oddities in lexicon

Not only have I missed several riveting installments of this page in a row, I have also forgotten to update the little sidebar additions on the last few posts. If I didn’t know any better I would think that I am really starting to do a really half-assed job with this whole webpage thing. I did spend a little bit of time trying to makes sense of some of the stuff that I do not yet have indexed in the archive page over the last couple of days. I didn’t make enough headway that I really felt like uploading the additions though, My page, my rules.

The reason that I haven’t put anything new up here in the last few days is pretty simple, I didn’t have anything on my mind worth bitching about. Usually I can look at the Yahoo news to get some bitching fodder, but with the Democratic National Covention going on I have not been able to find anything that I really cared about. No point in discussing the Democratic convention here when 1) I just don’t care, and 2) you could find a lot better coverage and opinions anywhere else but here. I know my limitations.

I usually don’t go into writing these with any idea what I am going to say at all. When I do get the occasional email, whether agreeing or disagreeing with what I said, it makes me smile. The funny thing is that I usually get emails regarding the little anecdotes from my childhood, while I rarely ever get one if I voice a strong opinion on any item that can be found in the news. Even when I went on a rant about mandatory birth control for women on government assistance (which I can’t find right now since some jack-ass is lazy about archiving) I didn’t get a single email about it. I know that my readership could easily be counted on one hand, but still, why do people feel the urge to send the email when I share a story from my past, yet not when I voice a strong opinion about a pretty controversial issue? That’s people for you.

• In a random, out of the blue, thought that I had today (which I can not take full credit for, since it was initially brought to my attention by a girl named Tina that I used to work with), why is it that people always substitute O for 0 when speaking? I don’t know how to do the special characters to make the phonetic o sound on a keyboard, but follow me. Most people will say their phone number like five, five, five, O, three, two, two. So that is six numbers and one letter? I know that it is simply a force of habit for us lazy Americans to cut any corners that we can, but come on ‘zero’ has only one more syllable than ‘o’, if you are in that much of a hurry you might have other issues. The reason that this came back to mind today is that we have a money transfer service thing where I work, it is strictly for sending money to Mexico and overseas, while the operators that run it are all bilingual, they get confused when you use the letter o instead of the number 0. While I was on the phone with one of the operators today I caught myself doing that very thing (which I have myself pretty well trained against) and she asked me to repeat myself. I said, “seven, o, four, o, one”. When she again asked me to repeat myself I realized that I had made that mistake, and when I said it again, but as seven, zero, four, zero, one, she immediately was able to access the information.

The reason that I bring this up is that it made me think about yet another thing, Pig-Latin. When I was growing up we used to use it all the time and thought that it was pretty funny, especially so in the movies where there is some dumb crook who doesn’t understand it. Until today I had never thought of the possibility that someone who has a different first language might also not be able to understand it. Think about it. If you learn all of the words in the English language from a book, but don’t hear a lot of people speaking the language, then someone throws out the word “ishway”, for instance, it probably wouldn’t pop immediately into your mind that the word was “wish”. I am certainly not meaning to imply that this is a really complex code or anything of that nature, but imagine if you were using a similar or even different method of talking to friends around someone who wasn’t “in the loop” on the method.

There was this really weird thing that my friends started doing, just for fun, back in the late eighties. They called it “op talk” which is pretty self explanatory when I make the following example “mop e top a lop lop i cop a”, of course all of the vowels sound like someone saying uhh. I don’t know where the whole thing originated but it sure was fun to screw with my parents using this method. This sort of thing continues, varying by generation, to the point that if you don’t take in enough television or popular music you might just get lost in the whole thing. Sort of like the Rap moguls now using terms like “shiznit” which is a pretty obvious one, but branching out into using only the first letter of the word like they do with heazy heezy, forget that example…How about “hizouse”, I hope I spelled that one right…

Boy do I ever rop a mop bop lop e.

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