all things me

I took a Goddess test just for fun and the result is: Hera. Hmm… I’m The First Lady (Hera is Zeus’s wife (and also his sister…), and Zeus is the supreme god in Greek mythology. He wasn’t really a committed type, though.) The whole of results is on the entry page.

I’m really annoyed by a restaurant’s name in the center of Helsinki: Casa Largo. Which language is that? Plutoan? In Spanish at least, which I think the name is trying to resemble, the adjective (here largo — large) has to agree with the noun it determines (here: la casa — house, home), thus the name should be Casa Larga. WHY ISN’T IT?!

@ 15:06
Mmm… Christmas Coffee. (I taste cardamom.)
I just realized a funny thing. We put kardemumma (cardamom) in our *ginger*bread (ginger being inkivääri in Finnish). And gingerbread is piparkakku in Finnish and the “prefix” pipar- can also be found in “piparjuuri” (horse-radish) or “piparminttu” (peppermint).

@ 12:04 on July 23
Mum pointed out that gingerbread in Swedish is pepparkaka in which peppar means ‘pepper’. I knew there was a pepper hidden there somewhere!! The Finnish piparkakku comes almost certainly (I’m not an etymologist) from Swedish and it has been phonetically adapted to Finnish (a common form of loan word formation).

Continues »

Word of the Day: Wonky — shaky, awry, crazy
(picked up from Black House (the book I’m reading…))

This is another excuse for posting a WOTD… Although, I have posted JUST WOTDs or QOTDs and nothing else. Oh well.

I forgot to watch the 2nd part of the gross parasite series but luckily (darn I’m lucky — no, really) they re-ran it on a digital channel and I just happened to check the programs for the channel in yester’s paper. And it just happened to be on later that night.
This time it wasn’t that gross (although there was one maggot) — only mosquitoes and diseases they spread. Of course it’s awful to have malaria, sleeping sickness, etc. in the world, but I’m talking about the *gross-factor*.

@ 9:58
Ok, this is weird.
The library man just called me. Yesterday I went to the library to look for a grammar book but it couldn’t be found anywhere. Now it had emerged. How did he know who I was? Very spooky. xD (I know there’s not a smiley for that, but sometimes I just can’t resist you know) I have to make one myself if there’s a blank one available.
Oh yeah: Due date 13.8. (I can’t access my menu (on the right) from work)
I didn’t desperately need the book but I couldn’t NOT go get it It might turn out to be useful cause sometimes I do need some grammar info which is difficult to find online.

@ 15:28
Uh-oooooh…

Finland gained its independence in 1919.

Says Bartleby (or The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition). That’d be 1917, thank you very much. Unless the Americans wouldn’t accept the independency until 1919…? And actually wouldn’t that be independencY (not independence)? Oh, no, sorry. Both are good.

Quote from an unknown source:

There are only 10 kinds of people in this world. Those whose understand binary, and those who don’t.

Word of the Day: curmudgeon — an ill-tempered person full of resentment and stubborn notions; a churlish, irascible fellow; mocker, debunker

@ 15:31
I’m pretty sure I woke up with my mobile in my hand and the alarm clock slash radio playing music. Both indicate that I had woken (or not…) to the alarms and silenced them — and fallen asleep right afterwards. But I’m not completely sure.

I don’t understand Part III:
– why some people think they’re bicycles
lots of people walk smack in the middle of a cycle path on the street
– yesterday a woman with a pram didn’t get on the bus because there was one step! I was all ready to help her to lift the pram in but she took one look at the bus and left. It didn’t cross her mind to ask for help?

Word of the Day: guffaw; I sort of learned that today, I’ve always thought it was “guwaff” I must’ve misread it when I was little (I’ve never *heard* it). Oh yeah, it means hearty, boisterous burst of laughter — or a corresponding verb

In a way I finished the homepage I was making for my aunt. Now we’re anxiously (well, I’m anxious at least) waiting for the details to arrive so I can start uploading and setting up things. Very exiting!

I just read a wonderful article by David Campbell (hopefully that’s a permanent link, and an accessible one) on careless spelling and the mistakes the spell-checker programs may allow. (Found it through a comment on Language Log, what else)

I’ve mentioned my allergy of “their vs. they’re vs. there” and that article contained some of my other horrors: seperate, definate, relevent… I also grimace when I see “than” instead of “then” or vice versa.
I have to admit that I didn’t see anything wrong with “accomodation” but that’s because I don’t think I’ve ever used that word myself. (In case you don’t see it either, it should have 2 m’s.)

