eftychia: Me in kilt and poofy shirt, facing away, playing acoustic guitar behind head (Default)
Add MemoryShare This Entry

It builds with each repeated error whose author I cannot easily reach to correct (or can't figure out how to correct gently enough to not come off as an ass) -- not single typos, but thinkos repeated within a document -- until eventually the pressure must be released somewhere. Like here:

Dammit, although seeds are sown, so your spalling choker will pass it, when you're talking about joining cloth or leather at a seam it's sewn.

Works are copyrighted, as concerning the right to control copies; you really do not mean copywritten. Similarly, it's a copyright, not a copywrite -- fortunately I've been seeing that one less often than I used to, but perplexingly 'copywritten' persists somehow.

And an old one that was repeated so many times in the same story that I still haven't quite gotten over it: if you write hinny when you intended hiney many of your readers won't be able to help picturing a very different sort of ass than you wanted to describe, and that makes it a disturbingly different sort of story.

(Similarly, confusing tinny and tiny will make for somewhat more esoteric mental images than planned, especially in erotic fiction. But much less disturbing than hinny.)

What? The red pen? You really just want to borrow it? Well, okay, if you promise to give it ba... hey, where are you going with it? My red pen! My red pen!

And for a change of pace, a reverse-etymological amusement that might be ruined if I bother to check the actual etymology ... It makes sense to me that making one person known to a group is introducing them, similar in concept to how one introduces an endoscope into a patient or introduces a knife into a murder victim, or introduces foreign genes into germ cells to create an artificial hybrid. But when two people are making themselves known to one another, or a third is making them known to each other, oughtn't that be an interduction?* (And when a person with MPD discovers a new alter, is that followed by an intraduction?) And when somebody making hirself known to new acquaintances insists on telling hir complete life story, is that an entireduction ... or an entirediction? Does advertising a group to (un-organized) outsiders -- say an SCA demo for example -- count as extraducing the group? Okay, okay, I've gone one step too far, since we have the non-Latinate (Germanic, in fact) outreach already. Sorry; got carried away. See subject-line regarding sleep. Likewise, I guess I don't get to play with exduce because we already have extract.

But it's a shame that interduce will sound like a sloppy or dialectical pronounciation of introduce instead of being heard as a context distinction.

[*] Er, ambiduction? I want to say that would be diaducing them, but did 'dia-' make it into Latin intact or would I have to** pick a Greek root to replace 'ducere'***? Hmm. Maybe synduce/synducing/synduction (especially if the party orchestrating the meeting hopes that the two other parties will work together or become friends or something) since 'syn-' appears to made it into Latin?

[**] For a linguistically anal-retentive definition of 'have to', yes. Your point? You're not going to say I should stop flinching at simulcast (Latin prefix + Norse verb) are you?

[***]**** Hey, Latin Scholars -- does that infinitive look as funny to you as '-ein' does to me? I keep thinking of Greek verbs being listed in dictionaries/lexicons in 1s (e.g. 'γραφω'/'grapho') but in English etymologies they're always shown in the infinitive (e.g. 'γραφειν'/'graphein') the same way an English word would be, and it's a tiny cognitive hiccup as I realign it to a more familiar form if it's a word I ought to already know. Since I don't really know Latin beyond a few useful phrases such as "Ita, nos habemos non ullas bananas," Latin infinitives in etymologies don't make me twitch; but you folks who've studied Latin, would you think 'duco' first instead of 'ducere'? (I've probably asked this before ... )

[****] Uh oh; footnote-creepout has begun. I'd better finish this up before it gets out of hand. (And no, I never used the compiler I just alluded to, but I heard about it from folks who did.)

There are 21 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
 
posted by [identity profile] metahacker.livejournal.com at 12:07pm on 2008-04-17
I do know both Latin and Greek, and while 'ducere' is more obviously Latin to me than 'duco', it's not as bad as 'grapho' would be for graphein. The reasoning in your next post makes sense to my brain too.

BTW, I know a lot of people who make 'interductions'. Though the way they pronounce it it's more like "inn'rduction"... similarly to how Bush slurs words.
 
posted by [identity profile] dglenn.livejournal.com at 03:00pm on 2008-04-17
So the '-ere' works for you as a quick "hey, Latin verb here, time to code-switch" flag for you?
 
posted by [identity profile] metahacker.livejournal.com at 03:11pm on 2008-04-17
It does but not reliably. (Especially since -are and -ire are also valid infinitives, and there are plenty of English words that use those endings. Or Italian.) It'd have to be in italics or something to be a good flag.

-ein is more distinctive, phonologically, but since I use Greek so much less (approximately, not at all since about 1993) it takes more to get there anyway.
 
posted by [identity profile] blueeowyn.livejournal.com at 01:28pm on 2008-04-17
In the time I studied Latin we either got the infinitive (ducere) or often 1st singlular present & the infinitive (duco, ducere).

And given the history of English, I (personally) have no problems with the mixing of roots from different cultures (esp. Latin & Greek since the Romans were greatly inspired but a lot of Greek).

Hinny --- HEE (Haw)

As you may know Rein /= Reign /= Rain is one of my huge peeves (reign in your ___ really makes me twitch ... it took me 2 tries to even type it).
 
posted by [identity profile] dglenn.livejournal.com at 02:57pm on 2008-04-17
Like I said, it changes the nature of the story disturbingly.

Embarrassed at having forgotten to mention rein/reign, since I've seen it recently.

Thanks for the clue re: Latin.
 
posted by [identity profile] lpetrazickis.livejournal.com at 08:29pm on 2008-04-17
My Latin textbook lists verbs using the four principal parts:

duco, ducere, duxi, ductum

Liber meus latinae verbas usundorum[*] quattuor principium partum dat.

