Category Archives: fun

An Introduction to Sclgnqi: Pronunciation Guide

Posted on February 3, 2011 | 1 comment

Nearly a decade ago, as an exercise in what my wife would undoubtedly call “geek humour,” I began writing an introduction to an invented language, Sclgnqi. I didn’t get very far, but I did complete the pronunciation guide. I dug it up to quote from for my word tasting note on sternutatory. Herewith I present it in entirety, for those whose sense of humour is as frankly odd and language-geeky as mine can be. It’s not polished or revised. So what. You paid how much to read this?

Before your have a klagnat’s hope of speaking the most beautiful, profound and logical language in the world, you must learn how to pronounce it. As you have been all your life speaking this flabby worm of a language English, this will take practice. You will never be able to walk down the street in Qhalgnna unless you practice the following sounds for three hours a day for at least two years: Continue reading →

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My veil of tears: an eggcorn poem

Posted on June 2, 2010 | 13 comments

Herewith a poem (and following note) from my book Songs of Love and Grammar, which will be forthcoming if and when I find a publisher or give up and publish it myself with an on-demand web publisher [EDIT: buy it at lulu.com]. The poem is about eggcorns. What are they? Read on…

My veil of tears

Oh, woeth me! I’ve fallen hard,
hosted by my own petard!
In one fowl swoop, my just desserts
have been served up – and, boy, it hurts!
I have betrayed my love, but plead
compulsion by deep-seeded need!
Whole-scale short-sided wrecklessness
has got me in an awful mess.
My Jane was straight-laced; I was cursed,
chalk-full of need to slack my thirst.
Although our lives were going fine,
I just couldn’t tow the line.
When on a small site-seeing tour,
I took a pretty southmore’s lure:
jar-dropping beauty, looks to kill –
with baited breath I stood stalk still.
“I have a view that’s quite unique,”
she said. “Let’s go and sneak a peak.”
Why did I heed her beckon call?
Free reign of passions leads to fall,
but what I thought led straight to hell:
“She’ll tie me over – my as well!”
We didn’t buy our time that night;
we cut straight to the cheese on sight –
I won’t mix words: our will to dare
just grew like top seed then and there.
As if possessed of slight of hand,
in never regions we did land
(to name a view would be too course
and put the cat before the horse).
When all was done, I had the sense
I’d face cognitive dissidence,
but thought I’d pawn off bold-faced lies.
At last I had to realize
my power mower was not one-of
when I got news that caused my love –
a note a few months later: “Soon your
southmore will produce a junior.”
I got a mindgrain; I could see
a storm in the offering for me.
My Jane was cued in, bye and bye,
and she raised up a human cry
in a high dungeon. “You’ve done wrongs!
Let’s go at it, hammer and thongs!
The chickens have come home to roast!
I won’t lie doormat now! Your toast!”
She caused a raucous with abuse
and anger I could not diffuse.
Her words were nasty – so profound,
my vocal chords can’t make the sound.
She was a bowl in a china shop,
beyond the pail. I said, “Please stop!
The dye is cast! It’s not the place
to cut off your nose despite your face!
Don’t get your nipples in a twist!
You give me short shift! I insist
I’m utterly beyond approach!
Don’t treat me like a mere cockroach!”
She cried, “My cause for consternation
is not a pigment of the imagination!
There’s a bi-product of your lust!
Get out! You fill me with disgust!”
The point was mute; my chance was past,
so I gave up the goat at last.
Fate accompli, forgotten conclusion –
my morays were my dissolution.
And so, without further adieu,
here’s some advice that’s trite and true:
It would be who of you to trust your gut;
nip wayward passions in the butt.
Don’t sow your wild oaks around –
the eggcorns might just bring you down.

