Caution: English Construction Next 5 Miles
At my work theres a guy who often mispronounces the names of things. Usually its nothing to bother with, but occasionally some unusual words are created by him.
Today he was talking with another coworker about Perpendicular Hard Drives, and the speed and storage benefits they have over older hard drives. However, not once did he use the word 'perpendicular' Instead, he came up with some new word.
Parapendicular.
This one's hard to break down, as perpendicular was borrowed from several different languages, originating as perpendiculum , being the line of a blumb bob. Finally I found the main root pendre, which means to hang. The prefix para has several similar-but-different meanings, I'm going to go with "beside, alongside of" for this word. So, here's my definition:
Parapendicular, adj. - hanging close to where it should be located
As such, that would make a 'parapendicular' hard drive one dangling in a computer case by the cables attaching to it without being secured. Haven't done that since my old 386 computer, but I had attached it with electrical tape too.
See? Using English is just that easy.
Sheer Abject Laziness
Lately my spelling in messenger programs has been getting worse. More and more mistakes are creeping into my chat conversations.
And I haven't been caring.
I really should, because that will trickle into my typing accuracy for when it is necessary to be correct.
But I don't.
Hmm...
Pronunciation Sandwich
GameTrailers has been doing retrospectives of the Final Fantasy series over the last month or so, from the beginning. I haven't seen the last couple that came out while I was in Hawaii, so Kyle and I were talking about it earlier and he mentioned that he thought they pronounced some names strangely. Pronouncing Yuffie different than the officially established pronunciation (in Kingdom Hearts, and I think her name was said in Advent Children as well), and some of the FF9 characters. When he came to the subject of Freya, their pronunciation was correct and his was wrong, as they pronounce the name as Norse mythology has it pronounced.
A simple interpretation of pronunciation can be rather difficult in the English language, since there are so many different languages that root it. One example today was on Notebook Forums, where I derived a similar pronunciation to a Reuben sandwich from the word "ruberish", a rather odd misspelling of "rubbish." Later 'r' ignored, the mere removal of a 'b' changes the sound from a "ruh" to a "roo".
Which leaves me wondering if you use ruberish to make reuben sandiches.
Back from Hawaii
I'm back from Hawaii. Actually, I've been back for a few days. I don't have anything to talk about, though. I've been spending most of my free time since I got back watching episodes of House, as I'm sort of out-of-gear for writing right now.
My trip did inform me of one thing though: I need to work more on my Japanese studies. There were a lot of Japanese people around, and I was only able to pick up small bits and fragments of their speech. Had I been working on it seriously since I got out of High School it ptobably would have been much better, I'm guessing now that I may very well know less vocabulary-wise than I did then.
Of course, language barriers don't hinder my understanding of universal language, such as the case watching a Japanese woman swat her son in the head after he made some smart-aleck remark on the elevator we were on. :D
C-c-c-combo Breaker
Well I'm going to have to break off my seven days of Skewed updates, because I still have some more things I have to take care of before I go to Hawaii. So I'll have to spend the next few nights working on those, rather than more story.
It was rather fun, but was making me dead tired expelling so much energy working each night. Several times today I was starting to fall asleep, which isn't a problem I've had at work for the last few months. But more importantly, because it was making me tired it was causing my writing quality to slip. I don't really have much time to work on things at night, there's only a four hour gap from when my shift at work ends and I usually go to bed. Out of that I've been doing other things that needed to be done for the day, so I haven't been getting to writing until after 10, leaving a mere 2 hours for deciding how I want the section to go and writing it.
That's not a lot of time, and it does hurt things. Despite the fact that I treat the Pokegym version of Skewed as a "first draft" copy, which will be revised later, I still try to do some good quality writing. With my last update, the library discovery, I wasn't happy at the end of it at how it turned out. Had I taken more time to work on it, I would have written it more carefully, and it would have been better.
So for now, to keep my sanity, and keep me from being dead tired at work any more and nearly falling asleep, I'm ending the marathon writing. I might do it again sometime, because as I said it was pretty fun, but it will have to be at a time where it will not compromise my writing quality, and not compromise my alertness.