Tag Archives: research

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TILWROT VIII

I used to sing of Saints – but when I became an adult, I put away childish things – until I decided to do some research.

In Grade 7, I was reluctantly, shyly, protestingly, put in the school choir.  (I later realized that was why.)  Among others, we sang a song about Santa Lucia.  Recent childhood reminiscing brought it back to mind.  Other than the refrain about Santa Lucia, I don’t remember singing in Italian.  I decided to do some research.

I went to Bing, and just plugged in “Santa Lucia.”  I guess if your Tourist Board spends a couple of million dollars in promotion, the algorithm moves you to the top of the pile.  There was no mention of an Italian saint, or a cute song.  The entire first page was about Saint (not Santa) Lucia, an island near the Bahamas.

(Saint) Lucia’s father tried to sell her into sexual servitude through marriage, because it was standard procedure at the time.  She strongly protested, and insisted on remaining virginal, unwed, and a drain on her family – not because she objected to having some dirty old man stick it to her, but because he was a non-Christian pagan.

The surprise in my research about the song was when I found out that it wasn’t about Santa Lucia.  It was about the Santa Lucia cove section of Naples Bay.  It is a barcarole, a song sung by gondoliers, to entice potential customers to rent their boats.

Gondolas at Naples??!  We all know about them at Venice, where the shallow, deeply indented bay and canal system suppresses storm waves, and makes these oversize canoes reasonably safe – but in an open bay??

So, this little song was never about a purported saint.  It was just an advertising jingle.  I might as well have been singing about “Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun.” only, those hadn’t been invented when I was a kid.

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’25 A To Z Challenge – V

I kinda, sorta, maybe, possibly, wanted to compose a post about the word

VELLEITY

  1. volition in its weakest form.
  2. a mere wish, unaccompanied by an effort to obtain it.

but I couldn’t get my ass in gear, and my act together.  The Good Lord wasn’t willing, and the creek wasn’t the only thing that didn’t rise, so I decided to do a mini-TILWROT, and tell you about the name

VENABLES

The term Venables is an English surname of Norman-French origin, derived from a town of the same name in Normandy.  It is associated with the Latin word, venabulum, meaning a long hunting spear, and was introduced to England following the Norman Conquest, by a lord called Gilbert de Venables.  The surname encapsulates lineage and geographical origins, reflecting a connection to hunting and land.

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TILWROT VII

I read a sword-and-sorcery fantasy book in which paladins were repeatedly mentioned.

Off down the rabbit hole I went.

Things I Learned While Researching Other Things

The modern definition of paladin, is guard, or protector.  It comes from the 12 mythic, ninth-century knights of Emperor Charlemagne of France, who went around rescuing maidens, slaying dragons, and protecting abused peasants – the story of Camelot, King Arthur, and Lancelot and the boys, but told in French.  It comes from palatin, a guard at the Roman Emperor’s palace, on the Palatine Hill.

In the westerns-littered late 1950s, there was a somewhat different TV series.  The protagonist passed out business cards which read HAVE GUN, WILL TRAVEL- wire Paladin.  I always thought that Paladin was his name.  Either my parents did not know the meaning of the word, or they thought that 10-year-old-me already did.

This character was the man with no name, 30 years before Clint Eastwood’s. It was never given.  In one episode, an interested bystander asks him what his name is.  He merely replied, “Paladin,” earning the snarky response, “Of course it is.”

With his quick and deep brain-power, he was more of a frontier private investigator, than a gunfighter.  Aside from his formidable wits, his main armament was the Colt Peacemaker .45 caliber Cavalry model, six-shooter revolver.  It had the 7-1/2 inch barrel, 2-3/4 inches longer than the standard Gunfighter model.  Not exactly like Lee van Kleef’s 12 inch Buntline Special version, but capable of discharging bullets at a higher speed, and accurate at greater distances.

One of three books written about the character, and the series, suggested that his name was Clay Alexander, and that he was a college-educated graduate of West Point, but no other information source close to the production verifies that.

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Natural Stupidity

A comic strip character recently complained, “Artificial Intelligence isn’t as smart as it thinks it is.”
The blog-site name of one of my regular visitors is INGLANDIO.  My squirrel brain can only look at that for so long, before I just have to know what it means.  Despite a similarity in spelling, I doubted that it had any reference to England.  First I plugged it into Bing, because it’s attached to MSN.CA, my home page.

