venta

Yesterday[*] I finished Life After Life. I highly recommend it, though I should declare that I am a massive fan of Kate Atkinson's writing.

Anyway, at one point during the book a character in a garden is surprised. He leaps backwards, and falls over into a cotton-eater.

Wait, back up, he falls back into a what now?

A cotton-easter.

Err, no that's not a thing, either.

At which point something weird happened. I realised that I was looking at a word, and had no idea what it was. Obviously I meet words whose meaning I don't know on a daily basis - technical terms, words in languages I can't read, obscure words that don't crop up much. I read them, and realise I don't know them. I look them up (or not, as appropriate) and move on.

A related problem, of course, now that I work on the fringes of marketingworld, is finding words that I know perfectly well but which are clearly being used to mean something other than what I think they mean. See also: neologisms, ghastly. Though at least it was immediately obvious what was meant by the word "onboarding".

Anyway, the cotton-eater. For the first time in probably thirty years, I found myself having to carefully spell out a word, syllable by syllable. Co-to-ne-as-ter. Aha! A cotoneaster! A word I know perfectly well once it's said, but which - had I ever thought about it - I would have spelled katoniasta.

It's rather nice to know that English can still surprise me.

[*] With rather annoying timing - I still had a lot of journey left when I ran out of book.

Well. That was unnecessarily exciting.

I, and a couple of colleagues, went shopping at lunchtime. And hjalfi bought some cobnuts, to find out what they were like.

So after my lunch, I ate a couple of cobnuts[*]. We hadn't realised that they were solid enough to require nutcrackers, so I cracked mine open with my teeth. And they're quite nice - interesting crunchy, juicy texture and a very mild flavour. I decided I quite liked them.

And then I noticed that the roof of my mouth was tingling. And the insides of my ears. And I thought, gosh. That's not ideal. I won't eat any more.

And a few minutes later I could feel a distinct lump-in-the-throat sensation that hadn't been there before. And was feeling a little breathless, and rather tight and wheezy about the lungs. And a bit dizzy.

Which wasn't great. I had told my colleagues this, so they'd have some idea what was going on if I toppled off my chair. As one of the work first aiders, I know perfectly well that allergic reactions weren't covered in our first aid course ;)

Anyway, about 90 minutes later and I'm back to normal (modulo a residual slightly sore throat, and the generally bizarre feelings you get from trying to over-analyse whether you feel ok or not). So, no harm done.

Using the absolutely-100%-reliable diagnosis-by-internet, I'm considering oral allergy syndrome and have filched an anti-histamine from a colleague. However, I suspect the best course of action from now on is "don't eat cobnuts".


[*] Which the internet tells me are the same as hazelnuts. Except these were the fresh kind, with green leaves still wrapping them.

When writing last week's BAYD post, I did what I always do: put up an mp3 (of Try This At Home) for download. Later on, when I wanted to refer in passing to Reasons Not To Be An Idiot, I just linked to YouTube.

And then I thought: why do I do that? Why don't I just link to YouTube for my BAYD posts? Unless it's something really quite obscure, it'll be there. Do people care that much about downloading an mp3?

And then I thought: er... good question. The answer surprised me. I first started BAYD as a regular thing at the beginning 2005. At that point, YouTube didn't exist.

( It wasn't even thought of... )

While idly perusing yesterday's poll answers, I noticed this:



See that there? That (next to "Martyn") is a twitter icon.

Now, I know some people do Mysterious Magic to make their teeny-tiny LJ icon look like something other than the default but... twitter?

Anyway, it turns out you can log in to LJ with your twitter credentials. And vote in polls! Also with your Facebook credentials, should you have such things. And with the credentials of some other things I've never heard of (mail.ru, vkontakte) for which I'm blaming Russia.

I knew about OpenID, but this is all new to me. When did that arrive?

So, today I was reminded that I don't know what the word "synedoche" means (yes, since you ask, I was reading XKCD). I've looked up synedoche many times, yet can never remember what the wretched thing means.

So, over I go Wikipedia. A dictionary would probably have been better, but my fingers automatically go to Wikipedia for virtually any answer these days.

In the little search box, I type "synedoche".

Back come the results... "Did you mean: synecdoche".

Did I mean synecdoche? No, of course I didn't, that's not a word.

Except a little further searching suggests it really is a word. And, what's more, it's the one I was looking for. I am 100% confident that the first 'c' has never been there before. I've certainly never known it was there, and - as we've already established - I've looked this word up a lot of times.

I can only assume that some foul-tempered script kiddie has carefully replaced all instances of the word on the internet with this new misspelled version. If I get home and find that my trusty hard-backed Oxford dictionary has the rogue extra 'c' in the word too, I shall know that goblins have been employed.