While New Year's Eve is celebrated around the world, the Scots have a rich heritage of revelry to celebrate this night. They even take an extra holiday on January 2, as well as New Year's Day, to recover from the annual celebration of Hogmanay.
There are many theories about the derivation of the word "Hogmanay". The Scandinavian word for the feast preceding Yule was "Hoggo-nott" while the Flemish words (many have come into Scots) "hoog min dag" means "great love day". Hogmanay could also be traced back to the Anglo-Saxon, Haleg monath, Holy Month, or the Gaelic, oge maidne, new morning. But the most likely source seems to be the French. "Homme est né" or "Man is born" while in France the last day of the year when gifts were exchanged was "aguillaneuf" while in Normandy presents given at that time were "hoguignetes". Take your pick!
In Scotland a similar practice to that in Normandy was recorded, rather disapprovingly, by the Church.
"It is ordinary among some Plebians in the South of Scotland, to go about from door to door upon New Year`s Eve, crying Hagmane." Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence, 1693.
An integral part of the Hogmanay partying, which continues very much today, is to welcome friends and strangers, with warm hospitality and of course a kiss to wish everyone a Guid New Year. The underlying belief is to clear out the vestiges of the old year, have a clean break and welcome in a young, New Year on a happy note.
A guid New Year to ane an 'a' and mony may ye see!
Posted by
abnu on Friday, December 31, 2004 @ 8:12 PM
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Affected countries had no warning of Sunday's devastating sea wave that killed tens of thousands of people unnecessarily because tsunamis are so rare in the area they are not tracked.
An early warning system operated by NOAA to raise the alarm of tsunamis and save lives already covers much of the Pacific, according to a report by Reuters news agency.
Sunday's wall of water that hit coasts in Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka and other countries was spotted by U.S. seismologists.
However, they said they had no way to warn local governments even though the tsunami hit shore up to two-and-a-half hours after the mega-quake off the island of Sumatra in Indonesia.
"We tried to do what we could," said Charles McCreery, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Honolulu centre. "We don't have contacts in our address book for anybody in that part of the world." [emphasis added]
For more information concerning this natural disaster, visit The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami weblog , or SEA-EAT blog.
Posted by
abnu on Wednesday, December 29, 2004 @ 2:39 PM
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InterAction.org is a coalition of more than 160 US-based private relief, international development and refugee assistance organizations and has an extensive index of suitable organizations for your disaster response contributions.
O Christ mas Tree, O Christmas Tree, Your branches green delight us.They're green when summer days are bright: They're green when winter snow is white.O Christmas Tree, O Christ mas Tree,Your branches green delight us.O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree, You give us so much pleasure! How oft at Christmastide the sight, O green fir tree, gives us delight! O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree, You give us so much pleasure! !!! !!! !!! UNDERSTAND TANNENBAUM
Posted by
abnu on Friday, December 24, 2004 @ 4:52 AM
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Overheard by our spies (they're everywhere!) near San Francisco Civic Center yesterday, man speaking to woman: "I know three different people in San Francisco named Unique. How can any of them be unique if others have the same name?"
Posted by
Jay on Tuesday, December 21, 2004 @ 9:20 AM
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As children, we learned how little elves work at a sweatshop in the middle of gnome-man's land making toys for girls and boys. We were told it's at the North Pole, and it's called Santa's Workshop. And we were told how Santa delivers those presents to children all around the world on Christmas Eve. In a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer. Landing on rooftops and climbing down chimneys in the middle of the night.
Nothing in that story could mess with a kid's head. But it's been a closely guarded secret how Santa keeps track of all the little boys and girls—who's naughty and nice—without confusing their names. Now, his secret is out of the big red bag. We might as well admit it. Years ago, the elves at Wordlab helped Santa set up a computer program to generate Secret Christmas Names for kids.
My therapist says I'll be all right; now I know it wasn't my father, but Santa, who wrote "To: Lucky Hot-Fairy" on my presents.
Posted by
abnu on Monday, December 20, 2004 @ 10:20 AM
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Gillette wants to penetrate the hot women's shaver market.
