Category Archives: Language

Xylia—314—PC—Victory!

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Winter Storm Xylia Sunset

While much of the Midwest is getting pummeled by winter storm Xylia, here in Saint Louis it is only a rain event. There is some flooding in the area, but thankfully none of it is occurring in our basement, at least so far. Last night, I used the drone to capture this storm generated sunset. At a hundred feet up, looking west is a nice view of the Clayton skyline, silhouetted by the angry sky.

Today, while everyone else is celebrating Pi day, here in the 314-area code, we have Saint Louis day to celebrate too. Here in the Lou, we’re not cool enough to have someone like Eminem singing the praise of our area code, but local stores are offering special deals in honor of this numerical holiday. Mainly all sorts of good things to eat, but unfortunately for me, tomorrow is weigh-in day.

We haven’t received our stimulus checks yet, but I’m already spending mine. I’m out there already, stimulating the economy. Our venerable desktop PC’s long running case of dementia had reached the tipping point. As I write Anne is rebooting it, because the Photo app stopped working. Its flaws are too numerous to count, but lately, like after this last week’s Windows update they seem to have multiplied. So, I ordered a new machine, which is due for delivery later this week. After ordering the new machine, I backed up the old one in preparation for the switch over. The price point for PCs has really dropped.

So, we have enough stimulus funds leftover to upgrade our iPhones too. Our phones are both so old that some apps have stopped working on them and new apps won’t even load. When we were at Laumeier sculpture park this last week, there was a new exhibit called Time Fork. As near as I can tell it is an augmented reality app that interfaces with the more bricks and mortar parts of the park. I’m only guessing though, because my phone is too old to support the app, but that will change soon and then we’ll be all up to date. Yeah…

Every dog has his day and mine was yesterday. The below pictured score is typical of one of our games, except for this one the names have been switched. I finally won a game. Overall exceptional letter draws and a seven-letter tray emptying play made the difference. I can see why Anne likes this game so much.

Scrabble

Artichoke Annie

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Road Closed—Open to Abutters Only

Well, she is feeling better today. She even lost a pound or two, just by lying on the couch, but I wouldn’t recommend it though. After Thursday’s mini road trip and vaccination, Friday was a pretty low-res kind of day. About the title? On the way to Columbia and back, we passed Artichoke Annie’s Antique Mall. Plus there was Auntie Annie’s bake shop in the mall. Just smelling it felt fattening.

I tried comforting her, but I only ended up annoying her. Letting her sleep all day seemed like the best medicine. That and playing sulcate¹ in Scrabble. Using all seven of my letter, letting the S do double duty and scoring a whopping 91 points. I say hit them while they’re down. This is Scrabble after all.

The photo is of a sign we saw in Boston. It was on a cul-de-sac there. It could have just said road closed to local traffic only or some such, but they had to get all fancy and use the word abutter², which is not some kind of a-hole,

  1. Marked with parallel grooves. “the margin is often sulcate”
  2. The owner of an adjoining property
 

Let’s Get Phygital! Phygital! ¹

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Holiday Place Settings—Extra Settings are for Elijah, Godot and Their Plus-Ones

‘Twas the night before… Wait, wrong holiday. Can’t go there yet. Today, on all Thanksgiving’s eve… Don’t even! Oh, well… Tomorrow is a national holiday, but I am afraid that amongst its calendar neighbors, it has become a bit lackluster of late and this year, 2020, hasn’t been particularly kind to the whole giving thanks department. Gone are the days of Pilgrim’s pride, which were vastly overrated, if you ask me, in my not quite so humble opinion. We want to change all that. Humaning you holiday is our purpose driven goal. 

We here at Regenaxe, Federer & Smith would like to offer you our outstretched and sanitized hand. Sure, we hail from Madison Avenue, but we’re not going to tell you how to enjoy your Thanksgiving by dumping a whole pile of corporate jargon monoxide on top of you. We would much rather spoon feed our pabulum.

Hi, I’m Mark and I would like to be your storyteller for tonight. By storytelling, I mean story-doing. Humaning the whole hyper-telling process for you, drawing you in, making my vision yours, so that we can act out our solutioning together.

