever refer to a she-wolf named marla, i am REALLY talking about my bitching pontiac (who is a baronessa named alessandra).
• should any of my posts ever contain a spelling or grammar error, that is a secret signal to you that i am getting dirty with a bottle of rye whisky.
• if i ever grumble that the citrus splash flavour of scope® mouthwash has been discontinued, that means i have just done something raunchy and depraved and am feeling very shameful.

the euphemism treadmill

is when words originally intended as euphemisms begin to acquire negative connotations themselves »

Idiot, imbecile, and moron were once neutral terms for a developmentally delayed child but soon acquired negative connotations so the phrase mentally retarded was used to replace them. Now that too, is considered rude and used as an insult. As a result, new terms like mentally challenged, learning difficulties and special needs have replaced retarded.

it is only a matter of time before idiot, imbecile, and moron become destigmatized and are called into service once more.

with this knowledge, i propose that we take back the terms coney, cock, and ass. we do this by making their euphemisms as durrrty as we can. therefore, when possible, refer to the male member as a rooster, female genitalia as a rabbit and the posterior of both sexes as their donkeys. if all goes according to plan, we just might get our words back.

my new year's resolution

to be more metric.

but before all the metric fanboys start yapping about how the u.s. system is arbitrary and inconsistent and that i shoulda made the switch years ago, i thought that i would let you in on the current definition of a metre. it is about as arbitrary as anything could be.

1 metre = the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum during 1/299,792,458th of the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the 2 hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom.

if i could only get my hands on some caesium-133, i can finally figure out how tall that i am in the metric system.

now accepting nominations

for my tumblr arch-nemesis. as tumblr adversaries, we can:

• reblog eachother’s posts with snarky, backhanded compliments.
• refer to eachother by mad-magazine-style names (ie. if your name is artlover, i would call you fartlover). suggestions for me: douchebag, hagbag, jizzrag, ragamuffin.
• post “smile friday” pictures of eachother that we have photoshopped making heavy use of the bloat tool, wrinkle stamp, and acne filters.
• additionally, i will adopt the epithet yournamemastix (-mastix is a greek suffix that means “scourge of.”)

i look forward to some spirited mocking between us.

ñerds

from now on, i will spell the word nerd as ñerd to relect the way that i say it.

ñerdy linguistics digression: as a general rule, the more palatal that the en is in nerd, the more nerdy the nerd is in real life.

eachother

i will hereafter write each other as eachother. if any two words deserve to become one, surely it is these two.