Are You a True Southerner?

Things Only a True Southerner Knows
1. Only a true southerner knows the difference between a hissie fit and a conniption, and that you don’t “have” them, you pitch them.
2. Only a true southerner knows how many fish, collard greens, turnips, beans, etc, make up a “mess”.
3. Only a true southerner can point you in the direction of “yonder”.
4. Only a true southerner knows how long “directly” is – as in “I’m going to town, be back directly.”
5. Only a true southerner can distinguish between "fixin to" do something and actually doing it.
6. Only a true southerner knows that the term “booger” can be a (a) resident of the nose (b) a description, as in “that ole booger Billy Ray!", (c) a first name, or (d) something that jumps out at you in the dark and scares you into a conniption.

Things a Southerner Would Never Say
1. Aw, heck, I just couldn’t – she’s only sixteen.
2. I’ll take Shakespeare for $1000, Alex.
3. Duct tape won’t fix that.
4. Come to think of it, I think I’ll have a Heineken.
5. We don’t keep firearms in the house.
6. You can’t feed that to the dog.
7. No kids in the back of the pickup, it’s just not safe.
8. Did you mail that donation to Greenpeace?
9. Wrasslin’s fake.
10. Too many deer heads detract from the décor.
11. We don’t need another dog.
12. I’ll have grapefruit instead of biscuits and gravy.

[PS - I was raised in Macon, Ga , home of Little Richard, Otis Redding, and the Allman Brothers, and now live in Pine Mountain, Ga, home of SciFi author Michael Bishop, so I know these things!]

The Mensa Invitational

Here is the Washington Post's Mensa Invitational which once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. The winners:

1. Cashtration. The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.
2. Ignoranus. A person who's both stupid and an asshole.
3. Intaxication. Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until your realize it was your money to start with.
4. Reintarnation. Coming back to life as a hillbilly.
5. Bozone. The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.
6. Foreploy. Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.
7. Giraffiti. Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
8. Sarchasm. The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
9. Inoculatte. To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
10. Osteopornosis. A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)
11. Karmageddon. It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.
12. Decafalon. The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
13. Glibido. All talk and no action.
14. Dopeler Effect. The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
15. Arachnoleptic Fit. The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.
16. Beelzebug. Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
17. Caterpallor. The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you're eating.

How GHOTI Equals FISH

Remember the post about Webster trying to get phonetic in spelling, such as 'booty' for beauty?

He did get lots of 'ph' made into 'f' - phantasy became fantasy, etc..
He tried all this in his first dictionary and most like booty got rejected!
He wanted stuff spelled like it sounded to avoid all the confusion

Here's a great example of English messing with students!

take these sounds:
GH as in ROUGH is "F"
O as I sound in WOMEN = "I"
TI for 'sh' sound as in ACTION = "SH"

so GHOTI == FISH !! - from Gallagher's "The Accountant" as in 'there's no accounting for the english language!'

later .. 'Oh,say'

Francis Bacon was Shakespeare

Francis Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare's works, so "Bacon was the Bard"

Criminal psychiatrist Richard M. Bucke, in his 1901 book Cosmic Consciousness, uses his psychological expertise and powers of deduction to make a very strong case for Francis Bacon (1561-1626, jurist and courtier, Parliamentary speaker) as the author of all of William Shakespeare’s works. When you couple his observations with internal clues and some “common sense” facts, it seems almost a forgone conclusion.

Bucke’s treatise was about levels of consciousness, particularly about what he saw as the next stage of man’s inner development: a leap from a species dominated by self consciousness to one gradually awakening a new level of cosmic consciousness. Beginning with Gautama, the Buddha, and continuing to the late 19th century and his friend Walt Whitman, the book documents what he calls “indisputable evidence” of cases of personal breakthroughs into what he termed a new level of consciousness just being awakened as a new faculty in the mind of man. Like any new skill or learned behavior, the new ability first exhibits itself in isolated cases years apart, then gradually becomes more and more prevalent, eventually becoming another inherited trait of the entire species, just as self awareness is now.