Upon hearing Gillette's plans to launch a battery-powered Venus Vibrance, some might not think it's a razor the company's talking about. Though, we trust Gillette did its market research on this product name before planning to spend $40 million promoting it. The new Venus Vibrance, similar to the men's M3Power razor, sends vibrations to the skin which raises the hair for a closer shave.
Mike Morgan, is having a blog-identity crisis. His weblog is suffering with the insufferable name I-Tach.
Being a lurker around Wordlab from time to time, Mike turned to our massive archives for fresh ideas and found a short list of names he thinks might work. And he was nice enough to give credit to Wordlab for these ideas; so we're giving him space here to bring his problem to the attention of those best equiped to give him the free naming and branding input he desperately needs.
November 29, 2004
Your Input, Please: Blog Identity Crisis
I'm stuck and seek your wise counsel, dear readers...
A couple months ago, I wanted to start a blog. I didn't think I'd be able to write enough interesting content to maintain a "general interest" blog. I didn't think my life was interesting enough (and I have a tough time opening up emotionally) to write a "diary blog". And a "link blog", well, that's just plain boring. So when I started the I-Tach Weblog, my idea was for it to be "specialty blog" centered around emergency department nursing -- E.D. war stories, nursing tips and tricks, E.D. and nursing humor, et cetera and so on.
Well, guess what? My ocean of unique E.D. knowledge turned out to be more like a wading pool of knowledge. I shot that wad quickly. [Insert hokey, overdone 'frown' smiley here]
Instead, I found myself writing political and current events commentary, offering a tutorial on making the world's best fake fart noise, posting humorous stuff I've found, and even starting to talk about a few personal items such as my adoption or our family dog getting hit by a car earlier this month.
So now I'm stuck and need your help.
December 14, 2004
Your Input, Please: New Blog Name
Thanks to your input, I'm currently rewriting the template and style for the blog. I'll also be changing the name... I think "I-Tach" is funny as Hell, but I've slowly realized that it's pretty much an inside joke, lost on most visitors.
Call me a lemming, but I like blogs with titles that make me grin. So I stopped by one of my favorite-but-only-occasionally-visited sites, WordLab, in search of inspiration. As a writer and famous-in-my-own-mind funny guy, several phrases caught my eye. Some have the potential to be a nifty blog name, some are simply punny.
So here are the phrases that I jotted down to use as inspiration for a name...
The Babble Belt Textual Relations Birth of a Notion Blarney Rubble Peanut Buddha and Jesus Peek-A-Buddha Capital Punmanship Carmel Knowledge Consummate Confessional Cup and Chaucer Devastating the Obvious Flying Chaucer English as a Fecund Language Just Say Know Just a Flash in the Pants New World Odor Grump Up The Volume Leaves of Crass Duct Tape and Cover Lingo Weenie Jack Of All Tirades Know Way, Know How A Norse is a Norse (of course, of course)
What do y'all think? I see potential in a couple of these, others are just too funny to let go unpublicized. Do you have another name suggestion? The name I'm working with during the redesign is A Cacophany of Miscellany, which I think is a pretty good fit with the [Fill In Your Opinion of My Writing Here] I post.
Then again, I may throw all this to the wind and go out on a limb naming it Mike Morgan in anticipation of my inevitable fame and fortune!
As good as the The Big List is at Wordlab, Mike and others like him who are really stuck for a great blog name might also want to try the Band & Song Name Generator. This tool from the Musician's Friend can be a very creative blog name regurgitator when put to the task. Here are a few more suggestions worthy of consideration:
Pleasurable Blog Victoria's Secretions Red Flour Frozen Boyfriend Land of the Blog Blog of the Impossible Blog of the Tangerine Resisting Blog Nurse King of the Pleasurable Drool Nipple of the Farting Earth Eighth of the Blog Goggles Blog Filthy Blog Nice Blog Blog Flab Blog Raspberry Nurse Parakeet Malignant Nurse Rubber Nurse Screaming Nurse Blog Juniper Social Blog Blog Defaulted Blog Mistress Wet Nurse
Thanks to web sifter extraordinaire John Walkenbach for figgering this creative application would be great for generating blog names.