An eggcorn is a misconstrual of a word or phrase on the basis of an inaccurate (but seemingly sensible) analysis of its parts or origins. It uses other existing words or word parts in place of the originals. The term eggcorn is of course one such – the word should be acorn. The six dozen eggcorns in this poem have all been observed “in the wild” – used by real people in earnest, not as jokes (see eggcorns.lascribe.net). The eggcorns (and their proper forms) are veil of tears (vale of tears), woeth me (woe is me), hosted by my own petard (hoist with my own petard), one fowl swoop (one fell swoop), just desserts (just deserts), deep-seeded (deep-seated), whole-scale (wholesale), short-sided (short-sighted), wrecklessness (recklessness), straight-laced (strait-laced), chalk-full (chock full), slack my thirst (slake my thirst), tow the line (toe the line), site-seeing (sightseeing), southmore (sophomore), jar-dropping (jaw-dropping), baited breath (bated breath), stalk still (stock still), sneak a peak (sneak a peek), beckon call (beck and call), free reign (free rein), tie me over (tide me over), my as well (might as well), buy our time (bide our time), cut to the cheese (cut to the chase), mix words (mince words), grew like top seed (grew like Topsy), slight of hand (sleight of hand), never regions (nether regions), to name a view (to name a few), course (coarse), put the cat before the horse (put the cart before the horse), cognitive dissidence (cognitive dissonance), pawn off (palm off), bold-faced lies (bald-faced lies), power mower (paramour), one-of (one-off), caused (cost), mindgrain (migraine), in the offering (in the offing), cued in (clued in), bye and bye (by and by), human cry (hue and cry), high dungeon (high dudgeon), hammer and thongs (hammer and tongs), come home to roast (come home to roost), lie doormat (lie dormant), your toast (you’re toast), a raucous (a ruckus), diffuse (defuse), profound (profane), vocal chords (vocal cords), bowl in a china shop (bull in a china shop), beyond the pail (beyond the pale), the dye is cast (the die is cast), cut off your nose despite your face (cut off your nose to spite your face), don’t get your nipples in a twist (don’t get your knickers in a twist), short shift (short shrift), beyond approach (beyond reproach), a pigment of the imagination (a figment of the imagination), bi-product (by-product), the point was mute (the point was moot), gave up the goat (gave up the ghost), fate accompli (fait accompli), forgotten conclusion (foregone conclusion), morays (mores), without further adieu (without further ado), trite and true (tried and true), be who of you (behoove you), nip in the butt (nip in the bud), sow your wild oaks (sow your wild oats), and of course  eggcorns (acorns).

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The onesies

Posted on December 31, 2009 | 1 comment

There’s been a lot of discussion about what to call the decade just ending.* But never mind that. What about the decade just about to start, the set of ten years with 1 as the third digit? The one that starts with the last year of the first decade of the third millennium and ends with the second-last year of the second decade of the third millennium? I wish to make a formal proposal: let’s call it the onesies.

Does that sound like something a baby would wear? Yup. Good. After you made your oh-ohs (or done your naughties), you can get in your onesies. Seems to suit the general trend of the world. The infancy of a new millennium… hopefully the best one yet.

I find that onesies is also another name for the game I know as jacks. That’s good: playing pickup while trying to catch the bouncing ball.

And if you’re saying “Why not the teens?” my answer is that the first three years (10, 11, 12) aren’t teens. The teens are a set of seven years – a septennium.

* No, I don’t mean the first decade of the 21st century, which ends a year from now; I mean the decade after the nineties, which overlaps 9 years with the first decade of the 20th century. Yes, we can do that (see “When does the new decade begin?“). I personally prefer the oh-ohs. But the naughties is also good. Some people like to use the spelling the noughties for distinction. I prefer the naughties precisely because of the pun! I don’t like the aughties not only because it’s not such a good pun (even if you spell it the oughties) but because aught originally, and still also, means “something” and came to mean “nothing” just by confusion (a naught –> an aught).

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Email joke writers, please read this

Posted on November 21, 2009 | 8 comments

I receive and forward a lot of email jokes. I’m pretty well known among my friends for being a nexus for humour. But in my years of reading emailed jokes, I have observed that there are many people out there who really don’t understand how to tell a joke well. (Worse, if I receive a joke several times over the course of a few years, it typically gets more and more ruined each time I get it – people are destroying it with their unneeded and misguided additions.) I’ve had to edit quite a few just to un-kill them. So I’ve decided to give some advice for those who want to write down some joke they recently heard to send around. Please read this and heed these pointers if you want to be funny. These are not tut-tutting po-faced rules! They are practical advice based on experience. The entire point is to be funnier.

