15,842 new words: Not sure we NEEDED a word for that but thanks English I'm sure it'll come in handy someday.

"Pandiculation" means stretching and yawning at the same time. 

15,842 new words

tarn: A mountain lake. But specifically a lake that is created by an amphitheater-like hole dug by a glacier, and then filled in with rain water. The word comes from Old Norse, tjorn, meaning pond. So the English took the Norse word for pond and used it to rename a pond.
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Read in So You Want To Be A Wizard: 

Strange creatures like phoenixes and psammeads, moving under smoky London daylight of a hundred years before, in company with groups of bemused children; starships and new worlds and the limitless vistas of interstellar night, outer space challenged but never conquered; princesses in silver and golden dresses, princes and heroes carrying swords like sharpened lines of light, monsters rising out of weedy tarns, wild creatures that talked and tricked one another.  .  .  .

psammead was another new word in that passage; it's a sand-fairy that apparently existed only in the 1902 book Five Children And It, a sort of pre-Narnian book about five kids in England who meet a magical creature and have all kinds of mishaps and adventures. Apparently Five Children And It has been continuously in print for 113 years. I'd never heard of it before, but as soon as I read about it I borrowed it from the library, so I'll let you know how it is.

Christmascarolization is a subset of Starwarsification, really (15,842 New Words)

Back at Xmastime, I found out that Charles Dickens -- who I blame for the ongoing ChristmasCarolization of Xmas, by which I mean that as time goes on, we retreat more and more from writing any original Xmas stories and...

...and I just realized that everyone is going "Hey, uh, you are aware that Xmas was like a zillion months ago, right?" so don't worry, this is NOT a Xmas post, I'm going somewhere with this...

...we retreat from writing original Xmas stories and just rewrite A Christmas Carol over and over, replacing Ebeneezer Scrooge with whatever character we have, which is why next year I'll be unveiling A 2 Frogs' Xmas Carol, but anyway, that's not my point.

My point is that this year I found out that Dickens wrote a Xmas story every single year, something you, like me, probably never knew.  Having found that out, this past Xmas I got my hands on them and read a few of them, and I can report that

(A) Xmas was actually kind of a sort of Hallowe'en back in the olden days, judging by the number of eerie Xmas stories people wrote. Between some of Dickens' weird stuff and Robert Louis Stevenson's Markheim, Xmas started out being pretty spooky, so really if you want a traditional Xmas you should watch The Nightmare Before Xmas, but

(B) Dickens wasn't above making up a word and using it for no reason whatsoever.

That latter is the point of this post, so sorry about all that Xmas stuff introducing it.

The word in question is sassigassity.  Dickens uses it in his story A Christmas Tree, in which he stares into a Christmas tree, looking at the ornaments and remembering all the prior Xmases, going back to when he was a kid.  It begins with this memory of childhood toys:

All toys at first, I find. Up yonder, among the green holly and red berries, is the Tumbler with his hands in his pockets, who wouldn't lie down, but whenever he was put upon the floor, persisted in rolling his fat body about, until he rolled himself still, and brought those lobster eyes of his to bear upon me--when I affected to laugh very much, but in my heart of hearts was extremely doubtful of him. Close beside him is that infernal snuff-box, out of which there sprang a demoniacal Counsellor in a black gown, with an obnoxious head of hair, and a red cloth mouth, wide open, who was not to be endured on any terms, but could not be put away either; for he used suddenly, in a highly magnified state, to fly out of Mammoth Snuff-boxes in dreams, when least expected. Nor is the frog with cobbler's wax on his tail, far off; for there was no knowing where he wouldn't jump; and when he flew over the candle, and came upon one's hand with that spotted back--red on a green ground--he was horrible. The cardboard lady in a blue-silk skirt, who was stood up against the candlestick to dance, and whom I see on the same branch, was milder, and was beautiful; but I can't say as much for the larger cardboard man, who used to be hung against the wall and pulled by a string; there was a sinister expression in that nose of his; and when he got his legs round his neck (which he very often did), he was ghastly, and not a creature to be alone with.