Bucke obviously includes Francis Bacon in his list of illuminated individuals, along with Jesus, Paul, Mohammed, John Yepes (St. John of the Cross), William Blake, Honoré Balzac, Walt Whitman and numerous others. He establishes several criteria, noting how psychiatrists can distinguish between the insane and those truly experiencing a change in consciousness, a state that is neither psychotic nor damaging, and in fact always causes positive changes in the individual as can be seen by the type of people included. Ironically, Bacon died from cold after performing an experiment: trying to stuff a chicken with snow, to create the world's first frozen dinner!

Here’s a summary of Bucke’s arguments for Francis Bacon as Shakespeare
1. The plays introduce over five hundred new words, most derived from Latin. Bacon wrote in Latin, and shares 98.5% of Shakespeare’s vocabulary – too much to be coincidence, and the “two” writers did not know each other.

2. There are over 100 common expressions and phrases found in both writings.

3. Each read the same books, each had the same favorite books.

4. They wrote on the same subjects and always from the same point of view, and they never express irreconcilable opinions.

5. For over thirty years, they lived together in a town of only 160,000 and supposedly never met, nor even knew the existence of each other.

6. Bacon left behind an abundance of evidence of his literary life such as letters and manuscripts; Shakespeare left none, no manuscripts, not even a letter.

7. The localities of the plays were all locations known or visited by Bacon.

8. There is a parallel between the plays and incidents in Bacon’s life.

9. Examinations of Shakespeare’s “Richard III” and “Henry the VIII” and Bacon’s prose history of Henry the VIII make it clear that all three are from the same author.

10. The philosophy and science of Bacon are constantly worked into the poetry of Shakespeare.

11. There’s a ridiculous but brilliant Latin anagram in “Love’s Labour Lost”, the word: Honorificabilitudinitatibus. Scholars have found this phrase in Latin from these letters: “Hi ludi, tuiti sibi, Fr. Bacono nati” which translates as “These plays entrusted to themselves proceeded from Fr. Bacon”. The form of the “word” is Latin, the anagram is in Latin. The intention is clear.
On the outer leaf of a manuscript of Bacon’s is the word: Honorificabilitudino. This is another Latin anagram: “Initio hi ludi Fr. Bacono”, which reads “In the beginning these plays from Fr. Bacon”. This “less perfect” anagram preceded the better one later placed in “Love’s Labour Lost”. Two different authors, each came up with these anagrams?

12. Bucke claims to have found a hidden cipher in nearly every play that claims the authorship of Bacon; he intended to publish them later in a volume solely devoted to Bacon. Unfortunately, death preceded this volume.

Well, this pretty much blows away my theory that the plays were written by the entire acting troupe that performed them. When I read that there are no manuscripts of the plays from the time they were performed, and that two actors wrote them down years later from memory, I thought I had developed a good theory. In fact, there are no manuscripts at all from Shakespeare, and of the seven known autographs of his, no TWO versions spell the name the same way! Now, how many people do you know that would spell their name differently every time they sign it? To me, that one fact alone implies that there was no actual person named William Shackspear, er Shakespeer, er Shakespeare. Whatever… Shake a Spear!

Webster and New World Words

Noah Webster himself used these alternate spellings in his first dictionary, many in an attempt to get people to use the shorter forms for convenience; he was rejected in each case.

Booty for beauty.........Soop for soup
Bred for bread.............Wimmen for women (still used in the south!)
Groop for group...........Tuf for tough (I’m for this one!)
Hed for head................Bilt for built
Tung for tongue...........Deef for deaf
Heerd for heard...........Nater for nature
Voloom for volume.....Thum for thumb (why the b, one wonders?)

Fantom for phantom – apparently sometimes this worked, as in fantasy (previously phantasy), other times the f for ph was rejected.

Webster also cleaned up the Bible for the insanely puritanical, re-writing such obscenities as testicles as “peculiar members”. Didn’t he realize that “testament” and “testimony” both came from testicles, for men swore on the family jewels in those days, the Bible not having been printed yet? Should testament therefore be “peculiar memberment”? When Onan spilled his seed, to Webster he “frustrated his purpose”.

