July 2010
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June 2010
23 posts
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the cost of a grill in the year 600
i had to go back to the salon this morning because my bro-zilian wax didn’t take. and while mai ly poured boiling wax over gonads, i pored through more medieval royal decrees. this time it was æthelberht of kent’s laws from the year 600, the earliest written code in any germanic language.
æthelberht’s code established a series of fines for all kinds of personal injuries. here is...
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monopoly men
i was getting a bro-zilian wax yesterday in preparation for the big brazil v. chee-lay soccer match and reading through tudor-era royal charters when i came across a few interesting deets. apparently, the monarch had the power to grant legal monopolies to a group of her cronies. thus, queen elizabeth could—say—give bill gates an exclusive license for making operating systems or allow mark cuban to...
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excerpts from the 1904 edition of "a dictionary of...
a man should remove his hat in a parlor-car, but not in a day coach.
toothpicks should not be used in public. if necessity requires it, raise the hand over the mouth, with the hand behind it, using the toothpick as quickly as possible.
salted nuts are eaten with the fingers.
smoking a pipe in the street is becoming more common. it is poor taste, however on a fashionable street.
men are not...
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words wholly unrelated
dog & dog
the word for dog in mbarbaram, a recently extinct australian aboriginal language, is dog. it is pronounced the same way as in english yet it is not a loanword—it is completely coincidental.
given the limited number of sounds that can be made with one’s mouth, the amount of basic words in any given language, and the 3.2 million languages currently spoken in our solar system,...
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hanno the navigator and the wild people of the...
way the heck back in five hundred bee cee (or thereabouts) hanno the navigator, a carthaginian explorer set sail for the african coast to see what there was to be seen. mostly it was boring trees and ugly beaches. occasionally, he would come across some dismal marshes. but then things began to get juicy. here is his account from two point five thousand years before you were born:
Following the...
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the great day
my niece, who is a famous 2nd grade novelist, just sent me her latest memoir. it’s called the great day and its virtuosic twist at the end is an m. night shyamalan movie waiting to happen.
the great day (2010)
the date is may 25. one day i was having a horrible, bad yucky day! it was may 24. i was walking in the grass. i sprained my ankle. “ouch!” i screamed.
i put a...
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hanging with hipsters
them: the party tonight is going to be so epic. them: the way he slipped in the grass was an epic fail. them: i just got an epic text. them: this milkshake is epic. me: the nibelungenlied and orlando furioso are so epic, amirite? and the shāhnāmeh, that’s about as epic as it gets. ha ha ha, i’m such a kidder. them: who invited this guy?
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words wholly unrelated
crayfish & fish
let us add another deceptively named animal to our list—for the crayfish is not a fish (nor a crayon), it is the crustiest crustacean of them all. crayfish and crawfish come from the old french escrevisse which means “little crab.” the word fish on the other hand, comes to us all the way from the pie language spoken by the pie people of the cenozoic era.
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milk and red curry paste
with my eagerness to tell you about my weekend double entendre (which did not pan out the way that i had hoped) i forgot to mention another peculiar interaction that happened at orson’s memorial day bbq.
i typically bring either a bottle of reichsgraf von kesselstatt riesling or a jar of kool-aid dills with me to summer bee bee ques but orson is a control freak with unconventional tastes....
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i'm not sure what to do with this information...
…so i will leave it in your capable hands.
fardingdeale · a portion of land worth a ¼ penny a year
obolate · a portion of land worth a ½ penny a year
denariate · a portion of land worth 1 penny a year
solidate · a portion of land worth 1 shilling a year
librate · a portion of land worth 1 pound a year
while this system is seemingly all neat and tidy, there is certainly some...
May 2010
23 posts
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ragbag miscellany
none of the 2,000 wikipedia tabs that are still open in my netscape browser window merit their own post. but perhaps if i aggregate them into a larger collection they may somehow combine like voltron robots into something greater than the sum of their parts.
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gangkhar puensum is the world’s 40th highest mountain. more importantly, it’s also the world’s highest unclimbed...
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echo, echo
the echo verse is an ancient form of poetry based on wordplay. in it, a speaker in a quandary shouts out his questions to the nymph echo who then responds by repeating the last few syllables in a way that seems to answer his queries. while many dismiss the form as false wit (at best and nonsense at worst), several of history’s greatest writers have composed echo verses. to namedrop a few:...
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jehovah & yhwh
i don’t mean to get all religious on you BUT the name jehovah and the sacred tetragrammaton are basically the same name. once yhwh (pronounced yahweh thesedays) is transliterated to english “jhvh” and its vowels are restored, pretso change-o yhwh becomes jehovah.
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two bizarre epitaphs
this one from victorian england:
Here lies Lady O’ Looney, Great niece of Burke, commonly called “The Sublime.” She was bland, passionate, and deeply religious; Also she painted in water colors, And sent several pictures to the Exhibition, She was first cousin of Lady Jones, And of such is the kingdom of Heaven
and this one from gold rush-era california:
Here lies the...
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words wholly related
bowel & pudding
gasp! these words don’t even share any letters and their meanings have no overlap. could my favourite butterscotch treat and the part of my body that i use to dispatch it actually come from a common word? the answer is yes—they both come from the latin word for sausage, botulus.
the bowel (from french boel) was said to resemble a little sausage and before pudding (from...
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how to play "badger in the bag"
Pwyll turned up the sides of the bag, so that Gwawl was over his head in it…and as they came in, every one of Pwyll’s knights struck a blow upon the bag, and asked, “What is here?” “A Badger,” said they. And in this manner they played, each of them striking the bag, either with his foot or with a staff. And thus played they with the bag. Every one as he came in asked, “What game are you playing...
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proof that boring linguistics papers are not...
i know what you’re thinking. you’re thinking that boring linguistics papers are always boring. but it ain’t always so, slacker! as evidence, i submit the paper* on the aforementioned adverbial prefixes in klamath. here, scott delancy discusses the prefix sg- (act with the penis) as it appears in several klamath myths.
the concluding line is the best line that ever appeared in...
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body parts of speech
one of the more compelling reasons to study another language is so we can learn how to say dirty things to people who aren’t familiar with it. for this, the native american language of klamath is especially well-suited.
klamath has a peculiar system of bodily adverbial affixes which is a ñerd’s way of saying that speakers of klamath can jam a prefix onto a verb to show which body part...
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April 2010
32 posts
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