Kris' Vocabulary and Style

Sometimes people have called me out on it, but there seem to be certain words I use relatively frequently. These aren't words one would use all the time, but I do notice them when I do. Partly because people have brought them to my attention.

vacillate /ˈvæ.sə.leɪt/, /ˈvæ.sɪ.leɪt/

1. (intransitive) To sway unsteadily from one side to the other; oscillate. 
2. (intransitive) To swing indecisively from one course of action or opinion to another. 

I'd used this just today in an e-mail to one of my co-workers, and it was then I'd decided this would be today's blog topic.


simultaneously (UK): /ˌsɪməlˈteɪnɪəsli/; (US) /ˌsaɪməlˈteɪnɪəsli/

This is the one on which people usually remark, partly because I've grown up -- and continue to -- pronouncing/pronounce it the UK way rather than the US/American way.

Other words people tend to notice because I don't sound quite American saying them:

• process  /ˈpɹoʊ̯.sɛs/ as if I were Canadian;
• Internet (and pretty much a lot of words with "nt" between vowels): I pronounce the "t", so it's  /ˈɪntɚˌnɛt/ rather than /ˈɪɾ̃ɚˌnɛt/.

iteration /ɪɾəɹˈeɪʃən/

1. Recital or performance a second time; repetition.
2. A variation or version.
3. (computing) The use of repetition in a computer program, especially in the form of a loop.
4. (computing) A single repetition of the code within such a repetitive process.

Especially the second definition.

Well, I suppose those are the only few that really come to mind right now.

My pronunciation is pretty all over the place, generally. It happens in my Spanish, too.

As far as my style, I've unfortunately embraced the lots-of-thoughts-in-a-short-stream method. My French teacher would comment frequently that I try to say too much too quickly. I use parenthetical asides a lot in even semi-professional writing. I also use hyphenate thought streams (like in my first sentence) quite a bit.

I tend to be passive voice-averse; this is my English teachers' faults. I remember reading an article about passive voice structures fairly recently and have been even more conscious about it. It may be partly because one of my co-workers is a serial passive voice user in writing and speech; it annoys me a little because I come across her writings every day (but it's just a personal choice of mine that I try to avoid passive voice).

I rarely have short sentences, and connect my clauses fairly frequently in the most grammatical ways I can. It may be another symptom of my expressing multiple thoughts in a single stream. Equally symptomatic, it seems, is my trying to use a word in every iteration (there I go again).

I suppose that's just another part of being me, exploring what it is to be human even though I really dislike being human a good deal of the time.

Seriously, #DumpStoli? WHY?!

It wasn't until I was on my Twitter feed today that I'd noticed Dan Savage (@fakedansavage) had changed his avatar to behold his latest - and might I say very misguided - crusade, one called #DmupStoli.

Searching that hashtag, I came upon his original blog posting, which explained his rationale.

And I disagree with most of it, because the nature of it is simply, at least with the Stoli part of the crusade, that all bars and people should drop it purely on that because Stoli is Russian one should drop it.

WTF? I mean, the #DumpSochi part, I can understand. Russia, having agreed to be internationally welcoming by virtue of agreeing to host another Olympics has made an implicit communication with the world that it would accept all people in the spirit of harmony and international union. Recently legalizing effective discrimination against any amount of people, GLBT members included, goes against that spirit.

Going against any number of private companies just because they come from a country which decided to enact certain legislation makes about as much sense in my eyes as Boston as a whole effectively refusing to allow Tamerlan Tsarnaev a burial within Massachusetts. That was another bit of ire at the backhanded twofaceness the United States can have.

Imagine if there were somewhere in the United States that still refused to bury someone in a specific place just because that person were, say, Jewish, Black, or Japanese? That was what happened to Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and what's now happening because Stolichnaya happens to be a Russian company. Not a Russian government company. A Russian company.

Don't refuse something based on its proximity to something "society" seems to dislike or that someone says shouldn't be.

I say one questions separately Russia the country and Tamerlan Tsarnaev's actions as what are reprehensible, and treat Russian vodka the private, unaffiliated company product and Tamerlan Tsarnaev the human being as private, unaffiliated company products undeserving of prosecution and a human being deserving a proper burial like any human being should.

I've thus decided - not that he would give two shits because he's so high on himself and his ego that he doesn't care what a person thinks anyway - to unsubscribe to Dan Savage's podcast. His decision to discriminate against a series of products just because they happen to be of a country - and not for a country - that discriminates is as unjust and backward as the people who thought Jewish people, Black people, and Japanese people were not human beings and thus exploitable and worthy of abuse.

