Blitz Week
I'm going to try something different, I'm going to try to do a full week of updates to Skewed.
Already done 2 so far, so I just need to do five more each of these weekdays. Then I may do another one while I'm in Hawaii, but that's not guaraunteed. I'm gonig to be bringing the second Otherland novel with me to try and get some good amount of it read during the travel time, and I might get caught up reading it. Or of course, be busy doing other stuff rather than writing, because its freaking Hawaii after all.
And since Hot Fuzz comes out tomorrow, it'll be a challenge to get updates every day this week.
Tags: movies personal travel writing
Emphasis Added
As a general rule, English follows a pattern of emphasizing every other syllable. Occasionally one and two syllable words in succession will swap this, but this more or less holds true.
For example, If you listen as you speak it, you can hear this. For example, the opening sentence of this entry would be emphasized as follows:
AS a GENerAL RULE, ENGlish FOLlows a PATtern of EMphaSIZing EveRY Other SYLlaBLE.
Certain words, however, are made such that emphasis needs to be in a certain place. The best example I can think of right now is from a commercial I heard while driving home, for Washington Mutual.
Or rather, WAmu.
This radio announcer who recorded the commercial, however, decided to switch the emphasis.
Making it waMU, or more appropriately waMOO.
Leaving his commercial as follows:
"waMOO. Visit waMOO.com to get your free waMOO checking account."
Cow banking?
Tags: linguistic pronunciation
Oh noes, a year!
Its my birthday today!
No, that doesn't really mean I have anything particular to talk about.
Tags: personal
They Need To Be Rounded Up
Its our supervisor's birthday next week, and he's taking the week off for vacation. So my team's been planning a birthday party for tomorrow. One person's been coordinating it, and he got everyone together in an MSN chat today to discuss the plans.
This is what he said:
"ok here is the plan tomorrow I am going to order pizza from Pappa Johns and we have been given the go ahead to eat in the conference room we are going to do this at noon i need someone to pick up the pizza and bring it back we will have cake as well if anyone has any paper plates or plastic untensils they can donate I would greatly appreciate it"
Its painful to read. As Kyle so wittedly replied, "Punctuation?" I'm reminded of a post on Notebook Forums sometime in the past, where a similar punctuation-less post was made, and one member replied "here, I rounded them up for you: ...,,,;!"
This quickly derailed the conversation, as Kyle's MSN comment is currently a line from the new Transformers movie, namely, "I learned Earth languages through the World Wide Web".
The reply, giving the true state of the internet, was "if you learned earth languages through the web, there's no way you know what punctuation is."
Indeed, the internet is not exactly the best place to learn punctuation. Optimus Prime would probably have a line like this:
"Autobots, roll out!!!!111one7!11"
Yeah............
Tags: anecdote internet typography
Caffinated
Here is a recipe:
1 Dictionary antithesis
3 Monsters
Instructions
Take one person, add 3 Monsters, then ask him to write an essay without giving him details.
Result:
His response:
"10 or 12 point? Double Single space? Cover page? Biblagroupphy? (Yeah I have no clue how to speel that)"
Never have I seen such a slaughtering of a word, yet still be able to figure out what the word is. And surprisingly, Google also is able to see through that minefield.
The fact that technology can keep up with human incompetence to that degree is quite amazing.
Tags: anecdote internet spelling