John Crowley's Blog, page 17

Lost neat thing

I read somewhere recently a piece not primarily about eggs, which in passing used a word or words describing how they are stored, or how birds arrange them in nests (??), that distinguished the small end from the big end.  The word or term began with a p or a ph ("pinning"?).  I know it's likely hopeless, and Google yields nothing to my queries, but more outre questions have found answers fromthe Smarty Pants Brigade.

Nawlins

L. and I here in the Big Uneasy with a couple of days to spend now that her conference is done. Been around the French Quarter and visited the Garden District, ate jambalaya and blackened catfish at Olivier's and turtle soup and oyster-shrimp gumbo at the Commander.  Suggestions?  (Not only about food, tough that too.)  We are of course, old academic white people from New England, so names of secret voodoo bars that open at midnight and earsplitting ten-horn live bands are probably wasted on us, but out-of-the-way history is not.

Making the best of it

This from a touching and dramatic story --  http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/27/too-young-to-have-a-heart-attack/  -- about a woman too young to have a heart attack, who did.  This bit is an irrelevance and threw my attention the wrong way for a moment.

"The night before we left for our summer vacation in Michigan, I accidentally stepped on my Kindle — which, like my heart, I cannot live without — and broke it. Reduced to reading novels on my iPhone, I made the best of it."

I then reached the end of the tale, which draws the moral:

"...people brought dinners and well wishes for weeks on end (not to mention commiseration about trying to read a book on an iPhone, a heart-attack-inducing event if ever there was one)."

I.e., stick to the paper-and-cardboard items, large print if required.

Clockeyed

A spam recently attached to a long-ago post consists of the following message, plus a url that I did not follow:

"A front door that opens clockwise into the home channels more energy inside."

Is that simple nonsense?  Feng shui? Would that link have led me to builders who would have swapped my opens-outward or anti-clockwise-opening door for a clockwise one?  What energy is channeled inside?  The world provides us with more puzzles to solve every day than an ordinary householder ever needed to think about in the long-ago.

Bored

When did the formulation "bored of" replace the more common "bored with" or "bored by" I grew up saying and hearing?  "Bored of" would have marked the speaker as unlearned in my (now passing) day.  I first remember it as the title of the hilarious National Lampoon parody "Bored of the Rings"  -- I thought then it was forced on them by the pun -- then I began seeing it in blogs etc. -- now I just saw it in the (once) august pages of the NY Times in a regular news story.

Today's random paradox

From the NY Times (which I do not piuck on, but is the one I read most):

A mining company is proceeding with a project that could help revive Brazil’s economy, but it would also destroy caves treasured by scholars of Amazonian prehistoric human history.

Regrets

What is the difference between remorse and regret?  I could look it up, but I trust you guys more.

TERALBAY

Okay, time's up.  The word -- which  dreadbeard  got before finishing the description, a claim I have no reason to doubt -- is BETRAYAL, which is perhaps the point of the little story; maybe Milne had good reason, as perhaps Victoria did, not to discover it.  I admit that I went wrong for a while trying to come up with a word with ALBERT in it, which certainly is in BETRAYAL though not in the right order, and would have given Vickie further pause.  It was  anselmo_b  's hint of "quisling" that made the word instantly pop out.  I could have got out the Scrabble tiles and done it faster, or the online scrabble tiles even.  But that would have been cheating.  Instead I just failed.

crowleycrow @ 2012-12-10T09:27:00

It may be useful for sight-impaired persons researching me, but everyone is welcome to hear my biography spoken by a rather winsome robot  while being regarded mockingly by a long-ago picture of the biographee.  It may be effective for inducing sleep, or trance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vDSoh21Eyw

TERALBAY

My sister's husband discovered this, from a 1921 essay by A.A. Milne:

TERALBAY is not a word which one uses much in ordinary life. Rearrange the letters, however, and it becomes such a word. A friend -- no, I can call him a friend no longer -- a person gave me this collection of letters as I was going to bed and challenged me to make a proper word of it. He added that Lord Melbourne -- this, he alleged, is a well-known historical fact -- Lord Melbourne had given this word to Queen Victoria once, and it had kept her awake the whole night. After this, one could not be so disloyal as to solve it at once. For two hours or so, therefore, I merely toyed with it. Whenever I seemed to be getting warm I hurriedly thought of something else. This quixotic loyalty has been the undoing of me; my chances of a solution have slipped by, and I am beginning to fear that they will never return. While this is the case, the only word I can write about is TERALBAY.

My sister glosses:  The answer is not RATEABLY, or BAT-EARLY, which "ought to mean something, but it doesn't." Rudolf Flesch notes that TRAYABLE is not a word, and that, though TEARABLY appears in small type in Webster's Unabridged, "it obviously won't do."

What's the answer? There's no trick -- it's an ordinary English word.

If you've long known the answer, or come upon it in five minutes, or a use a letter-rearrangfing program to run through all the possibilities, don't post.  I haven't given it any thought myself because i am a BUSY MAN with REAPONSIBILITIES and have NO TIME for such pursuits.