Apropos of nothing, have you ever noticed that you can create one new and really interesting word, by hyphening two rather plain and ordinary words together? Plus, the spellchecker doesn’t care that you’ve just created a new word out of thin air. I call that a win-win. Now, I’m just spit-balling here, but the game of Scrabble has these two blank tiles that until you lose a letter or two can be played as any letter that you want, but why just limit yourselves to the original twenty-six? I say let them also be hyphens. What possibilities! I hope as you scroll through this post that you find this idea as thumb-stopping as I have.

But I digress. We here at RFS want to make your holiday meal as tasty, convivial and safe as it can possibly be. Let me enumerate, first tasty. We offer a wide selection of purpose-driven lifestyle brands (Blue Apron, Chipotle, Goop, Godiva, etc.) that are prepared to lead you on a delightful customer journey to the dinner table. Just don’t eat the Goop. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it is much better for you when applied externally. Think of it as an after-dinner spa treatment. There I go again, second. After you’ve first lifted that fork and taken that first bite of our truly scrumptious snackable content, wouldn’t it be so nice to be able to look around the table and see all of your friends and family smiling back at you? Let’s get Phygital! Building on current Zoom technology, we can offer you our [insert TLA² here] app. Through your phone, and with our app, you can enjoy a convivial and safe supper, with all your love-ones, virtually. Better than real life, it comes with a mute button for Uncle Fred.

This concludes my elevator pitch and just in time, because we have just arrived at your floor, the penthouse. I hope that I have been able to convey to you some of the warmth, the brand heat that we feel for you. Now enter, your party awaits you, have a nice time and have a happy and safe Thanksgiving holiday.

  1. Thumb-Stopping, Humaning, B4H, the Strange Language of Modern Marketing by Tiffany Hsu and Sapna Maheshwari
  2. Three Letter Acronym

Ripples in Time

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Greenwich Paving Stones

I like the way that these stones were laid. Their concentric-intersecting pattern reminds me of ripples on a pond after successive pebbles were thrown into the water, where newer ripples erase older ones as they all continue to arc outwards from their different origins. I can imagine some child, standing on the bank and hurling rocks that send water striders skittering from one tsunami to the next. An imaginary scene that is frozen in time, but captured by these stone’s layout.

Some might call these cobble stones, but Harry, my Father-in-Law would be quick to correct their error. These are cut stones. Their rectangular shape shows that they have been worked. A cobblestone is a rounded unworked stone, such as one plucked out of a stream bed. ‘Paving stone’ ambiguously covers both.

These stones cover a courtyard at the Greenwich observatory, where a metal bar is inlaid that signifies the Prime meridian. I was standing on that bar when I took this picture, so you can think of these ripples of stone as emanating out from it. Looking at this pattern, within that context, the phrase, a ripple in time, comes to mind.  I wonder it that was the artisan’s intent?

The Full Catastrophe

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Am I not a man? And is a man not stupid? I’m a man, so I married. Wife, children, house, everything. The full catastrophe. – Zorba

Ill-Matched Lovers, Quentin Massys, 1465

Ill-Matched Lovers, Quentin Massys, 1465

As part of this year’s ‘Ignite!’ season, we went to hear a reading of the new play, “The Full Catastrophe”, by Mark Weller. Adapted from the David Carkeet novel of the same title, this is a tragicomic story of the verbally disturbed Wilsons, Dan and Beth, of Saint Louis, MO (Ladue actually) and their troubled marriage. In order to save their marriage, they hire linguist Jeremy Cook to act as a live-in marriage counselor. Cook has only recently lost his longtime gig of studying preschooler’s speech patterns and has just snagged this new job with the mysterious Pillow Agency. Roy Pillow the strange founder of the Pillow Agency, author of the Pillow Manual and creator of the Pillow Method has as his main dialog contribution the line, “The Horror. The Horror.” He repeats this line throughout the play, all Kurtz-like, as from Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”.

This is Jeremy’s first case. To say that Jeremy is a little off-kilter himself is a bit of an understatement. He comes to the subject of interpersonal relationships with the same understanding that a visiting space alien on his first trip to earth might have. Still, he is able to diagnose the problem with this linguistically troubled marriage right off the bat as “complementary schismogenesis” or the mutual creation of division, but once diagnosed he seems at a total lost at how to cure its woes.

