Category: words

weaving out of control

overwhelmed and under pressure
buckling under, in over my head
fruitflies overtake an underripe banana

overeducated and underdressed
chronic overachiever feeling snowed under
underestimated tasks, schedule overloaded
commitments overlapping and under the gun
time to shave underarms when hell freezes over

overwrought and under attack
hot under the collar I overreact
overeasy eggs have undercooked yolks

overextended and underfunded
tree branches overhang, basement floor under water
the undergrowth is overgrown
overdue bills crackle under foot
in under the roof, squirrels overrun the attic

overprivileged and underproductive
an overstuffed sofa cushion under my butt
get over yourself and get underway
the monkey’s overboard and the undertow pulls

overtired and under the weather
overconfidence getting undermined
soft underbelly feels overexposed
overanxious thoughts swept under the carpet
laundry overflowing and no clean underwear

overwritten and underwhelming
an overzealous undertaking
overblown metaphors from under my hat
overcooked pasta with underseasoned sauce

yes we can (can)

cylinder-19_42791_smWith winter around the corner (or actually in the building for some of us), many people are looking to preserve their foods for the colder months. So some people can.

Can you can? Actually, I can’t can. Well, maybe I could can. But I don’t can. Perhaps I should can. Maybe someday I will can.

But for now, what I can do is make a list. Of cans. For ThThTh¹.

A big can of cans

  1. can: an English modal verb. Like other modals (eg could, should, would, will, may, etc.), it doesn’t take the third person singular -s suffix. It is typically spoken in a very reduced form, with a syllabic alveolar nasal for the rhyme [kʰn̩] unless it bears sentence-level stress (eg. a pitch accent), in which case it has the full low front vowel [æ] like the other cans (i.e. [kʰæn]²).
  2. can: a verb meaning “preserve food in jars or cans”
  3. can: a noun meaning “an enclosed metal container” (also a tin, though cans not need be made of tin. Actually, I guess some cans are not even entirely metal.)
  4. the can: a slang term for a bathroom, or for the toilet itself.
  5. can: a verb meaning “discontinue.” As in “the show was canned.”
  6. can it!: an expression akin to “shut up.”
  7. Pringles: potato chips that come in a can
  8. cheeseburger in a can: exactly what it sounds like. Yick.
  9. Prince Albert in a can: A kind of tobacco sold in a tin made famous for the use of its name in prank phone calls:

    prank caller: Do you have Prince Albert in a can?
    shopkeeper: Yes we do.
    prank caller: Well, why don’t you let him out?

  10. Campbell’s Soup Cans: Andy Warhol’s famous work of art, which consists of 32 canvasses each with a silk-screened picture of a can of Campbell’s soup.
  11. canned laughter: recorded laugh tracks used with TV shows.
  12. kick the can: a game usually played outdoors. (I’ve never played it, actually. It appears to be akin to both tag and hide and seek)
  13. can of worms: an expression meaning “complications” or “difficulties.” As in “we don’t want to open up that can of worms.” Which strikes me as kinda funny, as I imagine that a can of worms, if not exactly pleasant, would be rather straightforward.
  14. There is a tradition to string empty cans from the back of a car (usually emblazened with “just married”) which a bride and groom will use to leave their wedding
  15. The Can can: a French chorus line dance. (Also written cancan or can-can.)

    16. can_can_dancers

  16. “Can You Can Can?”: lyrics by Richard Perlmutter (of Beethoven’s Wig) set to Can Can from Orpheus in the Underworld by Jacques Offenbach. The chorus goes like this:

    Oh can you do the Can Can?
    If you can then I can
    I can Can Can if you Can Can
    Can you Can Can

  17. Yes We Can Can: a Pointer Sisters song.
  18. “Yes We Can”: a campaign speech by President-elect Barack Obama³ about the benefits of preserving food, and a song using elements of that speech [YouTube]. (Okay, it’s not really about canning.)

———

¹This list of cans was inspired by a post on preserving foods from Flying Tomato Farms. In particular, this bit got me thinking about can:

Because I can (that is, preserve food in jars using boiling water and pressure-processing methods), and because I teach a couple of people each season to can, I sometimes get frustrated with customers at farmers markets who decline to take the farmers up on their bulk discounts for produce that could easily be put up using simple methods of boiling water bath canning, drying, or freezing.

In addition to it providing me with amusement over the need to disambiguate the word can, it was a very intersting post about the need for local processing of food in order to better support local food economies.

² This should actually have a tilda diacritic over the vowel, too, but I can’t get the unicode symbol to work right.

³ Wahoo!

—-
images: can-can dancers from wpclipart.com, soup cans from Florida Center for Instructional Technology Clipart ETC

anatomy lessons

This may come as a shock to you, but males and females have differences in anatomy. Well, if you are 2 years old, at least, it may come as a bit of a surprise.

