She’s finishing a novel—a critical scene—and we usually leave the word processors up when playing games. We were playing Guild Wars last evening.
So…well, likely that has nothing to do with it. Word Perfect has its screwy notions.
At any rate, about the time I went to bed last night—she discovered her day’s work was blitzed, and not just any day’s work. The file had lost its end-of-file EOF pointer. And the back end is out there somewhere, likely, but not appearing in WP.
She’s been a little short of sleep lately—you get that way on end-of-book crunch, when all the ideas have to be woven in…and needless to say, when I got up (it was still pre-dawn) –she was out there at her work station, trying to reconstruct. She’s got the front end: it survived. I fed her breakfast. She says she thinks Wesley did it.
Thank God for sense of humor. It’s better than jumping off a cliff, by far.
Jane’s going to be reconstructing yesterday’s work…which is by no means easy. I plan to hand her food at appropriate times and try to keep the house quiet.
Oh, no *tiptoes away, returns with suitable food offerings* Best of luck refinding that which was lost. If it was Wesley, he needs a spanking. *tiptoes away again*
File-recovery utilities may be worth trying.
Wise Data Recovery is simple, effective and free. Here’s the portable version:
http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/wise-data-recovery-portable
She thinks she’s got the significant part. Vast relief.
Shu is back to normal, parking between me and the telly, trying to cadge kibble.
Sei is still searching the house for whatever spooked Shu yesterday. Sometimes I wish I spoke cat, but Sei will be absolutely sure the house is free of bears.
I think some allergen blew in on the wind we’ve been having. I absolutely can’t manage mental alertness. The mind wants to work. The brain isn’t cooperating. I may take some Sudafed and Benedryl (2 of one, 1 of the other) —which sometimes will knock the ‘stupids’ of allergy.
My weight is officially back to pre-Thankgiving, or, what the BATTLE OF THE BULGE graph officially shows. From here, we hope to start down again. I’m back at my 1980 weight. I’m headed for 1975 and beyond.
One thing—being 33 pounds lighter means a lot if you’ve tripped and fallen. My knee didn’t even bruise. So it already has benefits.
Then I get a faint “Carolyn?” from Jane, who works in the living room. I work in my bedroom. “Carolyn, can I get some help here?”
Seems she just knocked over a glass full of ice and diet drink, which landed in her lap, splashed her keyboard, soaked the chair, and her…
This violates the ‘quiet day’ concept.
It’s a disgusting 40 degrees out there. We want snow.
Jane’s chair is quite soaked and probably will be for more than a day. The unfortunate cushion is in the kitchen window attempting to be dried out…
She is now in the tub…
This seems like a good idea.
At least the computer is still running.
Stiff drinks all around, I think. But if you’ve taken your head defoggers, I don’t recommend it.
Some days are marked: “Closed. Please try again tomorrow.”
This is almost one of those—but I got all the contracts, for every short story, every novel, every country, every game, every project—all but two folders—finally scanned, pdf’ed, and stored in editable, findable format. One of the monster jobs that has hung fire and not been readily doable until this generation of Adobe Pro, which OCRs like a genius…
Jane is dried out and vowing to finish the troublesome scene today or tomorrow.
And I have cleared the work table for her to begin to assemble a computer my brother gave us to replace our very creaky die-on-any-day central desktop. That computer has been kind of out of the loop for all practical purposes: a venerable HP laptop has been running the operations I’ve just been doing, and handling the accounting; but it’s time we a) got a monitor—the one we’ve got is color: you can say that for it. But we can do several centuries more modern at Costco, for not too much. And with that, and the much more modern CPU that used to be my niece’s gaming machine, and maybe my brother’s art machine before that, I think we can do better than the patchwork we’ve got going in there…
A blow dryer is a conveniently portable dry-out-anything appliance if you don’t hold it too close.
