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Today being Australia Day, the ABC has an Australian slang quiz. I scored nine out of ten (I missed the first one). I must say, though, I have never actually said any of those things, nor would I expect to hear most of them from anyone else.

What else? Did you know that you can buy a Barbie electronic typewriter? And it comes with four pre-loaded ciphers to code and decode secret messages, but Mattel chose not to advertise that because they thought little girls wouldn't be interested in codes. I wonder if Mattel has ever actually met any little girls, because I'd have loved that back when I was one. Now I really like the idea of ASIO (or whatever your local secret service is called) buying these in bulk and using them as a very lo-fi Enigma machine. That'd confuse the Russians.
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March books read

* The Horologicon - Mark Forsyth (2012)
Read more... )

* Malice - Keigo Higashino (1996) (Trans. Alexander O. Smith, 2014)
Read more... )

* KNITSONIK: Stranded Colourwork Sourcebook - Felicity Ford (2014)
Read more... )

* 1974: Le livre illustré de ceux qui sont nés cette année-là! - Adrien Servent (2015)
Read more... )

I also started a new Cartland during the month and didn't get back to it. I know you'll find this hard to believe, f-list, but it was boring. I mean, the hero was called John. John. Remember that time there was a hero called Norvin? Those were the days. John was described as looking like a leopard, which would make him... spotty? That can't be what she meant.



Answers to 1974 quiz )
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So here is a new and interesting thing: you can sign up to learn a word of Bininj Gunwok (a family of Aboriginal languages from Northern Australia) a few times a week.

This week's random word:

7. Purse
I have been puzzling about this all week, because I did not think I had any thoughts about purses. By 'purse', I mean a small pouch for holding coins or keys or whatnot. I know some people use the word to mean a bigger bag too, but that, to me, is a handbag. You can put a purse in a handbag, but you can't put a handbag in a purse. There is a grey area where the two intersect, and that is the clutch bag or clutch purse, but you can avoid problems by just calling it a clutch.

I have a purse in my handbag. It's a green-sequinned affair for holding three sets of keys. It's all right. I mean, it does the job. When I think of purses, the first one I think of the one my grandmother had in the 1970s, which I used to play with during Mass when I was very little. It was a gold Glomesh number, which I thought was the height of elegance (after looking at a large number of photos, I believe it to be the square gold purse in the first photo on this page). It had a beautifully smooth clicking mechanism, and I loved rubbing my finger over the purse itself and feeling the mesh rippling. For a very long time, I thought chain-mail was made of Glomesh. Imagine how funky those knights would have been: ready to battle by day, disco by night.

Next week: Ripple
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I read something the other day about language death, and how it's not just languages and words that are dying: it's also number systems. Not everyone uses base-10 like we do. For example, a tribe in Papua New Guinean has a septivigesimal (base-27) number system. I'd be 1B years old if I lived with them. So young!

And so to this week's thing of the 100 random things:

2. Tea bags
At some point in the mid-1980s, a tea company had a competition. Like a golden ticket in a Wonka bar, they hid a symbol in the label of a tea bag. My grandfather and I whiled away a rainy weekend afternoon pulling tags off every tea bag in my grandmother's new box. We didn't win, and my grandmother was very cross when she found that each of her tea bags had string that wasn't attached to anything. I don't remember what the prize we didn't win was, but it surely wasn't as good as this:


(From http://www.luxuo.com/most-expensive/tea-bag.html)

That would be a tea bag studded with 280 diamonds, valued at $12,000, awarded as a prize in a different competition. Runners-up won a teapot and a year's supply of tea, which, frankly, seems much more useful than a diamond-studded tea-bag. Perhaps they should have put the diamonds on the teapot instead. Or could you take the diamonds off and have them set in something, then make a nice cup of tea with the plain bag? Or, or, could you make a cup of tea with the diamond bag, then take the diamonds off, just so you could say you've drunk diamond tea? Hmmm. What would *you* do with a diamond tea bag?

The filter paper on tea bags is made from abacá, the 'leafstalk of Philippine bananas also known as Manila hemp'. Thanks, Wikipedia.

Next week: Pears.
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Tonight I watched that Stephen Fry on language thing, the episode about swearing and other taboos. He interviewed a nurse, who said that if somebody died on the ward, staff will ring the porters and say, 'We have a gentleman to go to Rose Cottage,' thus not upsetting anyone overhearing this with mention of bodies and morgues. I looked at my mother with raised eyebrows. She understood the implied question.

'We would ring and say, "Bring the trolley up",' she said. Not quite as subtle, that.

I have been trying f.lux on my computer the last few days. The first couple of evenings, I found it a bit strange when the screen changed colour, but I've decided I like it. So there we go.
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There should be a word that means "the mess made while tidying up a mess that is actually bigger than the mess being tidied up". That's asking a lot of one little word, but it would be extremely useful for me to explain what my desk looks like right now. As in: You should see my desk: I started to tidy it and now there's a ______.

I suppose I could just say "bigger mess".

At any rate, I hope I'll soon need a word that means "the moment the bigger mess clears to reveal the tidiness beneath". Then all will be right with the world.
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There's a meme going round at the moment in which you enter your LiveJournal user name into a box and it generates an analysis of your journal content: whether the writing has a masculine or feminine basis, whether it deals with the past, present or future, and other stuff like that. So I did the meme - don't worry, I'll spare you the whole result - and discovered that my 'general message is distinguished by verbosity', which is a fair cop. I was more surprised to find that it analysed my writing style as predominantly male. I'd always thought the way I write was quite obviously female, but perhaps that's because I know I'm female. Although, reading a bit more about it, the gender basis is determined by counting the occurrences of certain words - 'and' is counted as female and (ha!) 'the' as male - so I'm not sure that I'd take that to be wholly reliable.

