"Linguisics often involves finding and explaining patterns in languages, even if speakers of languages aren't consciously aware of the patterns. Yesterday while reading Robert Sheckley's short story "Protection", I noticed such a pattern in English. In the story, Sheckley (the same author who wrote "Shall We Have a Little Talk?") makes up a bunch of nonsense words to represent words in an alien language. One of them is feeg, and it immediately struck me as odd-sounding. Is feeg a phonetically possible English word?"
Randle Cotgrave’s "A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues of 1611." He says clapier is French for a “clapper of conies�? (coney being the usual word at the time for an adult rabbit), “a heap of stones &c., whereinto they retire themselves; or (as our clapper), a court walled about, and full of nests or boards, or stones, for tame conies.
Being sometimes a saccharine optimist, I can't help opining that the reason others' pain is funny is not that ha-ha, it's you instead of me, but rather an instinctual, communal response to tragedy: an affirmation that, despite obstacles, injuries, and atrocities, we survive anyway. Laughter springs not from a sense of superiority, but from a sense of connectedness.
Having self-taught typing but not touch-typing, I used to look away from the typewriter and type without regard for the many inevitable errors raining down on the page. The resultant garbled text I named Buton Blatsfish--the language spoken by the glow worms who created the universe.
Since I've gotten a little better at typing without looking, Buton Blatsfish may be considered a dying language--but not quite. It just looks a lot more like English, now.
A JanusNode is a user-configurable dynamic textual projective surface- that is, a generator of random texts. JanusNodes contain tools for creating new texts, using a simple rule-based text-generation language, and for morphing old texts, using Markov chains or more random methods.
Hmmmmmm.... How can one see it? For me, it starts to show itself in any personally intriguing system of interweavings grown sufficiently complex. For example, back in the good old Mac OS 9 days, I had a sixty-four-folder ecosystem of text clippings (the text clipping functionality in OS X just isn't as je ne sais quoi), for which each of the seven color label metadata denoted a separate species. Thus, when I would execute some (usually serendipitous and relatively low-tech) algorithm for choosing a random folder and clipping, a trout (for example) might say, in answer to a vague inquiry about the future of my marital status (for example), "Prepare for the erotic fictitious bisexual tiger," or some such oracularsensical utterance. In addition to (half- or full-assedly) answering questions, teh dsa has also been known to help me construct poems, stories, etc.
I suspect there are parallels between teh dsa and Jungian synchronicity, a concept in which I am both undereducated and extremely interested.
Pronunciation varies, since word is hardly ever spoken aloud. I think I usually think it as "tay sah."
I've come to see it as almost an organism in itself, kinda like the Internet seems to be becoming.
Only different. ;-)
Plus--I didn't know this--I think it's bashful. It seems to be blushing and looking at its feet and kinda smiling, at the notion that someone besides me even knows it exists!
As a child, when typing on old Smith Corona, frequently typed "teh" for "the;" this long before the 1337 usage of course... teh dsa (or teh-dsa) became term for quasi-mystical divinatory system of random combinations of either Legos, homemade Tarot cards, small ceramic tiles found in dirt behind art department of midwestern University, and now, text files on computer(s), including Wordie.
No offense intended! I actually have great respect for graphic designers. :-)
It's just that a text-based site (or even a text-based flyer or ad) is sometimes just what the doctor ordered for my image-weary brain. In the context of something like Wordie, I think the blankness of it actually facilitates the imagination.
And besides, I think junk has become one of those contronyms like bad. These kids these days!
"The young man waits on the side of the road; the plane has gone; thumb moves in a small arc when a car tears hissing past. Eyes seek the driver’s eyes. A hundred miles down the road. Head swims, belly tightens, wants crawl over his skin like ants:
went to school, books said opportunity, ads promised speed, own your home, shine bigger than your neighbor, the radiocrooner whispered girls, ghosts of platinum girls coaxed from the screen, millions in winnings were chalked up on the boards in the offices, paychecks were for hands willing to work; the cleared desk of an executive with three telephones on it;
waits with swimming head, needs knot the belly, idle hands numb, beside the speeding traffic.
I have included a couple of external links in some of my comments. I assumed that because it was possible, it was allowed. Are there any thoughts about whether one should warn the reader that a link will leave Wordie, or anything like that? To avoid that jarring "I don't think we're in Wordie any more" feeling?
Also, in case the question is in any way still undecided, I want to voice my support for the text-only, basic site design. Thanks for not succumbing to a bunch of colors and "graphic design" junk!
