Creating Words and Worlds

Many people may not know this about me, but I love to play with word roots, like Greek and Latin pre/suffices. To borrow the vulgar argot: "It's just the funnest thing." I'd always been curious about this as a game, you know, creating new words (or discovering obscure ones, as with circumversion—thought I made it up, but it totally existed) out of these components. It's a useful exercise, not just for learning and memorizing these roots but as a creative tool: a new word can evoke images, suggest a culture or a new world.

I've been making my own lists of word components, but here are a couple resources for Greek and Latin medical beginnings and endings:

• Wikipedia
• Nat'l Library of Medicine
• About.com
• English words categorized by prefix and suffix

And now, a selection of made-up words that I may do something with later.

tocometer

a tool to analyze and measure one's children (Ex.: Either my tocometrics are way off, or you're eating too much sugar, young man.)

necrophore

one who transports corpses/carcasses (Ex.: Consarn it anyway! Whar's that blasted necrofer at? This here body needs ta git throwed into Potter's Field 'fore it 'splodes in this heat!)

demolatry

adoration of the common people (Ex.: No one with that much money can claim to be a demolatrix, I assure you.)

The Dieresis: Not an Umlaut

Updates to the language may come slowly and without fanfare, but... I try to keep my eyes open.

Let me share something I've learned recently. When I was very young, a board game came out that was themed on the Star Wars burgeoning movie franchise. It was a simple game in which you moved from one end of the board to the other, collecting objects and overcoming obstacles. My love for the game came not from the complicated game engine, of course, but that it kept me in the spirit of the film. Playing this jejune pass-time, which had no more to do with Star Wars than the images printed upon it, gave my impressionable imagination the sensation of prolonging my existence within the Star Wars universe for that much longer, in intervals of ten minutes as I played with my cousins.

But the world of language intruded here, ever so slightly. One of the instruction cards a player could draw ordered them to dedicate all moves to arriving at Yavin-4 starbase, with the imperative "coördinate." We debated briefly as to what that meant, that single word that seemed redundant among the instructions: of course we were going to coördinate with the order just passed to us. Why that iteration?

I was bugged by something further: those two dots over the second "o". I had only seen anything like that in the word "naïve," but I didn't know what those dots were doing there, either. This was a rare application that never turned up in any other form of printed literature I had access to, as a child, and when I described it to my elementary school teachers they had no idea what it meant either. Instead, they simply assumed I was mistaken.

Years later, when I began studying German, I was made familiar with the umlaut. I thought it was cool, this extra adornment added to vowels to make an additional sound. And if you didn't have an umlaut on your typewriter, it was acceptable to tack an "e" on after the vowel that would've worn it. Our German exchange student came from Bühl, which I could've written as Buehl, and someone else had for the title Ferris Buehler's Day Off. One from Bühl would be a Bühler, just as those little sausages from Wien (Vienna) are called wieners. Oh German, is there anything you haven't thought of?

But in "coördinate," that is not an umlaut. It's called a dieresis (diaeresis in UK), and it is used to indicate that the second in a pair of vowels will take on a markedly different sound. According to Random House's The Mavens' Word of the Day, The New Yorker Magazine adheres to the strictest implementation of this convention, making it unique among all other U.S. print publications. Why they opt to retain this antiquated stylistic function is unknown to me, but I can't say I disapprove at all. Once in a while, I'll even implement it in a letter or postcard I'm writing, just to shake things up.

Friends and Dining Abroad

On my main blog, I built (for the sake of building) a Page of naive but well-intentioned tips for traveling throughout SE Asia. I did the best I could with it, attempting to show how to say three important and handy phrases for wherever they go: hello, thank you, and (very) delicious. Using even this little of the language will put you on people's good side and make your interactions more positive, as folks living overseas are used to tourists blowing through their proud nation and not making any effort to learn their language.

On Postcrossing, I listed in my profile that I'd like to learn these phrases from other nations—when people send me postcards, they come from all nations around the globe—and many senders have been nicely compliant with this request. Here's a summary of what I've got so far:

My Postal Carrier is a Donkey Penis

It pains me to write this, as I would only like to reflect the entire postal system as the generous and glowing network it is. I love it, I use it all the time, and I encourage others to avail themselves of it as well. So many postal worker and postal carriers are hard-working, good-spirited civil servants, worthy of commendation and recognition for their tireless, consistent efforts. I consider them friends in absentia.