Ha ha! Cherished memories.  Then, through a series of other frightful images, Dickens begins to remember books he has been given for Xmas as presents, and gets to this one:

And now, I see a wonderful row of little lights rise smoothly out of the ground, before a vast green curtain. Now, a bell rings--a magic bell, which still sounds in my ears unlike all other bells--and music plays, amidst a buzz of voices, and a fragrant smell of orange-peel and oil. Anon, the magic bell commands the music to cease, and the great green curtain rolls itself up majestically, and The Play begins! The devoted dog of Montargis avenges the death of his master, foully murdered in the Forest of Bondy; and a humorous Peasant with a red nose and a very little hat, whom I take from this hour forth to my bosom as a friend (I think he was a Waiter or an Hostler at a village Inn, but many years have passed since he and I have met), remarks that the sassigassity of that dog is indeed surprising; and evermore this jocular conceit will live in my remembrance fresh and unfading, overtopping all possible jokes, unto the end of time.

So when I came to that part I thought "Hey! Sassigassity! That's a new word and now it's part of the 15,842 new words I am going to learn in my lifetime," and so I looked it up, only to find that it has no meaning.

But more than that-- more than being a made up word, it's a special kind of made up word.  Because as I looked around for sassigassity to see if the meaning I was getting from the context was right, I found this phrase:

hapax legomenon

which is actually not the thing you say to Superman's archenemy to send him back to his own dimension, but it's okay if you confused the two.

A hapax legomenon is a word that occurs only once in a context, whatever that context is.  The most common context for a hapax is that it appear only once, say, in the complete set of an author's works, which is what sassigassity is for Dickens: it is a word that appears one single time in all his writings (and, apparently, in all of literature).

Here's what's even weirder about hapaxes: they're very common, and there's even a law that describes how they occur:  Zipf's law, which is this:

Zipf's law states that given some corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, etc. For example, in the Brown Corpus of American English text, the word "the" is the most frequently occurring word, and by itself accounts for nearly 7% of all word occurrences (69,971 out of slightly over 1 million). True to Zipf's Law, the second-place word "of" accounts for slightly over 3.5% of words (36,411 occurrences), followed by "and" (28,852). Only 135 vocabulary items are needed to account for half the Brown Corpus 

 I'm not sure how that's helpful, but now I know that pizza will appear in my writings twice as often as the next most common word (leftover pizza, I assume.)

Hapaxes are different than nonce words, which are words you make up for a single occasion, and which then may be adopted or not.  Quark was a nonce word, made up by James Joyce. and only later used to apply to the subatomic particle.

Just to finish this off, consider this word:

Honorificabilitudinitatibus

That word is somewhat remarkable.  Coined by Shakespeare, it was used in Love's Labour Lost, and means "the state of being able to achieve honors," and not only is it a nonce word, but it is also a hapax legomenon, as Shakespeare used it only one time, but beyond those two it is also the longest word in the English language featuring only alternating consonants and vowels.

Use it in a sentence today!
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Context is meaningless; Or, have I already written about this before? (15,842 New Words Word 3)

When I originally started this series of posts, I was going to look in a dictionary from time to time and find the next word, going alphabetically, that I didn't know.

But recently, reading Nick Harkaway's The Gone-Away World (which instantly made it into my Top 5 books EVER as a book that was so awesome [as my review pointed out] that it made me laugh out loud with how great it was) and I had to stop occasionally and look up a word that I didn't know --

-- which, by the way,  people including Grant Snider, who is a person, is one reason why e-readers are superior to books.

Grant Snider recently drew this:

which is from his site and also which bemoans the loss of "books," which is kind of ridiculous, to me, because 99% of books are about the content, not the packaging, which although nice sometimes (I am actually planning on when I get around to it repackaging some of my ebooks into a large bound volume like a desktop book) isn't the book, it'sjust what the book came in, and old-style paper books cannot compete with new-style ebooks, which not only get delivered instantly even if you are sitting in a doctor's office waiting for a stress test and knowing you're going to be there all day, but which also let you look up words instantly just by tapping them, so that you need not rely solely on figuring out a word from the context.

I think I forgot I was in a parentheses again. Here we go:)

Anyway, figuring out a word from the context is all well and good -- or at least one of those -- but it's not always perfect.  Also, I'm pretty sure it's not even a thing any more. I'm about 91% sure they don't teach phonics or figuring things out from the context anymore in schools, probably because of communism or something, but that's okay because even though I am supposed to say that however I learned things was the best way to learn things, it pretty obviously wasn't the best way, or at least wasn't automatically the best way.

