Exactly how were we *saving* daylight?

If since March 11 we've been "saving" daylight then conceivably we should have a seven-month stockpile from which we could redeem some of that saved-up daylight and not have it be so dark when we leave work tomorrow.

"Daylight Saving Time" my ass; it was Daylight Having Time and we squandered it during summer when there was plenty of daylight already.

(Clearly linguists were not consulted when the policy was named.)

A couple moments with my son

Tonight after I put our son in bed and turned out the light he said, "Let's talk about our day, Daddy." And so I asked him about school, and he answered. Then he said (for the first time ever), "How was your day?" And I told him it was fine, which is as much as he needed to know about what it's like to be a grown-up, despite how mature he sounded when asking.

~

Earlier in the evening, without establishing any context, he had talked about how "my friends say 'poo' which has an 'o' on the end, but 'poop' has a 'p' on the end" and he was quite certain he was right and they were saying it wrong, and his pedantry was too cute for me to mention either variant is acceptable. Nor did I elaborate on how either is just what grown-ups say around young children to avoid saying words they don't want to have to explain to the teachers.

But whatever elicited his remark it surely revolved around how either "poo" or "poop" is something that is hilarious in preschool. And I'm glad he's not growing up too fast to stop enjoying that.

Fucking shit up and fucking up shit

Ostensibly, to "fuck shit up" and to "fuck up shit" are interchangeable, but idiomatically it seems the former is intentional and the latter inadvertent.

It seems the current occupant of the Oval Office's policies seek the former while his legal team achieve the latter.

Give a shit?

Some months back I struggled to put together the headboard for an Ikea bed (and was reminded the items one gets at that store are actually Swedish torture devices masquerading as affordable furniture), and I vowed it was the last fucking thing I'd ever put together from there*. As I was alone I didn't refrain from venting my frustration through profane utterances. At one point I declared (in reference to the possibility of being required to assemble some such item in the future) that I "didn't give a shit" in some hypothetical wherein I may have to leave my wife and child in order to escape another agrivating assembly scenario.

It was not one of my finer moments, but that's not the point here.

Reflecting later on that expression—"I don't give a shit"—I was somewhat intrigued as to how that became a common idiom. It connotes a significant lack of concern for consequences with the indication of anger and/or exasperation; it carries a bit stronger message than merely saying "I really don't care." And while I have no difficulty believing there would be a need for such a sentiment, parsing out the literal meanings of the component terms there is the suggestion that if one does care about the ramifications of a decision one "gives a shit," and in that scenario it raises the question: To whom is one giving that shit?

Contemplating "homophobia" literally

Resurrecting posts I never got around to at the time...

Remember a few years ago when a man who was fired from a business that teaches English to foreigners for writing about homophones (because his ignorant boss thought it had some association with homophobia), I am... finally... using that as a paltry excuse inspired to share the following which I'd composed before that incident (for no particular reason), despite the peril in which I could be putting myself.

(Having never made a penny from the blahg, I'm not risking much, I concede.)

~

Let's take a moment to consider the term "homophobia." Obviously that designates a prejudice toward homosexuals, derived from the pejorative truncating of that down to "homo" and tacking on the Greek "phobia" ("fear of"). This construction has been around for many years now and certainly is ingrained in the contemporary lexicon; I'm not suggesting it isn't handy for identifying that, or that there isn't still a significant need for such a term.

However, that construction—of a slang-influenced abbreviated version of one term and the (let's call it) scientific-based term—seems, upon reflection, like it should be somewhat troublesome. If one is aware of the etymology of "homo" and knows that means "same" then the literal translation becomes "fear of the same," and while that could still be construed to mean "fear of those who are sexually attracted to their same gender" it could just as easily suggest a fear of those who are like oneself. I'm not implying that's really a thing (although I'm not going to say it's not either), or that there seems a need for such a term. I'm merely noting it's a word that operates a little better if one doesn't break it down to its component parts, if one doesn't know the origins of those parts.

The cuddle/snuggle distinction

What is the difference between "cuddling" and "snuggling"? Both suggest a prolonged period of affectionate touching with one's body pressed at least in part with another's body, but the terms are obviously different words so conceivably there's some difference.

The only definite distinction I can draw is that on the Simpsons "snuggling" is Marge's euphemism for having sex, and so as far as I'm concerned that can be the difference: the latter carries a sexual connotation (if it occurs between consenting adults).

When in doubt, look to Matt Groening's characters.

~

As further evidence of "cuddle" being the less innuendo-laden one, I offer that in the show Doc McStuffins when one of the characters is sad or in some distress it is said (by Lambie) he or she needs a cuddle--not a snuggle.

The doc is in.

You don't know what 'aarp' should mean

Commercials for the American Association of Retired Persons have included the slogan "You don't know 'aarp'" for a while now, and in the ad that ran during tonight's Emmy telecast still had that in the voiceover, bringing this to mind again.

