artemisdart

Here's a couple of quotations to mull over:

"The reader is reminded, quite seriously! that all the language arts involve either spelling — the laying of spells — or grammar — glamorie,¹ the knowledge of magic."

(Footnote: Walter W. Skeat, in A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Oxford, 1901), writes: "Gramarye: magic. (F.-L.-G.) M.E. gramery skill in grammar, and hence skill in magic—O.F. gramaire, grammar.; see Grammar. O.F. grammaire, (1) a grammarian, (2) a magician. Para. The word glamour is a mere corruption of gramarye or grammar, meaning (1) grammar, (2) magic.")

And,

"The art of swearing flourishes only in a high civilization, and the loss of that art and its powers is a great one."

--From "The Melancholy of Anatomy: Cussing, Cursing, Swearing, and Spelling, " an article by Richard Burnett Carter to be found in the May 2002 edition of The Vocabula Review (vol. 4 no. 5). (A subscription, sadly, is necessary to view the content of articles past the first paragraph or two).

556) Here's something I came across in a very old e-mail... From World Wide Recipes PLUS, September 24 2003:

"[Recently] Jennifer from the Belgian Ring described a Peruvian dish
called Causa Rellena as being "mashed potato which is combined with
oil, chili and lemon and then stuffed with tuna and vegetables," and
both the dish and the method sounded interesting to me. So I went on
Google and typed in "Causa Rellena," and most entries came up in
Spanish. So, I used the Google translator and this is what it gave
me... please note I did not change anything, really, even though some
who know me know how I feel about lawyers. I thought you might find
this worth a read:

Rellena causa

( Read more... )

479) Here are the 2004 Top Ten Favorite Words from Merriam-Webster, as sent to me by a friend...

    1.     defenestration
    2.     serendipity
    3.     onomatopoeia
    4.     discombobulate
    5.     plethora
    6.     callipygian
    7.     juxtapose
    8.     persnickety
    9.     kerfuffle
    10.    flibbertigibbet

466) I get a lot of spam. In the old days, back when the titles of spam messages could directly lie to you, I would get a lot of subject lines like "Re: Your message" or "Getting back to you," from names that sounded vaguely familiar... like "Doug" or "Charles."

Not sure if this is true, but I heard somewhere that there was some sort of legislation saying that the subject line had to tell you what it was selling. So then I got a lot of messages titled "Hot Horny Babes" and "VIAGRA!!!"

After lots of spam filters started filtering out any messages with the word "VIAGRA" or "horny" in the title, the spammers would break up the words with spaces or other characters... so I would get messages that would have titles like "v.i.a.g.a.r.a." and "H0T H000RNIE BAEBZ." They were often from names like "Naughty Mindy" or "Home Doctor Approved!"

I would still scan through those messages and delete them out of hand, having zero interest in either babes or viagra.

Now the spammers who mail to me are onto something new, and it's actually clever. They generate a random name -- regular first name, regular last name, just something a bit odd about how some of them are put together. And they generate a random two- or three-word phrase as the subject of the e-mail. (But when you click in, you get the same old tired pleas to try their Viagra or give them a credit card number in order to see the babes. So there's no innovation in the content -- just in the form of the delivery.)

I've been saving these message for a few weeks because they are amusing. Here are the "from" names and the "subject" lines of spam I've received recently. I especially love the first name on the list. Classic!

Mohammed Oconnell - Re: incumbent craftsmen
Sheri Norris -     pope convergent promise
Jodie Whitaker - bartender 89 somnambulists
Darius Abraham - parapet alcestis
Cleo Barnett -     Re: sec coplanar
Lenore Boswell - Re: johnstown pacifism
Gordon Schmidt - Re: basalt coincident
Christa Hoyt - cloy armament
Kimberley Fulton - lundquist shasta
Kristi Neal - sherrill arsenate
Trey Putnam - salon asthma
Loraine Mason - geographer too
Earle Boykin -     Re: quandary metamorphosis
Edwin Kendall - martinez amos
Flossie Henderson - chattel concerto
Trisha Hampton - dungeon declaim william
Elise Woodard - acuity mulch

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30

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