The point is to me that education is supposed to teach you how to think about things, and how to reason out or find the answer.  My rule, for example, for people who want to ask me questions at work are that they are to have thought up an answer first, before they ask me the question.  Very often, people will forget that and they will come and ask me a question, and I will respond to them with my own question.

"What do you think we should do about " some problem, they will ask me, and I ask them right back what they suggest I do about it.

There are various reasons why I do that, the number one reason being that I don't want people who simply push their problems onto someone else, and especially not to push them on to me.  If you have a problem and you simply ask me how to solve it, you've just made your problem into my problem, and not only does that create more trouble for me, but it doesn't help you become a better problem-solver.

You know the old saying: Give a man a fish, and he will ask you why we can't have hamburger for dinner instead because fish is gross; teach a man to fish, and he will wonder why anyone would do this as a hobby.  I mean, it requires that you sit on the side of a lake, or river, and wait and wait and wait and nothing ever happens, really, but then when something does happen, it's over in minutes and then you've got this slimy fish, and what are you going to do with that? Eat it? I don't think so. So you're just going to throw it back? Why bother catching it in the first place, then?  Fishing is dumb.

That old saying.

"Figuring things out from the context" is only one way to think about things or solve problems, and often not the best way. Take, for example, today's new word, which is what this post was about (remember?) now that I'm doing these posts about words I come across in my reading and don't know.

Here's the quote from which I took today's word:

The car is not a street racer...It is a muted maroon colour, and it is as dignified as it is powerful.   It looks distinctly bulletproof and the glass windows are smoked, but even so, it's possible to see that this car has curtains. It also has a silver angel on the front end and the kind of engine they used to put in small planes.  Quite possibly it will catch up with the front runners before it has to change gear.  It is unmistakably a Rolls-Royce, but it is a Rolls-Royce the way Koh-i-noor is a diamond.

So, going from context I can tell... that the Koh-i-noor is a diamond. Some kind of spectacular diamond,  I suppose, but you can't always tell, with diamonds, which sounds stupid to say, but have you ever seen the Hope Diamond? I have.  Or maybe I haven't.  I'm not entirely sure that I was looking at the Hope Diamond in the Smithsonian.

I did see the Hope Diamond, I think, but I'm not sure, as I sit here today, because I saw (I think) the Hope Diamond back in 1994, but years later when I wrote about seeing the Hope Diamond I realized that maybe my memory was not as great as it should be. Or perhaps I had been the victim of a ruse, the way I suspected I was recently when Sweetie and the boys and I were driving down to State Street on Sunday to visit "The Castle," a university building Mr Bunches likes because it looks exactly like a castle, and to eat lunch, and we got to this part of University Drive that was down to one, rather than 2, lanes, and we had this conversation:

ME:  What is this?

SWEETIE:  What is what?

ME: This. This lane closing. When did this happen?

SWEETIE:  This has been this way all summer.  We have driven through it at least five times.  You always complain about it.

Sweetie maintains that's the truth, even now, three days later, when it would be easy enough for her to admit she was just having some fun with me because the alternative is that an entire section of my memory -- albeit a small section, maybe? -- is gone, the part that holds onto the memory that University Drive is one lane has disappeared, and while that's not alarming (I don't drive it every day) on it's own, it is alarming because if that just up and disappeared:

1.  What else might have disappeared, too? Recipes? Song lyrics? The meeting I'm supposed to have today that I won't remember? My PIN number for my ATM card? No, that's still there. and

2.  Why? Why did it go?

(In retrospect, #2 is probably more important.)

So maybe one time I knew what the Koh-i-noor was? I doubt it.  But I do now, because "Koh-i-noor" became the first of my new method of learning 15,842 new words, and the 3rd on that list, and here's what I know about it now:

"Koh-i-noor" is the name of a 186 1/6 carat diamond that is currently part of the "Crown Jewels," held by Queen of England; she got it when the British East India Company stole it from the previous owner when India came under British rule.   Since its discovery in 1526 (or earlier) it has been stolen,  seized, and coveted by a variety of rulers.  While it's valued in carats, now, it was once valued in this colorful way:

The valuation of the Koh-i Noor is given in the legend that one of Nādir Shāh's consorts supposedly said, "If a strong man should take five stones, and throw one north, one south, one east, and one west, and the last straight up into the air, and the space between filled with gold and gems, that would equal the value of the Koh-i Noor." 

