This is a compendium (a summary or abstract containing the essential information in a brief form; a concise but comprehensive treatise) of goofiness inspired by what is going on–or not– all around us. The random items appearing either in the papers or online seem to be getting weirder every day.
And speaking of that, here’s an item that I found that says it all about our “mother tongue”, that is to say, English. Read carefully:
“English can be weird. It can be understood through tough, thorough thought, though.” Right. Also…the majority of ballots disallowed in most elections have been not counted for two main reasons: post marks (Each state has its own rules on this; some of them are really, really strict, some aren’t. Some are just hard to figure out.) and signature (Same rules as above). Which brings us to the fact that cursive writing is not being taught in far too many schools. Lots of recent graduates of our educational systems cannot, for the life of them manage to write their own names legibly–you know, with letters and all, that can be discerned by someone else looking at them. All very well to have an “executive signature” which shows that the signer is an important person in the organization, and has been for sufficient time that everyone else had better recognize it. Fame of one sort or another allows this sort of signature to be a trademark, of sorts (My father had one of those. It was impressive…and perfectly legible. I aspire to the same. Mother’s is far more modest, but, likewise, perfectly legible. She’s no “power behind the throne” but a power in her own right.). Where was I? Oh yes, legibility.
Scribble does not a signature make. One might as well print up a little sticker to go with every signing of any document, which reads: “Go ahead and forge my name. I don’t care who impersonates me.
Doesn’t matter. Sign me up for anything. Cash my checks. Doesn’t matter.
“Couldn’t we just teach kids to write? Nobody has to go the Spencerian route anymore, with all of the loops and curls and such but couldn’t we all just learn the letter shapes and how to make them? Spelling might even improve if it were clear what letters were being lined up on the paper and what the sounds of those letters are (Notice lately that people are basically ignoring the letter “t” when it comes in the middle of a word? I keep hearing “impor’ ant.” I blame a lot of it on the British, particularly the Beatles. Pretty soon we’ll be sounding like them all over the place, like when they pronounce “Cholomondeley” as if it were “Chumly” or Worcestershire as if it were “Wooster”. Of course, we have a Wooster down south of us a ways but we spell it as God intended, “Wooster”.)
Am I losing it on “concise”?
On another tack altogether…. The word “Quark” appeared on a vocabulary site that I look at online. I hit the button and the definition (which I thought I already knew) popped up. Actually there were two definitions, about as different from each other as could be. One was the definition that I knew– “subatomic particle carrying fractional electric charge; building blocks of hadrons (O.K., I lied about the hadrons. What the heck are they?). The other definition said that it was a low-fat curd cheese. How’s that for a switch? If you were of German, Scandinavian, Dutch or Slavic ancestry, you might have got that but it doesn’t sound real scientific to me. Did some humorist name the particle after the cheese as some sort of a cosmic joke? Or are Q’s just amusing on their own and physicists needed a chuckle in the lab or the computer room or wherever they hang out? Puzzling, for sure.
I’m not even going to tell you where to look this one up. Recently a pair of soccer teams in Germany held a game protesting the commercialization of their “beautiful game”, playing in the nude. The players had their numbers painted on their skin–front and back–and their shoes, socks and shin guards on. Nothing else. Unless you count the beards and tattoos, of course. The organizers claimed to be striking a blow for “authenticity”, but I noticed that during the free kick, the players were making sure that no other blows would be struck. Also, during the video of the team line-ups and the play-by-play, there was strategic blurring going on. Sometimes authenticity is over-rated. There was also a gal at another game who was going for something of the sort by “streaking” into a men’s soccer competition. She was just X-rated.
And in that vein to close this episode of frivolity… How come my spam page the other day had 6 entries starting off with “Sex”…”Sex”…”Sex”? Do these people know something I don’t? Do I want to know what it is? Probably not.