Yankee, by the way, is a corruption of the Dutch Jan Kees, which means “John Cheese”, so apparently there were cheeseheads (i.e., Green Bay Packers’ fans) back in pioneer days. Now, at the Varsity in Atlanta, a “Yankee dog” is a dog with just mustard (in Mexico, it’s a “tourista”). If they knew the origin of Yankee, it would have to include john cheese on the dog.

One renowned linguist, Dr. W.C. Minor, who contributed a vast number of words to the first Oxford English Dictionary, a 12-volume compendium that attempted to be a complete and exhaustive encyclopedia of English, could not attend a conference of the contributors due to incarceration in a hospital for the criminally insane. His paranoia was a morbid fear of Irishmen, and when he finally was released and did go to England in 1871, he killed an innocent bystander that he thought was stalking him.

Hooch came from the Indian tribe Hoochinoo, noted for their homemade liquor. Nearly half of our state names came from Indian words, but only a few dozen words remain from Native Americans, notably canoe, hammock, and tobacco, while squash, hickory, and raccoon were shortened from longer, nearly unpronounceable words. Some compound words created in the New World are catfish, mockingbird, grasshopper, bullfrog, eggplant, rattlesnake.

“Ok” (for “okay”, which sounds like “oak hay”) was also a New World creation, along with hornswaggle, cattawampus, and rambunctious. OK was not in widespread usage (having first appeared in print in Boston in 1839) and may have died out but for the presidential campaign of Martin Van Buren, whose nickname was “Old Kinderhook”. Democrats organized the Democratic O.K. Club and the phrase was used as a campaign slogan in 1840. It is most likely an abbreviation for the illiterate “oll korrect”, used by President Andrew Johnson (along with O.W. for “oll wright”, both used jokingly), but the real origins are obscure and have been often debated. ok by me..

Top 50 Websites of 2008

Time Magazine's list and poll for the fifty best websites of 2008:
50 Best Websites of 2008

There are some good site there, check out this one, Urban Dictionary, with the words all defined by users:
The Urban Dictionary

Here are the words I authored at Urban Dictionary:
Author Jose Sinclair at Urban Dictionary

There's some very interesting stuff out there, check it out.... Jman

Bad Translations

A computer was once asked to translate “out of sight, out of mind” into other languages and back into English, and came up with “blind insanity”.

Due to English confusion, an Italian film with English subtitles had a policeman asking a motorist for a sweater – a “pullover”, get it?

In a Spanish film, a man asking “if he could bring a date to a funeral” was translated into “if he could bring a fig to the funeral.” (date = fig, or some such fruit… rather than “a companion of the opposite gender for possible romantic interaction”)


A sign in a park somewhere in Asia

A Congressman once told a Joint National Committee on Languages in 1988 that “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for me.” He’d better be learning Aramaic and Hebrew and giving up pork as well!

The Oxford English Dictionary sells as much in Japan as in America, each one third more than in England.

That's Insulting in Other Lands

Not every culture uses the same insults, here are some from abroad.

China: To be called a turtle is the worst possible insult
Norway: devil is highly taboo, one letter worse than four letters
South Africa: The Xoxa tribe hates “your mother’s ears”
France: a cow or camel is pretty bad, but preceded by espèce de (“kind of”) is even worse
Germany: don’t be a schweinehund, or a “pig dog”
Spain: tu madre, or “your mama” (ie, yo momma)
Finland: the word ravolintolassa covers all swearing; it means “in the restaurant”

In Dixie (a foreign land within the US!): a shooter is someone who will do anything for money; usually spoken of minimum-wage earners

The Japanese, Malayans, most Polynesians, and Native Americans do not have swear words. Hit your thumb with a tomahawk and apparently you have to blurt out something like “crow barks” or “horse feathers” or “my mother-in-law”

Wik Monkan natives of the Cape York Peninsula (like many cultures) have two levels of insults or swearing:
● Mild: big head, long nose, skinny arms
● Severe: plenty urine, vagina woman mad

In Vietnam, something great is "Number one", while "Number ten" is the lowest possible number, as in "Don't drink paddy water, paddy water number ten!" (thanks to Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" for this line; I never heard this in the US!)

