tabloid

Someone sent this email:

"I am trying to find out when 'Tabloid' ceased to be a trade name. I think it was some time in the late 1950s or early 1960s".

If anyone remembers..!

Mai

countdown

I won't even try to recap what has been going on with my life lately.. partly because it would take a long time that I don't exactly have to spare, and partly because I'm not really in the mood. Well.. you're probably asking now what happened to the all happy-happy-loving feeling I've been rubbing in your face for some time, it's still there but right now it's being overwhelmed by the sense of thinking of a million thing to do. I mean all the preparations and the things that need to be done are exciting of course, but to be constantly thinking about them day and night will eventually get to you. It's now a little less than a month and a half till my expected marriage date, so wish me luck.

So, to make a long story short, I'm struggling to get some work done before deadlines coming up, I'm thinking all the time and going around a lot to see and buy stuff, I'm very very tired, I'm missing my family, I very much look forward to my future life, I'm worried, and I'm, as ever, cold.

Mai

what's wrong with Haida?

Still going through the loads of late emails, I came across this:

I have computed the Haida Indian texts. I came across a new encounter in my detective story of investigating the occurrence of labial consonants in AmerIndian texts. It has the lowest use of labials - 1.70% only. As I said earlier I expected the labial consonants to have a very small share of the Cocopa speech sound chain since there are only 3 labials in Cocopa [p, w, m]. So, I thought that they would take only 4% or 5% like in Navaho (4.15%) or Iquito (4.83%). To my great surprise the Cocopa labials take 18.69%, i.e. like Odjibwa (17.14%) or Apinaye (17.40%). Therefore, Cocopa has one of the highest concentration of labial consonants in its speech sound chain. However in Haida the same 3 labials give only 1.70% in the Haida speech sound chain. It is the smallest use of labials I found in 168 world languages. I wonder, if it is a typological similarity or it shows some genetical relatedness? I wonder who can tell me why Haida uses so little labials?

Any idea? any one? hellooooo :)

Mai

know and remember

"How Islamic Inventors Changed the World" - The Independent

For some it's good to know, for others it's good to remember. It seems that the order of those inventions is meant to be descending but, although I'm a coffee lover, I would've put Ibn al-Haitham's achievements before discovering coffee.

Mai

wish i could say that

I do not seek, I find.

Pablo Picasso

Mai

pist off

Not only am I pist off because of being sick, of being energy-drained, of losing time, of missing opportunities, but also because I have to find out now that my university email is flooded with loads of old emails, some of which were quite important.

Mai

velopment or de-velopment?

Yeh yeh, I'm still in my so-sick-i-am-inventing-new-words phase. This time I was thinking of how my reading list dramatically changed in the past few months. From real estate newsletters to travel agencies brochures to wedding magazines.. phew, I don't know how can I cope with all this. Ok, obviously I'm being ironic :) But I have to say that, so far, wedding magazines have proven to be the most amusing. How could I ever miss reading about what will Liz Hurley wear on her wedding, or how could I make the decision to get married before reading the 10 questions a couple should ask each other before marriage, or how could I go about arranging for a wedding party without ordering personalized invitation cards, reminding-you-of-my-wedding-date cards, thank-you-for-coming cards, why-the-hell-didn't-you-show-up cards and glad-you-didn't-make-it cards for a couple of hundred guests for only a few thousand pounds?

So.. lesson learned? One: wedding magazines are crap, two: being sick apparently makes me very ironic.

p.s.
my background music right now is Mendelssohn "A Midsummer Night's Dream" - Wedding March :) (this is from a cd of wedding music which came with one of the magazines)

Mai

bewinter bespeaks becold

Of course only one of those three words is actually a word in English :) As I am lying on my sofa with a soar throat and a possible fever probably for the tenth time in this never-ending winter, I don't know what made me think of this word "bespeak". Billy mentioned it in a lecture last Monday when he played an audio clip which included a very nice comment about using this word. So with the lack of the ability to do anything requiring even a medium degree of mental focus, I decided to play around with this for a while, and of course bother you with it.

The first logical (or illogical, depending on your point of view) step was to run a google search on the word. And it took mr. google 0.48 seconds to tell us that there are 549,000 instances of "bespeak" on the internet. The first 10 hits were interesting because 9 of them were definitions of the word from various sources. Only the last hit was an actual use of the word in the context of an American magazine article entitled "New digs bespeak forgotten grandeur". Furter research into this unveiled that there is a www.bespeak.net website which belongs to Baltimore Ethical Society, and there is also a blog entitled Bespeak by a certain Nancy in the States. And if you are still wondering about how you never heard this word before, add to your vocabulary its related cousins: Becalc and Bemap.

Well.. all this could be bespeaking of one of two things: either I am befreaking sick and possibly delirious or I am befreaking bored to death.

p.s.
my tv broke yesterday and this alone bespeaks loads.. :)

beMai :)