But an untarnished panegyric would be disingenuous, and we must be adults about these things. We love America, we love our parents, but you have reached adulthood when you can admit to yourself--however uncomfortably--that they have some flaws and they could be better. So it is with the post office.

My postal carrier is, to avoid cussing, a colonic polyp. I've never seen him in action, I only know him by his results and evidence. But first, let's look at what makes a postal worker angry.

Oh, an' That's a Bad Miss

This is some of the big news circulating today: Amy Winehouse's addiction has finally caught up with her. The police call it an "unexplained" death, but they have to, don't they. I think there are no mysteries behind this.

The unexplained mystery here is how the "Editor-at-Large" of Mashable, Ben Parr, got tangled over his use of "alluded/eluded." This is a screenshot of Parr's post on Google+.

You can be sure other people following him called this out. And sure, it's a common enough mistake, but it's exceptional when it comes from the hands of one whose trade is wordsmithing. One advantage of Google+ is that you can edit your posts after they go up--unlike with Facebook--but it's been over six hours and Parr hasn't touched this. Ouch.

Post Office in Narita, Japan

No great and high-falutin story with this one. We were in Japan for a seven-hour layover, between Jakarta and Minneapolis, so we got out of the airport and toured a calligraphy museum in Narita. The curator spoke almost no English but tried to explain to us the first floor was only an exhibit of high school students practicing kanji in Japanese and Chinese--the good and ancient stuff was upstairs. She also declined to make eye contact and rather than coming off as rude it was somehow adorable.

After touring an actual Japanese garden, we tried winding our way back through the streets to the bus station (we'd taken a taxi to the museum but the station wasn't far at all). When we got stuck at one point I called out to a nearby teen who was walking by with his head respectfully down. "Sumimasen," I was able to forage from my scant Japanese, "Narita-eki wa doko desu ka?" I felt proud of myself but then the instructions, naturally, came to me in Japanese which I couldn't understand. I did get his hand gestures, and we found our way back in plenty of time to go back through passport registration and catch our flight.

But before that, we wrote quick notes to ourselves on postcards from the calligraphy museum, and I mailed them to ourselves at this airport post office.

My Fear Is They Already Do

When Things Will Pick Up

Namsan Tower, Seoul, South Korea

I hope my readers will pardon this increasing lull in activity here. Just tonight I don't feel hard-edged enough to plunge into picking off easy targets, i.e., grammar samples from my photo collection. Yes, I've been saving them up for just such a thing, but right now I'm not in the mood.

Please to enjoy this image of Seoul, South Korea. Why this picture? Soon, I'll be living there.

My wife and I both have entertained a dream of living abroad. I got to do that to some degree when I was stationed at Camp Carroll, Korea, in the Army. We had an agreement between ourselves: either we have children or we travel, because one makes the other very difficult. And given that there are already too many people on the planet, and considering the resources a child will use and squander between ages 0 and 18, and considering how grateful teenagers are for the parents' labors, and while our infrastructure will still support intercontinental travel and jet fuel is not prohibitively expensive, we decided to travel.

The easiest way to live overseas, we figured, would be to find jobs teaching English. For the past two months I've been instructing Hispanic and Somali students from basic to high-intermediate levels on everything from common nouns to modals and past continuous tense. My wife already has degrees in education but is also teaching students from many nations. In sixty days we take the next step: a 3.5-week intensive course in Bali, Indonesia, teaching English for our TESOL certification through Trinity College London.

That done, we will look for jobs in South Korea. We could easily teach anywhere for there's no question of demand, but I would actually like to find a work doing copy editing/proofing for a marketing or PR company anywhere in the nation. Doesn't have to be in Seoul: in fact, it might be better if not, just looking at it from a cost-of-living consideration. The best of all situations would see me at a video game company, maybe even one of those whose MMOs I play, helping to clean up the final edits on all outgoing literature and software. I'd even give English lessons over lunch break.

Once I'm overseas, I anticipate I'll have a brand-new realm of postal and maybe linguistic information to share. I'll try to post a couple things in the meanwhile, of course. I just feel bad about having attracted a few followers, buying a domain name, and then not doing anything with the blog. That will change, I assure you.