Turning the initials into an acronym (so rather than it being pronounced by the individual letters in "A.A.R.P." it turns into a single-syllable term that rhymes with "harp") is in keeping with the clear push to make the organization seem not just for old fuddy-duddies.

However, to my ear, that pronunciation makes it one slight exaggeration away from being the acronym for the American Association of Retired Pirates.

Arrrrp!

(Perhaps it's in part from yesterday being Talk Like a Pirate Day yesterday.

No, it's just me. I know.)

Splitting the alphabet

Looking at TV for young children where they list the alphabet I've noticed they struggle with how to split up the lines of letters when there isn't room all on one or two. Given that 26 is not divisible by three or four or any whole number until one gets to 13 the lines end up unbalanced.

But it occurred to me that five lines would be closer to equal (with one leftover) than other possible splits. Then I had the thought that the five vowels could make for another way of separating the lines, putting each vowel at the start of one of the five lines; those letters hold a distinction so having the notice from being at the front of the lines made a certain sense.

And while working out each remaining line (with the set of consonants after each vowel) I realized that gave an unexpected sort of quasi-symmetry:

ABCD

EFGH

IJKLMN

OPQRST

UVWXYZ

Born Day

As my toddler had me up at the wee hours one recent morning, and we were due to attend our first birthday party of his best buddy at daycare, the following occurred to me about the term "birthday."

On the anniversary of people's birth we call that their "birthday," but generally I don't hear people refer to it as the day they were "birthed"; it's the day they were born. Giving birth is more what their mother did (and probably for many hours prior to the actual emergence out into the world which is considered the moment of birth, as though all that traveling through the birth canal up to that point was unimportant).

So conceivably the expression instead should be "Happy Born Day," with "Happy Birthday" being what you would direct toward the person who actually did the birthing.

This is why I shouldn't think at such an hour.

Great, just great (fun with pronunciation)

A while back the site Grammarly's Facebook page had a post about the inconsistencies of English, and the following came to mind (probably for unrelated reasons; I'm just grasping at any connection to justify spending time on it). It regards how the same letter construction can have different pronunciations.

"Eat" rhymes with "beat" (and "beet") and "feat" (and "feet") and "meat" (and "meet") but not with "great" (but it does with "greet"). Or, put another way, "great" does not rhyme with most other words having its same last three letters (in fact, I'm not sure there is another English word ending in "eat" with which it rhymes); it rhymes with "ate" (the past tense of "eat") and "fate" and "mate" and "grate" (most words where the e moves from before the a to after the t).

Our wacky language: It's enough to give up its meaning

As regular readers know, I was never a linguist but I do find the topic of language development to be of at least passing interest. Not of sufficient interest to do exhaustive research, of course, but enough to ruminate on something for the next few minutes.

I paid attention in life to an extent that allows me to know the difference between possessives (such as its) and contractions (it's). I'm not suggesting that is at all an impressive intellectual feat; I'm merely identifying it as a bit of knowledge that, experience tells me, distinguishes me from some other people (who appear to have difficulty consistently distinguishing which is which).

Lest you start to think this will be a scathing criticism of those who seem to fail to make the effort to learn such things, let's step back a moment and consider what our language requires of us all.

O Captain, my Captain: the only rank in nicknames

Over the past months of being a parent I have noticed when I concoct an impromptu nickname for my infant son it often involves taking his mood or action and prefacing it with "captain" (and sometimes appending "pants" at the end); a slightly cranky boy is dubbed "Captain Fussypants," for example. It occurred to me that of all the military ranks with which I'm familiar—which are many—the go-to for these extemporaneous assignments is always "captain"; he's never "Sergeant Squirmy" even though that has some nice alliteration. Sure, "Captain Kickypants" flows well, but "Colonel Kickypants" or "Commodore Kickypants" would carry the same similarity of opening sounds—and could be even higher in rank.

I suppose I could conclude "captain" has its default status because that rank is both high enough to be respected ("Private Poopypants" seems clearly pejorative, for instance) but still holds room for advancement ("General Giggles" sounds like a jolly fellow sitting behind a desk, not one out there participating with the troops).

I need more than 140 characters to tell you that 'F*Upd' is f*cked up

My relationship with Twitter went from general disdain before I really tried it to eventually finding some merit in it; if you follow the right people (those with clever or amusing or interesting albeit pithy thoughts) it can be better than Facebook in certain regards. (Well, these days saying something's better than Facebook isn't necessary giving it much of a compliment, but with any luck one gets the idea.) Ultimately, like anything else on the internet, some of it is good and a lot of it is crap, but one is under no obligation to trek through any more of the drek than one chooses.

I don't tweet very often (so it's not difficult to understand my low number of followers) but occasionally I am inspired to throw 140-characters (or less) worth of a thought out into the Twittersphere, with the general expectation no one will really see it, or at least that no one will reply. (Which is pretty much the same attitude I have about blahg posts; the difference is I spend far less time on the tweets, so those really are a more logical outlet for my online sharing. But I digress.)