Here are all the results for inguinal; did you only want results for inglandio?
YES! Click
Here are all the results for inguinal, did you only want results for inglandio?
GAAH!!

People who searched for inglandio also searched for:
ingenio
linguine
duolingo
why is England called Britain  (The other three I understand.  This one bemuses me.)

So I gave it to Google – and got exactly the same page of unhelpful stupidity.  😳  I decided to try Google-Translate.  I thought the word was probably Italian, but I’ve been fooled before, so I clicked on “Detect Language.”  Translating – from English – to English – meaning – inglandio.  There is no English word, “inglandio!”

I clicked Translate Italian to English, and was finally rewarded with, “I am going to swell.” which the same translation program, in reverse, tells me is, ”Mi gonfierò.”  That sure is swell.  Now I’m popping blood-pressure pills from a Pez dispenser.  What a ridiculous, useless, unlikely, definition, there is probably an idiomatic connotation for the word, or name, so, Mister Linguine Inglandio, if you hear someone tapping at your website’s back door, it’s just me, searching for meaning.

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I implored Mr. Inglandio to elucidate, and he was kind enough to put me out of his misery.  First, you just take twice the square root of the split infinitive of a word that does not exist.  You add in some verbiage to simulate action.  Then you divide by the number of nosy inquisitive readers who question it – ONE – unity – just me.  You get a genuine imitation word that not only convinces readers that you can do it, but that you can do it in English.  The biggest reason that both AI and I had trouble was that I managed to misspell it as Inglandio – rather than Ingliando.  Poor old new Artificial Intelligence – it never stood a chance.  I know the feeling.

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’25 A To Z Challenge – K

Welcome back to KARCH-TV’s riotously funny comedy program,

KERMIT AND FAWZI

This week’s episode is titled KERMIT AND KISMET.

The name Fawzi seems to be middle-eastern.  When The Muppet Show first appeared on TV, I wondered if Jim Henson had intentionally named the unthreatening, goofball character Fawzi as a way to normalize and reassure people about the presence of peaceful Arab/Muslim immigrants.

Of the very few people that I was aware of, named Kermit, it seemed that most of them were Jewish, so I thought that this name was also middle-eastern.  Imagine my surprise when I actually did some research, and found that it is a pronunciation/spelling evolution slide from the Scottish/Irish Gaelic name Diarmid, or Diarmaid – meaning either “free man,” or “without envy,” apparently depending on how much whiskey you’ve imbibed.

My kismet from not doing my research earlier, is having to do it now, for this post.  Kismet is a kind of soft, easy-going word that carries the connotation of, “What goes around, comes around,” unlike its harder, nastier cousin Karma, which implies that, “You deserve what you get.”

I am disappointed (yet again) by the number of “Good Christians” who believe in karma.  It means that they must also believe that young children deserve to get cancer, or that nice people deserve to have their homes flooded, or blown down by tornadoes or hurricanes.  I don’t care, though.  My Karma ran over their Dogma.

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I’m Rarely This Happy

WOW!!  I found two uncommon and interesting names on one drive home from the store.

After I followed the butthole of America, I passed a small work-truck that said INGOD Basement Restoration and Construction.

At first, I thought it might be English, and mean exactly what it said, or an Estonian name that means ‘left-handed,’ but research reveals that it’s a Romance-language-based name from the word ‘ingo,’ which means male ruler.  In Spanish, the male given name gained an I, and became Inigo.

My name is Inigo Montoya.  You killed my Father.  Prepare to die!

Closer to home, we followed a Sorrento, almost identical to mine, but from a dealership a hundred miles to the East, named Bessada KIA.  Spelled with one S, besada is an Egyptian word that means Arrakian sand-worm.  With two SS’es, Bessada is not merely Portuguese, but Brazilian Portuguese, and means ‘kissed.’

Eso beso

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’25 A To Z Challenge – I

So, that’s I-glesias?  What do da I stand for – I need a bigger bed??!

No, that means that I need to come up with a theme, no matter how pitiful, for the letter I.