[Finnish alert] There’s a “personal” experience in this area too. Or actually it was my sister’s. The spell-checker didn’t recognise the word viisisakarainen (with five points (I don’t know what the things on a star are called)) even though it should understand compound words; one of its alternatives was viisipakarainen (with five buttocks). Clever.

What was I supposed to write about… Oh yeah, there was a gross documentary on parasites (focus on worms, it’s a 3-part series) on tv last night. I watched it (of course!) and I had goosebumps and suddenly started itching all over. It was BBC‘s “Body Snatchers”. I can’t remember (and the commentator was dubbed) the English terms of the species so I can’t talk about it much, but one man grew a tapeworm type of creature inside him — for research purposes. It grew to almost 2 meters. And one woman had been stung by a mosquito that carried the eggs of a fly and a big (about an inch) maggot started growing under her scalp. It looked like a big bump on her head and there was a biggish hole in her skin through which the maggot breathed. Ewww… I’m shivering again.
Oh and one man had caught a leech from drinking from a brook and it had attached itself in his nostril.

Brrr… is it cold in here?

Yesterday we had Grandpa’s 80th birthday dinner. We all were there: us and all Dad’s sisters with their families. One of my aunts asked if I could do a homepage for her, and if course I could! The website is done now (apart from her critique and my adjustments accordingly). It’s pretty exciting I’m going to be the webmistress because she doesn’t have a Internet connection at home (and I understand about that stuff, she has “heard about a resolution and something called jpg” ).

Anyway, I don’t have anything to say really, I just wanted to post the following quote I read yesterday in the car (on the way to the dinner) and bookmarked it with a Jesus brochure I found in my pocket

Quote of the day:

“Space-lag,” he [Ford Prefect] said, “is very bad for sub-clauses.”
— Douglas Adams: So Long and Thanks for All the Fish

[Warning: Finnish ahead]
Talking about inflecting… I’ve always wondered why — in Finnish — one way to wish things (“have a nice weekend”, “good night”) can be done with plural + partitive case: viikonloppuja, öitä respectively. You don’t need any preceding “good” or “nice” words either (e.g. “good night” is hyvää yötä in the “normal” way — hyvää is, obviously, “good”)

The corner of my mouth still twitches when I think my professor just said that if there’s an emergency (something doesn’t work, I don’t understand something…) it might be more practical for me to text him than send an email. Text! Apparently he is comfortable with the additional features cell phones offer nowadays (additional to just using it as a phone). I am not planning to disturb his vacation, however.

Another thing, I was just told (not 100% sure) that the structure <possessive pronoun> + <uninflected noun> is nowadays *allowed* in Finnish. Damn those allowances (hey, I thought that was a “word play” but it does mean “act of allowing” too… super). Soon we’ll be talking merely in uninflected words cause everyone’s too damn lazy to inflect.

Inflect, people!

I always stop for a fraction of a second when someone has written ‘iff’ (or Finnish equivalent ‘joss’) in a text (scientific or at least somewhat). That, of course, means “if and only if” (‘jos ja vain jos’).

[Useless-ish to read if you don’t understand Finnish] I just sent positive feedback to a radio station because last night I heard one of the announcers (radio jockeys) say “minun nimeni on…” which is the proper, inflected way to say it. Usually he (the jockey) says “minun nimi on…” which to my ear feels like a hot needle. (If you need to use the erroneous (in that context) uninflected ‘nimi’ then please at least use the colloquial ‘mun’ — not half and half.)

A woman asked people for coins near the railway station this morning (she looked like a traveller though, not a professional begger). She asked me, too. That reminded me of this (extremely annoying) woman that has been standing around the exact same place (not railway station) since I was in high school (at least), so that’s 5-6 years by now. She has the same winter clothes and boots all year round and asks the passers-by “do you have any money to give” with her hand stretched out. 6 years! I wonder if anyone gives her money. If not, why does she keep doing that? Wouldn’t she be better off even in a crappy job or looking for a crappy job? That would probably be more productive than her current line of “work”.