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There’s a Word for That

According to the Global Language Monitor, a new word enters the English language every 98 minutes, meaning that the millionth word was added to English yesterday at precisely 5:22 (ET). (Incidentally, the Global Language Monitor is an “internet media analytics company” that only cares about global languages named English.)

And the millionth word is… Web 2.0, defined as “the next generation of web services.” Wait, I thought Web 2.0 is this generation. They’ve been using Web 2.0 for years. In any case… how bloody wonderful! Welcome to the madness, Web 2.0!

According to Paul J.J. Payack, the sole force behind GLM, a word must make 25,000 appearances in a global print and electronic media, the Internet, the blogosphere, and Twitter (Twitter?!) in order to be considered a legitimate English word. This makes it all sounds very scholarly until you look at some of the recent entries that he has allowed in the English language :

  • Octomom. If the “word” is actually a nickname that can only be used to describe one person, then… does it really deserve an official place in our lexicon?
  • Sexting. Barf.
  • Chengguan. Since when are Chinese words that have originated in China and that are exclusively used in China considered English?
  • Mobama. Really, Paul J.J. Payack? Really?
  • Shovel Ready. The what-what?

While most language experts agree that it’s impossible to count the number of words in the English language, let alone deduce the exact time that a word has entered the vernacular, Paul J.J. Payack, well, agrees. “It’s always an estimation,” he said. “It’s like the height of Mount Everest is an estimation. The height of Mount Everest has changed five times in my lifetime because as we get better tools, the estimates get better.”

I think I just realized what “shovel ready” means : pseudo-scientific findings that some academic nutjob foists upon an uncaring public while admitting it’s total bullshit.

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By Meredith – June 11, 2009

Zut, Stylo, and Malice: French Library Adventure

I discovered the foreign language section of the town’s public library and took my time perusing the French shelf. It was like flipping through a time capsule of linguistic ambition, funded in irregular spurts by whatever budget allocation deemed call number 440, “Romance languages French,” worthy of attention. The oldest relic was a U.S. military-issued French drill book from the 1950s. I shuddered as I turned its yellowed pages, imagining the harsh, clipped tones of a drill sergeant barking out conjugations:

“To assassinate, indicative present! Je assassine! Tu assassines! Il assassine! Nous assassinons! Vous assassinez! Ils assassinent! To bomb, conditional present! Je bombarderais! Tu bombarderais! Il bombarderait!…”

In the 1960s and 1970s, the tone of the books shifted from repetitive brain-numbing drills to whimsical cartoons, with illustrated scenes of, say, families walking through the streets of Paris and querying the natives: “Où est la Tour Eiffel?” And once they reach the Eiffel Tower, they ask: “Où peut-on acheter des billets?” And once they get to the top, they say: “C’est magnifique!”

Then came the 1980s and 1990s, the era of the workbook. These books promised practice but left library-goers frustrated, with exercises that begged to be filled out but remained perpetually blank. Anyone serious about learning French had already amassed their own stack of workbooks at home, complete with half-hearted scribbles from one or two enthusiastic attempts.

The book with the most appeal turned out to be a beginner’s French textbook from 1997 called Discovering French Bleu (Première partie). I totally clicked with the cover:

frenchbook1
I mean, look at the size of that sandwich! Mon dieu! I wonder if the English textbooks for French schoolchildren feature photos of English-speaking children with head-sized hamburgers.

The level is a little below me, but it never hurts to review the basics, like the meaning of zut:

zut

And other basic things that every French student should learn:

likes

And words that they will never, ever forget:

stylo

Let’s all develop a healthy fear of the French!

malice

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By Meredith – June 7, 2009

“Smells like Epic Fish”

Walking home from the town library around 4 p.m., I passed the row of generic Asian restaurants, each one boasting Chinese/Japanese/Korean tri-fold menus displayed in weathered windows. The thick pre-storm air clung like a damp wool blanket, carrying with it an unmistakable, intense aroma of grilled fish. The smell was so pervasive it seemed to coat the sidewalk itself, creating an invisible wall of briny, smoky scent that pedestrians couldn’t help but notice.

And then, I heard it. The voice of a teenage girl, turning to her friend with the only summary that seemed to fit the moment:

“Um, it smells like epic fish.”

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By Meredith – June 5, 2009

Pressing Words

Well, blogging via WordPress is very strange, so strange that I’m typing this in TextEdit (the Mac version of Notepad) to avoid the distracting bells and whistles of the WordPress user interface. Writing is fickle. It does not adapt readily to a change in process. It’s not like when you start a new job, and everything is so shiny and new that energy, creativity, and enthusiasm abounds. It’s more like going to the toilet in a foreign country.