Remember Costco Online. You seem to like Dell, and guess whose monitors Costco sells online? (And delivers through the slush.) http://www.costco.com/monitors.html
English Is Weird Department
Or It’s the Chicago Manual of Style
Or I’m Losing My Marbles
I’m not sure which. — Now, I should mention I’m good at English, languages in general. I’ve proofread and edited, both for paid work and for volunteer projects. I’m good at it. Proofing. Spelling. Grammar. Punctuation. Such-like.
But lately, I’m experiencing both “cognitive dissonance” and “spell checker disapproval.”
Now, I grew up with some spelling and phonetic rules of thumb for both spelling and syllable division for hyphenation. English being English, there are nearly as many exceptions as rules, but that aside, there are some general rules to follow. One is that, in general, when you inflect a verb or a noun, you double a consonant after a short vowel, then add the ending, -s/-es, -t/-d/-ed, -n/-en, -ing, and a few others that are common. Another is that you change -y to -ie before adding -s or -d (or -n, though I can’t think of an example of that right off). Yet lately, frequently, my word processor’s flag-as-you-type auto spell checker keeps balking at several of these.
Modeled. Pedaling a bike. These two are from the past couple of days. My word processor wants to insist these should have one L and not two. My inner dictionary wants to claim these should have two L’s. They, and others, look wrong, misspelled, to me without the two L’s, and I’m not sure if I’m correct or if someone, some style arbiter or dictionary compiler, changed the rules while I wasn’t looking, since I was last in a classroom or sat professionally in a typesetter/editor’s chair.
Traveler, traveling, traveled. For some reason, I want to spell these with two L’s also, though I remember this because someone once reminded me that Robert E. Lee’s horse was called Traveler. — To add to the puzzle, I’ve seen these spelled both ways. I know they’re supposed to be one L, but I keep wanting two L’s. That’s my own idiosyncrasy.
There was another, just last week, that I would swear was an American versus British difference, in which my word processor chose to be British that day instead of American. But I can’t recall the word. It wasn’t judgment versus judgement, but something along those lines, a strange exception. (American usage omits the e, claiming the -dg- is soft on its own, though this is not strictly true: Edgar would disagree, for one.)
I’m familiar enough with US/American versus UK/International spelling and punctuation that I don’t often make a mistake with British/Australian (etc.) usage, enough to edit and proof non-US writers and keep their spelling for their countries.
So — Have I somehow forgotten something? Either exceptions or a rule? It’s bothering me that I keep seeing such things and I’m rarely one who needs to consult a dictionary anymore. It’s usually already in my head and has been since junior high or so. But it’s bothering me that I keep seeing oddities like this and can’t pin down whether I’m missing it, the spell checker is, or whether it’s an either/or optional usage case.
Meanwhile, I’m going to double check in case my current word processor has decided it’s British or, ah, quite confused.
It would be very nice if we could all agree on a single spelling system, reform it a little to make better sense, and go from there. — I would not mind at all if we wrote “thru,” for instance, or if we wrote “looze” or “luze” to avoid all those people who (understandably) cannot tell “loose” (S-sound) from “lose” (Z-sound). It would be one common mistake I didn’t have to keep correcting. If I had a nickel for even the most common hundred or so mistakes I see….
Cognitive dissonance. Spell checker weirdness. Optional usage cases. Sigh….
Dear Doctor Daly, who was my professor of Roman History at Bowling Green State University (OH), told us upfront at the beginning of every quarter, that we would have X number of term papers to write. We were required to use our heads and actually think about what we were writing, not just type words on a sheet of paper. Oh yes, typed, double-space, single side of the sheet. He would take off for punctuation, spelling, grammar, and his pet peeve was the use of the genitive singular substituted for the nominative or accusative plural. He recommended we pick up a copy of Kate Wilhelm’s (maybe a different writer)book on how to write a term paper. I never did, but then, I never got less than an A on my term papers. If he took off for anything on my papers, it was for insufficient proof of my premises. I still have this thing for people who depend on their computers to spell words for them……as well as grammar. Now, CJ writes in a conversational style, so grammar rules that are stringent for the written word aren’t applicable here, imo. So, dangling participles, split infinitives, phrases ending in a preposition, etc. are all fine, since that’s the style. If I were writing an essay on her books, though, I’d expect to use the correct punctuation, spelling, grammar, etc., and despite the Chicago Book of Style, that comma WILL be inserted between the second alternative and the third alternative.
