Back of the Shack

Picture was taken last week, when things were significantly warmer and more beautiful.

I am well into the swing of things lately. Not having Xopher at home anymore. My crazy new/old job. My dearly beloved ability to groove in my own routine. Remembering that I can’t get anything out of this life; I can only live inside it.

We’ll Always Have Techlab

In on the ground floor of CoffeeCoin

Holy Expletive, what a day I had at work, back at my “old” job, henceforth known as my “job”, as of yesterday. The big project they wanted me for hasn’t started yet, so I thought in the interim, things would be peaceful, dull, I’d sit around quietly waiting for someone to assign me something. OMG things are such a mess. I had been like, why the hell do they have to pull me back two months shy of the year I was supposed to be rotating? I guess I see now.

And look what arrived today, as if the cheesecake weren’t enough. CoffeeCoin was the “token” project back at TechLab, and my former manager wanted me to have this memento. Good times, those were.

Fail

Nobody puts their horrible fails on social media! Well I’m here to tell you, for every thing I do with my hands that manages to come out right, there are at least ten things that are utter fails. I had intended to put some beadwork around this hat. I need a lot of practice finishing beadwork. I’m just gonna ditch the whole thing at this point, take the beads apart, I wasn’t that crazy about it anyway.

Book Corner 2021.53

Nine Nasty Words

by John McWhorter

Linguist John McWhorter gives us the derivation and analysis of the usage over the years of nine nasty words. Dirty words, profane words, taboo words.

I love the exploration of how the suffix “-ass” is evolving into a mere adjective identifier. McWhorter shows this in chart form (his charts are funny): In 1830, a “big-ass man” would be a man with a big ass. Starting around 1930, a “big-ass man” would be a man who was surprisingly big. In 2300, it’ll just mean a big man. Apparently the pidgin that is the official language of Papua New Guinea treats “-fella”, which for them morphed into “-pela”, in the same way. A big guy is a “bigpela” guy, etc.

McWhorter is my age and I also like his usage of shows like THE JEFFERSONS to illustrate points.

And for the first time I’ve seen in print, someone comments on that extremely annoying “young female” accent that drives me up a wall, where short -e is pronounced like a short -a. I.e. instead of “My Mom is dead,” it comes out “My Mom is Dad” (I’m taking that example from a filthy old Daniel Tosh clip). Uuuuuuuugh, I hate this so much! As a linguist, though, McWhorter isn’t judgy about these things.