Gris's Journal

Yes, yes, it’s been awhile, lovely to see you again too, no, I’m not dead.
Now that we’ve gotten that all out of the way… I’ve taken the next step into Web 2.0-ness, and created a Google Reader account and signed myself up for a plethora of RSS feeds (notably, a whole bunch of the links in my sidebar over there). Now, all the things that I’ve promised myself I would read regularly, I actually AM reading regularly, yay! (Come to think… I should share a few of the other sites I’ve added over on my sidebar. Right. One thing at a time.)
So, in honor of my marginally increased geekiness (did I mention I’ve gone all Firefox, all the time, now, too?), I offer you: a web event, and the uncloaking of the origins of a web meme.
The web event is fairly straightforward: Joss Whedon is back, and he’s brought friends. Tune in TODAY (and until the stroke of midnight on Sun., July 20, 2008) to the third and final act of…

DR. HORRIBLE’S SING-ALONG BLOG!!!
But FEAR NOT!!! If you’re reading this belatedly and missed the spectacular web event, Joss intends to make it available in other formats (according to his diabolical Master Plan. You DID read the Master Plan, didn’t you?) In case that link goes away too, he states in his FAQ:
“[Q:] What happens when it goes away? Does it go to a happy farm for always like Fluffy did when mommy was crying and the neighbor kept washing his fender?
[A:] No, Dr horrible will live on. We intend to make it available for download soon after it’s published. This would be for a nominal fee, which we’re hoping people will embrace instead of getting all piratey. We have big dreams, people, and one of them is paying our crew.
And somewhat later, we will put the complete short epic out on DVD – with the finest and bravest extras in all the land. We’ll go into greater detail about that at Comiccon, but we’re changing the face of Show Friendliness a second time with that crazy DVD. ”
Now, as for the meme… read on, Dear Reader, read on (and I DO mean that)…

Continue reading →

I love AlphaDictionary! Today Dr. Goodword taught me about a whole class of verbs I’d never heard of before. They’re known as “frequentative” verbs, and they are formed by adding -le or -er to an existing verb to indicate repetitive action (and sometimes, they’re formed off nouns to make them into verb forms). So “daze” becomes “dazzle,” “crack” becomes “crackle,” “spark” becomes “sparkle,” “nose” becomes “nuzzle,” “snug” becomes “snuggle.” I’ve been using the pattern to dig up all sorts of obsolete words (or verbs that were simply skipped over, coming to us only as the frequentative form). So far I’ve got sissen, the Middle English for “to hiss or buzz” and the root of “sizzle,” and cull or coll (also the root of “collar”) as the possible origin of “cuddle.” It’s an interesting look into the word-formation process. Here’s a list of a few more frequentative verbs.
And in keeping with the spirit of my category, have another new thing: some owls have crooked ears! No, they’re not deformed, or anything like that. It’s part of the unique set of tools they use to pinpoint invisible prey (such as a vole hidden under snow.) Instead of being set in parallel with one another, the way human ears are, one aperture is set higher than the other. This allows the owl to tell not only if a sound is coming from the left or right, but whether it is “up” or “down” in their current line of sight. By slightly shifting its head, an owl can pinpoint its next meal precisely, without ever seeing it!

…this is what happens when one reads reviews of books about a CSI’s work. (That’s “Crime Scene Investigator” for people who haven’t watched television in several years.) I’m sure most people have heard the term rigor mortis (one of the reasons a corpse is called a stiff, after all), but did you know about livor mortis (also known as lividity)? How about algor mortis?
And while I’m at it, a dictionary-browsing bonus: don’t you agree that “lixiviation” is a much more fun word to say than “leaching”? ^_^

My job is a constant education… two new N-words from the same journal (Booklist 11/1/06, if you’re rabidly curious) that turned out the be vaguely related!
I suspect the first word was not used correctly, or else I’m missing something profound in the definition. Here’s the context, from the review of Jean-Noel Jeanneney’s Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: “Jeanneney believes that Google’s retrievals as presently constituted pass to the reader the merely noetic, not truly the intelligent, insightful, thoughtful, and genuinely helpful information implied by the notion of universal knowledge.” Even if we delve into the philosophical definition, we’re still talking about a word that essentially deals with the intellect and reason. So how is that meant to contrast with “intelligent, insightful, thoughtful, and genuinely helpful”? (For that matter, how is it that having all the world’s knowledge at your fingertips automatically implies possession of the wisdom to select the most helpful bits insightfully and thoughtfully? Were that true, librarians would have been out of a job the day the World Wide Web came into being.) I suspect the reviewer was looking for a word more like facile or perhaps (to be fair) ratiocinative, to contrast between a computer’s strict trains of logic and proficiency of language, and a human’s intuition and fluency of language. (See? I have big words, too!) At any rate, even if the reviewer didn’t use it correctly, I got a new word out of the bargain. ^_^
The second word I thought I’d encountered before, but it turns out I’d confused it with something similar but unrelated. From the review of Jay Lake’s Trial of Flowers: “When the city’s de facto and largely unknown leader vanishes from a locked room, his apprentice, Jason the Factor, struggles to maintain civilian order in the face of terrifying hauntings from the noumenal world and the threat of advancing enemy soldiers beyond the city’s walls.” The word I knew was numen– a Roman spirit-of-place, from Latin nūmen, “a nod, command; divine will or power, divinity.” Noumenal comes from noumena (singular noumenon), a word coined by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant from a Greek participle of noein, “to perceive by thought,”– and lo, we’re right back to noetic.