June 30 was the end of the financial year here (happy new year!), so I've been busy all day doing payroll stuff. How much do I hate my payroll software, the stupidly named Payroll Pro Professional? This time last year, I spent half a day on the phone, pretty much equally divided between being on hold and fruitlessly trying to explain that the payment summaries for a handful of my employees weren't printing correctly (in fact, weren't printing at all). In the end I gave up and ordered some stationery from the Tax Office and wrote them by hand. This year, I realised the (updated) software was doing the same thing, so I saved myself a lot of heartache and wrote the problem half-dozen out straight away using the left-over stationery from last year. So take that, Payroll Pro Professional!
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When you see a baby (or a cat or whatever) lying on its back and you go to tickle its belly, what do you say? In my family we say, "I'm going to tickle your binjy!" or "Look at that big binjy!" I always wondered about that, because I never heard anyone else say it; other people always say belly or tummy. It wasn't until I did a unit of linguistics at university and we used Aboriginal languages in a translation exercise that I realised that, thanks to my mother's time as a midwife (and my time as a baby) in central Australia, we had absorbed the Pitjantjatjara word for "belly" and brought it home south with us.

Anyway, so I love regional dialect things, which is why I grabbed this meme when [livejournal.com profile] yaaresse did it.

1. A body of water, smaller than a river, contained within relatively narrow banks.
That would be a stream or a creek.

2. What the thing you push around the grocery store is called.
A (shopping) trolley. And the grocery store would be a supermarket (large) or grocer's (small).

3. A metal container to carry a meal in.
Well... a container to carry a meal in would be a lunchbox, but they're not metal. Most lunchboxes I've seen are plastic: adults seem to use any old Tupperware(-type) container, schoolchildren often have special lunchboxes with compartments and a fitted drink bottle (or sometimes just a brown paper bag). My lunchbox looks like this only with a dragonfly pattern (and I don't normally carry the chopsticks with it).

And there's more in the same vein )

Ippocampo

Sep. 3rd, 2007 04:50 pm
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Why does my Italian-English dictionary think that I may need to translate "heroin" but not "seahorse"? That's making certain assumptions about my lifestyle that I don't feel a dictionary is qualified to make. Hmph.

Right now, I'm reading a book called The Third Heaven Conspiracy by Giulio Leoni. It's a cosy little mystery novel about murder and intrigue in the Church in fourteenth century Florence, and hot on the killer's trail is the sleuth... Dante. That's right: the poet Dante. Fantastic.

What random historical person do you think could have solved mysteries in their spare time? Personally, I'm waiting for Genghis Khan, PI.
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Today, let us contemplate the cow. While we've all heard about those showy female insects who eat their menfolk, I think we've forgotten about the contribution made to feminism by the humble cow. If I said, "Look at those horses over there", you might see some stallions and some mares. A herd of pigs may contain boars and sows. A herd of cows, however, can be made up of bulls... and cows.

Although there is a word - "cattle" - which serves the same group purpose as "horses" or "pigs", I find it interesting that the term for a female cow can also be used to convey the collective. (In fact, I remember a novelty song a few years ago called "Cows with guns", in which the lead cow was consistently referred to as "he".) Perhaps it's because one of the most important functions of the cow in our society - milk production - can only be undertaken by female cows.

In short, cows: striking a blow for the sisterhood.
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Imagine this scene: two people are running for a bus or driving up to a green light, only to miss it. If those people are any two members of my family, they will invariably have the following conversation:

Person 1: Too late ...
Person 2: ... she cried as she waved her wooden leg in the air.


After thirty odd years of hearing this, it occurred to me recently that it's really quite an odd thing to say.

Of wooden legs )

Thinking about that reminded me of something my grandmother used to say, which I loved but haven't heard for ages:

Person 1: What are you doing?
Person 2: Making a wingwong for a goose's bridle.


Of wingwongs )

What family sayings do you have?
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I forgot to mention in my previous post about the Victorian short stories that I think the world would be a better place if more people said "by Jove."

Go on, give it a try. "Did he, by Jove?" And once you're there, it's only a hop, skip and a jump from calling someone a cad. Or, possibly, a bounder.

Go on. You know you want to.
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The Gloom has been upon me these last few weeks, rendering me incapable of writing anything but lists of Things That Annoy Me (No. 1: “Impact” as a verb). My wellbeing has been further upset by a sudden welter of small but annoying ailments: my winter cough, a sore wrist, a gammy knee, my usual sense of general inadequacy and an eye infection that has kept me exiled from the computer to avoid any strain. Poor, miserable, Eeyore-me. However the gloomy weather has started in earnest and I can now wallow in my disgruntledness to my heart’s content.

I recently heard an interview with Mark Latham (a politician and possible – likely? – next Prime Minister, for the benefit of non-Australian readers), in which he channelled the spirit of my late grandmother and told her favourite joke. Asked what he thought of someone calling him some unpleasant name, he answered, “I don’t care, as long as they don’t call me late for dinner.” How often did I hear that as a child?

“I’ll call you when I want to be picked up.”
“As long as you don’t call me late for dinner!”

Other favourite sayings of my grandmother that I haven’t heard in a long time:

  • On being ignored by a friend in public: “Look at her with her head in the air like a snake.” This was usually said with some venom (ahem), but I’ve just realised my mother says it too, with amusement.

  • On being asked what she was doing or what something was: “(I’m making) a wingwong for a goose’s bridle.”

  • On seeing someone (usually my grandfather) get up early and come into her kitchen still bleary-eyed and half-asleep: “Look out, here comes creeping Jesus.” That would be a great name for an alt-country band.

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