The diamond was demanded not as a gift, but a spoil of war, for symbolic purposes after England seized India, and the Koh-i-noor comes with a curse:

He who owns this diamond will own the world, but will also know all its misfortunes. Only God, or a woman, can wear it with impunity.

Knowing all that, as opposed to what I could figure out from the context is like... well, it's like knowing the difference between a diamond and the Koh-i-noor.  When I read the book, I was able to deduce that the Koh-i-noor is some kind of fabulous diamond, which in my mind I equated with the Hope Diamond (which of course I do not equate with fabulousity at all, but rather with disappointment and possible memory troubles, but that's just me), only it's not like the Hope Diamond because this is a diamond that is a spoil of war, that has a long and tortured history,  and which promises that it's owner will "own the world" but "will also know its misfortunes," which in the context of the owner of that Rolls-Royce in the book actually makes perfect sense, because that is almost exactly what happens to the man who turns out to own that Rolls-Royce.

PS: I have long had a debate running about whether "looking something up" is as good as "knowing something," and while I take the stance that nothing is either always good or always better than something else, this is a strong argument in favor of looking something up taking this round.

Gershwin Carry-Out? NO: Takeaway Gershwin (15,842 New Words)

In moving on from a battuta, the last word I found that I didn't know (four months ago) I was able to skip gracefully -- well, as gracefully as I can -- over a fortiori, a Latin word(s) I already know because I have read the book Catch 22 three times in my life, the last time being just over a year before I looked up a battuta, and a fortiori, as everyone who's read that book (which ought to be everyone) should know, is the kid who Yossarian switches places with in the hospital so that he (Yossarian) can be by Dunbar; the switch ends up not working because when the Army decides to send Yossarian home, A. Fortiori gets to go instead, because of the switch.

a fortiori means "to express a new conclusion for which there is stronger evidence than an earlier one," That is not the word today, though; as I said, I knew that word because I looked it up long ago when I first read the book.  a fortiori is just a word I came across that I knew as I looked for the next word I didn't know.

I also skipped over, as known, a cappella, a deux, "A game" and landed on a gogo, which I decided to make the new word today because I wasn't sure if I really knew what it meant, or not.  Here is what I thought when I read a gogo:

"Oh, I know that word.  Like in Whiskey A Gogo,"

which I then realized meant nothing to me.  It was like a string of nonsense syllables.  What, I wondered, is Whiskey A Gogo?  Is that even a thing?

First, the word: a gogo, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, means "in abundance; galore." The example Oxford uses is "Gershwin a gogo -- all the hits" which is kind of a dated reference.  I'm not sure whether I could name a Gershwin tune, so a gogo has, in essence, worked like a negative image of my mind, revealing all the areas where I thought I knew something but maybe didn't.  In my mind, I kind of thought a gogo would mean "able to be taken to go" or something like that.

(As an aside:  I am jealous of British expressions, which always seem so much more charming to me.  Like to go or carryout, which we use.  The British say takeaway, as in "Let's get some takeaway pizza," if my extensive research [Reading Nick Hornby books, watching Hugh Grant movies] is accurate.  I have always wanted to import that term: takeaway pizza, but I've been too shy to get it started here in Wisconsin.  Maybe someday when I am rich and living in Hawaii -- 2014 is my goal, now -- I will use some of those riches to start Takeaway Pizza and run a pizza shop.   I could work it with Mr Bunches and Mr F.  Although let's be honest; they're not going to do much of the work, as Mr Bunches is very busy these days with his four different Star Wars Legos sets that he got for Christmas.  He got those little sets that make a small spaceship and a Lego man; the spaceships fit in the palm of my hand and still use 70-80 pieces.  Each time I assemble one for him, I marvel at how many pieces it takes to make a tiny X-wing, and each time, too, I think to myself: this is someone's job, designing Legos for people to build.

Imagine that as your job: each day, you go into work and sit at a desk, or probably a table, and figure out how to build whatever it is Lego wants to make.  Right now, probably a lot of Hobbit stuff: "Build us a Smaug," the bosses will tell you, and you've got to do it, but, I figure, there's some rules here.  If you ever look at those Lego sets, they use a weird combination of standard Lego pieces.  They'll use, say, a bunch of little two-hitchers (as we used to call them when I was a kid, "give me a two-hitcher," which was a block with two bumps) to build a cockpit for the Avengers jet, and I'll think "Why can't they just use on 8 hitcher," but then I realized: Lego doesn't want to rejigger the entire factory every time they make a new set.  They want to make the fewest number of blocks possible, and just recombine those into new things, which is the whole point of Lego (from kids' perspectives) and which also makes sure they can make a profit, because this way they can just keep churning out 2-hitchers and people can make them into a Mars Rover, an X-wing, or Smaug.

