Category: Language

Here’s the board of one of the few games I have won recently against Scrabble Grand Master Zoey (she is an algorithm).

I looked up some of the words that Zoey played, the ones I didn’t know.
I don’t do that for every Scrabble game (I am too lazy, and besides: it cuts into my Scrabble play time).

Here are the words, for the logophiles (persons that love words):
NOES noun plural of the negative response called ‘no’
PLOTTIER adjective superlative of plotty (marked by intricacy of plot or intrigue), as in ‘this spy movie was plottier than the last one’
a plotty novel
MEH interjection— used to express indifference or mild disappointment
ZA noun slang for PIZZA (a word which my friends & I never use)
ALUNITE noun a mineral that consists of a hydrous potassium aluminum sulfate and occurs in massive form or in rhombohedral crystals
KI noun 1. alternative spelling for chi, the 22nd letter of the Greek alphabet; 2. also: aura, chi (or ch’i also qi), energy, vibe(s), vibration(s), as in ‘martial artists learn to use ki to fend off would-be attackers’
LUX noun a unit of illumination
JERRID noun (British English) a blunt wooden javelin used in games involving horsemen in some Muslim countries.
DEVI noun used in India as a title following the personal name of a married woman (in Hinduism)
AR noun the letter r written out
FAH noun abbreviation of Fahrenheit
WYES noun plural 1. a Y-shaped part or object 2. the letter y written out
CONI noun plural of conus, a very large genus (the type of the family Conidae) of tropical marine snails comprising the cones and including many harmless forms and a few chiefly in the southwest Pacific that are highly dangerous because they are capable of biting with the radula and injecting a paralytic venom that has been known to cause death in humans
DIPLEGIAS noun, plural, paralysis of corresponding parts on both sides of the body

Washington State, as most other states, allow vehicle owners to personalize their license plates — for an extra license renewal fee, of course. I think it’s $80 per year.

I’ve been there, and had done that, with my two Toyota Camrys:  just the letters for my name or a slight variation of that (not very imaginative, but definitely personalized).
The last number of years I had just gone with the randomly assigned plate number issued to me by the licensing agent for Washington State DOT.

Now with my super high-tech and exciting electric car on the way, I’m tempted to go for it again.

Here’s a rundown of some possibilities.

The plates in the leftmost column are all taken, per the licensing website, so those are not available! Those in the 2nd and 3rd columns still are.

BLIKSEM Let me help with the decoding here. BLIKSEM (say ‘blɪksəm’) is the evergreen favorite of personalized car plates for South Africans. It’s Afrikaans for ‘lightning’. It is also an expression of surprise, or shock, or disgust, and slang for ‘rogue’ or ‘devilish-but-maybe-still-likeable person’, as in  Man! Did you do that? You are a BLIKSEM!  BLITS (say ‘blitz’) means ‘lightning’ or ‘very fast thing’.

WATTSUP, NOWWATT WATT is the SI unit of power/ electric power. I thought of AMPERE3 and VOLT3 as well. VOLT is the name of Chevrolet’s 2011–2019 electric car, and not ideal to use, though.

3SACHRM Short for ‘Three’s a charm’ (third time is a charm). Three for Model 3, with the SA in there for South Africa, let’s say. And —very obscure, I will admit — a charm quark is a sub-atomic particle, found in protons and neutrons (but not in electrons).

VUVUZLA Vuvuzela, a long horn blown by fans at soccer matches in South Africa. Made famous during the World Cup of 2010 in South Africa.

10SNE1 Tennis anyone?

JENESQA Je ne sais quoi, the French expression for ‘that certain something’ (such as an appealing quality), that cannot be adequately described or expressed with any other words. Unfortunately, some people might think there is also a QANon conspiracy theory in there.

This Scrabble game of me against ‘CPU’ (central processing unit) had an unusual ending: the computer had to pass the last 5 turns. It could not find a way to put even one of its 7 remaining tiles on the board.

