META - January 21, 2001
The Spiritual Translator Newsletter
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IN META TODAY
1. DICTIONARIES AND GLOSSARIES
2. ALL IN THE WORDS
3. DIFFICULTY WITH ENGLISH
4. SKYSCRAPER HEIGHT
5.
POSTCRIPTUM
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1 DICTIONARIES AND GLOSSARIES
This should be helpful for many among you.
This list has already been published by Mary Maloof in Tranfree, Issue 7 but I
just updated it by checking the URL. I had to suppress a few from the original
list.
http://www.mabercom.com
The translator's portfolio of
Internet resources
http://allserv.rug.ac.be/~rvdstich/eugloss/welcome.html
A multilingual glossary of medical terms.
http://www.translationbureau.gc.ca/pwgsc_internet/english/03_tools/03_pubs/en/enPubMain.htm
The website of the Translation Bureau of the
Department of Public Works and Government Services of Canada offers a number of
free French/English and French/English/Spanish glossaries.
http://www.llp.fu-berlin.de/baum/hyperref.html
Online English-language dictionaries,
glossaries, and encyclopedias, touching on everything from aikido to meteor
astronomy.
http://www.notebook4u.com/glossary.htm
Sony and Aiwa's Technical Terms Glossaries
http://www.mtnds.com/af/
English-language acronym finder. Over 106,700
acronyms and abbreviations from various fields.
http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/doddict/
Dictionary of military terms and acronyms,
compiled by the United States Department of Defense.
http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/dougb/rhyme-doc.html
The Semantic Rhyming Dictionary. A boon to
the literary translator who translates into English.
And now let us laugh…
2. ALL IN THE WORDS
I
was helping someone set up his computer, and he wanted to log in with a
password.... Now you have to understand he's got somewhat of a rebellious
attitude and goes for the shock effect... So when the computer asked him to
enter his password, he keys in "PENIS"...I nearly fell off the chair
from laughing so hard when the computer replied: *** PASSWORD REJECTED. NOT
LONG ENOUGH ***
Contribution:
Martine Gerard
INTERESTING
EXCUSES
A
contest was held to come up with excuses to miss a day of work. Here are the
best answers:
I
can't come in to work today because I'll be stalking my previous boss, who
fired me for not showing up for work. OK?
Constipation
has made me a walking time bomb.
I
just found out that I was switched at birth. Legally, I shouldn't come to work
knowing my employee records may now contain false
information.
The
dog ate my car keys. We're going to hitchhike to the vet.
I
prefer to remain an enigma.
My
mother-in-law has come back as one of the Undead and we must track her to her
coffin to drive a stake through her heart and give her eternal peace. One day
should do it.
I
can't come to work today because the EPA has determined that my house is
completely surrounded by wetlands and I have to arrange for helicopter
transportation.
I
refuse to travel to my job in the District until there is a commuter tax. I
insist on paying my fair share.
THE
HARVARD BRIDGE
The bridge connecting Boston and Cambridge (Massachusetts) via Massachusetts Avenue is commonly know as the Harvard Bridge. When it was built, the state offered to name the bridge for the Cambridge school that could present the best claim for the honor.
Harvard
submitted an essay detailing its contributions to education in America,
concluding that it deserved the honor of having a bridge leading into Cambridge
named for the institution. MIT did a structural analysis of the bridge and
found it so full of defects that they agreed that it should be named for
Harvard.
GROANERS
1. Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly,
but when they lit a fire in the craft it sank - proving once and for all that
you can't have your kayak and heat it, too.
2. Two boll weevils grew up in South Carolina.
One went to Hollywood and became a famous actor. The other stayed behind in the
cotton fields and never amounted to much. The second one, naturally, became
known as the lesser of two weevils.
3. A three-legged dog walks into a saloon in
the Old West. He sidles up to the bar and announces, "I'm looking for the
man who shot my paw."
