Still at it

Report from the word face

Having finished a rough-cut (very rough) of the *il* section, I'm taking time out to reflect a bit on the Android spell-checker.

Android's spell-checker never ceases to amaze me: its latest suggestion, for "n o-frills" is
"up-front" which does share a hyphen followed by fr, and (though in the wrong places) an "n" and an "o"; but it shares nothing else.

In these five cases I hadn't made a mistake, but Android (or maybe Kingsoft Office – the software I'm using [I'm not really on top of this thing]) still felt I needed some help finding le mot juste:

1

(You can ignore the pink bit. Selecting a cell makes the Comment box appear willy-nilly [see below]. The green outline marks the selected word, and the suggestions made by the spell-checker are in blue, at the bottom left-hand corner.)

I wonder what's wrong with ill-advised, apart from the general hostility to the hyphen felt by some users of American English (mentioned here). Anyway, I'm impressed by the creativity underlying the suggestions of alternatives.

2

 I detect a somewhat Calvinistic value system at work here.

3

From stern to surreal. I generally expect my t-shirts to be still. The notion of an autonomous (automotive?) one is rather disturbing.

4
 

I wonder which of these full-time things is the least surreal; or indeed the most. A full-time logo sounds like something Harry Potter might know about, akin to those moving pictures in the newspapers.  And what would it do on its day off?

5

I think this might  be a thinly-veiled comment on T-Mobile's customer service.

Enough of this. Onwards and *ol*wards...

b

(PS... but this word-bashing is pretty arduous, and I have an interesting idea for a real book. So I'll carry on with #WVTbook2 as far as *ul*. Then I'll take stock,  and [maybe] change direction.)

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Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs – but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?)

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this. 

Freebies (Teaching resources:  Nearly 50,000 views and 9,000 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with nearly 2,700 views and nearly 1,100 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.

Always mount a scratch monkey

Tales from the word-face

Today's subject line is the punchline of a joke (or maybe anecdote?) that I heard in the halcyon days of DEC (and there's no doubt a good reason for naming a particularly enjoyable  period after a kingfisher [for that is what a halcyon is]; but I don't have time for the resear... Heck, why not go mad?...

<digression>
halcyon days

noun

a period of peace and happiness; an idyllic time; also, a period of calm weather during the winter solstice
 

Word Origin

Greek Alkyone a legend of fourteen windless days

 ... says Dictionary . com, so it was the other way around I guess, the bird being named after such windless days – and in mid-winter, rather than those lazy crazy hazy days of summer.... But, hang on, the truth is rather more interesting:

halcyon (adj.)

"calm, quiet, peaceful," 1540s, in halcyon dayes (translating Latin alcyonei dies, Greek alkyonides hemerai), 14 days of calm weather at the winter solstice, when a mythical bird (also identified with the kingfisher) was said to breed in a nest floating on calm seas....

says Etymonline. Hmmm. For Further Study.... (as they used to say in the world of Nets-N-Comms standardization.
</digression>

I don't remember the joke, but I do remember it involved disaster recovery. Which has been on my mind since my little android thingy fell and broke its screen. That is, I was involved, but I didn't want it to fall; or break its screen for that matter.

But I had a day-old backup of my WVGTbk2 work, so I've only lost *il* words starting with s or the beginning of t. Not too bad really, and it's now all in the hands of the insurers. But normal service has taken a bit of a hit.

The silver-lining is that it's  forced me to start to get to grips with Linux.

bye for now.

Oh, and just because someone on Radio 4 this morning, talking about poetry,  provoked it...

<rant likelihood_of_deliverance_from_this_evil="none">
It's geneAlogy for Gad's sake. If you speak American English, you can stand down, as the American English /ɑ/ of anthropology is not unlike American English /æ/ of genealogy – not the British English /æ/, which is a whole nother thing. Sometimes my British English ear tells me they're identical. [I'm sure they're not, but the process of acquiring British English involves us in learning not to hear phonemic differences in languages that don't interest us {as speakers, that is, not scholars}])
</rant>

 b

PS A clutch of clues

• Look in the centre of Galway for a patch over the water. (8)    GALLOWAY
• Low centre of gravity takes cutting of holly. (4)                      VILE
• End of bow with misinformation about Resistance. (4)           FROG
• Musician, heathen (obvs.) (8)                                               PAGANINI
• Alteration embracing beginning and end of leptocephali,         ALLITERATION
  in the spirit of this PS. (12)

Update 2016.06.21.12:50 – Added answers in red and deleted footer (getting there, slowly)

Free at last, FOGgies (pt 5), and a new look

Free at last

I am now the pleasantly confused owner of an Android device. This could mean a change in modus operandi, but after a 20-years' exposure to the dreaded 'Windows' virus I am perforce more at home in that environment; indeed, there are times  when a sort of Stockholm Syndrome starts to take over and I find myself wishing for the Bad Old Days.  Possibly I will in due course be blogging away happily on my new tabletty thing, but first things first; I must learn to walk before I run [off at the mouth?]

FOGgies round-up

I have mixed feelings about the FOGgies – recognition of distinguished contributions to the corpus of bad writing. Apart from the seasonal misfire [well it made sense at the time, but a correspondent soon put me right see the Update], there were four posts. The first gave two awards:

Most Meaningless String of Abstract Nouns 

Best Epithet Given Inappropriate Subject Status

The second gave only one, going to town rather on the award for

Most Misleading Use of Headlines

The third gave another two awards, for

Most Unnecessary Use of Management Jargon

and a

special 'Clusterbomb' award for a family of inter-related euphemisms

The fourth gave one:

The FOGgy for Hasty Sub-editing (or 'Can they really have meant to write that?)  

There would have been more, but as I  said in that last post (which sounds appropriately final, in a bugle-y sort of way)  'Waves of apathy for the FOGgies – reflected in the Blogger statistics – have persuaded me ... to put an end to the FOGgies'.

They may be back next year, but with more planning.

The New Look

<digression theme="Man proposes, Blogger disposes">
This was my planned text:

Attentive readers may have noticed that hitherto each Harmless Drudgery post has had a footer that points to my TESconnect resources and Amazon links, and that the statistics given in this footer are time-specific. I update them from time to time, but some of the older posts have footers that are well past their sell-by date. 

From now on, the 'footer' information will be on a separate page.

But things aren't working as I expected them to, and I have things to do before the end of the year. So you'll have to make do with the same old same old.
</digression>

A happy New Year to  all our readers (a growing number, averaging about 35 visits a day). Here's an interesting graph, showing  fairly steady, if not meteoric growth (as I said recently, meteors fall anyway). I'm not sure what happened in the year to September, but otherwise the trend is in the right direction.

b

PS – A few clues to be going on with:

Confused stab in the dark – not for them! (4)
Whinge and throw fish back with space for grasping motto. (5, 4)
Marooned sailor finds shell (7)

Andrupdoid  2015-01-01-17:20  – just to prove I can, and to fix a typo.

Update 2015.02.12.15:05  – Added PPS

PPS  – A few clues to be going on with: And the answers:

bats

carpe diem

abalone [the first fruit of my -AL- work]

---

Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?) 

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this. 

Freebies (Teaching resources:  nearly 48,200 views  and over 6,500 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with over 2,400 views and nearly 1,000 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.