I remember when I made the transition from longhand to digital writing. I missed the feel of the pencil in between my fingers. I missed scratching out words and scribbling in new ones.  I missed flipping through a hard-back notebook in search of a blank page, reading random snips and passages that I had jotted down in fits of inspiration. “It’s over,” I thought. “Writing is dead.” It only took a month before I was playing the keyboard like a concert pianist, and my handwriting began to disintegrate to resemble runes.

But if the move to WordPress is disorienting to me, I can only imagine how completely confused you are, Dear Reader. For when you read a blog, you are not just taking in words, but fonts, colors, spacing, layouts, and other formatting as well — the face for a writer’s voice. And suddenly, my face has morphed from something green and clodgy into something slick and grayscale.

I’ve been steadily porting over content from the old site into WordPress. This morning it took me about 45 minutes to  do the entire month of August 2006, which was an eventful, photo-filled month. I don’t remember writing half of this stuff. What a little pip I used to be! Is it strange to say that I’m inspiring myself?

Posted in Miscellany.

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By Meredith – June 4, 2009

*Cough, Cough*

Ummm… is this thing on?

This is my first post on WordPress. After 6 years of blogging via a primitive hand-coded HTML webpage, this is a little freaky. The WordPress user interface is sleek and crowded, with an array of buttons and links flanking the actual writing area, which accommodates 10 lines of text at one time.  It’s intimidating.  On the toolbar above the writing area, there is a button, “Show/Hide the Kitchen Sink.” I’m petrified to click it.

My words may have been fine and sweet for HTML, but this is WordPress. The big league.

So anyway, for 6 years I’ve really focused on blogging for the sake of writing. I viewed blog ornamentation like comments, tagging, trackbacks, etc. as being distractions to my writing. I can’t say exactly why I’ve changed my mind/given in and moved to WordPress, but I’ve known for a while that it was inevitable, and every month that I delayed the move resulted in another HTML page with a block of 28-31 separate pieces of my writing, hand-coded into my archives and essentially lost to posterity.

Might take me a while to get off the ground with WordPress. I would like to try to move my precious archives to this site and back-date each entry, a process that could take another 6 years. Stay with me.

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By Meredith – June 3, 2009

Whiteface and Passaconaway – The Birthday Bears

When most wives ask their husbands, “Honey, Saturday is your birthday, so what do you want to do?” the plans probably involve grilling enough meat to feed a small army, donning scandalous lingerie, or begrudgingly sipping light beer at a sports bar while hubby watches football with a chicken wing dangling from his hand.

Mr. Pinault on Mt Passaconaway

Me, I found myself on an 11-mile, 7-hour forced march across two of New Hampshire’s 4000-footers: Mts. Whiteface and Passaconaway. It had been almost eight months since our last peak-bagging adventure, so I was keen to check a few more summits off our list. That said, 11 miles is a bold ask for hiking muscles that have spent the better part of a year in hibernation. By the time we reached the wooded summit of Mt. Passaconaway, I was toast. But this wasn’t a treadmill with a stop button, and sadly, the White Mountains don’t run a shuttle service.

The Gulf between Whiteface and Passaconaway

The trek between Whiteface and Passaconaway is a grueling gauntlet, and I gamely tried to keep my grumbles to myself—after all, it was Mr. P’s birthday. That resolve only wavered when we scrambled up cliff-like boulders near Whiteface’s summit. Then, I allowed myself a solid whine.

On the Blueberry Ledge Trail

When we finally made it back to the car, I thought the adventure was over. But no, not 1 mile from the trailhead, we saw a car stopped in the middle of the road and the occupants staring into the woods with cameras blazing. We slowed down, thinking a moose was going to jump in front of our car at any moment, but no!

Instead, we spotted two baby black bears climbing up and down a tree, crying out for their mother. They were impossibly adorable, their tiny forms silhouetted against the forest. I briefly entertained the idea of hopping out to snap a closer picture, but then reality (and the very real risk of mama bear’s wrath) set in. Mr. P, ever the tech-savvy adventurer, captured a quick video from the car and proclaimed it the best birthday gift ever.

And with that, we drove off, weary but content—another unforgettable birthday in the books, complete with peaks, scrambles, and bears.

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By Meredith – May 31, 2009

Mounts Passaconaway 4043′ and Whiteface 4020′ May 30, 2009






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By Meredith – May 30, 2009

Cake, Candles… Blow!

Today is my 32nd birthday. Earlier this month, when I realized that my birthday would be falling on a Friday and that I’d have the day off, I was pleased. After all, going to work on your birthday is about as pleasurable as eating saltines for dessert. But now, at home alone, bereft of my co-workers’ companionship and staring down a mounting heap of consulting work, it’s a little depressing. I was sitting on our 3-season veranda, re-working some legacy Quark files when the leaves on the trees suddenly began to murmur with the sounds of a fresh light rain. Rain on my birthday? But, it never rains on my birthday!

