week 13: ptr

what is striking about the few ptr words in the oed is how many of them relate to the ladies. and of the ones that i chose to round out my most licentious fantasies (female captors, corruptors, and redeemers) none have the same ending (-ress, -rix, and -rice respectively). while you are using your word skillz® to try and figure out why this is, me and my captress will be playing such titillating games as “find the key,” “cavity search redux,” and “ooops, my prison grade soap has slipped from my grasp and landed on the mildewy floor, i guess i will bend down to retrieve it against my better judgment, oh my, is that footsteps that i hear behind me?”

captress · a female captor
corruptrix · a female corrupter
dissceptre · to deprive of kingly authority
redemtrice · a female redeemer

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this is a post in the ragbag word summer series. for this series, i search for words in the oh ee dee that contain a randomly generated string of 3 letters and report my findings. it is a thrill ride.

week 12: uia

quia timet translates to “because yo fears”. it is used in the science of law* as a way of saying that whatever dirty deed that yo is alleged to have committed, yo did so because yo’s life was in imminent danger.

raynor, you cannot being doing wheelies on your ducati motorcycle through the mall. quia timet, beyotch. raynor, it is forbidden to eat panda meat, especially with that horrid kc masterpiece™ bbq sauce. quia timet, beyotch. raynor, sideburns like that are illegal in 5 states. quia timet, beyotch, et cetry, et cetry.

alloquial · pertaining to the action of addressing others
biloquial · speaking with two different voices
equiæval · of equal age
exequial · pertaining to a funeral
gastriloquial · pertaining to a ventriloquist
reliquiæ · literary remains; unpublished or uncollected writings
sesquialter · a 3:2 proportion
sub-unguial · underneath the nail

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*raynor ganan is not (yet) licensed to practice law in your particular state or country. if you need actual legal advice from a bona fide attorney, the dudes that do their own commercials that run during all my children are usually the most qualified people on the planet with which to consult.

this is a post in the ragbag word summer series. for this series, i search for words in the oh ee dee that contain a randomly generated string of 3 letters and report my findings. it is a thrill ride.

week 11: cow

hahaha…..bovines. of the 500+ words in the oxford english dictionary that contain the letters see, oh, and double you, close to 90 per cent are related to that most mammalian of mammals: the cow.

why our ancestors chose the cow as the de facto provider of milk—a substance which a billion other species (even monotremes) are capable of producing—nobody knows for certain. but what i know beyond all doubt is that the dairy industry is the most sexist industry going. if you are a bull looking to find some work in the dairy biz, more power to you brother.

accoward · to make faint-hearted
contacowre · a quarrelsome contentious person
cow-cloom · a mixture of cow dung and clay
cowscape · a painting of a rural scene involving cows
mancowe · a baboon
scowbank · to loaf
scowles · of mine-workings, to cave in
worricow · a scarecrow; a hobgoblin

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this is a post in the ragbag word summer series. for this series, i search for words in the oh ee dee that contain a randomly generated string of 3 letters and report my findings. it is a thrill ride.

gone til september

unless you are a subscriber of my weekly email newsletter or a confirmed buddy of mine on orkut, you probably don’t know what it is that i do professionally—or even if there is a professional component to whatever it is that i do. there is, and because of a few non-disclosure agreements that i signed while buzzing on armagnac and mood stabilizers, i’m not entirely able make this part of my life explicit. but what i can tell you is that it has something to do with zinc, zinc isotopes and (my personal favourite) zinc radioisotopes.

so when a vast repository of naturally occurring ⁶⁴Zn was discovered in a ravine north of calgary, you can imagine my extreme ecstasy. now as far as the zinc biz goes, i’m relatively small potatoes, so i when the world’s preëminent zinc researcher called me on my iphone and was like, “raynor, will you help us study this motherfucking zinc?” i was like “dur!” and then tucked my erection into my waistband and started giving howie mandel fistbumps to everyone around me even total strangers and people who wear oversized t-shirts with giant corporate logos on them.

i now have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play with as much ⁶⁴Zn as my pockets will hold. to put this opportunity in perspective: most people, even the super handsome and even the most zinc-gifted don’t get an opportunity like this until they are 65 and want to retire (or are lured to the darkside of cadmium study). but there is one downside to this boon—because i will be working non-stop in northwestern canada for two months, regrettably, i don’t anticipate that i will be able to update the ragbag until september 1st.

what this means: i might twitter a tweet before then, i may email an email, but as far as ragbagging a ragbag, i honestly think that i will be too exhausted from all this zinc. plus: i’m not entirely certain that the information superhighway has come to the canadian wilderness yet. but don’t worry: you can still expect a word summer series entry to ooze out of this website fridayly—starting this friday with [spoiler alert] words that have the letters see, oh, and double you in them.

i look forward to september first when we can again engage in our one-sided raynorcentric dialogue and i can direct you to which scholarly zinc journal will be publishing my groundbreaking *fingers crossed* study on ⁶⁴Zn.