So: your job is Lego Guy, and you get told to make a Smaug, and it's got to look like Smaug, and it's got to be possible to do, and it's got to use the fewest possible bricks to do it.  Go!

Could you do that? Like most jobs, at first blush it seems great: "I can play with Legos all day and get paid for it?" But after you think about it, it's work.  Playing with Legos for a living seems like fun because when you play with Legos in real life, you're doing it on Christmas Day, assembling Naboo fighters...

...Actual Dialogue:

MR BUNCHES:  What is it, Daddy? (holding up one box)

ME:  It's a Naboo fighter.

MR BUNCHES:  A NEW fighter.

ME:  Na-BOO fighter.

MR BUNCHES: New Boo Fighter.

ME: Close enough.

 ... so it seems like that would be an awesome job.  But it's different when you've got to get up early and go there and spend your entire day building your Smaug and then Steve in the next cubicle does it but uses two fewer blocks, which doesn't seem like much but translated into sales that saves Lego, Inc., 35,000,000,000 blocks, which is a lot of money, and you have to go home and tell your wife that you didn't make Smaug and you're not getting that promotion and you probably will get transferred to MegaBlox next week, building a "House."

It's pressure, is what I'm saying.

Each of those Lego sets comes with a little round, hollow planet to keep them in.  They are Star Wars planets, but Mr Bunches has never watched Star Wars; we started once but he got scared by the intro, so his exposure to Star Wars is based entirely on this:

 which he loves to watch and gives him the basics.

Because he doesn't know Star Wars planets, but he does know Our Solar System planets, Mr Bunches calls the planets what they look like to him: rather than Tatooine, Naboo, and such, he has "Earth, Venus, and Mercury."

But the fourth one, which is grey and metal and has that big ion cannon, he cannot pass off as a planet, so when he asked me what it was, I said "Death Star."

And now he has Earth, Venus, Mercury, and Death Star.  That will make him a hit when they study the planets in school.)

a go go, which is what this post is about, comes from the French, being derived from gogue, which means "fun" in old French, which I find interesting: fun in the olden days now translates into having a lot of a thing, which is an apt metaphor for our times, isn't it?  We're two days past Christmas and the boys got so many toys they haven't even had time to play with them all -- toys from Grandma and Grandpa and their brother and sister and us and some of their teachers, and they have a whole roomful of toys already -- and relatives still to come, this weekend.  And it's not just them; older people, too.  The older kids got gift cards on top of their presents, and Oldest was gleeful that she could get two outfits from her favorite store.  After checking the prices on her phone app (yes, she has a phone app for her favorite store because Oldest makes good choices) she announced that she could get three outfits.  Shopping a gogo = fun, as do legos a gogo, as more = fun in our lives.

There is a Whisky a gogo.  I was spelling it wrong.  It's some kind of famous bar in Los Angeles, apparently big in rock and roll history, as there's a page of "famous quotes" about it.  I read them, and don't recognize any of the quotes, so I'm not sure how "famous" the quotes are.  I don't even recognize most of the people who said them.  But you can get yourself some Whisky a gogo merchandise there, in case you don't have enough stuff to make your life fun yet.

Me, I'm going to listen to some Gershwin:

Turns out I knew some, after all.  Knowledge a gogo.

15,842 New Words, Word 3: If I may foreshadow a bit, what's the deal with X?

If I may foreshadow a bit, what's the deal with X?

Put more clearly, why is X a letter?

If Pluto is not a planet any longer -- teach the controversy! -- then can't we sometimes demote letters down to, I don't know, phonetical symbols or something?

I'm sure this has happened before, that we demoted a letter, because there are things that I remember learning about in school that seemed to exist in other people's consciousness but did not exist in mine and which therefore must have at some time been a letter only weren't anymore; people talked about them in the way that people talk about a lot of stuff that I vaguely recognized as existing, but which I had no clue about, really.

That was life for me as a kid (and, mostly, still, as an adult): people talking about things that they all take for granted as existing and knowing about them, while I am completely lost.

