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I'm not as militant as Phil on this topic -- you can call it a /kil-OM-@-t@r/ if you like, and I'll hardly twitch -- but I'm glad to see someone else making this terribly, terribly important point.

Now, apostrophes are another matter. Get them wrong, I'll happily hold you by the feet and feed you into an industrial chicken mincer. A bat's gotta have standards!

Jeff Atwood has written about the pronunciation of ASCII characters like _, ( and &, so since I recently worked out how to access my archives of the old fLog blog, I thought I'd repost this:

An old boss of mine, Rob Cox, used to call the backslash character "slosh", because it was quicker to pronounce: "Just type E D I T space C colon slosh win N T slosh system thirty-two slosh drivers slosh e-t-c slosh hosts...".

It occurred to me the other day that the slash/slosh pairs can apply to other characters. Here's my extended Coxian character set:

/ = slash, \ = slosh
- = dash, _ = dosh
< = angle, > = ongle
{ = brace, } = broce
[ = bracket, ] = brocket
( = paren, ) = poren
' = tick, ` = tock

and, if you go out on a limb a bit...

: = colon, ; = Colin

The important thing to remember is: there is no such thing as an ompersond. It would be too silly, and we couldn't have that, could we?

(There's more of the fLog archives to come, when I get some tuits.)

I'd been wondering this for years, but only when I wasn't in front of a computer. Today I remembered to look it up. So, for the edification and enlightenment of my Beloved and anyone else who wondered too, here is the truth of the matter:

Ham is the thigh and rump of a pig or boar, and is usually cured "in some fashion", and possibly smoked.

Bacon is cut from the sides, belly, or back of a pig that has been cured, smoked, or both.

So that's the difference. Bene convenemus.

I'm with Stilgherrian in this: the black and white woman on the screens of Westpac ATMs is one of the most annoying non-human interactions I'm likely to encounter in a typical week.  "Here's your money (and your receipt, if you asked for one)."  What?  Don't you remember that I asked for a receipt?  It was only ten seconds ago, you stupidly minimalist piece of software!


Now don't get me started on the way NAB ATMs don't beep when you press the button to select an amount to withdraw, after they've beeped (bept?  Should be bept.)... after they've bept for every other button-press.  What is that?  Poor testing?  A management fiat?  Ooh, we don't want muggers to know they've chosen an amount -- maybe they're just standing near the ATM to keep out of the rain, but as soon as the muggers hear the distinctive beep of "twenty bucks", which is indistinguishable from every other identical beep, they'll dive in for the kill!  Suppress the beep!

ATMs: may contain traces of stupid.  That is all.

Turducken.

Spumante.

Come on - isn't the name a hint?

Rule of thumb: never eat anything that has a possible end-product of the eating process as part of its name. It's just tempting fate.

The Beloved has coined a word, “Squargle”, for the noise the Boy Wonder makes on occasion. For some reason, it inspired this filk of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Tit Willow.

On a bed with a pillow a little round boy
Said “Squargle, oh squargle, oh squargle”
And I said to him, “Son, does it give you much joy,
Singing ‘Squargle, oh squargle, oh squargle’”
“Is it weakness of intellect, Hughie?” I cried
“Or a Mummy-juice glut in your little inside”
With a shake of his bald little head, he replied
“Oh squargle, oh squargle, oh squargle!”

He viewed me intently with never a smile,
Singing “Squargle, oh squargle, oh squargle”
And kicked with his dear little feet all the while,
Saying squargle, oh squargle, oh squargle
He snorked and he sighed, and a gurgle he gave
Then a look of relief made his features less grave
And an odour arose from the pants of that knave,
“Oh squargle, oh squargle, oh squargle”

Now I’m fairly convinced that no diction’ry yet
Contains squargle, oh squargle, oh squargle.
However, I’m sure I shall never forget
His “Squargle, oh squargle, oh squargle”
And if you need translation to figure it out,
Examine his nappy, and you’ll have no doubt
Of the matter he’s seeking to tell us about:
“Oh squargle, oh squargle, oh squargle”

Crossposted from fLog.

I remember hearing about this at the time, and thinking what a splendid idea it was. Now, thanks to a comment tucked away in the discussion page for the Wikipedia entry on Toes, I have a source. The BatPup will be most pleased.

"Why, Phillips asks, must toes "merely be counted?" In a Feb. 14 (1991?) NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE letter, he proposes labels for the pedal digits: porcellus fori (big toe), p. domi (second toe); p. carnivorus (third toe), p. nonvoratus (fourth digit) and p. plorans domum (smallest toe). These names--all variations on a theme by Mother Goose--translate loosely into: little pig at market, baby pig at home, meat-eating piglet, small pig that's not eaten, and piggy crying all the way home."

