Sleep Spent

OMG, this site addictive. You have been warned. When you have 12 hours to kill, go check out my lists.

In (slightly belated) honor of National Coming Out Day, I present some haiku I threw together when I should have been sleeping:

Not quite like Stewie
Certainly not like Foley
I’m gay and I’m proud

Straight sex may be fun
But there can be little doubt:
Gay sex is more so

( Sorry, breeders! )

For once in my life
To let them all see who I
Really am. What joy!

Your own contributions are encouraged. Show me what you’ve got!

• I’ve dropped The Brothers Karamazov, at least for the time being. Two hundred pages in and I still didn’t really care about any of the characters. I’ve started Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell instead, and it is fantastic! She spells things in the Georgian fashion (scisars, connexion, shewn, chuse, shoking), it’s really funny and is written like a period novel would be (this helps the funny immeasurably), she editorializes, and the plot has really drawn me in. I should have bought this in England when I saw it all over the place in 2004, but I didn’t. Anyway, I am quite sure I’ll finish this one.
• I am really excited about Tristram Shandy, which I heard about from this rave on Slate, but it won’t open in San Francisco for another two weeks. :-( I really want to read the book, too, but this is an adaptation in the mold of Adaptation. Meaning, I don’t think too much will be given away by the film.
• I got my taxes done in 3 hours tonight with H&R Block. $20 later, I have a ~$150 combined federal/state refund. Taxes really aren’t that hard with the online application, which I did last year as well. It’s nice to be done, and it will be nice to get two checks in the mail. :-)

So I was reading this Dr. Seuss cartoon (you can find a passel of them here), and I saw the word hock. And I thought, “that’s odd.” Because I’d only ever seen that word in the context of a part of a cow or pig.

Then I thought of hawking something, agressively selling or peddling. “Is this just another spelling of that?” I thought.

But no, they’re two different words. If I’ve heard “hock” (meaning “to pawn”) before, I must have assumed it was included in the definition of “hawk,” and conflated them by virtue of their homonymy.

I love our language. :-)

Oh, and another awesome word I discovered today while reading the February issue of Harper’s, which just showed up in my mailbox today: qua. Meaning, “in the capacity of.” As in, “I’m speaking to you qua computer scientist.” Sounds like a useful Scrabble word to me.

This was used in a really great article by the great, great grandson of Charles Darwin about the recent kerfuffle in Dover over Idiotic Design. It’s good reading; BigChalk’s eLibrary should have it, though you may have to wait a few days. (Your school/public library does subscribe to eLibrary, doesn’t it? Mine does.)

A few years ago, Harvard did a survey of a whole bunch of people across the US, asking them how they said different words. And I found a website where you can take the same survey, and I did.

Here’s how I pronounce things.

Turns out, my dialect is 52% popular. Would you believe, most people say “sir-up” not “sear-up”?

It’s too bad he didn’t ask about “bagel.” :-)