code words for the days of the year

way back in the 18-whatevers when sending a telegram cost a charwoman’s daily wages, some enterprising telegraph operator found a loophole in the telegraph pricing scheme. yo realised that telegraph senders charged per word rather than per character—thus transmitting “it is on” would cost the same as “raynor is maschalophilous.”

anywhoosies, the telegraph operator then went on to invent code words for common telegraphic phrases. morisco refers to “money no object.” crisp is short hand for “can you recommend to me a good female cook?” flank means “a fire is raging here. please send engine,” which is a convenient abbreviation because when a fire really rages, one hasn’t much extra time to waste on frivolous wording when telegraphing for an engine. the resulting book is a real gas. you can peruse it here.

but what really floats my tugboats is that this book offers a code word for EVERY SINGLE day of the year, including leap year. here are some highlights:

• today (june 9) is joker
• may 29 is merkin
• leap day (february 29) is fictitious
• january 20 is <ahem> jaculatory
• the day that i crawled out of my mother’s weeping womb is jester
• and you? what is the code word for your birthday? is it oddness, fiasco, or octogamy?

f(x) = ½x + 7

it was only yesterday that i realised that the rule of thumb for dating people of different ages (the “half your age plus 7” rule) determines not only the lower bounds for dating but the upper bounds as well—that for each ½x + 7, there is a corresponding 2(x-7). for the last 15 years of my life, i have been ignoring an entire market segment, namely those of the genus cougar.

i decided to graph these equations as a handy pocket guide for when i mack on chicks in the library stacks and a few interesting things soon became apparent. for starters, if one is under 14, it is mathematically impossible to date anybody. let’s say my five year-old nephew wanted to join the scene. according to this rule, he could only date girls older than 7.5 (which he would be down with), BUT the same girls also have to be younger than -4. MATH has prevented my nephew from getting jiggy with anybody!

only when you become 14, does math allow you to begin dating—and then you can ONLY date other 14 year-olds. society will scoff at you if you ask a 15 year-old to your freshman day dance, and don’t even think of approaching a 13 year-old.

from 14 on, your options increase at a linear rate such that by the time you are seventy, you are eligible to date 42 year-olds AND 126 year-olds. so the next time that your seventy year-old auntie introduces you to her 126 year-old paramour, give them each a (gentle) nudge and let them know that you support their union.

how to tie your neckcloth in the latest georgian era fashion

you can find detailed instructions here (as well as the associated colours of each style)—but stay away from the osbaldiston, that particular way of wearing a neckcloth is mine and mine alone.

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from: the whole art of dress! by “a cavalry officer” (1830)
previously: this

in hot pursuit of the most deceptively named animal

thanks to a lot of stellar comments, i have been catatonically obsessing over deceptively named animals all weekend long. i built this chart to help determine which animal is the biggest impostor on planet earth. it turns out* it’s the sea cucumber! silly sea cucumber, you’re not even in the same kingdom as the key ingredient of my tzatziki sauce.

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*unless of course, the rules of our pursuit allow us to add up the non-antness, non-lionness qualities of the antlion.

special thanks to the remarkable f+l blog for helping me rethink the size of my footnotes.

not worth your time

when i was on my daily snow jog (making my quads look like those of a thoroughbred stallion), a glint of metal from a tarnished nickel caught my eye. here’s the thing: normally raynor ganan never breaks up his workout routine for any reason, nor does he stop to retrieve anything less than a newly-minted benjamin or a hot wheels rear loading 1969 volkswagen beach bomb—but this time i paused briefly before double-timing it up a hill to make my obliques pop. i am a consumer of luxury brands like banana republic, but what would a member of the gap bourgeois or <choke> the prole navy do in a similar situation*?

i decided to try to correlate the act of retrieving a found coin with the value of one’s time. this chart is the result. the calculations are proprietary, so i cannot reveal them though i should mention that in order to determine the average time that it takes for one to bend over and retrieve a coin, i scattered a sack of pennies outside the local all-girls catholic school and filmed the result from the tinted windows of my van.

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*another metric that i have developed to help one determine one’s class is this: the next time that you are making stuffed peppers, observe the colour of the pepper that you are stuffing. if it is green, you are unfortunately a member of the lower class. if it is red, you have found yourself in the middle class. if it is yellow, you are an aristocrat like me and are thus eligible for a banana republic luxe card.

word idol week

1. an unnecessary history: i began blogging about words that start with f as a way of showcasing some recherché gems from my (and the internet’s) collection of specialised dictionaries. as i have previously mentioned, i chose f partly because of my infantile preoccupation with labiodental fricatives but also because enabling limits on my search meant that i would have more free time to shop with my buddies at abercrombie and fitch and chillax at chili’s (big up to chili’s southwestern egg rolls!!!!!).

then my friend orson, gave me the first volume of halliwell’s dictionary of archaic and provincial words and i realised at once that the words starting with f in that marvelous grimoire merited more than a mere post. thus a five part series within a series was waterbirthed into the internet.

i then experienced what only brooke shields can identify with and only tom cruise knows how to cure: postpartum depression—my involvement with blogging archaic f-words was now over with. rhetorical question: or was it?