It may not come as a surprise to you that a 2-year-old who has been going through intensive potty training might be rather intrigued with diapers. So when Theo came home from the hospital, Phoebe wanted to be around to watch his diaper changes. For the first couple changes that Phoebe observed, she was mostly disturbed by the umbilical stump, which was a pretty disturbing thing. “I don’t like that thing,” she said. “Take it off.”

Once the offending appendage had fallen off, when Theo was around 10 days old, Phoebe’s attention was drawn to the diaper area.

“He has a nipple!” she exclaimed with surprise.
“Oh, um, that’s something else,” I replied.
And then, blissfully, the attention got diverted.
—
Some diaper change, a few days later:
Phoebe: What’s that thing?
My head: Damn, do we have to have this conversation?
Me: Well, that’s where his pee-pee comes out. Um…
Some people call it a “pee-pee.”
My head: Do we really want to teach her baby-talk terms?
Me: But it’s really called a penis.
My head: Damn, did I just teach the word penis to my 2-year-old daughter?
Me: It’s something that boys have.
Phoebe: Oh.
Me: [awkward silence]
My head: [awkward silence]
Phoebe: [Happily] I just have the regular kind.
Me: Me too!

—-
I’ve had this in my drafts for a few weeks, and have since been amused to read a couple of other posts on terms for nipples and other bits from
dragonfly and Emily.

abbreviated

City Girl (of Country Girl / City Girl) tagged me for the one word meme last week.

I actually had done a version of this a while back. Some people had been calling it “monosyllablic,” and I was shocked (deeply, deeply shocked) that many people used words that were disyllablic or even polysyllabic. So I made sure that none of my own answers exceeded one syllable.

Anyhow, all my answers are still single words, according to the instructions. But I decided to spice things up additionally in my own way.

  1. Where is your mobile phone? attaché
  2. Where is your significant other? abed
  3. Your hair colour? auburn
  4. Your mother? adventurous
  5. Your father? absent
  6. Your favourite thing? acoustics
  7. Your dream last night? amusing
  8. Your dream goal? achievement
  9. The room you’re in? alcove
  10. Your hobby? anagrams
  11. Your fear? aggression
  12. Where do you want to be in 6 years? academia
  13. Where were you last night? abode
  14. What you’re not? aardvark
  15. One of your wish-list items? Avengers
  16. Where you grew up? around
  17. The last thing you did? ate
  18. What are you wearing? argyle
  19. Your TV? adequate
  20. Your pets? ants
  21. Your computer? Apple
  22. Your mood? appeased
  23. Missing someone? ancestors
  24. Your car? adorable
  25. Something you’re not wearing? anorak
  26. Favourite shop? Amazon
  27. Your summer? active
  28. Love someone? absolutely
  29. Your favourite colour? azure
  30. When is the last time you laughed? antics
  31. When is the last time you cried? announcement

Most of the answers aren’t altogether apocryphal, although a few approach.¹ (Can you guess which I just made up?)

Oh, yeah. Today’s word of the day is alliteration.

—–
¹ They say a little alliteration goes a long way. I’m assuming a lot of alliteration is an assault.²
² I apologize. Kinda.

bunny and carrot (and also a cat)

I had grand ideas to have Phoebe and Theo’s Halloween costumes coordinate in some way. As Phoebe wanted to be a bunny, I thought Theo (who had no input in the matter) could be a carrot.

I early gave up on the idea of making Phoebe’s bunny costume, thinking that it would be easy to find one ready-made. I had plans to make Theo’s costume as well as my own, and thought making 3 costumes would be insane. We had some trouble finding a bunny in her size, as it turned out, and ended up ordering online. But seeing as I am a pathological procrastinator, we did so only a week before our party.

A few days before the party, we got a bit antsy, and when we saw a much-discounted white kitty costume, we decided to get it, thinking that I could transform it into a bunny in a pinch. As it turned out, the bunny costume arrived the same day. But, it also turned out to have enclosed plush-covered feet. Such that one could not wear the costume with shoes. As one might want to do when walking outside. Such as one tends to do for trick-or-treating.

So, we decided she could wear the bunny costume for our party, and then the kitty cat for trick-or-treating. (And as such may have set the expectation for future years of having two costumes for Halloween…)

I did manage to make Theo’s carrot, using orange fleece (so as to need minimal hemming) and some green felt for the greens. I made up a pattern for carrot bunting-type thing as well as a hat. We don’t have a sewing machine, so I stitched it up by hand. Much of it while I was on the phone for a work conference call a few hours before the party.

And, because I had to go and run off at the mouth (or whatever the typed equivalent is) about having each of my posts this month feature some word that I like, I felt compelled to follow through in some way. And while I do think the word bunny is a fine word¹, it seemed a bit…um…fluffy…as a followup to yesterday’s omphaloskepsis.

