When a Korean is near, watch your language...

When Firecracker George was in South Korea teaching English, I wonder if he led a similar class lesson. A little NSFW if small children or pregnant women are around:

Gong Xi Fa Cai!

Happy Chinese New Year! It's the Year of the Rat. Legend has it that Buddha staged a race across a river with the animals of the Chinese zodiac to determine the order of the lunar calendar. The race was almost won by the determined Ox, but at the last minute, the Rat who had been riding on his back, jumped off at the end to win the race--sneaky bastard. And if you were curious, Tigers, you came in third. Thus, the Rat comes first in the cycle, meaning this year is a good time to start over and begin anew.

Perhaps I'll use this year to start over with learning Mandarin Chinese, which I might be able to achieve doing what I do best--watching TV! From The Boston Globe (via Pop Candy):

Kai-lan Chow, the newest addition to Nickelodeon's "Nick Jr." preschool block, has big, wide-set brown eyes and a penchant - like some others on her network - for breaking the fourth wall. Many times in every episode of "Ni Hao, Kai-lan," the new animated series that launches at 11 a.m. today, she will gaze beyond the TV screen and ask her audience for help. Often, the task will involve repeating a word in Mandarin.

Of the many goals packed into every half-hour "Ni Hao" episode, this is the most inventive and ambitious: To give preschoolers a rudimentary lesson in the Chinese language. (Ni Hao, incidentally, means "hello.") There is precedent, of course; PBS's "Sesame Street" taught a generation to count to 10 in Spanish, and Nick Jr.'s "Dora the Explorer" and "Go, Diego, Go!" have continued the tradition. "Ni Hao, Kai-lan" promises political relevance, too. Of all the languages worth knowing in the future, Mandarin ranks high.

Strange to think that Wild Willie's and Fandango's kids will probably know more Chinese than me. Now, even they can make fun of me behind my back with my wife and her family.

No wonder they think the Hoff is so cool in Germany...

The voiceover for the German version of Knight Rider makes it sound so much more menacing. What is it about the German language? You can throw the worst insults at me in French, and I'd think you were trying to make love to me. Say the same things in German, and I'm liable to cry on the spot from fear.

Procrastinate for a good cause...

Firecracker George, with that insane vocabulary of his, should enjoy this game.

FreeRice gives you an endless quiz of your word knowledge, and donates 10 grains of rice for each answer you get right. I got up to a vocabulary level of 44 (perhaps partially by luck - you've got a 1 in 4 chance of being right just by guessing) before I had a string of wrong answers that discouraged me enough to quit for the afternoon.

Hyphen - R.I.P.

Firecracker George (and 115-CLF, if he ever reads this blog) may recall "Dash Day" from our senior year of high school, an annual celebration of sorts dedicated to the use of the dash instead of the semicolon which also served as a blatant excuse to bring food to class and to wear homemade t-shirts with such mottos as "Down with the Semicolon." In fact, I've taken to using the dash rather liberally in my writings, much in part to the teachings of our coolest English teacher from years past.

Alas, another dash of sorts is going the way of the dodo bird. The hyphen, used to link two words like bumble-bee or cry-baby, was dropped in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

If you want to drive my wife crazy, you can drop the hyphen in her name, too, all in the name of efficiency and aesthetics. As the editor of the Dictionary says:

"Printed writing is very much design-led these days in adverts and Web sites, and people feel that hyphens mess up the look of a nice bit of typography," he said. "The hyphen is seen as messy looking and old-fashioned."

I chuckled at the fact that the author of that story chose to throw a couple of hyphens in when quoting the guy who hates them. And try calling my wife old-fashioned when she uses that hyphen to spell her name--she's liable to give you a sock in the mouth (or at least a mean glare).

Notes from a Canuck condorcation, Part 1...

Growing up as a kid, you could say I was a somewhat the model student. I paid attention in class, did my homework, made good grades, didn't act up, etc. In fact, I spent no time in detention my entire academic career. Apart from my long absences due to illness (or perhaps a bit of good acting on my part) and a worrisome threat of possible remediation if I didn't get my attendance up (despite the fact that I was well amongst the top 5% in the class), my parents never got any calls regarding my behavior or performance at school. The only time I remember getting pulled for doing something wrong was sometime in my junior year of high school when the assistant principal pulled me aside to comment on the t-shirt I was wearing that day which I had recently bought from Dick's Last Resort during a Latin convention trip to Dallas.