4. This guy goes into a restaurant for a
Christmas breakfast while in his hometown for the holidays. After looking over
the menu he says, "I'll just have the eggs Benedict." His order comes
a while later and it's served on a big, shiny hubcap. He asks the waiter,
"What's with the hubcap?" The waiter sings, "Oh, there's no
plate like chrome for the hollandaise!"
5. When she told me I was average, she was just
being mean.
6. Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused
his dentist's Novocain during root canal work? He wanted to transcend dental
medication.
7. A group of chess enthusiasts checked into a
hotel and were standing in the lobby discussing their recent tournament
victories. After about an hour, the manager came out of the office and asked
them to disperse. "But why?" they asked, as they moved off.
"Because," he said, "I can't stand chess nuts boasting in an
open foyer."
8. A doctor made it his regular habit to stop
off at a bar for a hazelnut daiquiri on his way home. The bartender knew of his
habit, and would always have the drink waiting at precisely 5:03 p.m. One
afternoon, as the end of the workday approached, the bartender was dismayed to
find that he was out of hazelnut extract. Thinking quickly, he threw together a
daiquiri made with hickory nuts and set it on the bar. The doctor came in at
his regular time, took one sip of the drink and exclaimed, "This isn't a
hazelnut daiquiri!" "No, I'm sorry,” replied the bartender,
"it's a hickory daiquiri, Doc."
9. A hungry lion was roaming through the jungle
looking for something to eat. He came across
two men. One was sitting under a tree reading a book; the other was typing away
on his typewriter. The lion quickly pounced on the man reading the book and
devoured him. Even the king of the jungle knows that readers digest, and
writers cramp.
10. There was a
man who entered a local paper's pun contest. He sent in ten different puns, in
the hope that at least one of the puns would win. Unfortunately, no pun in ten
did.
11. A woman has
twins, and gives them up for adoption. One of them goes to a family in Egypt
and is named "Amal." The other goes to a family in Spain; they name
him "Juan." Years later, Juan sends a picture of himself to his
mom. Upon receiving the picture, she
tells her husband that she wishes she also had a picture of Amal. Her husband
responds, "But they are twins - if you've seen Juan, you've seen
Amal." ........... (Groan)
Contribution: Diane Howell
3. DIFFICULTY WITH ENGLISH
In
this essay you will find a few things that you may know already but you will
also find things that you do not know. It is a good reminder that words and
meaning do not have a logical link in a language used by 90% of the people on
Internet.
English
is a crazy language. There is neither egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger;
neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in
England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads,
which aren't sweet are meat.
If
crime fighters fight crime, and firefighters fight fire, what do freedom
fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?
We
take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that
quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither
from Guinea nor is it a pig.
Doesn't
it seem crazy that you can make amends, but not one amend; that you comb
through annals of history but not a single annal? If you have a bunch of odds
and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?
In
what language do people recite a play and play a recital? Ship by truck and
send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell? Park on driveways
and drive on parkways?
How
can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy
are opposites? How can overlook and oversee be opposites, while quite a lot and
quite a few are alike? How can the weather be hot as hell one day and cold as
hell another?
Have
you noticed that we talk about certain things only when they are absent? Have
you ever seen a horseful carriage or a strapful gown? Met a sung hero or
experienced requited love? Have you ever run into someone who was combobulated,
gruntled, ruly, or peccable? And where are all those people who ARE spring
chickens or who would ACTUALLY hurt a fly?
You
have to marvel at the lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as
it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which an
alarm clock goes off by going on. English was invented by people, not
computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race (which is not a
race at all). That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when
the lights are out, they are invisible. And why, when I wind up my watch, I
start it, but when I wind up this essay, I end it.
4. SKYSCRAPER HEIGHT
The following question appeared in a physics degree exam at the University of Copenhagen:
"Describe
how to determine the height of a skyscraper with a barometer."
One
enterprising student replied: "You tie a long piece of string to the neck
of the barometer, then lower the
barometer
from the roof of the skyscraper to the ground. The length of the string plus
the length of the barometer will equal the height of the building."