So, I dug up a couple of new words to go along with this post. Both of these are from a site called Luciferous Logolepsy.

    apiaceous
    adj. – parsley-like; belonging to plant family including carrot, parsley, etc.

    macrotous
    adj. – having large ears


My temorarily macrotous daughter and briefly apiaceous son.


Here is Phoebe as a kitty. No bonus word for this image, unless someone else wants to add one.

¹ I did discover though, that in British English, bunny can refer to a squirrel. Which funnily enough was Phoebe’s costume of last year.

NaNaGaMo begins

In addition to NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month), I’ve decided to participate in NaNaGaMo, National Navel-Gazing Month. Every day for the month of November, I will contemplate my navel, or perhaps someone else’s navel. In a pinch, I may stare at a navel orange.

On this theme, I’d like to highlight a word with you that I met in the past year or so, and which I’ve become quite fond of:
omphaloskepsis (noun)

literally, the contemplation of one’s navel, which is an idiom usually meaning complacent self-absorption (from dictionary.com)

I think it’s quite a good word. I try to use it whenever possible.

Phoebe at about 16 months promises to master the art of ompaholskepsis.Such a lovely belly button.
Phoebe, at 16 months, shows signs that she will be a master of the art of omphaloskepsis.

Actually, I was considering having each of my posts for the month of November feature a word that I like. (I mean, a different word that I like. Otherwise we could end up with a month of posts about pants.) (Well, that might happen anyhow.) We’ll see. I promise to, at the very least, use words in every post.

some key things

Damn. It’s now less than an hour before Thursday’s over, and I haven’t put up my Themed Things list. I always think I’ll find more time…

Anyhow, my lost keys of yesterday (which have now been found, by the way) had me digging around in my mind to find various key-related things. Here are some keys I found in the cluttered piles of my head.

A few key things

  • key. An item used to unlock something. Traditionally a metal object which fits a lock, but extended to refer to other things that give some sort of access, such as cards, passwords and codes.
  • the key to X: an idiom meaning “the means to achieve X, or gain access to X.” (eg. the key to success, the key to happiness, the key to my heart, the key to my pants…)
  • key. an adjective meaning crucial or primary. As in “the key participants” or “getting sleep is key.”
  • Dawn, the character introduced in Buffy, season 6.
  • Zero Effect (1998). A movie where a detective is hired to find a set of lost keys.
  • “The Golden Key“, a fairy tale from the Grimm brothers.
  • the key to the city. An award that is “presented to esteemed visitors, residents, or others the city wishes to honor,” typically in the form of an ornamental key. At least in TV and movies.
  • keys. The things you push on a typewriter or, um, keyboard. Or piano.
  • key. a musical term about the tonality of a composition such as “in a minor key”
  • “Musical Key.” A song by the Cowboy Junkies.
  • movie/TV cliches featuring keys: I feel like I’ve seen tons of movies and or TV episodes where a character is in a jail cell, and tries to escape by means of reaching keys either left unattended (eg. Harold & Kumar) or held by a dog (eg. the first Pirates of the Caribbean). The spy/heist genre also frequently features the need to sneak a key away from a character who keeps a key on their body. (eg. in Danny Kaye’s Court Jester, or apparently in the second Pirates of the Caribbean) If you can think of examples of these, please share. My brain couldn’t dig up more.
  • Then there’s the scene from The Princess Bride where Wesley, Inigo and Fezzig storm the castle and confront the gatekeeper:

    “Give us the gate key.”
    “I have no gate key.”
    “Fezzig, tear his arms off.”
    “Oh, you mean this gate key.”

    • —
    Okay, it’s 11:56. Still Thursday!

    going nuts

    It’s fall now up here in the Northern Hemisphere, and the squirrels are busy squirreling away their nuts for the winter. Meanwhile, I’ve been eating a lot of nuts, and going a little nuts. And reading about nuts¹. It’s almost as if nuts have been falling out of the trees and bonking me on the head². So, grab your nutcracker³, because I’ve gathered up a few nuts to share with you for this week’s list o’ Things.

    a selection of mixed nuts

    • nuts. (adj.) An expression meaning “crazy.” As in “you are totally nuts.” There are also other nut-themed variations, such as the additional adjectives nutty and nutso, and nouns like nutjob and nutcase.
    • Nuts (1987) A movie starring Richard Dreyfuss and Barbra Streisand.
    • Nuts (2007) A short movie directed by Irvine Welsh. (You can actually watch it on IMDB.)
    • nut: a piece of hardware: “a type of hardware fastener with a threaded hole.” Typically used with a bolt.

    • wingnut: a kind of nut (the hardware kind) with the appearance of wings
    • wingnut: someone with extremely right-wing political views. As in “please don’t let us have a wingnut for vice president!”
    • nuts: a slang term for testicles.