Jeff Duntemann writes about the misuse of the word “imply” in popular parlance:

The problems lies in our two different meanings of the word “imply.” In logic, “imply” means “necessarily follows from.” In modern English outside the lofty field of logic, “imply” simply means “suggests,” which may not be a diametrically opposite meaning, but is certainly 90 degrees skewed.

I have a friend who gets irritated at people using the word “osmosis” incorrectly too — “What?” he asks, “Did you stick your head and a book in a bucket of saline solution and wait for the knowledge to infuse through your forehead?”  Similarly, I and many other sane people get annoyed at Creationists claiming evolution is “just a theory” (dude - a spherical Earth is just a theory too, unless you’ve got a reeeeeally long tape measure).

There needs to be a word for this phenomenon, and since I like a bit of Liff in my morning, I’m going to rummage through the post code directory and find… Burrowye, henceforth defined as “a word stolen from scientific terminology and warped into a thoroughly different meaning for the use of the masses”.

Crossposted from fLog.

My family coined an earlier Liff word, Wonglepong, a generic term for what the Brits call "iced lollies" and the Yanks call "popsicles", but which Australians only know by assorted co-opted brand names like "icy pole" and "paddle pop". Usage: "I have a sudden sugar craving. Who fancies a wonglepong?"

It was while I was looking up the Google Maps entry for Wonglepong, Queensland that I ran into an example of another interesting phenomenon: a genuine Mountweazel. See, map makers have a lot of trouble with copyright infringement, since anyone who rips off their work can claim to have got it the way they were supposed to have: by going out with a yardstick (or its equivalent in modern currency, a GPS receiver) and measuring the lay of the land. So to protect their investment and provide evidence of infringement in any prospective lawsuit, the mapmakers will insert random made-up geographical features in out-of-the-way places. The odd little road south of Wonglepong Qld, which can be seen in Google Maps's hybrid view, careening through an innocent farmhouse, appears to be exactly this.

No doubt I could think of some witty comment about the mapmakers enjoying a pleasant frozen drink-on-a-stick confection as they go about their falsifying of the public record, but I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Ordering pizza in the office for lunch, I realised there's no word for the one ingredient that every "ensemble food" always has that hardly anyone likes: the anchovies on pizzas, the beetroot on hamburgers, the rockmelon or honeydew melon in fruit salad, the black jelly beans. So a moment's rummaging through the post code database revealed Bockelberg, which will do nicely.

Me, I'm a big bockelberg fan, except for the awful honeydews, which I don't hate so much as feel a deep and profound apathy for. In general, bockelbergs add a bite and a flavour to foods, and make them worth eating.

I like 'em.

And now I've named 'em.

When the Elder Daughter of DOOM was still in utero, a good half a decade before I was introduced to her, the Beloved gave her the nickname of Sprout. This is a pretty normal thing to do. I believe daharja referred to dragon_and_dawn as Paris before he made his appearance: it's short for Uterine Parasite (silly alto, she is). We call this a nom de womb, of course.

When the BatPup was still only a pointy-nosed narcissistic conductor fœtus, we reasoned thus: the Beloved's totem animal is the dragon; mine is the bat; the offspring of a bat and a dragon is either a drat, which we didn't like, or a bagon. Bagon sounds enough like Baggins to be going on with, so we called him/her/it Frodo. And Frodo she was, until she arrived and we discovered that she was a girl, not the boy we'd all been expecting, so she got her actual name and the added bonus of a nickname.

The Beloved was feeling a little unreal about pregnancy number three, partly for the lack of morning sickness, but mostly because we didn't have a nom de womb for the new creature yet. Last night we realised that both of our proposed names, male and female, will fit nicely with an old pun, for reasons that will become half-obvious at least when BatPup 2.0 is born. The name that this pun suggests is Rosy. So that's what he or she will be called.

Given that a male nom led to a female baby, I expect this female nom will turn out to be (channeling Blackadder) a boy with a winkle. But as always, it's 50:50, or maybe 50.1:49.9. No matter; we'll be happy regardless.

And with the name comes... no morning sickness, but that's OK. I recall a similar limbo very early on in the last pregnancy; it won't last!

The Beloved having claimed her weekly Sanity Break, and with the Elder Daughter of DOOOM off at her grand parents' place for a week, I was left with a BatPup and a messy house. Thus, we have gone for a walk, and I'm sitting under a tree cursing my phone's keypad while the enormous bublet explores the playground.

Should the photo caption perplex you, I'll explain: "wonglepong" is a Liff word of our own devising for what is otherwise called a paddle pop, iced lolly, icy pole, or the equivalent in your country, state and dialect. The lack of a good Aussie generic term always annoyed me; problem solved!


The BatPup enjoys a wonglepong in the shade