hot wet meat (this is not a misleading title)

the dictionary of abbreviations and contractions commonly used in general mercantile transactions (1902) is about as thrilling as it sounds, which is a very poetic way of saying that it is not thrilling at all. however, in this age where we are nickel-and-dimed for each text message that we transmit through our cellular phones, where the amount of letters in our exceedingly clever tweets are limited by the man, and where all our business is conducted in online auction sites in the span of microseconds—mercantile abbreviations may not be such a bad thing. to get you started in your txts, tweets, and e-trades, here are a few f-business abbreviations:

Fa. … … Florida
fcy … … fancy
f.e. … … for example
f.g. … … fully good
f.i. … … for instance
fir. … … firkin
f.i.t. … … free of income tax
Fl. & st. … Florins and stevers
f/o … … firm offer
folg. … … following
f.p. … … fully paid
‘Frisco … San Francisco 

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 is acting on it.

tqiq- for instance, means “to act with the elbow”. adding it to the verb t’ac (to stretch) yields the preposterous word histqatca which translates to “fight by stretching the other’s mouth with an elbow.”

here are a few more:

d- with the hands
y- with the foot
qb- with the mouth
loc- with the knee
tshoq- with the buttocks
sg- with the penis

stealing these and using them in english (which is what english does best) could be quite useful as in the following imagined conversation:

orson o’riley: i was jostled in the subway this morning.
crepuscular ray: were you djostled or locjostled?
oo: actually, i was tshoqjostled.
cr: you have brought shame on our house that cannot be absolved with 1,000 bars of soap.

__

source: “lexical prefixes and the bipartite stem construction in klamath” by scott delancey, international journal of american linguistics, (january 1999).

frequentative flyers

it turns out that the guy who was sitting next to me on my æroplane was studying linguistics so i axed him what was the hawt new thing in his field that gave him wood every time he thought about it. he didn’t answer me outright but he did tell me a little bit about frequentatives.

according to him, there are some languages (finnish, lithuanian, and turkish) that can slap a suffix on a verb to show that that the verb happens not once, not twice, but frequently. eg. the turkish word anlat means “to recite,” you can stick a -gelmek up in there to make anlatagelmek which means “to be reciting repetitively.” he then gave me a few boring examples in finno-ugric languages and i was about to slip on my blublockers and tune him out when he pinched me hard and said, “raynor, you dope. english has frequentatives too!”

when all the dust settled, he showed me that the english suffix -le is actually an ancient morpheme that allows english speakers to construct their own frequentatives. consider:

• when something frequently sparks, it sparkles.
• i can be dazed once but when i am dazed continuously, i am dazzled.
• if an object cracks without stopping, it crackles.
• and so on with nest/nestle, crumb/crumble, tramp/trample, and wrest/wrestle. 
• of additional interest is how some words like fondle, prattle, and scuttle preserve the verbs fond, prate, and scud which passed out of english usage many æons ago.
• you can find out more on this subject by flyle-ing on delta and sittle-ing next to the dude that i sat next to or by visitle-ing the frequentative wikipedia page here.

it’s that time again

ever since my casio® digital watch got stuck on the 24-hour clock, so did i. like the american military (and everyone else in the world (including the portugese)) i dig its clarity°. one thing that i have always found confusing is determing if noon is 12:00 am or 12:00 pm. according to sticklers—it isn’t either. noon is the ONLY time on the dial that is neither before nor after midday—it IS midday.

stylewise, if it is not possible to write noon, a preferred way to note this time in the 12-hour system is:

12:00 m.

no joke.

yo looks like a freak

here is some interesting news about kids in baltimore [deflator alert: it has nothing to do with the wire or omar little]. it concerns a grass-roots trend of adopting yo as a gender neutral pronoun.

[The] Street term ‘Yo’ is being used by kids as a gender-neutral replacement for ‘he’ and ‘she’, according to researchers.

Language experts in the US say since at least 2004 students have been saying “yo” as a substitute for gender specific pronouns and the trend is growing. The study, published in this week’s New Scientist, found middle-school and high-school students in Baltimore, Maryland, used the word in sentences such as, “Yo put his foot up” and “Yo looks like a freak”.

Dennis Baron, a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has written extensively about the failure of invented words that have not been picked up as pronoun substitutes. He described the emergence of “yo” as significant because it has not been planted and was a grass-roots phenomenon.
He said: “Most of the gender-neutral pronouns are artificial coinages that are then marketed - unsuccessfully - to users”.

i have not been this jazzed up from the linguistic inventions of children since the genesis of nicaraguan sign language. but then i read the following line WHICH TOTALLY BLEW MY BUZZ:

feminist scholar Brenda Wrigley said “yo” sounds “crass and disrespectful. It is something a younger person would shout down the street as a greeting, but not something I’d like to see used in writing.”

as far as i am concerned: this world needs more innovative baltimorean teenagers and fewer feminist scholar brenda wrigleys.

[source]

tomorrow’s to-do list

work the word, ostrobogulous into a conversation of any type. it is used to describe something that is “bizarre, unusual, or interesting.”

if there is such a thing as mouthfeel for word pronunciation, ostrobogulous would rank up there with ineluctable.

diæresis pieces

i think that we can all agree that english is a pretty bitching language and i don’t want to be overly diacritical, but i amn’t alone in wishing that english orthography contained at least a few more interesting characters.

here is a wikipedia list of the small number of english words that actually have diacritical marks. most of these are loan words from klingon and old elvis but a few words like reëlect and blessèd° are ACTUALLY NATIVE ENGLISH WORDS WITH DIACRITICS.

that stooopid grave accent on blessèd is stooopid and deserves to be forgotten about but the diæresis (NOT to be confused with its germanic doppelgänger, the umlaut) on reëlect must be preserved at all costs. and that is why i am instituting this usage as the ragbag house style (i hear that the new yorker may be copycatting me in this nostalgic hypercorrection). here is a list of english language words that are blinged out in diæreses:

• boötes
• continuüm
• coöperate [-ion, -ive]
• coöpt
• coördinate [-ed, -ing, -ion, -or, -ors]
• daïs
• naïf
• naïve
• naïveté
• faïence
• noël
• noöne
• oölogy
• opïum
• preëminent [-ly]
• preëmpt [-ion, -ive]
• reëlect [-ed, -ing]
• reënter [-ed, -ing]
• reëstablish [-ed, -ing]
• residuüm
• zaïre
• zoölogy

if you catch me writing one of these words in the future without the bling, i will abandon vegetarianism for 1 day. also, just for lols i will try and write the following words the way they originally appeared in english: cañón, rôle, piraña, hôtel, élite, and dépôt.

to all aspiring porn bloggers:

• “Lusty” means “brimming with vigor and good health” or “enthusiastic.” Don’t confuse it with “lustful,” which means “filled with sexual desire.”
• “Sensual” usually relates to physical desires and experiences, and often means “sexy.” “Sensuous” is more often used for esthetic pleasures, like “sensuous music.”
• Crevices are by definition tiny. A huge crack in a glacier is given the French spelling: crevasse.