'“Stories have a job to do,�? the book spells out, in what might as well be neon letters. “They can’t just lie around like lazybone dogs. They have to teach you something.�?'
"Regarding analogous kerning-esque activities, is it accurate to say you’re looking for examples of people moving things around with the aim of modulating space? Depending on how broad you want to take it, landscapers, plastic surgeons, and all manner of artists do this as a matter of routine. But then you could also say a pugilist kerns his/her fist to an opponent’s face.
- from an online discussion on the origin and implications of the word "kern"
“The existence of unseen hyperspatial realities... that, through information transfer between dimensions, are the literal ‘foundation substrate’ maintaining the reality of everything in this dimension.�?
The Wordie manse is hyperdimensional! A room can (and usually does) occupy more than one wing at a time. I guess that's the sort of bonus one gets when one's spatial reality is an imaginative construct within a logical virtuality!
And, you can draw a door any place you want, to any other place, as if with magical chalk, just by making brackets! I do so love a vibrant, experientialmetaphor!
This Wordie place can have a decidedly spatialvibe to it, at times, if it wants to.... As if you're wandering through a quasi-infinite, ever-evolving mansion in which each word is a room (and each list is a wing?). And characters inhabit the mansion; come and go as they please; congregate in certain rooms (like the erstwhile smoking klatsch over at cigarette!) And some rooms are so quiet as to evince a mysticalreverence—until some happy traveler strolls through and with obscure footfalls undeafens the silence with delightfully humble cream pie!
To quote Calvin: "This is so cool I have to go to the bathroom!"
As far as I can tell "dupa" is of Polish origin; my wife's family introduced me to this lovely word. I don't know if there is an official spelling, but I always pictured it as "dupa."
Hmmm.... Tenacious, reliable, unstoppable, unkillable, persistent, unbreakable, indestructible, etcetera. They all aren't _exactly_ equivalent, but depending on the context, they might serve.
Actually, once you get used to pronouncing "undisableable," it's oddly pleasant to say.
Comments by npydyuan
Show previous 200 comments...
npydyuan commented on the word negligence
O, those net-nipping nancies!
September 19, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word ♥
Looks like a vertical bar in my bwowser. Or it could be a piece of electrical tape. Or a single, unwavering band of light.
September 19, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word feeg
"Linguisics often involves finding and explaining patterns in languages, even if speakers of languages aren't consciously aware of the patterns. Yesterday while reading Robert Sheckley's short story "Protection", I noticed such a pattern in English. In the story, Sheckley (the same author who wrote "Shall We Have a Little Talk?") makes up a bunch of nonsense words to represent words in an alien language. One of them is feeg, and it immediately struck me as odd-sounding. Is feeg a phonetically possible English word?"
http://tenser.typepad.com/tenser_said_the_tensor/2007/09/-vg.html#more
September 19, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word clapper
Randle Cotgrave’s "A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues of 1611." He says clapier is French for a “clapper of conies�? (coney being the usual word at the time for an adult rabbit), “a heap of stones &c., whereinto they retire themselves; or (as our clapper), a court walled about, and full of nests or boards, or stones, for tame conies.
September 19, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word hearts
Is also a card game that I always have to be retaught, because I can never remember how to play it.
September 19, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word schadenfreude
"one brief, shining moment"?
maith go leor!
September 18, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word schadenfreude
Being sometimes a saccharine optimist, I can't help opining that the reason others' pain is funny is not that ha-ha, it's you instead of me, but rather an instinctual, communal response to tragedy: an affirmation that, despite obstacles, injuries, and atrocities, we survive anyway. Laughter springs not from a sense of superiority, but from a sense of connectedness.
September 18, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word cunt
Also related to coney or cunny.
September 18, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word honey
"What happened to a sense of wonder
On yonder hillside, getting dim
Why didn’t they leave us, alone
Why couldn’t we just be ourselves
We could dream, and keep bees
And live on honey street"
Van Morrison, "Pagan Streams"
September 18, 2007
npydyuan commented on the list words-that-make-me-uncomfortable
These are... titillating!
September 18, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word buton blatsfish
oksy. EWill do.!
September 18, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word buton blatsfish
Having self-taught typing but not touch-typing, I used to look away from the typewriter and type without regard for the many inevitable errors raining down on the page. The resultant garbled text I named Buton Blatsfish--the language spoken by the glow worms who created the universe.
Since I've gotten a little better at typing without looking, Buton Blatsfish may be considered a dying language--but not quite. It just looks a lot more like English, now.