I spend about 84% of my daily life not knowing what the heck people are talking about.  It was a higher percentage when I was a kid and would routinely get on a bus for a field trip to the Octagon House or something and not really know what was happening because I'd forgotten about the field trip (or, more likely) hadn't known about it at all.  Sometimes I would have a bag lunch with me, indicating that my mom had remembered the field trip and remembered to send the lunch with me, but also indicating that I not only didn't know I had a field trip but also I didn't remember carrying my bag lunch to school.

The mere fact that I've made it to 43 is amazing in more ways than ten.

Consider the schwa.

Pictured: schwa

To get back on track, here, just think about a schwa for a while.  We learned about the schwa in some grade or other, I'll just say it was the third grade because it doesn't really matter and I want to move on with my thought.

That's one of the reasons I never know what's going on or what the heck you are talking about, really: because you make me agree to stuff just to get the story going, because you are boring.  I don't mean that to be offensive (but it is), it's just the truth.  Here's how the vast majority of stories you tell go:

You:  Hey, you know that guy, Artie Johnson?*
*this is a made up name. But I think it was Marge Simpson's boyfriend in school, too.

Me: No.

You: Sure you do.  Artie was that guy who ...

*my mind fades away wondering, perhaps, whether it would be possible to make Macaroni and Cheese Balls on a stick, and whether that's a thing that people would want to eat, because I would want to eat it*

SEVERAL HOURS PASS.

You:  ... and that's how you know Artie Johnson.

Me: I still don't know who he is.

You: Sure you do.  He was also that guy...

That's how they all go, and that's annoying because the important point of the story is (I assume) from your perspective not whether I know who Artie Johnson is, it's something Artie did or said.  (I say from your perspective because from my perspective the important point of the story is not to talk to you at all; I was just going to get coffee and you cornered me.)

So to combat that I have developed a defense mechanism that is the oral equivalent of a chameleon (or an octopus since they are better at it) changing its colors to match its surroundings, and so whenever you tell me a story about a guy, I immediately agree that I know that person, which goes like this:

You:  Remember Margo Timmins?*
*I think she is the lead singer of Cowboy Junkies.  I'm not good with making up names.

Me: Yes!

You:  She knows Artie Johnson, too...

It is not a perfect system.

We were talking about the schwa, which for purposes of this story is something I first heard of in third grade, and I heard of it because my teacher wrote an upside-down e on the board:

Pictured: schwa

and went on like nothing in the world weird had just happened, talking about this and that and stuff, and everyone in the class was acting like it was perfectly normal that Ms. Wilhelmi had just written an upside-down e on the board and then later on she said it was a schwa and people like Derrick Van Orten just acted like this was a thing and I recall staring at my soft, pulpy, grayish-yellow paper with the rows of solid blue lines with the dashed-blue lines between them forming the minimum height requirements for lower-case letters to join the word, a feeling of resignation forming in me as I longed to just be back at home in my room reading comic books and not dealing with letters that couldn't possibly exist but everyone knew about them.

To this day I do not know what the schwa is supposed to be, or do, or say, and I have for about 35 years (how old is one in 3rd grade?  That's another thing I can't recall.) suspected that it was an elaborate practical joke because my only other alternative is to admit that here is another part of society that I am clueless about, which would put the schwa in the same not-so-exclusive club as girls, women, females, and everything else that isn't Green Lantern.

(I also do not know that much about Green Lantern, either, because I only just recently found out that Earth has, like, thirteen of them and there's only supposed to be one per sector.  Having too many Green Lanterns is worse for me, far worse, than blinking Ewoks.)

The schwa, according to Wikipedia is:

the mid-central vowel sound (rounded or unrounded) in the middle of the vowel chart, denoted by the IPA symbol ə, or another vowel sound close to that position. An example in English is the vowel sound in the second syllable of the word sofa. Schwa in English is limited to unstressed positions, but in some other languages it can occur as a stressed vowel.

 And now I know less than before.  But it gets worse: Wikipedia notes that the schwa is imported from Hebrew where sometimes it was used to

either the phoneme /e/ or the complete absence of a vowel. 

 So now we have a letter that is used to indicate the complete absence of a letter.