Mr. P gave me my present this morning: Earrings, white gold and diamonds, small delicate hoops, elegant and understated. I hugged him and kissed him, very much gratified after last year’s present of nothing (he took my protestations of “I don’t need anything for my birthday” seriously, which will never happen again). Tomorrow is his birthday, so I lap up the spotlight while I can, for there will be no carry-over specialness. But I like that we have adjacent birthdays. We share them, like we share everything.

32. People who are older than me tell me “32 is young! You’re young!” But I am wise enough not to tell them, “You’re only saying that because you’re old!” The biological clock is ticking. Oh, it’s ticking. 32 is the age that a woman’s fertility begins its rapid decline, and each passing month sounds a new alarm. I eye mothers on the street and on the subway, and they all look younger than me. What have I done? Why did I wait? Biologically, 32 is way past prime.

The house needed cleaning, but I ignored it and went to yoga. Ommmm… I read the New York Times. I listened to French podcasts. I answered emails and phone calls. I ate hummus and tapioca pudding for lunch, and then wayyy too many Kinder sweets brought home from Germany. One of my loser stocks jumped 12% for seemingly no reason so I sold 200 shares and felt relief, then regret, and then nothing.

I wanted to hug my mother and father, and thank them for giving me life.

I studied my face in the mirror as I got ready to go out for dinner. It’s an older face, but no, it’s not old. I can still see a plumpness in my cheeks, a gleam in my eye, and a girlish pleasure in my smile. I can see who I was yesterday. I can see who I’ll be tomorrow.

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By Meredith – May 29, 2009

Cologne, Germany — Part 3

I hit the bottle pretty hard at the wedding. That is, the bottle of Gerolsteiner, because at that point in the trip my body was parched from the traveling and the lack of an adundant drinking water source. Our hotel sold 1/2 liter bottles of spring water for 3.50 euros (beer is cheaper). Water was made available at the breakfast bar, but the glasses only held about 3 ounces of liquid. These little shots of hydration just didn’t quench me; I wanted to take repeated greedy gulps of water, and so I found the unlimited availability of Gerolsteiner at the wedding to be pretty much the most awesome thing ever.

So I woke up the next morning feeling pretty good. We were due in Cologne at 11am to meet up with the family and take a tour of Cologne’s old city, including the inside of the Cathedral. I liked this secular stained-glass window, which was installed in the 1970s to replace a window damaged in World War II. The colors were randomized by a computer:

Cologne Cathedral

This is the Glockenspiel on the Rathaus. The man sticks out his tongue at 1 o’clock, but I was too slow with the camera:

Rathaus Glockenspiel

The Beer Bike went by, albeit incredibly slowly. What a country!

Bier Bike

After the tour, we went out to lunch with the extended family. If you ever have the opportunity to accompany 30 French people to a traditional German brauhaus, well, I highly recommend keeping your camera on hand so you can capture the stunned faces when they are served the pork knuckle that they inadvertently ordered. Bon appetite!

Pork: It's whats for Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner

Pork: It's whats for Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner

After saying goodbye to the extended family, we walked around our hotel’s neighborhood, trying to digest the heavy lunch before another family dinner. Every 1/8 of a mile, we came upon a poster of a heavily-retouched Angela Merkel promoting a public appearance. Angie, you sexy demogogue, you!

Angela!

By Sunday, frankly we had had enough of walking the busy sidewalks of Cologne, and decided to head out into the country for a walk. Mr. Pinault scanned the map and found a lake surrounded by a park about 45 minutes away. “Let’s go there,” he said, and so we did:

German Lake

The wildflowers were simply stunning. I don’t think I’ve ever seen as many wildflowers as I saw in Germany.

German Wildflowers

So, that’s it. I totally loved Germany and all the Germans that I met. They’re sporty, intellectual, outdoorsy, environmentally-conscious, and they love hard rock! The only flaw is that they speak German and they eat way too much pork (although honestly, when we walked past outdoor restaurants, I saw way more salads than pork knuckle).

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By Meredith – May 28, 2009

Half-Assedly

I had a choice tonight: either write this post, or do my French homework. Or I could post my French homework and do a half-assed job at both, which is my general philosophy in life: Do it all, but only half-assedly.

My homework is to pretend to arrange for housing while on a vacation in France:

  • Mon mari et moi recherchons un petit appartement qui se trouve dans la ville (My husband and I are looking for a small apartment that is in the city or town)
  • Nous avons besoin d’une chambre avec un grand lit. “Grand American”, pas “grand Francais”. (We need one bedroom with a big bed. “American big”, not “French big.”)
  • Je prefere avoir une vraie douche, pas d’une baignoire avec un tuyau. (I prefer to have a real shower, not a bathtub with a hose.)
  • Hauts plafonds! Tres hauts plafonds! (High ceilings! Very high ceilings!)
  • S’il vous plait, nous ne voulons pas de mimes. (Please, we do not want any mimes.)

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By Meredith – April 30, 2009