This year, poor, poor, pitiful me could only come up with

ILLUSORY

The first dictionary definition given was Virtual, but the slide of connotation now has that word meaning almost, nearly, and close to – as in He was a virtual genius with the Rubik’s Cube.  It used to mean deceptive, false, not in fact, so when your dishwasher detergent pods claim that they will get your dishes virtually spotless, you know that it’s an advertising lie.

Any resemblance between this blogpost, and a well-researched, entertaining, educational one, is just illusory.

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Telepathic Comedy

He gives her a quick glance, and then casually looks at his watch for a moment.  The woman notices this and asks, “Is your date running late?”
“No.” he replies “I just got this state-of the-art watch, and I was just testing it.”
The intrigued woman says, “A state-of-the-art watch? What’s so special about it?”
The guy explains, “It uses alpha waves to talk to me telepathically.”
The lady says, “What’s it telling you now?”
“Well, it says you’re not wearing any panties.”
The woman giggles and replies, “It must be broken because I am wearing panties!”
The guy smiles, taps his watch and says, “Damn thing’s an hour fast.”

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“Yesterday, scientists revealed that beer contains small traces of female hormones.
To prove their theory, the scientists fed 100 men 12 pints of beer and observed.
100% of them gained weight, talked excessively without making sense, became emotional, couldn’t drive, and refused to apologize when wrong.
No further testing is planned.”

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How many Atheists does it take to change a light bulb?
Two!  One to actually change it, and another to videotape it, so that fundamentalists can’t claim that God did it.

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A lawyer was reading out the will of a rich man to the people mentioned in the will:
“To you, my loving wife Rose, who stood by me in rough times, as well as good, I leave her the house and $2 million.”

The lawyer continued, “To my daughter Jessica, who looked after me in sickness and kept the business going, I leave her the yacht, the business and $1 million.”

The lawyer concluded, “And, to my cousin Dan, who hated me, argued with me, and thought that I would never mention him in my will – well you are wrong.

Hi Dan!”

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’24 A To Z Challenge – X

I’ve already done a “Thanks For The Mammaries” post, so, if I’m gonna talk about melons, they better be the kind that grow on vines.  I once used Jimmy Durante’s sign-off line, Good night Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are, to respond to a commenter.  It caused some confusion because, unlike me, not many bloggers were born during the Industrial Revolution.  Calabash is a type of long, hard-shelled melon or gourd.

Words beginning with the letter X are thin on the ground – and up in the air – and in trees – and even in dictionaries.  INTERESTING words beginning with the letter X are even rarer.  After much debate, I decided on

XIGUA

When I first researched it, it was described as an African melon, but when I dived in deeper, it became an Asian melon.  Okay, – what kind of melon?  Large?  Small?  Long?  Round?  Soft-shell?  Hard-shell?  It turns out that it is a Chinese watermelon.  You know – the only fruit that you can eat, drink, and wash your face in.  The main difference between it and American watermelons, is that, instead of the inner flesh being red, it can be lemon-yellow, or a bright, lime-green.

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Subcontracted Fibbing Friday

With grateful acknowledgments, and many thanx to daughter Lady Ryl, who geniused the large majority of this post.

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Last week, Pensitivity101 was after our alternative definitions of these familiar words:

1. What is a fib?

This is the newly minted *Federal Imbroglio Bureau*…  soon to replace the FBI.

2. What is a crib?

That special mobile hen house that homesteaders use to keep the chickens safe while they hunt and peck for their daily feed.

3.What is a bib?

The new acronym/slang for a pregnant female – *Baby In Belly*

4. What is a titfer?

What those crazy hillbillies call a nursing mother.

5. What is an antler?

When a metal artist uses an ant mound to pour molten metal into and creates branched art pieces.

6. Define staunch.

The smell of a group of politicians spewing their typical garbage all over the place, not particularly pleasant and usually foaming from the mouth.

7. What is a paunch?

A group of political roadies, that follow, support, and cheer on their favourites like a person would a sports team.

8. What is a launch?

A trencherman’s mid-day meal

9. What is a nub?

Individuals that are sure their Google-fu is better than anything a team of scientists, doctors or other learned professionals have studied, tested or proven.

10. What is a hub?

What some wives call their insignificant others