I figured out which the final letters on CPU’s rack were: A A I I O O V Y. So yes, not a lot to work with. Even so, CPU still managed to beat me by a wide margin, 420-336. Earlier on, it had built two 7-letter words,  GEMLIKE and TERNION, for 50 bonus points each.

Here are the meanings of some of the more unusual words on the board:
GI: a lightweight two-piece white garment worn in judo and other martial arts.
TERNION: the number three; three things together; a ternary or triplet.
JEHADIS: (plural) a person involved in a jihad; an Islamic militant.
TOFT: a site for a dwelling and its outbuildings; an entire holding comprising a homestead and additional land.
QIS: (plural) the circulating life force whose existence and properties are the basis of much Chinese philosophy and medicine.
TREMS: (plural) short form of tremolo (arm) on a guitar, a lever attached to the bridge of an electric guitar and used to vary the pitch of a note.
IGG: (slang) to ignore or snub (someone); a snub or rebuff.
FET: short form (acronym) for field-effect transistor, a transistor in which most current flows in a channel whose effective resistance can be controlled by a transverse electric field.
PERVO: (slang) a sexual pervert.

I found this Arabic friendship pyramid on Twitter (@arabicwords_0).
There seems to be a specific Arabic word for every degree of friendship.
(Note: These words all describe platonic friendships/ relationships. There is a different set of Arabic words for carnal relationships!).

I could not resist to write in the Afrikaans words on the right, as well.
Finally: these are constructive or positive friendships, with the possible exception of drinking companion. Is that where we can add in fair weather friend and frenemy?

And here is the Spanish translation of King Ottokar’s Sceptre (see my recent posts about its translations into Scots, Irish and Welsh).

Below is the panel from the book again that I use to compare the translations with (Tintin and detectives on the motorcycle). The two bungling detectives with similar-sounding names (in Spanish: Hernández & Fernández) say the same thing as usual, but just in different words.

My Tintin book in Irish landed on my porch today.
Irish (written Gaeilge in Ireland and pronounced ‘gail-gyuh’) is spoken by some 2 million* people in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
It has been the dominant language of the Irish people for most of their recorded history, with inscriptions in primitive Irish of the names of people going back to at least the 4th century.

*These are level 2 speakers with some knowledge of the language. There are fewer than 100,000 daily speakers (outside the education system).

Some of the Adventures of Tintin tales have now been translated into Scots*.
So of course, I had to add one of these books to my collection.
I ordered it on AbeBooks.com.

*Scots is spoken in Scotland and parts of Ulster in Ireland. It is sometimes called Lowland Scots to distinguish it from Scottish Gaelic, the Goidelic Celtic language that was historically restricted to most of the Highlands, the Hebrides and Galloway after the 16th century. [Source: Wikipedia]

Hmm.. is that a legitimate word: cenosillicaphobia? I wondered, as I looked at the letter board sign behind the bar counter in the Elysian Capitol Hill Brewery tonight.

Well, kind of. It looks like it was invented some 10 years ago. It is listed by Urban Dictionary, but not by Merriam-Webster (the gold standard for online dictionaries).

Ceno means empty, such as in cenotaph (a tomb or a monument erected in honor of a person, or group of persons, whose remains are elsewhere), sillica would be the glass and phobia (of course), the irrational fear.
No reason to suffer from cenosillicaphobia when the bartender is right there, though – unless you have had several too many, already.

.. no, not a pastry that you can eat – the kind you can read. I got this little first-grade reader book at a second-hand bookstore for a few dollars. For now, I don’t intend to learn Danish. I just like the o with the streg (ø) and the a with the overring (å).  So foreign. 

‘Søren and Mette’ was first published in 1954. The authors were teacher Knud Hermansen and psychologist Ejvind Jensen. The artist was Kirsten Jensenius. An updated version of the book is still in use today.