I say #DropDanSavage, if that's how he's going to be.

#RASP - Rant Around Several Paragraphs #2 - The Birthday Song

So, there has been much talk about he copyright on the birthday song. I'm going to leave that be, because obviously my take on it is the song is public domain and one should be able to use it freely.

No, the point of this post is the singing of the song.

So, we all know the first few lines: “Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday…”

And that's where I pause.

What's the next word in the third line? Is it "dear" or the person's name? There are different opinions on this, certainly, but I'm addressing mine here on this, providing examples of course.

Let's use my name, Kristopha. Should it be October 24 and people have gathered to regale me with gifts and song, in my opinion the third line should go "Happy birthday Kristopha…"

This is because my name has three syllables, the second syllable having the emphasis and not the first or third. Should they have elected to use the shortened form of my name, Kris, the verse would go "Happy birthday, dear Kris", with the "Kris" part drawn out into two "syllables" (Kri-is), just so the post "happy birthday" element maintains three beats and the second of three beats has the emphasis.

So, what about names with emphasis on the other-than-second syllable? For this, we'll use my sister's name, Melonie.

We pronounce her name /'mε l^ ni:/, and so the third line, in my estimation, should be "Happy birthday, dear Melonie". Æsthetically, this pleases my ear, and I think others would agree.

When people in South Africa were singing the Happy Birthday song for Nelson Mandela, it seems a lot of them sang "Happy birthday, dear Madiba", which sounds wrong to me. Since the word/title Madiba has second-syllable emphasis and is a three-syllable word, the line should be "Happy birthday Madiba".

If they'd decided to use his Xhosa name, Rolihlahla, which has emphasis on the second syllable and has four syllables, I'd think it would have the dear: "Happy Birthday, dear Rolihlahla".

If it were my Nigerian cousin-in-law, whose full name is Adetunji (emphasis on the third syllable), there'd be no dear: "Happy birthday Adetunji". It sounds a bit stuffy to call him Adetunji, though, so most of us call him just Tunji (where there would be a dear).

My opinion on any name greater than four syllables is the person would usually have a shorter nickname or an abbreviated name that should fit into these cases.

All that said, I have one more gripe to grapple with: the additional stanzas beyond "How old are you now?". Traditionally in Jamaica, at least, there is a third stanza which goes, "May the Dear Lord bless you." I don't mind this stanza, and it's a nice touch to me but only if multiple people (being more than three) all continue the song through that stanza without pausing.

At my niece's first birthday party, people were pretty much ready to quit singing after the "How old are you now" stanza, but my Dad insisted on singing the Dear-Lord-bless-you stanza too. He was the only one who had continued on to singing it, and the rest of us grudgingly continued on to sing that one. It was just awkward, so my take is one should have some social maturity to gauge pauses and empathize with a group (this coming from someone - me - who is generally socially anxious and awkward anyway!).

That way you don't become the bully who commandeered a nice tradition into a sing-that-stanza-or-burn-in-Hell session.

Ligature

It's funny how much I've been thinking about how often it seems we lump things with very distinct differences together.

It started Wednesday while I was watching Modern Family. Sofía Vergara's character Gloria couldn't think of the animal, so she said it in Spanish: ardilla. Me speaking and knowing Spanish, I'd always known ardilla to mean "chipmunk", so when Gloria's son translated it as squirrel, it surprised me. Checking the RAE's dictionary, I found it to be both chipmunk and squirrel. I thought this: how can Spanish lump together two similar but *very* different mammals under the same word? They share a kingdom, phylum, class, order and family. Close enough, but they can't interbreed viably, they look different, act differently. How can that be?

I brought this up with one of my Colombian co-workers/friends - Alix - and it brought up many trains of thought.

How, for example, do Spanish-speakers principally, from my experience, call all Asians "chinos"? Or after 9-11, I was hearing a lot of the Cubans around me referring to Arabs universally as "talibanes".

Backing to the animal theme, I'd brought up how dissimilar squirrels and chipmunks are, and asked if you would lump lions and tigers together. The response was, of course, no, because they're different. We kind of do the same thing in English quite a bit, like with turtles and tortoises.

I suppose I'm more sensitive to meaning in Spanish since it's my adopted language and not my main language, or I suppose because I'm me.

But chipmunks aren't squirrels, damn it!

English words with uncommon properties

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Scrabble Help Desk!