Statistics Saturday: Some Words Which Are Auto-Corrected And Some Words Which Are Not

Word	Other Word
Lugubrious	Rake
Councilig	Mediocratize
Stele	Reak
Rhythmus	21
Sward	Roke
Productiver	Impatiens
Aker	Screetch
Value-Neutral	Whimisical
Hosta	Hofstra
Instanec	Pais

Statistics Saturday: Things I Couldn’t Get To Work In Boggle

As your Saturday or Sunday or whatever reference guide, here are some things I’ve found not to work in a game of Boggle, that puzzle game to find the words in a randomly generated matrix of letters:

• Rolls. (Letter ‘R’ wasn’t actually there.)
• Queue. (Dispute about whether a ‘Q’ on the board automatically included a ‘u’ with it.)
• Cat. (Didn’t see it.)
• Flinch. (Shied away from it. Admitted irony of the situation.)
• Aququrqu. (Was just needless sarcasm after that Queue dispute above.)
• Obelus. (Nobody believes me that’s even a thing.)
• “What do you mean that’s not in the Scrabble dictionary?” (They meant what the words obviously imply.)
• Dogma. (Letter ‘G’ was actually a ‘Q’.)
• “Let’s play cribbage instead.” (Fantastically bad move.)
• Hemed. (I couldn’t believe that was a word.)
• Sighing and walking away, shaking my head sadly that things should have come to this. (Insufficiently cool. I should have pretended I saw a squirrel doing a cute thing and never come back.)

Unbeknownst

I’m starting from the premise that you just can’t say “unbeknownst” anymore, not without sounding at least a little arch and like you’re making fun of the people who use words like “unbeknownst” without meaning to sound a little arch and like they’re making fun of (I’m sorry, I have to call this sentence off because of the recursion error). Anyway, if you’re not willing to give me that premise we’re just not going to get anywhere.

The thing is that “unbeknownst” was a perfectly good word, usable for all sorts of conditions when the beknownsting of things was aptly described as un-, and now it isn’t. At some point the comical uses of the word so overwhelmed the serious uses that the word had to be given up as part of the usable non-humorous vocabulary.

So that means there’s someone out there who was the last person to use “unbeknownst” without meaning it archly, and without expecting the audience to hear it a little archly, and given that arch uses of the word had to be on the rise then I wonder: was this last-serious-use of the word something the writer knew was going on, or was it unbeknownst to her? But if it was beknownst to her, doesn’t that keep it from being a legitimate use? Even a little bitty bit? Or did she refuse to think about that lest she lose the spot of last-legitimate-user to whoever used it just before she did?

To sum up, worrying about this nonsense is why I got like two hours of sleep last night.

Community Calendar: Pronunciation Day

Come on down to the Deer Mouse Street Library to enjoy the fifth annual pronunciation-off at 3:15 pm Thursday. Main Auxiliary Room. Participants are hoping after the preliminary rounds to make it through most of “oryctolagus”. Attendees are asked to specify when they arrive whether they believe “snuck” to be a word so they may attend the correct session. We don’t want a repeat of the quarrels which broke out last time, although we admit it was kind of great when Ms Windling, shaking with rage, demanded the judges tell her whether they thought “tuck” was the past tense of “teak”.

Misconstrued Poetry Restorations

The North American Council on Poetic Quality has issued the following guidelines of words that can no longer be used in consumer- or industrial-grade poetry. Exemptions will be applied for cause. The Council also reminds all that National Haiku Pedantry Month starts the first of November, so be ready to help them enforce the rules about cutting words and nature imagery by leaping up on desks and shaking golf clubs about while insisting it’s everyone else on the Internet that has the issue and they should go write limericks instead.

O: as a particulate extrapolation that fills in those little bits where it feels the sentence hasn’t quite got started yet, the word-letter “O” has suffered from extreme overuse and fatigue, bringing the population of the word-letters to the brink of extinction. Therefore the word-letter “E” is to take its place, as the stocks of this are much more robust and have a tendency to get into the garage if not thinned out some. Use with abandon, the long E only.

I Guess I Need Some Colorful Help

I should’ve known I’d get myself into trouble. I was hoping to pick up a little extra money because there’ve been all these unexpected expenses like food and those roller coaster seeds I’ve been trying to grow in the front yard. Anyway, I took a contract bit where I just have to work up a name for a newly-invented color, which I figured I could toss off in a moment, the way someone decided that “Cornflower” could be a color.

Anyway, what they want is a word for the shade of orange you get when someone built a community college in like 1971 and put bright orange carpeting all over the walls, because that was something that seemed normal in 1971, and then it’s still somehow up there in 2013. Sure, you know the color I mean from that description, but what are we supposed to do if we need to describe that quickly? Worse, what are people doing with that color that they need it described in a word?

I should’ve taken a temp job making JSON do that thing where you get error messages from your web browser instead.

[ Unrelated: WordPress tells me I’ve now got 250 people following this blog. Thanks kindly to each of you, and I hope that you’re enjoying the occasional glance around these parts. Please feel free to introduce yourselves to one another as there’s a fine student lounge with an indescribable orange-carpeted wall available. ]

What-Nots That Were

Q. When someone talks about what-nots, as in, “taking care of this or that or what-not” (this isn’t a good example and I should fix that before I send the question in) what are they referring to?

A. Begin by considering things. Now rule out from the set of things: mathematical operations, griffins, pancake breakfasts, sandcastles, ham radio repeater stations, tool sheds, rock operas, and the things you keep in that compartment of your car’s armest but not where CDs are supposed to go. Now take the geometric mean of the things that remain. You can’t, because that’s a mathematical operation, which you ruled out, see? The what-nots are the trinkets you keep on your shelf so that it would be too much bother to remove them before dusting, as well as the receipts from ATM transactions and movie purchases that you keep because they might come in handy someday. Also included, optionally, are up to one quarter-cup of spices (any kind).

Meaningless Awards

I see from the Institute for General Wordiness that “pusillanimous” has been added to the official collection of Words That May As Well Not Mean Anything, Because Nobody Uses Them Enough To Remember What They Do mean. I’m a little offended because I remember the word very well, as it was one of my favorites in the 7th grade vocabulary sheets that gave us words to learn how to spell and to define, and I was very good in those. Pusillanimous means, I believe, quarrelsome and unpleasant but not quite so much as the March 2011 inductee “lugubrious” does. Anyway, it’s a perfectly “vibrissae” day outside so I’m going to watch the lawn instead of worrying about it.
I mean words, not the lawn. I have people to worry about the lawn for me.

Selections From My Library

I need to clear out some books and so offer these samples of my eclectic tastes to any takers. Please contact this or any department if you would like it sent gratis, or contact me if you would like it sent to you.

An Incomplete History Of The Cold War, by Daniel “D D” Davison “Hall”, accepts that any history of a complicated event will be incomplete, and so for this popularization it includes only the years 1947, 1953-55, 1964-67, 1978, 1980, then goes back to 1972 because of some stuff it thought about, and 1980 again; and it omits completely all reference to “Poland” or “Belize”, the latter of which the author insists was merely coincidence. 325 pages.