until that time gentlemen and curvy womenfolk, i will remain your handsome colleague,

raynor ganan

week 10: scl

when i mince about in my size 38 juicy sweatpants and a lime green snuggie that doubles as a bathrobe/smoking jacket, i fear (from the ghastly looks that i receive) that it’s time to buy some better fitting clothes. from my adventures in the oh ee dee, i now know that such clothing is said to transclout—to change one’s appearance from trim and neat to mis-shapen and untidy.

this word is a weird one, even for me. in fact it was only ever used once in 1647. here is the citation from the simple barber of aggawam:

it is beyond the ken of my understanding to conceive, how those women…disfigure themselves with such exotic garbs, as not only dismantles their native lovely lustre, but transclouts them into barnacle geese, ill-shapen-shotten-shell-fish…

day-yum! it seems that the author, nathanial ward, liked to coin his own words—words that the editors of the oh ee dee thought were worth preservation. in addition to transclout, ward gives us: exadverse, directly opposed; fool-fangle, a silly trifle; nudiustertian, the day before yesterday, and perquisquilian, thoroughly worthless.

here are a few more scl words. while you read over them, i will be transclouting myself with a mylar garbage bag.

crepuscle · twilight
disclander · public disgrace
esclandre · unpleasant notoriety
floscle · a flower
miscleping · misnaming
opuscle · a literary or musical work of a small size
rascle · to yawn
sclaff · in golf, a stroke which scrapes the ground before hitting the ball

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this is a post in the ragbag word summer series. for this series, i search for words in the oh ee dee that contain a randomly generated string of 3 letters and report my findings. it is a thrill ride.

here is a chart that i made, trying my darndest to represent the win-loss-draw relationship between the four teams in each of the eight world cup groups. if there were only three teams per group, this type of visualisation would be relatively straight forward. with four teams (and two spatial dimensions), things get a little dicey and the visualisation turns into a topological math problem. in the end, i wound up with this shield design based on a solution to a similar problem by john venn. i hope it is not overly confusing.

week 9: uno

what intrigues me most about diy prison culture is the same thing that intrigues me about the oulipo: that creativity can persevere, indeed it can flourish even under the most severe constraints—be they the inability to use multisyllabic words or the lack of access to metal forks.

some of the objects that jailbirds have been able to craft during their time in the big house are absolutely genius. but alcohol? is improvised prison wine even possible? like great scotch, pruno has many different methods of preparation and flavour notes, but the basic recipe is the same:

mix warm water, fruit juice, sugar, ketchup and moldy bread (for yeast!) in your prison toilet. cover, heat occasionally, wait a month et voilà, enough hoochy booze to inebriate a mastodon!

i was going to make a batch and force my handsome friends and orson to test it out. thankfully this has already been done. what i can do is give you the hook-up on some other words that have uno in them.

ceraunoscope · an apparatus used by the ancients to imitate thunder and lightning
chaunoprockt · wide-breeched
crunode · a point on a curve where it crosses itself; a node with two real tangents
cunopic · dog-faced, shameless
eunomic · law-abiding; socially well adjusted or ordered
lacunose · of a manuscript: full of gaps or hiatuses
lacunoso-rugose · wrinkled with irregular furrows
nounou · a wet nurse
unodorable · incapable of being smelled
unorn · of persons: plain in manners or appearance

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this is a post in the ragbag word summer series. for this series, i search for words in the oh ee dee that contain a randomly generated string of 3 letters and report my findings. it is a thrill ride.

for bestiary: a wulver, a mellow werewolf

the wulver is a kind of werewolf native to the shetland islands in scotland. he is not aggressive and won’t get up up in your business unless provoked. he keeps to himself, spending much of his day fishing from his favourite rock. from time to time he leaves fish on the window sills of poor families. he is the keanu reeves of werewolves.

week 8: syt

before you get all all hot and bothered over the fact that i picked sythe over the hilarious-looking assything, you should know that it isn’t actually pronounced assy-thing (it’s assyth + ing). sythe on the other hand, has not one but two great definitions. besides the one that i went with, there is also, “fortune on a journey.”

assything · the giving of satisfaction for an offence
busyty · fussiness
epassyterotically · one after another
sythyche · an oath meaning “may i prosper!”

if you still think that i made the wrong choice, i will thumb wrestle you all epassyterotically. sythyche!

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this is a post in the ragbag word summer series. for this series, i search for words in the oh ee dee that contain a randomly generated string of 3 letters and report my findings. it is a thrill ride.

previous entries have been: acyrological (incorrect in use of words), lobcock (a blundering fool), crwth (an ancient celtic violin), pfuiteufel (an exclamation of contempt or disgust), tenebrio (one who lurks in the dark), agathokakological (composed of good and evil), and ville lumière (an exciting modern city).

turtle-ka-bob

if you are like me and have a pet turtle and haven’t gone shopping for groceries since parsnips were in season, this recipe for turtle (from the indian ocean island of mauritius) may come in handy:

Skewered Turtle Meat

Marinate 1-inch cubes of turtle meat in lemon juice, salt, crushed garlic, and a little oil. Alternate on skewers with pieces of turtle liver and grill over charcoal. Serve with boiled turtle eggs, a hot chutney sauce, and rice.

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disclaimer: i did not actually eat this recipe. i don’t really like rice, so i served the turtle meat on toast points instead.
from: unmentionable cuisine (1979) by calvin schwabe