Because Ted doesn’t like to read, I’ve created a Text-to-Speech version of my recent blog post on authority using SpokenText.net.

It’s a 1.3 MB MP3 file, so download with caution. If it starts eating up too much bandwidth then I’ll kill it, so if you’re interested please grab it sooner rather than later.

The actual article is full of common-sense reasoning, but it was this part that caused me to post:

And while the zero-emission cars, are a big hit with environmentalists, the Canadian Federation of the Blind says the cars are a hazard for those who can’t see.

“For us, they are invisible,” Mary Ellen Gabias, the federation’s vice-president, told CBC News this week.

Think about that statement for a second.

“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” is a grammatically correct sentence used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to construct complicated constructs.

…

The sentence is unpunctuated and uses three different readings of the word “buffalo”. In order of their first use, these are:

• c. The city of Buffalo, New York (or any other place named “Buffalo”), which is used as an adjective in the sentence and is followed by the animal;
• a. The animal buffalo, in the plural (equivalent to “buffaloes”), in order to avoid articles (a noun);
• v. The verb “buffalo” meaning to bully, confuse, deceive, or intimidate.

Thus, the sentence when parsed reads as a description of the pecking order in the social hierarchy of buffaloes living in Buffalo:

…

Bison from Buffalo, New York who are intimidated by other bison in their community also happen to intimidate other bison in their community.

From Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. More good ones at List of linguistic example sentences.

From the Same Wikipedia article on Jeanne Calment:

In 1965, aged 90, with no living heirs, Jeanne Calment signed a deal, common in France, to sell her condominium apartment en viager to lawyer François Raffray. Raffray, then aged 47, agreed to pay a monthly sum until she died, an agreement sometimes called a “reverse mortgage”. At the time of the deal, the value of the apartment was equal to ten years of payments. Calment lived more than thirty additional years. Raffray died of cancer in December 1995, at the age of 77, leaving his widow to continue the payments for twenty more months.

I’ve only got one wrinkle, and I’m sitting on it.

From Quotations by Jeanne Calment, the human with the longest confirmed lifespan.

Revision history of Revisionist history

Won’t someone please think of the motorists!

Peter Cushing / Star Wars

Costuming difficulties resulted in an endearing piece of trivia about Star Wars. He was presented with ill-fitting riding boots for the Moff Tarkin role and they pinched his feet so much that he was given permission by George Lucas to play the role wearing his slippers. The camera operators filmed him above the knees or standing behind the table of the conference room set.

I’ve been looking to buy a replacement DVD drive for my Xbox (the original one is effectively dead, a common problem). I attempted to buy one on Kijiji (a Craigslist competitor with a horrible name). Unfortunately, it looks like I’ve been stiffed; it’s been two weeks since I paid and I haven’t heard anything from the seller after repeated requests. So, I’m doing what I can to respond: I’ve already reported him to Paypal and Kijiji, and I’m posting his information to earn him some negative Google-karma.

The seller contacted me using the email address murdercityknight@hotmail.com. The display name was “d g”. The emails were tagged with IP addresses of 70.67.143.59 and 207.216.255.121. He gave me a Paypal address of 1610@live.ca; Paypal reported his name to be Jeffrey March. Google knows a bit about him too; it sounds like he’s also going by the names David Poreba and Dave Gilchrist and uses the email/paypal addresses davegilch@hotmail.com and superspeed@live.ca. He claimed he relocated to Vancouver, which matches the IPs and the other information on the message boards. Nothing in our email conversation seemed particularly suspicious; he knew appropriate details about the product in question.

I only lost $35, so the damage isn’t too bad. I hope everyone else who deals be more fortunate. Keyword goodness: thief liar steal ripoff fraud scam.

When does a word become a word?

Today Laura described something as “strambotic”. I blinked when I heard this. I have a pretty big vocabulary but Laura does, on occasion, use an English word that I’m not familiar with. This is pretty rare though, so I was curious to see if this was one of those times.

So I asked her to Google it.

Results 1 - 10 of about 180 for strambotic.

Did you mean: estrambotica.

Note the lack of definition link for “strambotic.” Given this Googlethority I claim that “strambotic” is not a valid English word.

Now, could it be?

• As I originally suspected, Laura was transliterating a valid Spanish word “estrambotica” (it means “pompous”) into English. The rules for doing this include “drop the leading “e” before an “s”" and “drop the last letter if it’s an “a” or “o”". It works a surprising amount of the time… which is why its failures are notable (and often humorous).
• It’s not a raw invention; “estrambotica” a valid Spanish word with a defined and accepted meaning. There’s a pretty good chance that there’s similar words in Portuguese, Italian, and French.
• There’s other cases (180 according to Google) of people using it. There’s a demand.
• I’ve heard it said that dictionaries describe a language but do not define it. (Note that this is different than what elementary school would have you believe, and doesn’t necessarily apply for regulated languages like French). That is, once a word becomes “official” by entering the common speech, it is included in dictionaries… not the other way around. Thus, “strambotic” isn’t invalid just because it doesn’t have a dictionary entry.

I guess “valid” or “invalid” isn’t applicable for English words. What’s really important to ask is “will people understand what I mean when I use it?” Since “strambotic” isn’t common and isn’t easy to look up, the answer is “no”, and thus you probably shouldn’t use it… at least not yet.