FYI: ...and 'google' is American Dialect Society's word of the decade
It beat out ‘9/11’, ‘blog’, ‘green’, ‘text’, and ‘war on terror’.
Empty
Karaoke - “empty orchestra”
Karate - “empty hand”
Yes, but Wikipedia says ‘karate’ is a bit more nuanced:
In this era of escalating Japanese militarism [circa 1932], the name was changed from 唐手 (“Chinese hand”) to 空手 (“empty hand”) – both of which are pronounced karate – to indicate that the Japanese wished to develop the combat form in Japanese style.
perendinate
verb • /puh-REN-di-nayt/ • to put off something until the day after tomorrow
inscos - Google Search →
Stumbled across this word this morning and it stopped me dead in my tracks. “inscos” means insurance companies. As in:
As I’ve been saying over and over, there’s nothing in these proposals that seriously, or even semi-seriously, cramps the style of the big inscos. [*]
Now would that be pronounced inse-koze (where inse rhymes with rinse), insh-koze, or in-skoze? Best of all possible worlds, imho: it strengthens to inch-koze.
Word of the day!: square + circle = squircle
Pitchfork: The Social History of the MP3 →
I give you “Music Rules,” a set of printable worksheets for teachers, who most certainly don’t need more externally-sanctioned frameworks telling them how to teach, let alone one that draws on a pedagogy built to create unthinking allegiance to an illogical law. Here’s an actual excerpt— this isn’t a joke— that draws on Cold War fear-mongering and a strategically-chosen new word (“songlifting”) for its rhetorical effect:
“Now find out if songlifting is a real problem in your community. Use this chart to interview family members and friends about where they get their music. Bring your findings back to class and combine them with those of your classmates. Use your data to figure out how much songlifting occurs among the people you know. See for yourself by completing the calculation below.”
I really do like the word “songlifting”, even if the semanticist in me has misgivings about how accurate the analogy between “shoplifting” and “songlifting” is: [insert theft/piracy distinction argument; note lack of a shop in songlifting; note the predicate rewrites the victim and context of shoplifting with an object type thus equating victim/crime and object]. Also one can shoplift anything and talk about it normally, but it’s funny saying things like “He songlifted five songs” or “What songs did you songlift?” or “the songs she songlifted…”.
GRE Flashcards →
I have to take the GRE in a couple months, so to help me study, I made a simple flashcard-tumblr for GRE vocabulary. All I have to do at this point is pump in more entries. Maybe I’ll enable submissions too.
I am a fan of Nintendo by the way, just not in a blinkered way.
— I had never seen the word blinkered before. Merriam-Webster defines it as “limited in scope or understanding : narrow-minded,” basically a metaphorical extension of what horses would wear on their sides. Unfortunately, when I read the word, I think of car blinkers, and I lose the meaning.
