Gingrich

It still surprises me when people don't know what santorum means. It also surprises me that people do not know how to address an envelope, so maybe I shouldn't be surprised. But I am.

Anyway, maybe you'd be surprised to know that when chickens poop out an egg, the eggs are sometimes covered in poop.

So yesterday Greg decided that the dried, frothy mix of urea and fecal matter that sometimes soils an egg should be called gingrich.

I think it'll stick, myself.

A pair of gingrich-coated eggs.

Fwtten

Santa brought lots of warm fuzzy presents this year, as he knows a thing or two about cold weather. Because I refuse to wear long pants while delivering the mail, I ended up with several pairs of wool knee socks in a wide range of non-postal blue colors. So now when it gets really cold I can wear my snow mittens on my hands and my girly knee-length fwttens with my parka to keep warm.

Fwttens?

Fwttens!

You say it like "footens."

G-man and I were in Wales, the trip where we ate shot-filled rabbit, spoke to a guy for whom English was a second language swinging a scythe by an old Roman amphitheater, and visited Gellert's grave. The Welsh, like the Jews, aren't fond of vowels, so they use 'w' when they want to say 'oo'. So the English comb/combe/coomb—a box canyon or even a hanging valley to Americans—is in Welsh a cwm. So if you follow me with this, a mitten-like covering for your foot, or fwt, is a fwtten.

Alright, how do you entertain yourselves in the car?

Thriven

G-man just asked me, "...shouldn't it be thriven?"

What?

"You know, drive, driven. Thrive, thriven."

Proving (and reassuring) that I am not the only one to come up with odd past participles.

Professor Tolkien would agree.

Dictionarian

We all know a dictionarian or two, don't we? Someone who just has to say, Isn't it pronounced in-ko-IT? I've never heard in-ko-ATE before... Or pointing out your confusion between tactics and strategy.

If dictionarian ever makes it into the Oxford English Dictionary, I think the first synonym listed should be prick.

Pantitas

We all have word quirks. Well, I hope we do and I'm not alone in this.

Personally, puppy is about the happiest word you can say in English. Nothing negative, sounds good, rhymes well. Puh. Pee. Easy to spell.

Not like dais at all.

Another word I've never gotten along with is panties. Why the diminutive, is it because they're little pants? Why don't we call men's underwear panties then? But try calling them that and see how far you get.

Underwear's okay, but underpants or drawers are more fun to say. But those aren't new words...let's add -ito, the Spanish dimunitive, to underpants and come up with pantitos (for men) and pantitas (for the ladies). Que buena! A horrible Spanglish Frankenstein of a word.

I like it.

Pollero

Aaron, our source for poultry here in Humboldt County, says in a couple of months he will go through his flock and decide who's he keeping as breeders. We hope to get a couple more chickens that don't make the cut when he does. w00t!

As part of our ongoing wordplay, G-man and I have been toying with what to call Aaron. Chicken wrangler, poultrist...we've been using pollero. Jury's still out, but I think I like it.

Googleganger

Ol' Chems there left a comment regarding Mormons, which got me to thinking about Jehovah's Witnesses, which got me to thinking about a conversation I had with G-man the other day about Googling* yourself. Do other people who show up in your Google searches share your name? Greg's got two online doppelgangers—what I like to think of as googlegangers. There's the football-playing Greg Stafford, the vocally anti-Jehovah's Witness Greg, and the cuddly, salad-fixin' game designer Greg. Nobody's ever mistaken my G-man for the jock, but at conventions people occasionally ask him what he's got against J-Dubs.

I've only got one googleganger, a Superior Court judge in Quebec. You'd probably guess, if you were looking for me, that I didn't move to Canada to study law. Too dang cold. But the other hits, the valid ones, might be just as puzzling to someone who knew me in high school, or hell, to the folks where I currently work.

So, you got any?

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*For those of you who like neologisms, I was in the back room of the Market St Safeway earlier this week and heard the inventory control clerk tell his minion to "big joe that stack of pallets." Big Joe is a make of hand-driven forklift. Now Big Joe, the brand, like Google, goes from being a noun to a verb. I love it.

The New English

savory rosted sparagus shrimp

spacy pesto

[That's off the specials board at a restaurant I delivered to today.]

I'm pencilling in another skill on my character sheet: Mangle L1 10%. Because while driving to Target and trying to remember the word participle, I explained, "You know, to bring: brang, brung. Brung is the...?"

"The ebonics? It's the past participle, and it's brought."

"Are you sure? Really? I'll have to look it up in the Big Book of Words when we get home." Heh, they weren't in there. Just bring and brought. What do you know?