    • Mr. Peanut. The mascot for Planter’s nuts. An anthropomorphic peanut wearing a tophat.
    • in a nutshell: an expression meaning “in summary” or “in brief,” evoking the compact size of a nutshell, and what can be stuffed in it.
    • O’Reilly’s In a Nutshell series: technical reference books, such as Perl in a Nutshell and Java in a Nutshell
    • The Nutshell Library: A box set collection of miniature books by Maurice Sendak. Not about technical topics.
    • “Death in a Nut“: A folktale (in various versions) about a boy who tries to save his mother from death by stuffing Death into a nut shell.
    • “Thumbelina“: a fairytale about a tiny girl. She had a cradle made of a walnut shell.

    • Kate Crackernuts: an English fairytale about a girl who frees her stepsister from a curse that hides her beauty. The nuts are somewhat peripheral to the story. Kate collects them while going about her tasks and eats them for breakfast.
    • Nutcracker: a device used to access nuts that are encased in a hard shell. Decorative ones sometimes are made to look like people.
    • The Nutcracker: a ballet by Tchaikovsky, based on the story “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” by E.T.A. Hoffmann featuring a decorative nutcracker toy.
    • Harlan Pepper, played by Christopher Guest in Best in Show, likes to name nuts:

      I used to be able to name every nut that there was. And it used to drive my mother crazy, because she used to say, “Harlan Pepper, if you don’t stop naming nuts,” and the joke was that we lived in Pine Nut, and I think that’s what put it in my mind at that point. So she would hear me in the other room, and she’d just start yelling. I’d say, “Peanut. Hazelnut. Cashew nut. Macadamia nut.” That was the one that would send her into going crazy. She’d say, “Would you stop naming nuts!” And Hubert used to be able to make the sound, he couldn’t talk, but he’d go “rrrawr rrawr” and that sounded like Macadamia nut. Pine nut, which is a nut, but it’s also the name of a town. Pistachio nut. Red pistachio nut. Natural, all natural white pistachio nut.

    —————————-

    ¹ Two of my favorite bloggers coincidentally (or perhaps both sparked by the start of school) wrote about how they are dealing with nut restrictions in their schools. Emily wrote Nutty, and Denguy wrote Aw, Nuts, two thoughtful posts that raise awareness about nut allergies. (I’d like to add that neither of them has a child with a nut allergy, and in fact have kids who love peanut butter. But they are both concerned and considerate.)

    ² That happened to me once with a chestnut. It hurt.

    ³ …or your epipen…

    Thumbelina image from Hans Christian Andersen, Fairy Tales (Chicago: W. B. Conkey Company, ND).

    decoding real estate listings: a helpful glossary

    If you’ve ever spent any time house-hunting, you’ve probably noticed that real estate listings have a certain lingo of their own. Often, this involves descriptions of properties that have been somewhat embellished to make even flaws quirky characteristics sound like selling points. Some of these euphemisms have become standardized, such as the “handyman’s special,” a term for a home that is falling apart in every imaginable way in minor need of repairs.

    In order to help you read between the lines in an MLS listing, I offer to you this helpful example and glossary.

    Example: a typical MLS listing

    Charming and cozy 2 bedroom house. Enjoy summer breezes in this lovingly decorated perfect starter home, with sunny, low-maintenance yard. Modern kitchen, 1 and a half baths, partially finished basement. Homey, and ready to move in!
    Location features:
    • easy access to freeway
    • excellent cell phone reception
    • close to amenities
    • friendly, mature neighborhood

    Glossary of Terms:
    charming: run-down
    cozy: cramped
    summer breezes: house is drafty, may have windows missing or holes in roof
    lovingly decorated: all the carpets are magenta, and there is loud wallpaper in every room
    perfect starter home: you’ll want to move out as soon as you can afford better
    sunny: no trees or shade of any kind
    low-maintenance yard: lawn is paved over
    modern kitchen: kitchen done in the Modern style, circa 1960
    1 and a half baths: the second bathroom has partially-installed fixtures, or there may be a toilet in the basement
    partially finished basement: basement features water-stained shag carpet
    homey: house has funky smells, possible from cat urine
    Ready to move in!: home has been abandoned
    easy access to freeway: next to an on-ramp
    excellent cell phone reception: under a cell phone tower
    close to amenities: across from a liquor and/or convenience store
    friendly, mature neighborhood: may be near a strip club or adult bookstore

    I hope that this information will be helpful to you in your house-hunting endeavors. If you have more terms to add to the glossary, I welcome your contributions!

    ——————————-
    This week’s Monday Mission, which I’ve chosen to accept in a roundabout way, was to write a post in the style of a real estate listing. For more listings, stop by Painted Maypole.

    Thanks to maja for teaching me “low-maintenance yard” and “easy freeway access,” terms that she may have actually seen in use.