Continue reading →

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Arcadia

Posted on September 16, 2009 | 11 comments

My abode is a serene island of peace and literature in the sky; looking north from my desk, where I write this while eating Cajun spice potato chips, I can see late-night office tower lights winking off and on: the vertical constellations of urban troglodytes. Looking past my poinsettia and aphelandra, out another window I can see Berczy Park. Crossing to the south side of my heavenly box, I can see Tommy Thompson Park, a spit of land in the lake turned into a nature preserve, crumbling blocks of construction detritus slowly being reclaimed by encroaching nature and birds, so many birds. Three times three times three floors down from my downtown view, the massive ark of my building meets the street with massive arches: an arcade running the length of our frontage and that of the neighbouring hotel, providing not only shelter from weather but an exceedingly popular spot for nuptial photography. I feel that I live in a most beautiful location.

Ah, et in Arcadia ego, as Nicolas Poussin put it. Well, now, admittedly, he put it on a tomb, a crumbling cube of stone in the midst of nature, and there remains debate on to whom it was dedicated or directed, and for that matter exactly what the phrase was saying – well-formed but ambiguous Latin that it is. It has been used by some as a key to cryptic constructions, fanciful mysteries involving blood and grails. But the scene in Poussin’s painting is reminiscent of the Arcadian: idyllic, pastoral, even if contrasted by Poussin with death. Arcadia has long been idealized – since Virgil’s Eclogues – as that unspoiled world of nature, home to shepherds in lambskin breechclouts bearing Pan pipes, and nary a structure in sight – certainly not stone arches, nor a fortiori entertainment arcades. So how may I say that I, too, am in Arcadia?

First, let us place Arcadia on a map. It is the heart of that nursery of eponyms, Peloponnesus, north of Laconia (home of the laconic and spartan Spartans), west of Argos (who actually play west of where I live, in the whilom Skydome), southwest of Corinth, south of Achaia (a name you may have seen on bottles of wine) and north of Kalamata (a name you’ll know from jars of olives). I note that this archetypically bucolic locale has, ironically, a town in it named Megalopoli – the first town in Arcadia, built in 371 BC, which gained its name by its growth (it had a theatre that seated 20,000, more than twice the town’s present-day population).

Arcadia, home turf of Pan, was said in myth to have been named after its first king, Arcas. His mother, Callisto (from Greek Kallisté, “most beautiful”), was a nymph, one of many maids seduced by Zeus; for this, her reward – aside from pregnancy – was not marriage but to be turned into a bear by Hera. She and her son now occupy the heavens as the Great Bear (Greek Arktos) and Little Bear (Greek Arkas). The Great Bear is the cynosure that points to Polaris, that sign of sure north and marker of the Arctic. (Yes, that’s where arctic comes from: the Greek “bear,” and this bear in particular.)

The idealization of Arcadia in idylls – in literature of Roman and Renaissance times, and into the neoclassical revival – made it a byword for sylvan beauty, so that Giovanni da Verrazano (he of the New York narrows between Brooklyn and Staten Island) applied it to the Atlantic coast north of Virginia. The region so designated crept northwards, but en route lost its r. It came to name a national park in Maine and, more importantly, a whole realm of New France in the Maritimes, formally established as Acadia in 1604, a third of a century before Poussin’s famous painting. And then, when in 1755 the British forced expulsion of those who would not swear fealty to the crown, some 7000 moved south to a new French enclave in a warmer area, and Acadian was further eroded and respelled to Cajun. And, as we know, the megalopolis of the Cajuns, New Orleans, though on the Gulf coast, nearly suffered the fate of Atlantis.

Arcadia also gave its name to a man named Arkadios, who became a saint of the Orthodox tradition. Thanks to him, there are many Russian men now named Arkady; one may think of Arkady Islaev, the owner of a country estate in Ivan Turgenev’s play A Month in the Country (jealous husband of a younger wife, who was bored out in the boondocks), and Arkady Renko, the protagonist in Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park, which takes its name from a Moscow amusement park.

Now, without assailing you with an asterism of asterisks, I leave it to you to connect the dots. How can my parallelepiped sans Pan pipes, my urbs et orbis, my tower of silence above the madding megalopolis, my words and plants perched between park and park, with stars to the north and water to the south, how can it be Arcadia without aid of a car? But how could it be anything but?

