Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"I believe the universe naturally tugs towards the evil. I certainly don't mind being on the side that tugs the other way." -- yesthattom, 2008-03-02

[In what seems to be a cluster of spring-new-year observances, this is the start of the 3-day Maha Thingyan -- Burmese New Year -- festival.]

"I believe the universe naturally tugs towards the evil. I certainly don't mind being on the side that tugs the other way." -- yesthattom, 2008-03-02

[In what seems to be a cluster of spring-new-year observances, this is the start of the 3-day Maha Thingyan -- Burmese New Year -- festival.]

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.)

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.)

1. A band leader telling the audience each band member's name would be another example of an extraduction, no?
2. Reading 'γραφειν' where I expect 'γραφω' isn't quite as large a cognitive hiccup as seeing 'graphein' where I expect 'grapho', because unless I'm very awake the former feels like a one step mental correction but the second feels like two steps in my head. (OTOH, without the context marking 'grapho' as a foreign verb, it would be easy to misparse it as the English noun (directly related to the Greek verb etymologically, of course) referring to a slip of the pen (the handwritten parallel to a 'typo'), while the omega on the end of 'γραφω' is a clear Glenn-brain signal to expect the word to be a 1s verb. (Not that it's even the slightest bit of help to someone who knows no Greek -- like how seeing Sanskrit roots in Devanagari script wouldn't help me at all -- so it's a good thing there are different dictionaries with different practices with regard to transliteration for folks with different language skills to use.) Really I just should have picked a different verb that doesn't have that problem, like 'pheugo'/'φευγω'. But when the context is an etymology preceding a definition, that misparsing of 'grapho' seems unlikely anyhow.)

1. A band leader telling the audience each band member's name would be another example of an extraduction, no?
2. Reading 'γραφειν' where I expect 'γραφω' isn't quite as large a cognitive hiccup as seeing 'graphein' where I expect 'grapho', because unless I'm very awake the former feels like a one step mental correction but the second feels like two steps in my head. (OTOH, without the context marking 'grapho' as a foreign verb, it would be easy to misparse it as the English noun (directly related to the Greek verb etymologically, of course) referring to a slip of the pen (the handwritten parallel to a 'typo'), while the omega on the end of 'γραφω' is a clear Glenn-brain signal to expect the word to be a 1s verb. (Not that it's even the slightest bit of help to someone who knows no Greek -- like how seeing Sanskrit roots in Devanagari script wouldn't help me at all -- so it's a good thing there are different dictionaries with different practices with regard to transliteration for folks with different language skills to use.) Really I just should have picked a different verb that doesn't have that problem, like 'pheugo'/'φευγω'. But when the context is an etymology preceding a definition, that misparsing of 'grapho' seems unlikely anyhow.)