The Twilight Report

commerce without morality

Sat, 14 Jul 2007 01:19:00 GMT

So forever ago, Smitha wrote in her LJ something about spelling alphabets and never being able to think of countries to associate with certain letters. What do you use for X? Anyway, that got me to think that defunct empires would be a good spelling alphabet to use, not because it would be easy to understand, but because I suspected that I could design it to be pretty hard to decipher. For example, when I got to H I chose “Holy Roman Empire” and for R I chose “Roman Empire.” Although it isn’t ambiguous, unless you were paying attention you might get lost.

So I finally wrote a little web app to give you the spelling alphabet spelling for a number of different alphabets. Some of them (NATO, LAPD) are actually in use. Some of the others (defunct empire, etc) I just made up for fun. I made defunct empire the default because it seemed to be the least useful.

www.wdlabs.com/twilight/lingua/alphabet

(btw- if you can think of a country that starts with X let me know. I will accept historical, currently nonexistent countries, but not fictional countries, as I am currently using the fictional country Xanth for X because I couldn’t think of anything else. I also need defunct empires for W X and Y; the current X is actually the capitol of an Empire, not the Empire itself)

I also have a new management policy for my website, so make sure you read that and agree to all of the terms before using my website. It is also available in latin if you English isn’t very good.

Spelling

Fri, 19 Nov 2004 17:02:00 GMT

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch codnutced at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are tpyed, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit oedrer. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?

Source Unknown

This is the philosophy by which our pet Quakers lived.

For Whom The Bell Tolls...

Sat, 11 Sep 2004 00:29:00 GMT

The fact that I just said "whom" there reminds me. I was looking for grammar jokes on-line today, because I had found someone's profile last night which had a grammar error. Now usually I don't really care about grammar or spelling errors. I try to avoid them with the spell/grammar checker, but if someone mistypes I usually don't think twice about it. This person bitches about people using poor spelling after incorrectly using "your" where she meant "you're" or "you are." So I politely said that what she was saying would be more effective if it um... were spelled right. She wrote me back and rudely told me that it was a joke. I guess that must be one of those nifty post-modern jokes which rely on not being funny to convey its point. So I wrote back and said "funny joke. makes you look ignorant." I deleted her response to that without reading it, because really, I had already wasted too much of my life on this little episode. But I did spend some time searching the Internet for grammar jokes. I thought if I found some funny ones then I might send them to her. I actually had something in mind... a segment from A Prairie Home Companion which I had found quite amusing. I couldn't find the segment from the show that I had in mind, which is a pity I suppose, but probably just as well. One of the other things I found was a list of "jokes" on Dr. Grammar's web site... none of which were funny at all. Maybe I'm just not able to get the whole Grammar Joke genre or something. Anyway one of the things there was on when to use "whom" and when to use "who". I'm never quite sure if I'm using the right one... but after reading what it said I think I pretty much always choose the right one.