This
highly original answer so incensed the examiner that the student was failed
immediately. The student appealed, on the grounds that his answer was
indisputably correct, and the university appointed an independent arbiter to
decide the case. The arbiter judged that the answer was indeed correct, but did
not display any noticeable knowledge of physics; to resolve the problem it was
decided to call the student in and allow him six minutes in which to verbally
provide an answer, which showed at least a minimal familiarity with the basic
principles of physics.
For
five minutes the student sat in silence, forehead creased in thought. The
arbiter reminded him that time was running out, to which the student replied
that he had several extremely relevant answers, but couldn't make up his mind
which to use. On being advised to hurry up the student replied as follows:
"One,
you could take the barometer up to the roof of the skyscraper, drop it over the
edge, and measure the time it takes to reach the ground. The height of the
building can then be worked out from the formula H =3D 1/2gt squared (height
equals half times gravity time squared). But bad luck on the barometer.
"Two,
if the sun is shining you could measure the height of the barometer, then set
it on end and measure the length of its shadow. Then you measure the length of
the skyscraper's shadow, and thereafter it is a simple matter of proportional
arithmetic to work out the height of the skyscraper.
"Three,
if you wanted to be highly scientific about it, you could tie a short piece of
string to the barometer and swing it like a pendulum, first at ground level and
then on the roof of the skyscraper. The height is worked out by the difference
in the gravitational restoring force (T = 3D 2 pi square root of l over g).
"Four,
if the skyscraper has an outside emergency staircase, it would be easy to walk
up it and mark off the height of the skyscraper in barometer lengths, then add
them up.
"Five,
if you merely wanted to be boring and orthodox about it, of course, you could
use the barometer to measure air pressure on the roof of the skyscraper,
compare it with standard air pressure on the ground, and convert the difference
in millibars into feet to give the height of the building.
"Six,
since we are constantly being exhorted to exercise independence of mind and
apply scientific methods, undoubtedly the best way would be to knock on the
janitor's door and say to him 'I will give you this nice new barometer, if you
will tell me the height of this skyscraper.'"
The
arbiter re-graded the student with an 'A.'
5. POSTCRIPTUM
ACTUAL
TOWN NAMES
Moose
Jaw, Saskatchewan
French
Lick, Indiana
Toast,
North Carolina
Lizard
Lick, North Carolina
Thanksgiving,
North Carolina
Conetoe,
North Carolina
Intercourse, Pennsylvanie
Gays, Illinois
Fort Gay, Wyoming
Sappho's
Leap, Levkas Greece
Big
Hole, Montana
BASTARDO
in Umbria Italy
Skull
Bone, Tennessee
Soddy
Daisey, Tennessee
Grinders
Switch, Tennessee
Cave-In-Rock,
Illinois
Possum
Trot, Kentucky
Monkey's
Eyebrow, KY
Whynot,
NC
Hell,
Michigan (In the Lower Peninsula, naturally).
Paradise,
Michigan (In the upper peninsula, naturally)
Head
Basged In, Saskatchewan
Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, Alberta
Medicine Hat, Alberta
Chicken, Alaska
Eek, Alaska
Unalaska, Alaska
Deadhorse, Alaska
Tightwad, MO
Blueballs, Pa
Intercourse, Pa
Bucksnort, Tennessee
Dry Fork, Virginia
Dime
Box, Texas
Possum
Kingdom, Texas
Earth,
Texas
Cut
and Shoot , Texas
Gun
Barrel City , Texas
Bigfoot
, Texas
Wink
, Texas
Happy
, Texas
Troup
, Texas
Pleak
, Texas
Sweetwater
, Texas
Agua
Dulce , Texas (which means Sweetwater in Spanish)
Sour
Lake , Texas
Notrees
, Texas
Pine
Forest , Texas
Levelland
, Texas
Mountain
Home , Texas
Booger
Holler, Arkansas
Toad
Suck, Arkansas
Frog
Suck, Wyoming
Jigger,
Louisiana
Devil's
Elbow, MO
Uncertain,
TX
Hot
Coffee, MS.