And then there are moments where the void is preferable to getting some acknowledgement of someone else seeing a tweet. But in this case that wasn't quite for the obvious reason.

~

A few weeks ago I tweeted a quip regarding the traffic snarls in Los Angeles caused by the president's visit, suggesting if a 2016 candidate for the G.O.P. promised never to come here I might vote Republican.

Within minutes a… okay, the kneejerk descriptor would be "right-wing nutjob" but as will be seen that's not quite appropriate nor is it fair for me to cast such aspersions recklessly, so let's just go with… conservatively-minded individual replied positing an alternative theory: that I might vote thusly because "Obama F*Upd pretty much EVERYTHING he touches".

Good to see Twitter is still encouraging clever (albeit succinct) discourse, eh?

When different vowels rhyme

Discussing the quirks and difficulties of learning English is a played-out trope. I know. Nonetheless, something that occurred to me recently (when my brain probably should have been better occupied) is someday I'll be explaining to my son how words can rhyme despite having different vowels. In fact, sets of rhyming words with four different vowels came to mind.

Herd, bird, word, turd.
Jerk, smirk, work, Turk.

The pattern in both is that any vowel followed by r and another consonant gets pronounced "er"; the r sound is too strong, it seems.

Happy People-(Mostly-Advertisers)-Call-It-Presidents/Presidents'/President's Day

Although as I wrote two years ago today is a federal holiday officially known as Washington's Birthday (and as others mention every February)*, it is more commonly known by the position he held. Efforts to include Abraham Lincoln (or even others who have occupied that office) have come to make the colloquial name reference "President" in some way.

However, because it's not an official name there is no standard for whether it should be called Presidents (no apostrophe) or Presidents' (apostrophe after the s) or President's (apostrophe before the s), and that results in a variety of ways it appears.

For this post I wanted to offer a bit of an update of this post from four years ago by showing shots from commercials that mention it, to see how advertisers appear to think of it.

Most automobile companies are having an "event" for the long weekend:

Honda - apostrophe after the s (of course, given how they're clearly featuring Honest Abe they really need to play up the plurality and possession)

New year pondering: Spangled

After a few bowl games it struck me: I can honestly say I've never even thought of the word "spangled" (much less used it) outside of the context of our national anthem.

Were it not specifically mentioned in the lyrics ("...does that star-spangled banner...") I suspect the term would have dropped from our lexicon altogether by now.

Happy new year, whether you work "spangled" into your vocabulary or not.

An expectant father's defense of "motherese" (a.k.a., baby talk)

A recent post on the Slate Lexicon Valley blog (re-posted from elsewhere) questioned the use of "baby talk" (more academically called "motherese")—that is, the exaggerated speech employed by many when speaking to infants. The writer identified some ways in which it could be effective in distinguishing syllables to better allow the children to learn the different words, but he also took to task whether that really made much of a difference in the long run regarding the adult's eventual mastery of language. Babies certainly overhear adults speaking to each other in "regular" speech and it's a stretch to suggest babies aren't picking up on some of that. The only solid conclusion the writer could draw: To him, at least, it's definitely annoying.

Fair enough.

However, I think all of that misses the point of what "motherese" achieves.

Things to not say in front of the baby: Substitute swearing

On a recent episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour they discussed use of profanity in pop culture, and how it is only effective when dispensed judiciously. Cursing the proverbial blue streak deadens the impact of the vulgarity. Similarly, the substitution of similar-sounding words that are not considered obscene by the FCC (or mere common decency) either in lieu of bleeping or to eschew that for broadcast can be more distracting than the use of the forbidden term would have done.

It's all about striking the appropriate balance when dispensing these so-called swear words. They need to serve their purpose without becoming pointless; they are a spice of language, and like any good spice too much makes the whole dish tasteless. However, pale substitution spices leave an unsatisfactory aftertaste.

Useless Rhetorical Rumination: The conundrum of 'Pre-existing'

When discussing the Affordable Care Act proponents tout how one can no longer be denied coverage by insurance companies for "pre-existing" conditions. While we have all accepted that through its repetition I still find it a fascinating construction.

Existence is a binary condition; either something exists or it doesn't. To "pre-exist" suggests there is a third state of existing before existence, which from a rhetorical standpoint seems impossible. Clearly something only exists when it exists, not before the initiation of that state, but when we hear "pre-existing" bandied about in this manner we don't pause and consider its inherent contradiction.

A message for the future: Unique

A note to my children in the future: This may be difficult to believe with how language is by the time you read this, but there was a time when "unique" meant "one of a kind." One of your grandfather's pet peeves about contemporary English usage (of which there were many) was when people would preface that term with a modifier (for example: "the most unique") to suggest a spectrum along which something could be varying degrees of being one of a kind.

Obviously this usage stemmed from the application (some would say misapplication) of "unique" as a euphemism for "unusual" or "distinctive" or "uncommon" (or other such adjectives) where there is more of an implicit possibility of relative status where modifiers could be applicable, unlike the binary status the traditional definition of "unique" held.