I can imagine this argument:
"Hey turtle, don't you be in the restaurant!"
"Yeah? Well, your mother's ears are number ten, shooter!"

Famously Funny Quotes

Anonymous is the most prolific writer in English

The poor became ‘needy’; the needy were elevated to ‘deprived’; and the deprived were promoted to ‘underprivilaged’. They still have no money, but they acquired a vocabulary. – William Lambdin

Patriotism is your conviction that your country is superior to all others because you were born in it. – George Bernard Shaw

A refrigerator is a place where you store your leftovers until they’re old enough to throw out. – Al Boliska

Fashion is a form of ugliness so unbearable that we have to alter it every six months. – Oscar Wilde

Mother Nature is wise enough to give us twelve years to love our children before turning them into teenagers. – anonymous

The biggest mystery of life is how the idiot that married your daughter can be the father of the most gifted grandchildren in the world. – anonymous

Gossip – that which no one claims to like but everyone enjoys. – Joseph Conrad

Happiness is nothing more than good health and a poor memory. – Albert Schweitzer

Insurance is something you pay now so that when you’re dead you’ll have nothing to worry about. – Joseph Rosenbloom

City life is millions of people being lonesome together. – Henry David Thoreau

A leader is a man who has the ability to make other people do what they don’t want to do and like it. – Harry S. Truman

Money is the poor person’s credit card. – Marshall McLuhan

A neurotic is a person who builds castles in the air; a psychotic is the person who lives in them, and a psychiatrist is the one who collects the rent. – anonymous

An optimist sees an opportunity in every calamity; a pessimist sees a calamity in every opportunity. – Winston Churchill

Originality is the art of remembering what you heard and forgetting where you heard it. – Tommy Douglas

A pessimist is an optimist on the way home from the racetrack. – Red Smith

Love is the quest, marriage the conquest, divorce the inquest. – anonymous

Twenty-five is the proper age for a woman; if she is not proper by that age, she never will be. – Oscar Wilde

The U.S. is the only country where a housewife hires a woman to do her cleaning so she can do volunteer work at the day nursery where the cleaning woman leaves her child. – Bob Phillips

If man is not called upon in his employment to exert his understanding or exercise his invention in facing challenges, then he generally becomes just about as ignorant and stupid as it is possible for a human creature to become. – Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776)

The Venus de Milo is the “goddess of disarmament”. – Robert Louis Levinson

We’re all in the gutter but some of us are looking up at the stars. – Oscar Wilde

If God had wanted us to use the metric system, he would have given us ten fingers and ten toes. - comedian George Wallace

The shortest poem in the world
Madam, I'm Adam - e.e. cummings ("The First Spoken Words")

The Wisdom of a Yogi
If you come to a fork in the road, take it. – Yogi Berra
A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore. – Yogi Berra
Nobody goes there any more cuz it’s always too crowded. – Yogi Berra

...and perhaps the greatest comeback in history:
Lady Astor: Sir, if you were my husband, I’d poison you.
Winston Churchill: Madame, if you were my wife, I’d let you.

Movies We Want to See

Homage to Art Fern

Fay Wray, Danny Kaye, Doris Day, Milo O’Shea, and Joel Gray in Cabaret
Billy Zane, Carol Kane, Marjorie Main, Nathan Lane, and John Wayne in The Andromeda Strain
Ethan Hawke, Claudia Cardinale, Robin Penn Wright, and Jay Mohr in The Birds
Red Foxx, Michael J. Fox, Jamie Foxx, and Robert Foxworthy in Never Cry Wolf
Joan Rivers, Veronica Lake, John Waters, Billy Ocean, and Ice Cube in Waterworld