Gods, I need to study for my exams.

[*] May be entirely wrong.
 
posted by [identity profile] blueeowyn.livejournal.com at 08:38pm on 2008-04-17
The textbooks do, but sometimes when doing translations they would give you the first 2 & definition for certain things. This came up a lot in college (I loved the professor that would give us something to translate. He provided us with any unusual words (meaning and basic forms) + any really bizarre things (contracted form/truly bizarre or obscure meaning) and would let us 'buy' other words (1 point for definition & the recognizable forms ... nom sing/gen sing for adjectives & nouns; first 2 parts for most verbs all 4 parts for some). I thought that was VERY fair of him.
 
posted by (anonymous) at 08:25am on 2015-03-19
I don't know if it's just me or if perhaps everyone else experiencing issues with your site. It appears as though some of the text in your posts are running off the screen. Can somebody else please comment and let me know if this is happening to them as well? This may be a issue with my web browser because I've had this happen before. Appreciate it
 
posted by [identity profile] silmaril.livejournal.com at 01:46pm on 2008-04-17
Here, have a red pen.
 
posted by [identity profile] dglenn.livejournal.com at 02:58pm on 2008-04-17
Thankyouthankyouthankyou *zooms off to correct web sites with it*
 
posted by [identity profile] sodyera.livejournal.com at 01:59pm on 2008-04-17
Hold on. Copywriter is a job in the advertising industry for someone who writes the words for an advertisement; the skill is called copywriting (one word).
 
posted by [identity profile] dglenn.livejournal.com at 02:55pm on 2008-04-17
I know (well okay, I wasn't 100% certain whether it was one word or two until just now) but a) it's often easy to tell from context when somebody meant copyrighted, and b) although I've seen copywriting I can't recall ever having seen copywritten naturally ocurring as anything other than a thinko for copyright. But I don't hang out much with copywriters so for all I know that form may actually occur correctly someplace.

(I still wonder why I'm seeing fewer instances of copywrite but still plenty of copywritten -- if an algorithmic spooling chucker[*] allows one as a transformation of copywriter, it would likely pass the other as well, right? Hmm. Maybe they're still mostly list-based after all and copywritten does come up among copywriters and employers of copywriters but the spilling chalkers know copywrite is wrong?)

[*] The Unix 'spell' program understands adding stuff to stems, like tacking on '-ing'. This makes it powerful with a smallish dictionary ... but also makes it smart enough to be tricked. It'll pass 'singinging' and 'ringinging' because it knows "you can add '-ing'" (but oddly enough 'singinginging' does get flagged). There used to be an option to make it tell you whether correct words were found in the dictionary or assembled from roots and rules, but not in the version I have handy, so I can't verify my recollection that it correctly said 'yes' was okay but for the curious reasoning that it looked like a pluralization of 'ye'.
 
posted by [identity profile] sodyera.livejournal.com at 12:45am on 2008-04-18
It's highly contextual, esp. in advertising where they reserve the right to misspell anything if it makes a point and attracts the eye to their ads.
twistedchick: watercolor painting of coffee cup on wood table (Default)
posted by [personal profile] twistedchick at 03:32pm on 2008-04-17
And then there's copywriting, which is an occupation, or used to be.
 
posted by [identity profile] realinterrobang.livejournal.com at 05:19pm on 2008-04-17
That improper use of "reign" gets up my nose, too, as does people who talk about things like "the tenants of a religion" (really? When was the last time you rented out your religion?), also "tow the line."

I used to be a copywriter and never owned a copyright for any of that stuff I'd copywritten.

Don't you want a blue pencil and not a red pen, by the way?
 
posted by [identity profile] dglenn.livejournal.com at 04:13pm on 2008-04-19
"Don't you want a blue pencil and not a red pen, by the way?

Depends on whether I'm proofreading/editing, ir grading.
 
posted by [identity profile] leiacat.livejournal.com at 06:03pm on 2008-04-17
I would, in fact, like to suggest that you stop flinching at mixtures of languages within a single word. I would suggest that instead, it's a lovely notion, a witness to the flexibility and power of the English language, that it can take parts of words from a variety of sources and make them play together. Awareness of said sources, to me, makes it no less pretty that these diverse morphemes can join each other in such a wide selection of combinations.
 
posted by [identity profile] miss-whiplash.livejournal.com at 06:32pm on 2008-04-17
Have you tried Camomile tea? Foul, but effective.
 
posted by [identity profile] dglenn.livejournal.com at 04:15pm on 2008-04-19
Didn't work for me when I tried it. (And a year or so later I read that it often doesn't help folks who are allergic to ragweed (as I am), which may explain why it didn't work for me.)
 
posted by [identity profile] miss-whiplash.livejournal.com at 06:12pm on 2008-04-20
Camomile tea's effect is supposed to be greatly enhanced by adding honey to the drink. If I recall correctly it is something to do with increasing the available amount of tryptophans, which have both sleep assisting and anti-depressant roles.

I find a yoga position also sometimes helps me when I cannot sleep, in particular one where I lie down on my back with my arms away from my side and my legs crossed (not lotus), about ten minutes of this position seems to calm my mind if it is overactive, but I realise not everyone could do that.

You might also find some yoga helps you generally; more specifically the meditation and relaxation side of it might actually buy you some spoons as opposed to the more active stuff which might cost them.
 
posted by [identity profile] lpetrazickis.livejournal.com at 08:32pm on 2008-04-17
"Ita, nos habemos non ullas bananas."

Surely:

Ita, nos habemus nullas bananas.

Links

January

SunMonTueWedThuFriSat
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24
 
25
 
26
 
27
 
28
 
29
 
30
 
31