Now that I have learned of it, I will be desperately searching for appropriate places to work the phrase “if-by-whiskey” or “if-by-whiskey fallacy” into my everyday communications. Also, the canonical example of it is pretty great. (And apparently old men in Mississippi don’t mind having a nip in the morning.)
Tag: language
In which the web helps me explain…
I sometimes find, when talking to my contemporaries, that some of what has become my personal vernacular over the years refers to things that aren’t really part of the common & general knowledge, for one reason or another. One such term is the “Rube Goldberg machine“–I’d say that less than 10% of the people who I drop that term around… Read more →
Aside
I am unable to resist “obscure words” lists, and generally most of the words on them are actually familiar to me. Not so with this list, on which I knew these ones from prior encounter: agraffe, bathykolpian, blandiloquent, callipygean, defenestrate, mumpsimus, slubberdegullion, and yclept. These, while I don’t think I’ve ever seen them before, were obvious in their meaning from their components: autohagiographer, autotonsorialist, batrachophagous, cruciverbalist, dephlogisticate, interfenestration, and preantepenultimate. And the rest were new to me. I think the most fun one to say, although rarely called for, would be “zenzizenzizenzic“, the one with the most fun definition is “sphallolalia“, and the one least likely to come up in my life is “mallemaroking“. There are several, though, that I could easily see coming up in my life, not least of which are “gambrinous“, “philosophunculist“, and “ultracrepidarian“.
Aside
While I’ve internalized selections from The Jargon File (well, sections thereof, from particular versions) I have to admit that the stuff in the new programming jargon collection run recently at Stack Overflow is all new to me. I don’t see myself using many of them heavily, but I think I can see drug/shrug/smug report all making their way into my lexicon.
A continuous moving on
Have I previously discussed my enjoyment of the word flux? I don’t think I have. In fact, I like the word enough that I’ve just officially adopted it for the next year at Adopt-A-Word. As the word’s new guardian, I will, of course, be traveling the web to ensure the word is not misused, or under-used. (This is a charity… Read more →
Language and the Shaping Of Thought
While I was doing my undergraduate studies, in addition to my Engineering degree, and my minor in Philosophy, I also pursed a number of “options”, notably including an option in Cognitive Studies. Both the mechanics of thinking and the philosophy of cognition and identity were (and remain) of great interest to me.I wonder if there’s anything to be noted from… Read more →
Diverse practyk in many sundry werkes
My goal is to redefine the whole history of rhyme ‘Cause the only way to free the soul is to free the mind And no wisdom as old as this should be confined To total mystery, so we’ll just read the signs And DaVinci codes, and try to see the science In this linguistically-composed pristine design –extracted from Rhyme Renaissance… Read more →
A moment of hobo appreciation
I passed a lovely bit of time today reading The American Hobo by Colin Beesley, a British academic paper about a quintessentially American phenomenonThe paper is hosted by northbankfred.com, a site dedicated to trains and the hobo experience. Be sure to browse around and check out some of the other articles, photographs, or if you’re really hard-core, the stories!. I’ve… Read more →
