even though joyce said this in defense of finnegans wake, this quote is an appropriate epigraph for the slowblogging ulysses project (today’s word is winding). and while we are on the topic of stories that will take thousands of years to complete, there is also this one (which employs a very different delaying measure).
i compiled this list myself so that means that there are probably a bunch more words. EVENSTILL it seems that a word that fits these parameters is relatively rare.
UPDATE (6/17/2009) words from the comments:
great work, hive mind. thank you!
cheer up, mr. joyce—it’s bloomsday!
as tomorrow is the 105th anniversary of bloomsday AND many of you have confessed to me that ulysses is one of your crack books (a book that you have only pretended to have read) AND ALSO the infinite summer project is a hot commodity right now, i thought that i would announce my latest project:
slowblogging ulysses, where i have been blogging the entirety of ulysses since may 4th at the rate of one word per day. i expect to complete the project around noon on the 27th day of April, 2741.
like the red cross but for culture
in april of 1935, the united states and 20 other nations signed an international treaty which adopted the use of this flag (called the pax cultura) as a means to protect “ancient relics, historic monuments, museums, scientific, artistic, educational and cultural institutions” in times of war—making it the cultural analog to the red cross. as shown by the enormous devastation of culturally significant buildings in both wwii and after, it has seldom been used.
a tangent: reading about the painter/philosopher behind the symbol, nicholas roerich may be worth your while.
if i ever have twins, i will name one dan and the other evil dan. it will be a social experiment.
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.
verb • to stick a piece of raw ginger (or a live eel) into a horse’s rectum so as to make it seem more lively when it is being sold.
note: sadly this word has fallen into disuse and has been replaced by the word gingering. should any of you out there in internetland need to describe a situation in which a live eel is administered as an equine suppository, please consider using feague in lieu of gingering.
i was at the dentist’s office for a follow up (from this incident) and as i was leaving, i was like “thanks dentist wilson.” huh? in the back of my mind i meant to say, “thanks dr. wilson.” it was awkward. for future reference, here is a list of occupations which get to have a specific honorific (note: list is not exhaustive):
why do these occupations get special treatment? in the future, i will only acknowledge addresses of: dilettante ganan.
today, i am going to switch the units of the ruler in both photoshop AND illustrator to centimeters. there is nothing worse than trying to mentally calculate one third of seven sixteenths of an inch.
by switching to metric units in my design programs, i predict that i will lead the u.s. to total dependence on foreign measurements by the spring of 2010. mark my word.
from now on, despite what emily post says, i will wait until my food is served before i move my napkin to my lap, thereby avoiding putting my silverware on a table laced with someone else’s hepatitis just for the sake of etiquette. the napkin is a prophlyactic that keeps my fork clean, why would i want to take it away and put the utensil that will wind up in my mouth directly on the table? answer: i wouldn’t.
my gas pump gripe is not about the rising price of oil. i’m a member of the bourgeois and these things don’t really concern me. nope, my gripe is over the word refuel.
the prefix re- means “again.” so when i talk about refueling my vehicle, (which is an awesome 1999 toyota corolla BTW) i am simply stating that i am fueling it again. BUT SO WHAT? why does the verb fuel get this special treatment? every time that i take a breath am i rebreathing? do i reeat each time that i put food in my mouth? no way.
it’s rad that english has a prefix that shows that an action is repeated, but it loses its value when the verb is done thousands of times. from now on, i will be fueling my corolla, and if someone asks me if i mean refuel, i am going to spray gas on him and step on his toes HARD.
