It annoys me that Monty Python is a pervasive social reference in my head. Nothing against Monty Python; god knows, they’ve made me laugh to the point of apoplexy many times. But now I can’t use the phrase “the means of production” without the image of Karl Marx on a game-show panel popping into my head. In my Saturday morning “Philosophy Lite” course yesterday, the mention of “Emmanual Kant” made me have to turn a giggle into a cough. (It is not cool to laugh at the name “Emmanual Kant” during a philosophy lecture.)
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From the Bibliophile Bookshelf. A naming of parts: SEXTODECIMO paging, MULLing the TEXT-BLOCK, the FLY TITLE page…all of which would be boring even to a book geek like me if it weren’t for gems of trivia and humour: “In the previous centuries, some people who were more financially well off than others, preferred to pick their bindings, for this purpose some books were sold in WRAPS. A paper cover was wrapped around the TEXT-BLOCK. Once the book was sold, the new owner could deliver it to his favorite binder and have it bound to suit his library’s decor; Blue or plaid, or faux gold lame’ alligator.” “SPINE, BOARDS, MULL, HINGES, ‘ENDPAPERS’, SIGNATURES, LEAVES, WORDS….words…words…mon dieux! we forgot the words! I thought you had them! ARGH!!” |
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Feb 262005
Strunk and White – attacked! How to have an eight-day week!
roses are #0000FF
violets are #FF0000
Stroop’s effect
is all in your head
Feb 252005
Everybody knows about this. Except everyone that doesn’t know about it, and everyone else who’s forgotten it:
- most nouns can be adjectived: “lame” -> “lameitude”, “cruft -> cruftitude”
- all nouns can be verbed: “all nouns can be verbed”
- all verbs can be nouned: “hack” -> “hackification”, “disgust” -> “disgustitude”
…and the plural of “mongoose” should be “polygoose”.
Take that, David Foster Wallace – oops, too bad your screed against evolutionary grammar is only available via pulpware.
Seek (weird newspaper names) and ye shall find: The Unterrified Democrat (Linn, Missouri), The Daily Boomerang (Laramie, Wyoming), and the Birmingham Eccentric.
From a word geek’s POV, the Bloomington-Normal (Illinois) Pantagraph gets special mention: “derived from the Greek words panta and grapho, meaning ‘write all things.’ Charles Merriman was co-owner of The Intelligencer when, in 1853, he changed its name to The Pantagraph as ‘a perpetual injunction upon its editors to dip their pens fearlessly into all matters of human interest.’”
(Thanks to Eric Shackle’s EBook.)
(“Bloomington-Normal, Illinois”? The American counterpart to “Standard, Alberta”, I guess.)
Now here I was thinking “Intelligencer” (as in the “The Seattle Post-Intelligencer”) was an example that the drive to create silly words like “prioritizer” has a long and ignoble history. In fact, an intelligencer is:
- one who conveys news or information
- a secret agent, an informer, or a spy
… according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.
(Ooooooh, a secret agent…last night I re-saw “La Femme Nikita” – I want to be an underwear-clad innocent-looking chick sitting on the edge of a bathtub somewhere in Vienna, concealing a big (big!) gun under the suds.)
…okay, okay, focus. This whole newspaper thing might just be another proof that time enshrines usage, both bad and good.
I wonder what other weird old newspaper names might be lurking out there?
Well, at least it’s within the realm of international tolerance.
From a tag on a pair of trousers:
“STRETCH FABRIC WE USED FOR REALIZING THIS GARMENT DUE TO ITS OWN PECULIARITY, COULD CAUSE FITTING AND LOOK MODIFICATION TO BE CONSIDERED WITHIN INTERNATIONAL TOLERANCE.”