You can join George Bernard Shaw on this quest to reform English spelling – he hopes to get the job done before he dies – oh wait …
His most famous one on this is to spell ‘fish’ as ‘ghoti’ – ‘gh’ as in cough, ‘o’ as in women, ‘ti’ as in anything ending in ‘tion’.
See http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j31/shaw.php
The singling of doubled consonants is only one of many trends to regularise English and remove exceptions, particularly visible in verb forms: when I were a lad, the only possibility was ‘learnt’, and ‘learn-ed’ was an adjective describing a lawyer, but nearly all of those irregular past participles have vanished. Not to mention Globish (please don’t).
Did you know that Noah Webster deliberately introduced (i.e. made up) the ‘colour/color’ distinction to his American dictionary in order to have something distinctively American – that’s one version: the other being that the Victorians (and Georgians before them) deliberately introduced the ‘ou’ forms because they just plain liked flowery stuff. The reality, of course, is that consistent spelling was only just taking off as a concept by then, and choices were being made that we now have to live with. Unless we go to Globish or Nuspel.
“…you double a consonant after a short vowel…”
A rule I learned is you don’t double the consonant if the syllable is unstressed. Traveller (British spelling) violates this.
I read somewhere it was a conscious change to “reform” kween to queen, hwat to what! And we’ve lost a lot of letters: thorn (Þ þ), wynn (Ƿ ƿ), eth (Ð ð), yogh (Ȝ ȝ)–I saw a list of about a dozen recently, though one was juſt long es (ſ). Ah! Found it:
http://mentalfloss.com/article/31904/12-letters-didnt-make-alphabet
Yet we have C, Q, and X which are pretty useless.
Part of the problem is that we standardized spelling during the Great Vowel Shift. At this point, I think English spelling is hopeless: think of all the great writing we’d lose the ability to read “easily”.
And in the US, we haven’t even switched to the metric system!
Quoth Walt: “A rule I learned is you don’t double the consonant if the syllable is unstressed. Traveller (British spelling) violates this.”
Aha! Thank you, Walt. The clause about the unstressed qualifier is probably what I’d forgotten / neglected.
The one recently getting to me is the English pronounciation of Austrian Hans Asperger’s name. His seminal paper was published in German! German has a hard “G”, as in “go”, not the soft “French” “G” as in “Jerry”.
Benedict Cumberbatch may not think Sherlock Holmes had Asperger’s syndrome, but Cumberbatch doesn’t have it, doesn’t know it. Holmes’ powers of observation and deduction may have to some extent been learnable, but the entire package, with the social ineptitude, is a flashing red arrow pointing to Asperger’s. The “Doc Martin” show was the other place I heard the incorrect pronounciation.
I di wonder what the syndrome had to do with holy water sprinklers…
Then there’s the hard G Graphic Interchange Format (GIF), usually pronounced jif; which the inventor is okay with, apparently.
Oh, and giga- should be pronounced, as in the 1985 movie Back to the Future, “jiga-” (“1.21 jigawatts”), but we’ve quite quickly shifted to “giga-“.
Hmmmm, because as a Navy Radioman, we were pronouncing it giga- when I was in school in 1977, not “jiga”. What is the derivation of “giga”, anyway? Since it’s Greek, then I don’t much see any other pronunciation but “giga”……., despite what the movie pronunciation was…..
If we’re going to be precise in the pronunciation of Ansberger, then we should be as precise in the pronunciation of other terms, as well. There was no “j” in either Attic or koine Greek, nor in Classical Latin. I’m for the purists in this case…..
Is that what “getting jiggy with it” is all about?