Dizzy yet?  I am, but, then, I've been drinking coffee and repeatedly rebuilding the Lego TIE Fighter I built Mr Bunches yesterday so that he could re-enact the scene in Lego Star Wars where Lego Darth Vader crashes his Lego Tie Fighter onto Tatooine, which Mr Bunches has mistaken for Mars.  Because that is the only scene Mr Bunches re-enacts (Lego Darth Vader crashing on Mars), I am called on to rebuild the TIE fighter a lot.

Schwa also has been around for over a hundred years, now, and as such it's picked up a lot of uses, as Wikipedia says that it can sound like the u in but, or

• like the 'a' in about [əˈbaʊt]
• like the 'e' in taken [ˈtʰeɪkən]
• like the 'i' in pencil [ˈpʰɛnsəl]
• like the 'o' in eloquent [ˈɛləkwənt]
• like the 'u' in supply [səˈplaɪ]
• like the 'y' in sibyl [ˈsɪbəl]

And now I'm really made because of that backwards 3 in eloquent's phonetic spelling.  So we can just make up letters now?  And what's that superscript h?  Can't math just stay in its own enclosure?

This is all because of x, and specifically, x is for box.  Which it isn't, but I'm getting ahead of myself, which is tough because I'm already beside myself with confusion.

Yesterday, Mr Bunches was singing a song about the alphabet that he'd learned from Youtube, where he found a video about the alphabet.  The song is kind of catchy in that mindless way that many children's songs are; I recall clearly the line for O:

O is for octopus

Ock, ock, octopus.

All the letters go like that.  And, as all alphabet songs have to, eventually the song gets around to X, at which point the song says:

X is for box.

Bah bah box.

Which it clearly isn't, as I said.  And I couldn't help but wonder, why not go with the traditional things that X is for, which are, judging by my extensive research into this consisting of thinking about it while I type this line:

X-ray

X-ray fish.

And that's all.

That's all X is ever for in the alphabet, and I don't know why the song didn't just go with that, because in every other case the letter was for something and what it was for was a word it started with, like

L is for lion

La la lion

 Until it flipped at X.

That, in turn, caused me to wonder why we bother having X as a letter at all, given how useless it is.  Do you have any idea how few words in the English language (best language EVER! YAY ENGLISH! GO USA USA USA!) start with X?

I do not, either, because my Dictionary on my Kindle doesn't let me skip to that page; apparently, to look up a word in that dictionary I will have to page all the way to it page by page, which makes it a not very helpful book at all.

But there's nothing that X does that can't be accomplished by a couple of other letters working together.  We don't need to have an X-ray, we can simply have an Ecksray machine, and fish, and we could store stuff in bockses, which is more than one bocks, and if you think that looks silly, then consider that you are probably right now wearing socks and on your door there are locks and when someone wants in they do a couple of knocks which if they are loud enough will give you shocks.

We'd get use to having bockses, is my point and after a while we probably wouldn't even miss "X" and it could go back to just being used to mark the spot and possibly for tic-tac-toe which, did you know that in Rome they played a version of that game which wasn't boring? In Roman Tic Tac Toe, which was called Terni Lapilli you got three pieces and had to keep moving them around to try to get three in a row or to block, making it more of a strategy game than I would have guessed, and I just now thought how awesome it would be to quickly, before Christmas gets into full swing, to manufacture Terni Lapilli desk games, classy little versions in velvet boxes with silver O's and gold X's, three of each, and market them.  That would, I bet, be a zillion seller.  It also would make a remarkably fun app for a phone, and I might be better at that than I am at computer chess, because I have never beaten the computer even though I have it set only on medium strength.

(The problem is I don't plan far enough ahead, and also I am pretty careless with my queen.)

(The bigger problem is I am not very good at chess.)

Plus, if we dropped X we'd have 25 letters, which seems like a better number of letters: we could do 5 rows of 5 when laying them out, instead of always having an awkward set of letters hanging off the tail end, standing around near the edge of the party while the other letters all ignore them.

(High school really left a mark on me.)

Today's word that I didn't know is aardwolf.  It is, according to my dictionary

a nocturnal black-striped African mammal of the hyena family, feeding mainly on termites, with its origins being Dutch South African, combining the dutch word aarde (meaning earth) with wolf (meaning wolf).

That latter definition being sort of cheating, if you ask me.  The Dutch have a word that means wolf, and that word is wolf?  Seems like you're not really trying, there, Netherlands.  Especially when you consider that the word aardvark means Earth Pig, because vark is Dutch South African for pig.