Posted by
abnu on Friday, December 17, 2004 @ 1:00 PM
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Jalopnik points to a very interesting post at The LA Car Blog: "Ford wants you to name their next car." And there's a lot more about naming and branding cars if you follow the links. This one's a Humdinga.
Posted by
abnu on Thursday, December 16, 2004 @ 10:30 AM
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Season's Greetings: As with anything addressing religion, you've got to be careful not to offend anyone—and, if you do, not to leave anyone out.
Companies that specialize in commercializing holy days and holidays alike, and are sensitive to consumer needs, have gone to great lengths with the language to find the right balance. American Greetings, Hallmark, and niche-marketers like the MixedBlessing Company, all have figured out how best to extend greetings with multicultural cards during this season some call Chrismukkah. "The essence of these cards is not about interfaith households as much as it is about friends and family members of different faiths acknowledging the different holidays that they all celebrate," said Shalanda Stanley, a Hallmark product manager, in an interview with ABC News.
So, in the true spirit of the celebrations that are most important to our three regular readers this holiday season, and with the kind permission of social commentator, wordsmith and syndicated cartoonist, Andy Singer, we wish you all a Happy Hanukwanzmas.
Posted by
abnu on Wednesday, December 15, 2004 @ 4:49 PM
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There is a lot to explore in the new Online Etymology Dictionary. "Etymologies are not definitions; they're explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago." The editor describes this compilation as a "map of the wheel-ruts of modern English." And there's more than just etymologies.
Hidden in the links of this new website is an interesting linguistic diversion—the full text of Anguish Languish. Foreign sample:
Whinny pious orphaned Door boards bay-gander sink. Worsen dizzy jelly ditch Toe setter furry kink?
Door kink worse inner conning horse Conning otters moaning. Door coin worse inner panda Aiding burden honing.
Door mate worse inner gardening Hankering ardor cloys. A lung camel blank board An sniffed offer noise.
According to Anguish Languish: "When all the words in a given passage of English have been so replaced, the passage keeps its original meaning, but all the words have acquired new ones. A word that has received a new meaning has become a wart, and when all the words in the passage have become warts, the passage is no longer English; it's Anguish."
Posted by
abnu on Monday, December 13, 2004 @ 5:00 PM
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The Punster noticed that The Style Invitational readers were asked to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.
1. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize that it was your money to start with.
2. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.
3. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.
4. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.
5. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.
6. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
7. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
8. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
9. Hipatitis: Terminal coolness.
10. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease.
11. Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.
12. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
13. Glibido: All talk and no action.
14. Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
15. Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.
16. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
17. Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a grub in the fruit you're eating.
18. Ignoranus: A person who's both stupid and an asshole.
The Presurfer, one of our favorite sifters of all things diversionary, has this tidbit of useless information for us today:
Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu is is the Maori placename on an otherwise unremarkable hill in New Zealand. It roughly translates into English as The brow of the hill where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, who slid down, climbed up and swallowed mountains, to travel the land, who is known as the Land Eater, played on his nose flute to his loved one.
At 85 letters, it is one of the longest placenames in the world.
According to the encyclopedia linked by The Presurfer, it is often shortened to Taumata by the locals for ease of conversation.
But this is only one of several diversions that might be interesting for Wordlab readers this holiday season. It was a toss-up whether or not it would be safe for work to re-link to this gift idea.
Posted by
abnu on Tuesday, December 07, 2004 @ 8:03 AM
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"Golden Bulls" are awarded for gobbledygook. There are several deserving winners, but this one is especially noteworthy as it was awarded to the GENIUS Project, based at the University of Reading.
The project is structured around multifaceted incremental work plan combining novel content design based on new pedagogical paradigms blended with the e-learning environments to facilitate hybrid mode of delivery. This is combined with series of educational experiments on the target learner groups with possibilities to adjust the approach and disseminate the interim and final results.
