Peri·

The greenish coloured gem peridot is the birthstone for the month of August.  Looking at this word I feel slightly uncomfortable.  It's one of those words that I've never actually heard anyone say out loud and the pronunciation isn't immediately obvious.  My first instinct is to pronounce it the "French way" that would be something like pear-a-doe, but there also seems to be an equally valid looking pronunciation, pear-a-dot.  For some reason the "dot" ending seems a bit harsh but if that's the correct way to pronounce peridot then I'm not going to argue.

Obviously it's time to enlist the help of the internet for what I thought would give me a consensus.  The first result is a YouTube video that gives the pronunciation of pear-a-dot.  Well that was simple enough.  Then I continued to scroll down to the comments (not always the safest thing to do without losing a few IQ points) and found the people there disagreeing, with some preferring the pear-a-doe pronunciation.  It appeared I had some more work to do.

Wikipedia lists both pronunciations and looking to see if there was some more information I headed to the talk page.  Now I don't normally frequent Wikipedia talk pages, but what I found could be called the polar opposite of YouTube comment threads.  There was a fairly long and verbose discussion about the pronunciation of peridot which was strangely amusing to read.  After reading through it all I determined that both pronunciations are acceptable and it can depend on where you live or if you're a gem tradesman.

If you would like to trust what was posted near the top of the talk page,

Many dictionaries put the "pear-a-dot" pronunciation first, before "pear-a-doe". Some only have the "pear-a-dot" listed, for example "Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language" is very definite and lists only one form, "per' i dot'".  Most gem and jewelery tradesmen use "pear-a-doe", and some are very definite in calling the "-dot" form as incorrect. If you believe dictionaries and encyclopedias, however, you have to conclude they are being near-sighted.  Peridot was first mined in quantity in the U.S. in the area of Peridot, Arizona. The name of that town is pronounced "pear-a-dot".

 Cool I guess.

The Scunthorpe Problem

You may have run into this problem sometime while on the internet where you typed the word "class" on a forum and it was automatically changed to "cl***".  Very naive filters like that don't seem to be as common as they were on the early internet but the occasion can still arise.

The name of this problem comes from back in 1996 when residents of Scunthorpe, England were unable to create AOL accounts because their town name included the word "cunt" and was blocked by AOL's filters.  Penistone, Lightwater and Cliterhoe (coincidentally all in England) have also had issues online.

Some other similar amusing cases include the Communauté urbaine de Montréal (CUM) having their website (www.cum.qc.ca) blocked because of the acronym.  The Canadian magazine "The Beaver" was being blocked by some filters and finally changed it's name in 2010 after being around for 90 years.  The Horniman Museum (in England of course) failing to receive their emails.  And emails with "specialist" being blocked because they contained the name of the drug cialis.

Hilarity can also ensue when "bad" words are replaced with a less offensive alternative; for example ass -> butt.  This lead to an article on the sprinter Tyson Gay being changed to Tyson Homosexual.  I think my favourite though is assassinate being changed to buttbuttinate.

Criss Cross Applesauce

With my last batch of cookies just finished it was time to create some more.  Thinking that I was sufficiently prepared with ingredients I set off on my adventure.  Little did I know that it would not be so easy...

I was making peanut butter cookies.  I suppose it was a healthier recipe or something because it called for applesauce instead of sugar.  I had bought a jar of applesauce probably over a month ago and had used it in this recipe before.  However it had been sitting in my fridge all that time after opening it and as I was about to find out applesauce goes bad fairly quickly.

Upon opening the jar I was surprised to be greeted by several pinkish splotches all over the applesauce.  It's a bit difficult to see them in the picture so I've include a digitally enhanced version.

I then smelled the jar and it was a strange, maybe fermented, bitter appley smell that wasn't very pleasant.  Panicking (not really), I went online to check out the fridge time of applesauce.  It was well before the listed expiration date so I had come to the conclusion that that was actually it's unopened shelf time.

My suspicions were confirmed after doing a bit of searching.  Apparently applesauce is supposed to last only a week or two in the fridge after being opened and mine had been there for well over a month...  Hoping I could make use of it by just scooping the pink splotches off and using the rest I quickly came upon a site that read my mind.  Basically saying don't do it you can get sick!  I also found out that apparently applesauce is usually written as one word, not two!

I'm not a very experienced baker so I'm not very good at improvising a recipe.  However I came to the conclusion that the applesauce was taking the place of sugar so I added a bunch of brown sugar in its place and hoped for the best.  Finally it came time to add the peanut butter and I discovered there was only about 3/4 of a cup left.  Oh well, close enough.

The rest of the recipe and mixing went off without incident.  I put the cookies in the oven and hoped for the best.  After taking them out and doing a cursory inspection it appeared that the cookies were similar in appearance to the ones I had made before.  An experimental taste confirmed by initial hypothesis and I deemed the cookies a success.

 Above are the cookies and my awesome cookie jar.

Novorolsky

I have an old phone.  I've had it for around 5 or 6 years and somehow it's still in very good shape.  I've kind of been waiting for my phone to die so that I would be forced to upgrade, however it appears that it's hardy enough to last any period of time and so I've decided I will likely upgrade very soon.  With that back story behind us, now let's get on to the main purpose of this post.

Since my phone is quite old and the screen is quite small I don't have a newfangled touch screen keyboard.  Instead I have to use a standard telephone keypad where each number corresponds to three or four letters.  This means that when typing text messages I make use of the predictive text feature that helps to automatically select words based on the numbers I enter and can guess the completed word after only entering the first few letters.

In general this actually works quite well and often I only have to press one button per letter for each word.  More uncommon words, some names and obscure or anything outside of a dictionary is much more difficult to type and is a more manual process one letter at a time.  Sometimes the predictions are unexpected, for example when I was attempting to type the word "novocaine" it predicted "novorolsky"...

What also can be annoying is when two or more words are represented by the same sequence of numbers like home and good (4663).  When I was searching to find out the significance of novorolsky I discovered this forum thread that happens to be associated with one of my favourite web comics.  Someone suggests the term homonums for words like this and then it's discovered that wikipedia already has an article about textonyms!  Regardless, I'm likely switching to a smart phone soon so I won't have to deal with this problem anymore.

Multiple Contractions

A short time ago I came across the word I'd've.  At first I was somewhat taken aback!  I had never seen a word quite like this before.  I had never even considered writing a word with two apostrophes.  It was easy enough to understand as "I would have", but I still wondered whether this type of contractionizing happened often.

After some searching around it seems like my experience has been fairly common.  People agree that it's used somewhat in spoken language, but rarely if ever written down and never in formal writing.

Of course why stop at I'd've?  How about couldn't've or she'd've.  And why stop at double contractions?  How about triple contractions like I'dn't've or you'dn't've!