Improve your vocabulary using… rice?
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Found this website today where you can improve your vocabulary and feel good doing it. Click on the link below to find out why.
http://www.freerice.com/index.php
It’s not time-wasting if it’s helping feed people.
Found this website today where you can improve your vocabulary and feel good doing it. Click on the link below to find out why.
http://www.freerice.com/index.php
It’s not time-wasting if it’s helping feed people.
This is cool. I can now enter queries in Malayalam from my iGoogle page using their on screen keyboard “gadget.” The results are displayed in Malayalam. You don’t need a separate localized keyboard for this. Other Indian languages such as Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, etc., are also supported. If nothing else, I hope this will prevent me from forgetting my own native script.
Like most other cultures (with the glaring exception of the French), the Czech are very appreciative if you at least try to speak their language. After a week here in Prague, I have picked up a few useful “phrasebook” words. Czech or čeština belongs to the Western Slavic language family along with Slovak and Polish. The phonetics is not hard to learn and there are hardly any exceptions to the rule (same as German). There is one sound that I find almost impossible to pronounce correctly and that is the one marked by ř (that is r with a diacritical mark above it called haček). The closest sound to this according to the language guides is a rolled “r” followed by the “zh” sound (like the s in pleasure). Even the Czech spend years of their childhood (complete with special training) to get this particular sound right. Why make it so tough?
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Apart from that, I have been able to pronounce Czech without much difficulty. Last night, this even got me a free appetizer at a fancy bar (where the wait staff spoke fluent English). For them, it was a pleasant surprise to hear me greet them with a dobrý den (”good day”) when I entered the place and say děkuji (”thank you”) whenever they poured me a Scotch. Their normal customer base of crusty old British blokes don’t bother with such niceties, I was told. While the pronunciation is one thing, learning the grammar is supposed to be quite difficult as words are modified at will with the gender and case. I am not even going to try learning the grammar.
The above two photographs are of the crude Czech language cartoons found in a popular local pub called Pivnice U Pivrnce (in the Jewish Quarter).
In a meeting at work recently, I was introduced to this word: grinfuck. The perpetrator explained to those of us non-Americans in the room what it meant and he even acted it out. He had someone pretend to talk stuff to him that he wasn’t really interested in and he had this silly grin on his face and nodded his head vigorously. So, you grin when you seemingly agree to what the other person is saying and then go and do exactly the opposite, i.e., fuck them over royally.
I searched the web for finding out more about this wonderful new word and came up with this definition from the Urban Dictionary:
From the song, Grinfucked on The Fury of Our Maker’s Hand by Devil Driver. Meaning to screw someone over all the while they believe you are their friend.
[Example usage]:
The way your boss took the credit for your work all the while telling you that he was going put you up for promotion. You just got grinfucked hard.
It’s only rarely these days that I come across a word that I can use a lot going forward. This is the word of the year for me.
The word seems almost impossible to pronounce at first glance, but it’s not as hard as it looks. The official state fish of Hawaii (English name: reef triggerfish) is not a big fish and it’s often said, half jokingly, that the fish is smaller than its Hawaiian name spelled out.
The Hawaiian language didn’t have alphabets until the missionaries landed on the islands. They studied the vernacular and decided that it can be represented by all the vowels (A, E, I, O, U) and only seven consonants (H, K, L, M, N, P, W). With the exception of W, the consonants are pronounced just like in English. W is pronounced like a V if it comes after an E or I. As for the vowels: A is pronounced as in Ah if stressed or above if not stressed; E is pronounced as in bay if stressed or gent if not stressed; I is pronounced as in bee; O is pronounced as in hose; and U is pronounced as in stew. Once you have the phonetics down pat, the language becomes much easier to pronounce.
The long Hawaiian words often have repeating patterns that make it easier to remember and pronounce once you break it down. Let’s try to do this with the fish name. Humu is pronounced twice as hoo-moo. Nuku is pronounced twice as noo-koo. A is pronounced once as ah. Pu is pronounced once as poo. A’a is pronounced as ah-ah (the apostrophe acts as a glottal stop or pause between syllables). Now say it out loud: hoo-moo hoo-moo noo-koo noo-koo ah poo ah ah. Not so hard now, is it?
This post is relevant only if you know the Indian language Malayalam.
A couple of “clever” Mallus have put together a Malayalam rap song in which they don’t really rap except for the occasional “yeahs” and the “uh huhs.” But they kind of talk through the song invoking memories of the slapstick Malayalam movie comedies of the late ’80s. Ootha wit fans and people who have stayed in university hostels will find this funny. Enjoy.
This morning’s NYT had a headline story on the Democrats taking back control of Congress. As usual, both parties made the same empty pledges of cooperation and “bipartisanship” that we always hear, but which rarely, if ever, happens. However, this time leaders of both parties used the same “pudding” metaphor, which was odd enough that the NYT even remarked on it. What was stranger to me (but perhaps not so strange after all) was that both the senators used the same incorrect version of the proverb - “The proof is in the pudding.” The correct proverb, of course, is - “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.” The latter actually makes sense, but I guess career politicians shy away from verbal constructs that have any real meaning. The proverb was first used by Cervantes in his epic work Don Quixote in which the Don’s squire, Sancho Panza, is a virtual fount of earthy wisdom, usually dispensed in the form of proverbs quoted out of context. But the sight of two senators mangling his proverb would make even good Sancho fall off his donkey.
I was going to write a longer post about this, but found the following which says it all.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2004/02/08/a_loss_for_words/
David Pogue writes in the NYT about the lack of courtesy in online forums. Luckily for us at rantlust, we are not big enough for the morons with bad grammar and bad etiquette to comment frequently. The disagreements have been mostly civil and polite even if heated. Some theories that Pogue has about the lack of etiquette (quoting verbatim):
Sarcasm in posts/comments are okay but let’s hope that unnecessary personal attacks and hostile comments don’t cloud our enjoyment of this blog.
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