Our pedagogical approach is based on the educational model which assumes that the learning process is an interactive process of seeking understanding, consisting of three fundamental components: Conceptualization, Construction and Dialogue. The relevant modules of the New Curricula are mapped onto these three components and a hybrid way of delivery is investigated through different scenarios.
The "Foot in Mouth Award" for the most baffling quote by a public figure was awarded to Boris Johnson MP for saying, "I could not fail to disagree with you less."
Posted by
abnu on Monday, December 06, 2004 @ 5:43 PM
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"Just a year ago, blogs were viewed as a collection of off-the-cuff ramblings in cyberspace read mainly by online devotees," according to an article titled "The Business of Blogging" in BusinessWeek.
Now advertisers are realizing there is a market emerging in the blogosphere. Already, the growth in regular online advertising, estimated to be about 35% this year, will far outpace the spending increases for any other sector of the media world. Add to all this the fact that about 11% of Internet users today are inveterate blog readers, and the blogging scene starts to get mighty compelling for marketers.
Unfortunately, the other 89% of Internet users are invertebrate blog readers, so it's an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary thing.
Merriam-Webster announced this week that blog, which it defines as "a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks," was one of the most looked-up words on its internet sites this year.
This shouldn't be news. It's old news, at best. More likely, it's just a clever viral marketing ploy by M-W to get some buzz in the blogosphere. If the Blogdex is any indication, it seems to be working. The introspective blogging community is obsessively linking to this to celebrate the apparent recognition of the word blog by lexicographers.
Mark Liberman, blogging at Language Log, points out that as early as 2002 the American Dialect Society chose blog as "the word most likely to succeed".
Paul McFedries, The Word Spy, notes the earliest citation of the word:
In the old days people used to have links pages on their websites, or used to publish their bookmarks files as pages in their own right.
Weblogs are more active and tend to be updated every day. This follows the classic advice for successful web sites — update regularly to keep visitors coming back for more.
The best of them have developed their own personalities and command a loyal audience. Many of the early weblogs — commonly shortened to 'blogs — link to one another and have built up quite a community of webloggers, the authors who maintain them.
Weblogs remained fairly niche-market for a while because there was no easy way to build them. Most bloggers had to hand-code their pages each day and upload the files every time they added a new link or comment.—"The Big Byte," Evening Chronicle (Newcastle, UK), August 24, 1999
Five years later, people are still trying to find out from Merriam-Webster what the heck a blog is, anyway. Sadly, it's not in the dictionary. What does this say about the state of lexicography, when the most-looked-up word of the year—that's been used in print publications, not to mention the internet, since 1999—is not even in the dictionary?
Considering the poor definition for blog proposed to be included in the 2005 version of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, their editors might be well-advised to spend some time this year reading these blogs.
UPDATE: Compared to the Merriam-Webster "definition" of blog as "a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer," the introduction to the Becker-Posner Blog includes an erudite definition of blogging:
Blogging is a major new social, political, and economic phenomenon. It is a fresh and striking exemplification of Friedrich Hayek’s thesis that knowledge is widely distributed among people and that the challenge to society is to create mechanisms for pooling that knowledge. The powerful mechanism that was the focus of Hayek’s work, as as of economists generally, is the price system (the market). The newest mechanism is the “blogosphere.” There are 4 million blogs. The internet enables the instantaneous pooling (and hence correction, refinement, and amplification) of the ideas and opinions, facts and images, reportage and scholarship, generated by bloggers.
Yep, that about sums it up.
Posted by
abnu on Friday, December 03, 2004 @ 8:56 AM
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A new name 'Efeel' was chosen to replace the English word condom in a bid to shake off the negative image of condoms and help make them more friendly to the traditionally-conservative Koreans, the Korean Anti-AIDS Federation announced yesterday.
'Efeel' is a newly coined term, which has a combined meaning of something you must have to make love. 'E' is from Korean word 'Eh' meaning love and 'feel' from 'phil' meaning must or must-have, it explained.
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short, any necessary due diligence is up to you, but we at least make
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you do decide to use any of our content, that you please send us an
email ["word at wordlab dot com"] about it for use in our
internal records and eplosive marketing campaigns. Thank you, and enjoy.