2. rhetorical question answered: it wasn’t. while enjoying a fishamajig sandwich at friendly’s with some fly honeys, i flirted with the idea of trying to revive one of the archaic f-words into popular usage. how does one force a word back into the lexicon after 700 years of its lying idle? also, i’m just a young man with well-cobbled abdominal muscles and a sick pacific sun wardrobe—what do i know about which word has the best shot at a comeback? dabbing the last bit of mayo-majig from my beguiling soulpatch, the answer came to me in the form of my number one, all time favourite show of the latter half of the 2008 television season: american idol.

3. american idol but for words: i figured it would be a real gas to have some of my closest tumblr associates select an archaic f-word from the list and make a case for its revival. thus, i called in a few favors from a few interested collaborators and was able to convince them to do this very thing. i will be syndicating their astonishing entries here throughout the week. the culmination of this preposterous exercise will be an internetwide vote where you will help select the word which you would like to see make a comeback, this will be your word idol.

the final phase of my plan involves forcing your word idol back into popular usage for all eternity (this will be the easy part).

4. stats:

• 2,000 obsolete f-words were chosen by james halliwell (the overachiever)
• 100 of those were ragbagable
• 10* of those have been championed by some of my favourite internet-wits
• 1 will be selected via popular vote to be your next word idol

the first entry in this week-long matryoshka doll of a series within a series within a series will appear here when all great challenges commence: high noon in the winnepeg timezone.

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*or slightly more depending upon the procrastination effect of those prone to procrastination.

#7 of 6

i ran past a wild turkey on my run yesterday and, now that i think about it, he was definitely flirting with me. the rapscallion!

i am off to a far corner of a state known as new hampshire to roast up a ballotine known as turducken. i will return tripping on tryptophan and stuffed with stuffing sometime next week. s’long y’all.

the adventures of papa and bill

there are, as far as i am aware, two famous literary disputes about length involving ernest hemingway. the first was with his buddy, f. scott fitzgerald over the length of his wiener. the second was a dispute with his adversary, william faulkner over the length of the words they chose.

faulkner fired the first shot saying, “hemingway has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” which earned the following riposte from hemingway, “poor faulkner. does he really think big emotions come from big words? i know all the ten-dollar words as he does, but i prefer the older, simpler ones.”

i decided to chart the longest words in each of their major works and see if i could draw a non-scientific conclusion. the longest of all words was faulkner’s cinderstrewnpacked, which only appears in the dictionary of made up words that william faulkner made up.

additional data: the average word length in these three hemingway novels is 3.85 letters; faulkner’s average word length is 3.88 letters, which is statistically the same. 1.08% of hemingway’s words were 10 letters or more whereas 1.56% of faulkner’s were.

conclusion: hype. the top two 20th century american novelists were engaging in a literary pillow fight so they could ride the gravy train of book sales for as long as the public would allow.

whiskey tango foxtrot

for kicks: the next time that you are making reservations over the phone with a maître d’, why not use the unhelpful phonetic alphabet to spell your name? as my former accordion instructor points out, “efficiency is the enemy of serendipity.”

r.i.a.a. affect booger naughty our r.i.a.a. over and out.

defrocking your books

it took me until pretty late in life to realise that book covers, by and large, are tacky and more or less useless. using them to keep dust from your books is akin to using neon plastic to preserve your furniture.

there are surprises in store for the adventurous defrocker of a hardback book…gold and silver foil stamping! linen! typography! earthtones! what’s more: since the binding of books has been more or less standardised over the last 3.2 million years, the dan brown bestseller that you bought yesterday will harmonise with your grandmother’s edition of fanny hill when they are both naked together on your bookshelf.

added bonus: you can upcycle your discarded covers into fashionable outerwear!

more unsolicited advice on how to arrange your bookshelf can be found here.

on halloween and how it factors into my nightmares

every year at midsummer, i throw a yard game decathlon party for family and friends. on account of a successful combination of hefeweizen, kansas city burnt ends, house music, and kubb for the 4th annual tournament (2008), my parents later informed me that it was one of the top five parties that they had ever attended. obviously, this made me curious about what else was on their list:

• one of them was some idiot’s ridiculously overplanned wedding reception that did not at all go according to plan.
• one was a party in greece that they were erroneously invited to because my dad was accidentally wearing the colours of the local football team.
• their number two party involved game 6 of the 1980 world series and several thousand old city carousers.

all and all, it was a pretty tame list so i was eager to hear what they chose as their number one. it turned out that it was a halloween party WHICH THEY THREW. now wait just a second, i thought, one can’t put one’s own party on the list of all-time best parties—it’s poor decorum.

not so, argued my parents. it was a marvelous party: trick-or-drinking, bobbing for apples, animatronic zombies, and outlandish costumes—my mom had dressed up as wonderwoman and my dad was sherlock holmes.

“still,” i said, “it sounds kinda lame.”

“no,” they said, “it was spectacular. in fact, it was so spectacular that it was—as near as we can calculate—the night that you were conceived.”

so now, not only am i acutely aware of the circumstance in which my dad planted the candy coated seed that would later become yours truly—but i have an unshakable mental image of he (wearing nothing but a deerstalker hat) and my mom (clad in a glittering tiara and a skimpy leotard) having freaky cosplay sex with the savage furor of pagan gods. this is how halloween factors into my nightmares.