San Francisco Pier

What I wanted to write about yesterday, before I became distracted by the twin demons of Wikipedia and continuity, was bubble vocabulary. I’m writing this post before I pick its photo, so any relevance to it is purely serendipity. Bubble vocabulary is words on the bubble. Words which you think you know, but just aren’t sure. Sometimes you use them correctly, sometimes you don’t. When you don’t use them correctly it tells more about your friends then it does about your vocabulary.

My program manager has a better vocabulary than I do. I guess in part that explains why I am working for him and not vice versa. A few of his ‘I’m the smartest person in the room’ words include lubricious, duopoly and sequestration. Sequestration made this list way before it was au currant. I’m still not sure about lubricious. It has two definitions either, offensively displaying or intended to arouse sexual desire or smooth and slippery with oil or a similar substance. I like to think it was the later, it has an aerodynamic feel. I was not there when he used the word. I did recently receive an email from him though. In this email he used a cryptic acronym, FYSA. I had to Google it. I think he meant, For Your Situational Awareness. He is very much into keeping the team in the know, but an alternative definition was Funny You Should Ask, which I liked better. I don’t know why he just didn’t use FYI.

I mentioned serendipity before and at lunchtime I hit upon a related topic. The Ghent online dictionary is holding a quiz. It is a timed quiz where you are presented with 100 English words, except not all of them are real words. Your task is in as quick as is possible is to separate the wheat from the chaff. Your task is to answer yes or no do you know this word. Beware though, because they penalize you for wrong answers. Here is the link for the quiz, it is way better than all those other online quizzes. Don’t use IE like they advise not to.