Hard G giga-, hard G .gif, hard G Asperger’s. At least that’s my preferred way of saying them.
I’ll just overlook Doc Brown’s pronunciation of giga- as jiga-. Anybody who can build a cold fusion powered time machine out of a DeLorean, y’know, deserves a little leeway. 😀
I recently heard som enthusiastic German filk singers doing a Firefly filk, who somehow missed that in English, if you’re juggling geese, the G is as hard as it is if you’re juggling a single goose. But hey, it’s not their native language, and they made a really fine effort. The song’s good. Nobody’s perfect.
Giga- is from the same Greek root as giant, gigas. “Jiga-” was the US National Bureau of Standards pronunciation. But the only time I’ve heard a soft gee recently was re-watching Back to the Future.
Soft G GIF seems, to me, to have problems with AniGIF (animated GIF), the hard G breaking the two parts more distinctly.
Relevant only if we hold to the Greek pronounciation. Frex (I like that contraction!), cephalopod is pronounced soft “sef”, while its hard origin relates it to capitol, cap, even decapitation, i.e. “kephalikos”
Oh, I forgot. “AniGIF”? Just pronounce it something like “any kif about?” 😉
And, of course, I defer to our hostess on drift from Greek pronounciation. 😉
Gig means a musical job. Jig is a dance,or a word meaning to jump. I think it’s less confusing to use ‘gig’ — which is rarer and not known to everyone, nor apt to be confused with musicians’ slang. THough there are ways, Lord knows, to screw almost any choice up.
I confess that a ‘jiff’ to me is an instant, and a ‘gif’ is a graphics file. “I’ll give it to you in two jiffs is a bit confusing.” DO you mean pdq or am I looking for 2 files?
Speaking of pronunciation, “tc’a”?????
It turns out “Huh?” is very widespread if not universal in languages:
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/nov/09/science/la-sci-huh-20131109
My hypothesis is that it’s universal because it’s a voiced sigh.
That’s pronounced t’KA or if you want to get fancy, [click]-AH.
And knnn is pronounced in your sinuses, with k(long, nasal N)
Pronouncing hakkikt requires an extra set of jaws and teeth, but, hey, humans don’t usually have to deal with them. Hani just hiss-spit.
I would not have guessed–I have not guessed in decades–t’KA. That’s about what I expected for knnn–a nasal purr, as it were.
Thank you!
(Have you thought that guide books, like a Compact pronunciation guide, could make nice freebies we could announce in fora that would not accept ads?)
That takes me back to college anthropology courses and the !Kung Bushmen, where the ! is a glottal click.
To me, ‘Jif’ is a brand of peanut butter.
ISTR they have three sounds that were lost out of Africa ad bits of language, though still used. Besides that glottal stop, the one we make in disapproval, generally written as “tsk, tsk, tsk”, made with the tongue on the hard palate right behind the front teeth. And another with the tongue and the side of the palate we usually use to tell a horse, “Let’s go!”
There’s one used in the tribal name “Xhosa” represented by the “x”, but I forget which that is. 🙁
We could certainly suggest that. You ask, I can answer and compile.
I’m in the middle of Kif now. Maybe we should organize this as a group read? Those are pretty popular on the Patrick O’Brian lists. Maybe give some time for everyone to finish what they’re reading now?
Anent tc’a: So, getting to some more tc’a names, is apostrophe indicating, “Do not break the syllable here”?
The tc is a consonant. The a is still a vowel.
All those underutilized letters, while poor “C” does double duty as “S” and “K”…
For more fun with G, there’s hard-G “Gary” versus soft-G (=J) “Gerald”, both of which which orthographically become soft-G “XH” in the constructed language my fannish/online persona is derived from…
“Fannish”, that’s what a lisping Spaniard calls his native tongue?
No one expects a fannish imposition!
Neuromancer, William Gibson.
Spider Robinson is always good for a few puns.
Still going? Just to make sure I killed it.