"You can't wear that in school," he said.
"Uh, why not?" I asked in a somewhat timid tone.
"Don't play games with me. You know exactly why. Now go home and change into something more appropriate, young man."

In all honesty, I really didn't know at the time what he was getting at, and I don't think it was until a couple of years later that I finally figured out the more raunchy meaning of the phrase "You Can't Kill a Man Born to Hang!"

. . . .

So last week, the wife and I took advantage of some frequent flyer miles we racked up on Frontier Airlines to take a vacation. My wife was burned out with work and all the things going on with my transitions in life, and I was pretty sure she was going to have a nervous break down if I didn't get her out of town for awhile. I, myself, was ready for a change of scenery, too. Since the tickets were free, we decided we go as far away as our points would allow us, which meant Vancouver.

Flying Frontier is always kind of a nice experience. Every seat has a TV (although you have to pay to watch anything), and every plane is slightly unique with each one painted up with a different animal. Wally the Wolf was our plane on our leg of the trip from Denver to Vancouver. This was particularly exciting to one kid I saw on our plane who enthusiastically waved goodbye to Wally after we reached our destination with his own stuffed wolf (complete with leather jacket) under his arm.

The view from my seat somewhere over the state of Washington. Note Wally on the wing. And that spot in the middle of the photo is not a UFO. I think a speck of dust is trapped on my digital camera sensor. Blurg!

We left St. Louis sometime around 6:00 AM and after changing planes in Denver, touched down in Vancouver sometime just after noon. I thought this was going to leave us plenty of time to enjoy the first afternoon of our vacation, but our bad luck had us arriving with plane loads of foreign Chinese college students coming over from Asia to start the new school year. Add to that, Canadian customs was short-staffed due to the new academic year, as well, as many of their temporary workers had left to go back to school. This left us snaking through a labyrinth of a line serviced by only six custom agents that made anything at Disney World look as short as Gary Coleman in comparison. After about three hours, we finally made it through the imaginary border, and were free to enjoy our vacation.

We were famished, and luckily I spotted a Vera's Burger Shack driving up on our way from the airport to the hotel. Vera's is a place I had read about on Chowhound before I left that was supposed to have some of the best burgers in the city of Vancouver. I don't know if it was our relative hunger at the time or what, but the fresh cut fries were amazing and their Baja Burger was just what we needed. Vera's secret to success is supposedly cooking their food to perfection and using really fresh meat, as they attest to on their logo.

Now perhaps I got too sensitized to double meanings when I got in trouble that day back in my teens, but somehow I think this wouldn't have been appropriate to wear in high school either:

Interpret that as you feel fit.

And here I thought my Texas twang wasn't that thick...

Quick question: Do any of you use the phrase "fixin' to?" I seem to use this quite a bit, and it clues anyone here in St. Louis that's paying attention to the fact that I grew up in Texas as it seems it's not a phrase that's widely used in the Midwest. Even my wife chuckles every time I use it, like last night. We also had a discussion about the pronunciation of "catch up" and "ketchup." She pronounces them distinctly different, and they seem to sound like the same word when I say it. Apparently, my linguistic skills run towards the George W. Bush route because she caught me saying "nuk-u-ler" instead of "nuk-le-ar" the other day, as well.

This one's for Scootypuff Jr...

The grammar police will be pleased to know that the federal government has posted this guide to improving your writing skills.

May all your language crimes and misdemeanors end now.

And here I thought the whole Rosie O'Donnell ching-chong thing was blown out of proportion...

Seeing as it's that time of year for Top 10 lists, I give you the Top 10 Politically Correct Words of 2006. My favorites?

# 3, using herstory for history. This is funny when you think that the origin of the word history has absolutely nothing to do with gender. And it's even more humorous that the father of history was Herodotus.

#6 and the guy who thought to order "black coffee" was racist. Perhaps we should remove the word black from our lexicon completely, and instead use the phrase "absence of color."

#7, which asks to refer to us as Asian, not Oriental. Actually, I'm surprised this is just now getting on the 2006 list. My wife harps about this all the time, as she likes to say that she's a person, not a rug. Of course, this doesn't take into account that Asia has people of diverse appearance such as those from India or the Middle East that differ from the stereotypical Asians from the eastern side of the continent. And many older Asians in this country still refer to themselves as Oriental--they're so insensitive.