Part of Jeremy’s problem is his own tortured history with love. Years ago, he let his one true love, Paula, walk out of his life and has come to regret it ever since. Tension in the Wilson household comes to a head when news arrives that the summer camp that Dan and Beth had planned on housing their son, Robbie in, has suddenly closed. They had planned on spending their summer together, jetting off to Italy, renewing their lost passion for each other and saving their marriage. Beth is heard yelling at and accusing Dan, “The summer is ruined! The summer is ruined!”

Not knowing how to relate to, let alone counsel Dan and Beth, Jeremy’s big moment comes when he helps the kid do a homework assignment that is requiring him to write a sentence ending in a preposition. The linguist tells him to imagine a little boy who is upstairs in his room waiting for his father to come read him a story. He goes to the top of the stairs and waits. He hears his father coming, but when he sees the book his father has chosen, he’s disappointed. So he says to his father, “What are you bringing that book that I don’t want to be read to from out of up for?”

We Have Nothing to Fear …

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Yucca Plants at White Sands National Monument

Yucca Plants at White Sands National Monument

Triskaidekaphobia is the word for fear of the number 13. Greek, this word translates literally as “3 and 10 fear”. It is a subset of the general fear of numbers, numerophobia. Triskaidekaphobia is a superstition that is said to originate with the idea that Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus Christ, was the 13th person at the Last Supper and since Christ died on a Friday, every Friday the 13th is said to be unlucky. In general, there is no proof for this superstition, except for today. This Friday the 13th is unlucky enough to find itself overshadowed by tomorrow.

Tomorrow, Pi Day or March 14th occurs every year, but tomorrow will be the Pi Day of the century. If you write tomorrow’s date using the shorthand, 3/14, then this sequence corresponds to the first three digits of the number Pi, 3.14, the ratio between the diameter and circumference of a circle. If you add the year to the date, 3/14/15, then this year you get the first five digits of Pi, 3.1415, but it goes further. Tomorrow, at 9:26:53, you get the Pi second of the century, 3.141592653. You could go further, but I find that the enjoyment of the moment is only that much shorter.

The math teacher said, “Area equals pi R squared.”
The slow student answered, “Pie aren’t square they’re round.”

I could not find any word for the general fear of dates. Google only returned entries for fear of first dates. I also couldn’t find anything on the fear of Pi, which is surprising, because it is an irrational number. The closest that I came was the word, pastrophobia or the fear of pastries, which includes pies. Fear of flaky desserts should not be confused with fear of deserts or xerophobia, although I have done so in the past, but my spelling is better now. Right? I know that the desert pic is a stretch for this post, but it is cool and maybe scary. I got a mini cherry pie today that I thought that Anne and I might share tomorrow at the opportune time, assuming we have the courage of our convictions.

I do have a fear of our sump pump. If I am in the basement, doing laundry and the pump kicks off in a roar, it always gives me a start. If I am lying in bed and in the middle of the night and it kicks off, I also find that unsettling. It sounds like some large creature is growling downstairs. It rained all day today and the soil was already saturated, I’m expecting a fitful night’s sleep tonight.

In addition to being Pi Day, tomorrow is also Albert Einstein’s birthday. It is also Pat A’s, another genius. File this under the saying, ‘every dog has his day’, but I was called a genius today and by my boss no less. Maybe it would be better filed under the saying, ‘the one-eyed man in the land of the blind is king’. It has been very hectic at work lately, but because of circumstances beyond my control, I have managed to avoid the worst of it. Honestly! A lot of other people have been burning their candles at both ends. Today, we had two tables that we wanted to ensure were the same. One was in a Word document and the other was in Excel. Two of the walking dead were prepared to go number-by-number by hand through hundreds of numbers when I suggested just subtracting the two. You should end up with a table of only zeros. My boss just happened to be present when I made this suggestion and he actually called me a genius. He even went on to sing my praise to his boss. I was reminded, what Gitmo interrogators have known for some time, sleep deprivation is a powerful weapon.