Neologism contest

My friend Stefan Hagemann is seeking a word and is willing to sponsor a contest to find it. I think that’s a great idea. Here is what Stefan is seeking:

I’d like us to invent a word that describes a particular kind of foolish shortcut, the kind that, often in a foreseeable way, fails to save time and may result in irritation or the feeling that one is absurd and a dimwit. The best example might be that of trying to put on or take off pants without removing one’s shoes, but I seem to need this (nonexistent) word almost every day. When I try to add cream to a container of iced coffee by pouring it through the small opening (rather than removing the larger lid), only to spill cream everywhere, I could use that word. When I haul a Shop-Vac up a ladder because I think it will be faster to vacuum the maple seeds out of my gutters, only to clog the vacuum repeatedly so that I finally give up, I could use that word. What should that word be?

The rules for this contest are simple:

1. You must leave your word in a comment on this post. Use your name or a pseudonym (but not an e-mail address).
2. You may enter more than once.
3. Void where prohibited.

Very important: you must have read this post to be eligible to play. You have now read this post. So play!

Stefan will choose the winning word and award a suitable prize. The deadline for all entries: Monday, June 11, 11:59 p.m. Central.

The Carbon Paper Exam

Margalit Fox in the New York Times:

The passing of carbon paper (and, more worrisome, the passing of people to whom the words “carbon paper” are as familiar as air) captures in miniature the sea change sweeping today’s work force. With the retirement of each member of the carbon-paper cohort — my cohort — a certain body of collective knowledge, which for decades has lent the American work product an essential, indefinable, generational something, is eroded a little more.

Thus a test for the use of employers who wish to perpetuate knowledge of such matters: The Carbon Paper Exam. Answers here.

Related reading
All “dowdy world” posts

[I missed only the Hotel Carlton question. How about you?]

War and Peace, Nookd

A Nook user reading War and Peace in translation has found that the non-word Nookd has replaced every instance of the word kindled. Read all about it: Nookd (Ocracoke Island Journal). Ars Technica has a screenshot.

When any seeker of a fast ninety-nine cents can get hold of a public-domain translation and package it as an e-book, this sort of sloppiness threatens to become the norm. You can find the Louise Shanks Maude and Aylmer Maude translation of Leo Tolstoy’s novel for free, with all the kindleds, at Google Books and Project Gutenberg.

Thanks, Seth.

A Big Lots tea find

If you like tea, go to Big Lots once in a while: these stores can be the source of wondrous bargains in good tea. Today, in the International Flavors section of the store, Typhoo tea, eighty bags for $4. Amazon’s lowest price: $9.12.

It’s a good idea with any Big Lots purchase to check the expiration date. Assume nothing.

More adventures in Big Lots
Attention, Big Lots shoppers
Serendipitous searching at Big Lots

[We bought five boxes, good through 2014.]

Coming Monday

Coming Monday: a neologism contest, sponsored by my friend Stefan Hagemann. Sharpen your thinking caps.

Crocodile

[Photograph by Michael Leddy. Click for a larger view.]

I found this baby crocodile (eight-and-a-half-inches long) in some stray debris after a nearby supermarket was torn down. Can someone tell me what this metal piece really is?

*

July 23, 2012: The mystery of this object has been solved, at least to my satisfaction: it is a handle from an electrical disconnect box. Throwing the handle shuts off power (or turns it back on). Seeing this object correctly requires a new perspective.

A bolt runs through the hole at the top.

A padlock’s shackle fits through the crocodile’s eye. The padlock 1) prevents nitwits from throwing the handle and shutting off power and 2) prevents nitwits from turning power on when someone has shut it off.

The crocodile should be wearing a plastic or rubber sheath over its mouth to prevent electrocution. I assume that the sheath was lost when this object joined the scrap heap.

When our plumber Rick Veach was here to fix a problem with our kitchen pipes, I asked him about this object, and he gave me his best guess: a disconnect-box handle. He suggested several possible manufacturers — Cooper Crouse-Hinds, Cutler-Hammer, and Square D, so I checked their websites, with no luck. At Rick’s suggestion, I also tried a nearby electrical supply company, where the clerk had never seen such an object. But he took me into the (awesome) warehouse and pulled a couple of disconnect boxes from their cardboard boxes. The clerk and I could see the family resemblance right away. A Google search for disconnect box will give you the general idea.

Rick Veach is both smart and wise. I often remind myself of something he once said when contending with our plumbing: “A problem is just a challenge that hasn’t been overcome.”

A related post
Mystery challenge (another strange object)

DNA font

Holy double helix, Batman! A font made of DNA.

Plagiarism in high places

From a June 2009 post: “Plagiarism seems to be governed by a sliding scale, with consequences lessening as the wrongdoer’s status rises.”

May I introduce Arnaud de Borchgrave?

Jacques Barzun on gadgets and education

I find in these observations a prescient defense of offline education:

It is idle to talk about what could be done by gadgets — gramophone disks or sound films. We know just what they can do: they aid teaching by bringing to the classroom irreplaceable subject matter or illustrations of it. The disk brings the music class a whole symphony; the film can bring Chinese agriculture to students in Texas; it could even be used more widely than it is to demonstrate delicate scientific techniques. But this will not replace the teacher — even though through false economy it might here and there displace him. In theory, the printed book should have technologically annihilated the teacher, for the original “lecture” was a reading from a costly manuscript to students who could not afford it. Well, why is it so hard to learn by oneself from a book? Cardinal Newman, himself a great teacher, gives part of the answer: “No book can convey the special spirit and delicate peculiarities of its subject with that rapidity and certainty which attend on the sympathy of mind with mind, through the eyes, the look, the accent, and the manner, in casual expressions thrown off at the moment, and the unstudied turns of familiar conversation.”

Jacques Barzun, Teacher in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945).

As Barzun goes on to say, “Teaching is not a process; it is a developing emotional situation,” mind to mind, face to face.

Related posts
Offline, real-presence education
Talk to the face

Perry Mason and Gilbert and Sullivan

I like the last few minutes of Perry Mason episodes, in which we find Mason (Raymond Burr), Della Street (Barbara Hale), and Paul Drake (William Hopper) gathered in at least somewhat lighter circumstances, enjoying a cup of coffee or a cigarette or a meal, sometimes by themselves (three musketeers), sometimes with a client or persons connected to the case. These are minutes in which, it seems, anything goes, including poetry and song. I caught Mason and Drake quoting Keats some time ago. Today, in “The Case of the Skeleton’s Closet” (first aired May 2, 1963), it was Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore.

MASON (to man connected to the case)
    Things are seldom what they seem, Dave.

DRAKE (excited)
    Hey, I know how that one ends!
    “Things are seldom what they seem,
    Skim milk masquerades as cream.”
    How’s that?

STREET (slyly)
You’re right, Perry. Things are seldom what they seem.

DRAKE (says nothing, looks embarrassed)

These exchanges assume that at least many viewers will get the reference (which is left unexplained). Television wasn’t always so dumb. See also Naked City.