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Nothing to chauffeur a classiomatic

Posted on February 21, 2009 | 64 comments

One of my favourite records (now CDs) of all time is Duran Duran’s Rio. I’ve listened to it countless times, and almost all of those times on speakers, not headphones, until recently, when I started listening to music at work in the afternoon to keep from getting drowsy.

Towards the end of the last track, “The Chauffeur,” there’s some speech and other sounds. The speech is in a resonant male voice with a somewhat toasty British accent. For years I really didn’t know what the voice was saying. You can’t tell that well over speakers, especially with the pan pipes, synthesizer and especially drums going all at the same time. I amused myself imagining the most audible bit was “It’s Maury Niska-Nagay, and Maury’s… covered in shit.” I knew, of course, that that certainly wasn’t it, though there were sounds of that general order.

But recently, listening to it on headphones, I thought, “No, really, what is that dude saying?” Continue reading →

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The Correction of Josef Stalin

Posted on December 2, 2008 | 1 comment

A blast from a few years ago, worth posting now that I remember it…

A colleague noted the following:

The Moscow Times notes, in a review of Robert Service’s Stalin: A Biography, that “not only was [Stalin] an intellectual, he was a compulsive and professional editor who corrected any manuscript that crossed his desk for style and grammar as well as for ideology.”

My response:

Robert Service wrote a biography of Stalin? I must have missed that one…

There are strange things done ‘neath the Soviet sun
By collective and komsomol…
The GULag trails have their secret tales
Of the once-proud kulak’s fall…
The Moscow nights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest my tovarishch knows
Was that night in the air of the great Red Square
That Stalin corrected my prose.

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silly place name limericks

Posted on November 20, 2008 | 2 comments

These limericks are all based on dual versions of well-known place names (well, except for one, which uses a disjunction between spelling and pronunciation). You read the one and say the other…

Thanks to Antonia Morton for inspiring me.

A lively young miss from Bombay
Sent a note to her beau to combay.
She said, “Have a look –
I’ve learned how to cook!”
But she burned him while making flumbai.

A man with a flat in Peking
Was forever inclined to reking.
“The bathtub is leijing!
The neighbours are beijing!
This place is all just gilded ceking!”

A teak cutter living in Myanmar
Came down with quite bad sclerodyanmar.
He found it a bon
To lie low in Yangon
Getting rubbed by a tart named Miss Yanmar.

Two newlyweds visited Ho Chi Minh City,
But the bride soon asked, “Where’s my go chi minh city?”
He was found with another.
Quoth she, “I’m gone to mother!
I just can’t let bo chi monh citys be bo chi minh city!”

A young lass who lived in Krung Thep
Went out one fine night for a wep.
She soon happened bhai
Her Thai sweetie-phai
And they stayed up until three o’clep.

A rude dude who visited Kalaallit Nunaat
Declared, “This is such an obsalallit nunaat!
Just come up to Godthab
And have a quick lodthab!
Next time I’ll just go to maralaallit nunaat!”

A Philly lass known to be fruylkill
Was taking a walk by the Schuylkill.
She picked up a dollow
Stashed away in a hollow –
Which she’d found through a map search on Guylkill.

A moocher who hung out in Báile Atha Cliath
Said “I surely don’t mean to be tràile atha cliath;
Begorrah, ’tis true,
I ate all your stew,
But I couldn’t just let it sit dàile atha cliath.”

Late addition: two more on pronunciation:

There once was a fellow from Worcester
Who had slept with a school-friend’s sorcester.
He explained to his mate,
“She’s so saucy and great,
Man, I’m sorry – I couldn’t resorcester!”

A jaunty young fellow from Cirencester
Saw a pretty lass and blew a kirencester,
But the poor silly fool
Was so gobsmacked with drool
That he just managed to spit and hirencester.

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let comma heads, as it were, prevail

Posted on August 30, 2008 | Leave a comment

A colleague mentioned another colleague’s having found a sentence with sixteen commas in it – “what may have been a record.” Well, who can pass up a challenge like that? Continue reading →

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