September 18, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word bassackward
Or backwassard?
September 18, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word teh dsa
Ha! Yes. Perhaps another of teh dsa's names is Clarus.
September 18, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word cheesequake
Love it. Adding it. Can't stop picturing it.
September 18, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word janusnode
A JanusNode is a user-configurable dynamic textual projective surface- that is, a generator of random texts. JanusNodes contain tools for creating new texts, using a simple rule-based text-generation language, and for morphing old texts, using Markov chains or more random methods.
September 18, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word teh dsa
Hmmmmmm.... How can one see it? For me, it starts to show itself in any personally intriguing system of interweavings grown sufficiently complex. For example, back in the good old Mac OS 9 days, I had a sixty-four-folder ecosystem of text clippings (the text clipping functionality in OS X just isn't as je ne sais quoi), for which each of the seven color label metadata denoted a separate species. Thus, when I would execute some (usually serendipitous and relatively low-tech) algorithm for choosing a random folder and clipping, a trout (for example) might say, in answer to a vague inquiry about the future of my marital status (for example), "Prepare for the erotic fictitious bisexual tiger," or some such oracular sensical utterance. In addition to (half- or full-assedly) answering questions, teh dsa has also been known to help me construct poems, stories, etc.
I suspect there are parallels between teh dsa and Jungian synchronicity, a concept in which I am both undereducated and extremely interested.
One of teh dsa's best friends is janusnode.
September 18, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word teh dsa
Pronunciation varies, since word is hardly ever spoken aloud. I think I usually think it as "tay sah."
I've come to see it as almost an organism in itself, kinda like the Internet seems to be becoming.
Only different. ;-)
Plus--I didn't know this--I think it's bashful. It seems to be blushing and looking at its feet and kinda smiling, at the notion that someone besides me even knows it exists!
September 18, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word teh dsa
(personal indulgence...)
As a child, when typing on old Smith Corona, frequently typed "teh" for "the;" this long before the 1337 usage of course... teh dsa (or teh-dsa) became term for quasi-mystical divinatory system of random combinations of either Legos, homemade Tarot cards, small ceramic tiles found in dirt behind art department of midwestern University, and now, text files on computer(s), including Wordie.
September 18, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word apple
Excellent suggestion, rt. Will do.
September 18, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word bassackward
variant of backassward
September 18, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word backassward
I also like the variant, bassackward.
September 18, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word enormouse
big Mickey
September 18, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word apple
Sounds like a Wisconsin thing. Ya know, where you sit around on your dupa eating enormous apple pies with lots of cheese. And beer.
Is there a good word for a serendipitous typo? On first attempt at above sentence, I came up with enormouse. Scary and cute!
September 18, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word reserve
rwar!
September 18, 2007
npydyuan commented on the list word-guidelines-for-wordie
No offense intended! I actually have great respect for graphic designers. :-)
It's just that a text-based site (or even a text-based flyer or ad) is sometimes just what the doctor ordered for my image-weary brain. In the context of something like Wordie, I think the blankness of it actually facilitates the imagination.
And besides, I think junk has become one of those contronyms like bad. These kids these days!
September 17, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word they
Ha! Nice. I always thought "they" were a vast, faceless corporation, running everything Illuminati-style.
September 17, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word palindrome
Wow!
September 17, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word palindrome
Go hang a salami; I'm a lasagna hog!
September 17, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word foyer
But it's (we're) the best kind of creeps!
September 17, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word davenport
This reminds me of my grandpa, with his big beautiful hands that could drive a nail with one stroke of the hammer.
And the davenport always had an afghan draped over the back.
September 17, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word dromedary
This reminds me of davenport.
September 17, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word effeminate
Has anyone ever seen this used as a transitive verb?
September 17, 2007
npydyuan commented on the list poetrie-forgetfulness
Reminds me of the story (I can't remember which one) in which Spider Robinson points out that forgetfulness is also an anodyne.
I think it may have been "Melancholy Elephants."
September 17, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word vag
"The young man waits on the side of the road; the plane has gone; thumb moves in a small arc when a car tears hissing past. Eyes seek the driver’s eyes. A hundred miles down the road. Head swims, belly tightens, wants crawl over his skin like ants:
went to school, books said opportunity, ads promised speed, own your home, shine bigger than your neighbor, the radiocrooner whispered girls, ghosts of platinum girls coaxed from the screen, millions in winnings were chalked up on the boards in the offices, paychecks were for hands willing to work; the cleared desk of an executive with three telephones on it;
waits with swimming head, needs knot the belly, idle hands numb, beside the speeding traffic.
