Category Archives: Fun With Words

He Sees You When You’re Sleeping…..

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Have some utterly inappropriate Christmas humor (h/t Lynn), as well as a very happy winter-holiday-of-your-choice.

Christmas Carols for the Psychiatrically Challenged

  • SCHIZOPHRENIA: Do You Hear What I Hear?
  • MULTIPLE PERSONALITY DISORDER: We Three Kings Disoriented Are
  • DEMENTIA: I Think I’ll Be Home For Christmas
  • NARCISSISTIC: Hark, the Herald Angels Sing About Me
  • MANIC: Deck the Halls and Walls and House and Lawn and Streets and Stores and Office and Town and Cars and Busses and Trucks and Trees and Fire Hydrants and . . .
  • PARANOID: Santa Claus Is Coming To Get Me
  • PERSONALITY DISORDER: You Better Watch Out, I’m Gonna Cry, I’m Gonna Pout, Maybe I’ll Tell You Why
  • DEPRESSION: Silent Anhedonia, Holy Anhedonia, All Is Flat, All is Lonely
  • OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE DISORDER: Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell Rock, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell Rock, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell Rock, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell Rock, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell Rock, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell Rock, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell Rock, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell Rock, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell Rock, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell Rock, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell Rock, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell Rock, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell Rock, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell Rock, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell Rock, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell Rock, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell Rock, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell Rock, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell Rock, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell Rock, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell Rock, …
    (better start again)
  • PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE PERSONALITY: On The First Day of Christmas My True Love Gave To Me (and then took it all away)
  • BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER: Thoughts of Roasting on an Open Fire.
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I’ve Been Misquoting “The Wire,” and I’m Sorry

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I don’t know how long this has been going on, but I have been attributing the line “This shit’s chess, it ain’t checkers” to Stringer Bell on the HBO show The Wire.

stringer-bell-drinks-tea

I was wrong, it’s actually a line delivered by Alonso Harris in the movie Training Day:

Continue reading →

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A Thought for NaNoWriMo Participants

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We are eleven days into November, and I haven’t actually started on National Novel Writing Month yet. That doesn’t mean I’m out, just that I procrastinate proudly.

For those who are actively participating, and who might be feeling sone frustration, this bit of wisdom from Chuck Wendig might not make you feel better, per se, but hopefully it will remind you that all creative endeavors are painful at some point.

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Can’t Hold It in Any More…

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You know what? I’ve never even seen Frozen, and yet I’m really tired of this song. Don’t get me wrong—it’s a phenomenal song, and it absolutely deserved an Oscar. It just seems like it is everywhere.

Since it won’t leave my head, I might as well give praise where it’s due, to this kid and her brilliant, poop-based parody:

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Fun with Numbers in Other Languages

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Multiples of ten in Russian, for the most part, have a common suffix, sort of like “-ty” in English (i.e. twenty, thirty, etc.) “Twenty” and “thirty” in Russian are “двадцать” and “тридцать” (pronounced “dvadtsat” and “treedtsat,” basically).

Note that they both end in “-цать.” “Forty” is different, though. (The words for “fifty” through “eighty” have a different suffix in common. “Ninety” is different, too, but that’s for another day.) I find this sort of thing interesting, and it’s my blog, so nyah.

The word for “forty” in Russian is “сорок” (pronounced “sorok.”) This threw us for a loop in Russian class back in college, and the professor’s explanation was interesting. I thought I’d share it today. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but Google helped me find the same basic linguistic theory.

A post by Joseph F. Foster, a University of Cincinnati anthropologist, at the website The Linguist List cites A.G. Preobrazhensky’s “Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language,” which suggests that the Russian word for forty “is related to this Russian form: sorochka = ‘shirt, blouse. shift (sack dress)’.” Foster explains: Continue reading →

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The Bing Translator Telephone Game

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I invented* a dumb internet game. Here are the basic rules:

  1. Take a sentence in English (or whatever language you prefer).
  2. Run it through Bing Translator.
  3. Copy the translated sentence into the first Bing Translator window (set the first window to “Auto-Detect”), and translate it into a third language.
  4. Copy that sentence into the first window…..and you get the idea from there.
  5. Repeat as much as you want.
  6. Translate the multiply-translated sentence back into whatever language you started with.
  7. See how bizarrely different it is.

I started with “These are the times that try men’s souls,” because for some entirely-made-up reason I think Thomas Paine would approve of this. Also because it’s a grammatically simple sentence with small, commonly-used words. And because it was the first thing that popped into my head.

Through 28 languages, “These are the times that try men’s souls” becomes “Today, is one of the foundations of the older brother.”

By Ionut Cojocaru (Own work) [CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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Are activists in Maryland taking a bold stand against diseased birds of prey?

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20140716-091629-33389644.jpg

Photo by Jenna Johnson, © The Washington Post

Or are they just a colossal disappointment to English teachers everywhere?

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