Aardvarks are also called antbears, which made me think of bugbears from my D&D days.

This is an aardvark:

Pictured: aardvark, probably.

And this is a bugbear:

Pictured: bugbear

And this is an aardwolf:

Pictured: aardwolf.

And it looks tough but remember, it mostly eats termites. And also, the aardvark looks a lot like an armadillo.

I looked ahead a bit and so I will just tell you that the next word I came up with that I didn't know is Aaron's rod, which is "another term for the great or common mullein."

This is a mullein:

Pictured: not a fish. Not even a little.

Which seems weird.  I'd have guessed a mullein was a kind of fish.  I'm going to go with that.  Mulleins are henceforth fishes, schwas never existed, and X is demoted to phonetic symbol.  If we ever need a 26th letter, we can always call up that superscript h.  I think he's ready for the show.

UPDATE:  Sweetie has corrected me. The song does not say "bah bah box," it says:

X is for box
ks ks ks

Making a kind of kiss/hissing sound like you're saying X but don't want to.

Which we agree is worse.

Sweetie also pointed out that X is for xylophone, too, so now X stands for three things and we still don't need it because you could play a zylophone if you wanted.  When I run for President of Earth, I will have as my main plank Demote X, and as my secondary plank, I will call on the Green Lantern Corps to reduce its numbers to a reasonable amount of one.  They can keep this one:

Pictured: Artie Johnson.

15,842 new words, Word 2: Posh's Feet, and beating a grace note.

It's been a while since I first decided to find out how many words I already know and then learn another 15,842 new ones-- not that I'm in danger of running out of old words to say-- but it's a cloudy Sunday morning and I'm drinking my coffee and sitting with Mr Bunches, who is eating cereal and watching Mr Bean on Youtube, and with that setting the mood (we've also got a fully-set-up Mousetrap game on the table, if you want to picture the scene perfectly) let's dive in to see where I land on another new word.

The last word I didn't know was only seven words into the Oxford English Dictionary; today, I go back to that dictionary, where I see the word of the day is telos (an ultimate object or aim) and the quote of the day is Victoria Beckham talking about how she can't go to the gym because she doesn't understand the shoes,

"I'd love to go to the gym, but I just can't get my head around the footwear. ” Victoria Beckham (1974– ) British pop singer

a quote I find baffling.

Is it supposed to be funny? I have a real problem with comedians (?) who make up a joke that relies on something that just isn't funny, at all, at its core.  So let's parse Posh's joke here:

She would like to work out, but finds the footwear:

too confusing.

In some way.

I suppose.

Or is it that she doesn't like the shoes?  Is that it? That she cannot bring herself to wear -- can't get her head around -- the shoes because they're just not her?

If you Google-Image-Search the phrase "Posh's feet," you will (A) get weird looks from people and (B) find out that Posh's feet have been photographed, a lot, and (C) the photos include this:

Which  are Posh's actual feet and which were the subject of an article in 2009 about how agonizing her feet are and which I suppose we should say "Oh, man, that's terrible she's in lots of pain" but nobody made her wear those shoes, and she's worth millions for singing a bunch of songs nobody not even her can remember, so whatever; I'm glad her feet hurt.

That was mean of me.

Anyway: on to the words! And back off of the words, as the very next entry, after a, that I don't know is a battuta:

a battuta 
Pronunciation: /ˌä bäˈto͞otä/ Syllabification: 
Definition of a battuta adverb Music (typically as a direction) returning to strict tempo. 
Origin: Italian, literally 'to the beating' 

 You might think, what with my having taken piano lessons when I was a kid until I was 12, with having learned to play guitar, as well, and also having tried to learn the bagpipes but that's really hard, I would have known a battuta, but here's a confession:  I never paid much attention to the directions on how to play music.  Beethoven or Brahms or Joplin would write allegretto or have a 4/4 time signature, and I would know what they meant, but I just played it the way I liked it, and didn't worry too much about how the guys who wrote the music would have wanted 12-year-old me to play.

Although I probably would have paid more attention if Mrs. Loppnow, in teaching me what musical notation meant, would have said "now, when you see a battuta that means, literally, to the beating, and so I want you to go back to the strict tempo as though you are beating someone."  

Piano lessons always needed a bit more implied brutality.  Take THAT, grace notes!