A hundred miles down the road."
John Dos Passos, U.S.A.
September 17, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word cuntificate
Ha! Before I saw these other comments, I pictured a piece of paper--here's your suitable-for-framing cuntificate, for being such a....
September 17, 2007
npydyuan commented on the list word-guidelines-for-wordie
I have included a couple of external links in some of my comments. I assumed that because it was possible, it was allowed. Are there any thoughts about whether one should warn the reader that a link will leave Wordie, or anything like that? To avoid that jarring "I don't think we're in Wordie any more" feeling?
Also, in case the question is in any way still undecided, I want to voice my support for the text-only, basic site design. Thanks for not succumbing to a bunch of colors and "graphic design" junk!
September 17, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word lazybone
'“Stories have a job to do,�? the book spells out, in what might as well be neon letters. “They can’t just lie around like lazybone dogs. They have to teach you something.�?'
from a NYT review of "Mister Pip" by Lloyd Jones
September 17, 2007
npydyuan commented on the list construction-for-poets
This is indeed a beautiful list. I like the idea of "____ for poets" lists in general. Hmmm....
September 17, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word moof
what the dogcow said
September 17, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word feline
Fain, forget foe-fear, 'flowerss! Friends found, forsooth!
September 17, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word manifold
I love how this word can be both academic and automotive.
September 17, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word coworking
But how do you ork a cow?
September 17, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word palindrome
Spot's regal lager's tops!
September 17, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word vinegar
pith and...
September 16, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word vim
...and vinegar
September 16, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word kern
"Regarding analogous kerning-esque activities, is it accurate to say you’re looking for examples of people moving things around with the aim of modulating space? Depending on how broad you want to take it, landscapers, plastic surgeons, and all manner of artists do this as a matter of routine. But then you could also say a pugilist kerns his/her fist to an opponent’s face.
- from an online discussion on the origin and implications of the word "kern"
September 16, 2007
npydyuan commented on the list prosie-how-i-met-my-wife
Ha! Bridled passion! I love it--I mean, I like it....
September 16, 2007
npydyuan commented on the list stuffie-poetrie-tunie-listings
Added: Poetrie: Recuerdo
September 16, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word hyperdimensional
“The existence of unseen hyperspatial realities... that, through information transfer between dimensions, are the literal ‘foundation substrate’ maintaining the reality of everything in this dimension.�?
- Richard Hoagland
September 16, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word mansion
The Wordie manse is hyperdimensional! A room can (and usually does) occupy more than one wing at a time. I guess that's the sort of bonus one gets when one's spatial reality is an imaginative construct within a logical virtuality!
September 16, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word crepuscular
A fine feature of "crepuscular" is its ability to signify dusk OR dawn. The in-between times, the secret times....
September 16, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word foyer
And, you can draw a door any place you want, to any other place, as if with magical chalk, just by making brackets! I do so love a vibrant, experiential metaphor!
September 16, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word foyer
This Wordie place can have a decidedly spatial vibe to it, at times, if it wants to.... As if you're wandering through a quasi-infinite, ever-evolving mansion in which each word is a room (and each list is a wing?). And characters inhabit the mansion; come and go as they please; congregate in certain rooms (like the erstwhile smoking klatsch over at cigarette!) And some rooms are so quiet as to evince a mystical reverence—until some happy traveler strolls through and with obscure footfalls undeafens the silence with delightfully humble cream pie!
To quote Calvin: "This is so cool I have to go to the bathroom!"
September 16, 2007
npydyuan commented on the list stuffie-go-long
a rod; rolls (if you're at Lambert's cafe in Sikeston, MO; your life away;
September 16, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word dupa
As far as I can tell "dupa" is of Polish origin; my wife's family introduced me to this lovely word. I don't know if there is an official spelling, but I always pictured it as "dupa."
September 15, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word artichoke
Dhalgren, anybody?
September 15, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word undisableable
Hmmm.... Tenacious, reliable, unstoppable, unkillable, persistent, unbreakable, indestructible, etcetera. They all aren't _exactly_ equivalent, but depending on the context, they might serve.
Actually, once you get used to pronouncing "undisableable," it's oddly pleasant to say.
September 15, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word cigarette
If then that sin stick dwelleth in my maw, I am sick with smoke which sticketh in my craw....
September 15, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word paranaue
any other Capoeiristas lurking about?
September 15, 2007
npydyuan commented on the word cigarette
...matter of fact, I think I'll have one now....
September 15, 2007