Did you ever notice that some stuttering is intentional? You might even do it yourself to emphasize a point, allow the listener time to think, or repeat a syllable because someone just coughed and you may not have been heard at least those are my theories. I think I catch myself doing it occasionally. It could just be learned from hearing others though.
Category: language
GMSP, dude!
There are all those common abbreviations you see on the internet because the full phrases would be too long to type out all the time. LOL, BRB, AFK, ROFLDOG, etc. The likeliness that someone will use one of these abbreviations is inversely proportional to the likeliness that the recipient will understand it. Then you have to explain it, which takes longer than it would have to just type the phrase in the first place. I’ve come up with my own. GMSP. Give Me Some Pie. You are free to use it. Why do I get the feeling you’re not going to?
He's talking about fonts! Unsubscribe!
Serifs are the little hooks and barbs on some fonts. I always figured it was a silly idea. Adding decorative stuff to letters would make them harder to read, you’d think. Wikipedia claims that this is true on computer monitors, but they claim that those extra thingies somehow help readability in printed media. I don’t get it. This guy looked at the issue of serif vs. sans serif and decided it doesn’t make much difference. I think I’d side with the sans serifarians. Trust me. I know nothing about typography. While on the subject, typography seems to have a lot of unnecessarily complicated terms. If we changed “serif” to “fonts with hangy things” and “sans serif” to “clean fonts”, it’d put an end to the problem right there. If you’re interested in learning more about fonts, you’re a very dull person.
Auwe!
In Lilo and Stitch, the Hawaiian dude says, “auwe!” (He’s voiced by Jason Lee, who played Bruce Lee in a movie not to be confused with Brandon Lee who was Bruce Lee’s son.) Anyway, I liked the word so I looked it up. It means something like, “oh no!” or “what?!!”
Smurfing and Wikipedia
What’s with Wikipedia’s fascination with non-standard units? Mebibyte instead of the megabyte. CE instead of AD. Why don’t they just name the units after themselves? The wikibyte and Anno Wiki. They could rename Esperanto to Wikianto and adopt it as their official language for all articles. Nobody would understand it, but at least it would be impartial.
aluminium
Another word to add to that list of surprisingly correct variations…Aluminium is the British spelling of the word and is apparently a correct variation. I wondered why British people added that extra “i” when saying it. Now ya know.
It ain't nucular science
Jeremy and I were chatting about odd pronunciations of some words
all surprisingly legitimate according to dictionary.com. Here are some of them and who I’ve heard saying them.
“diabetis” — Wilfred Brimley in those infomercials
“jigawatt” — Doc from Back to the Future, of course
and I think my grampa too.
“robut” — a coworker who knows everything there is to know about 50s electronics as well as some 50s sci-fi movie
I was reading that the Vietnamese name, “Nguyen” is pronounced “win”. I looked it up on the net and it seems to be even more subtle than that. Lesson learned don’t guess at how to pronounce something at a Vietnamese restaurant just order the number.
I installed Remote Calendars to sync between Outlook at work and my google calendar. Convenient! I noticed that Google calendar has the ability to text message your cellphone for reminders.
UPDATE: Watch it…I’ve somehow trashed my Outlook Calendar with this. If you do not create a new Outlook folder to receive the Google calendar, you will crush your existing Outlook Calendar in a sync!
humuhumunukunukuapua?a
My coworker was remembering a song that mentions a Hawaiian fish called the humuhumunukunukuapua?a. Its long name probably keeps it off the menu.
non-word of the day
From dictionary.com:
Irregardless is a word that many mistakenly believe to be correct usage in formal style, when in fact it is used chiefly in nonstandard speech or casual writing. Coined in the United States in the early 20th century, it has met with a blizzard of condemnation for being an improper yoking of irrespective and regardless and for the logical absurdity of combining the negative ir- prefix and -less suffix in a single term. Although one might reasonably argue that it is no different from words with redundant affixes like debone and unravel, it has been considered a blunder for decades and will probably continue to be so.