Your Life on a Milk Carton!

As we sat breaking our fast one morning last week, the Love of My Life and I let our collective gazes rest momentarily on the milk container sitting prettily on the bench between us ... No, before you ask, it wasn't a dainty, antique glass jug, nor even a quirky, countrified pottery jug, it was more in the nature of a ... ummm ... plastic bottle. Well, who has room in the fridge at this festive time of year for a milk jug as well as the original container?

So there we were, perusing the label when the LoML commented that we should do the same ...

Sorry?

Write a list of ingredients?

Design a logo?

"No," said he. "We should try to write a milk-carton bio!"

For, while I'd been gazing restfully at the back of the carton, he'd been looking at the side view, and the milk we buy (from the sole remaining all-Australian-owned company) currently has 75-word bios of farmers who (we're led to believe) spend their entire lives rearing cute cows to provide milk just for us.

So, your mission today, Boys and Girls, is to come up with a 75-word bio of your time here on planet Earth.

Here are some tips on streamlining your words.

Click to Add a Comment ...

You Can Bank On It!

Am I the only one who can remember the days when governments existed to provide services for the public? When doctors made house calls? And when banks prided themselves on serving their customers?

I'm not?

You can?

Then prepare to weep, boys and girls, because I have a tale to unfold ...

It started when I made my weekly trip to our friendly local financial institution. "Bank" is far too simple a term to encompass the many functions of this business. While standing in the queue, I did a quick check around all the posters and noticed that not only was I able to deposit my hard-won earnings here for safe-keeping, I could also insure my home (and contents) against anything the Universe cared to toss our way (excluding flood, fire, theft ... these are all optional extras).

Then I could take out loans for everything from a personal holiday to a takeover of a small country.

I could get a credit card, a debit card and an EFTPOS card ...

I could do a spot of hedging my foreign exchange thingummies ...

For crying out loud, I discovered I could even have a private bank! But only if I qualified ... Sadly, only eligible customers can aspire to this lofty dream. All I need to do to meet their eligibility criteria is to "hold or have the potential to hold account funds in the region of $750,000 by way of credit funds, debit funds or a combination of both."

Hmmm ... deficient in the dollar department to the tune of several hundred thousand ... But there's always next year!

After passing a pleasant few minutes in my reveries, I finally made it to the counter, where I engaged in friendly repartee with the teller regarding the Mysterious Case of the Vanishing Cheque.

This sad and sorry saga began back in August when I deposited a cheque from a source that has been sending me cheques for many years. A few days later, I received a letter from my bank that set in motion what was to become an epic of biblical proportions. It involved individuals from two continents. It utilised communications by email, by fax, by phone and carrier pigeon! And it nearly broke the spirit of many a good man ... but not this little black duck!

My cheque, you see, was missing the BSB codes, those magical numbers along the bottom, which meant that the Banking Universal Management sector responsible for sorting and forwarding cheques for payment, wasn't able to process my poor little orphan. I was informed, on one of the many occasions I enquired politely about the current state of play, that if cheques lacked their bottom codes, they would be spat out of the machine.

"And?" I asked.

But received only a deafening silence in reply, for it seems, dear reader, that that is that.

Now my question, and it's a curly one I admit, but I'll pose it to you, is this: in the 21st century, when banks are making billions of dollars a year in profits, is it too much to ask that they supply a book of BSB codes and a ballpoint pen to the person sitting watching the cheques that are spat out of the processor? Could they then also, and I know that it's a bit of a stretch, but could they then require that said person look up the BSB code in said book, then pick up said pen and write the bloody number on the cheque?

Sigh ...

After finally getting the bank to admit they'd lost my cheque, I was asked to get a replacement one issued by the paying bank. (Banks, it seems, don't communicate with each other.) This I did, and the bank most generously offered to pay the cost to replace the Vanishing Cheque.

The cost was the grand sum of US$25, which amounted to $31.54 in Aussie dollars. (Remember that number, it's crucial to our tale.)

A few days after depositing the replacement cheque, I had a phone call from my bank telling me they'd also deposited the $31.54 fee.

"Woohoo!" I said, "and the $10 fee you removed from my account at the beginning of the saga?"

"Sorry, no," I was told by the bank, which had just posted a half-yearly profit increase of 25% and had pocketed a measly $85 million.

Coincidence? I'll let you be the judge of that.

So I put the experience behind me until the monthly statement arrived. Glancing quickly at my balance I was astounded. A quick check of the figures showed a deposit not of the expected $31.54, but a rather more generous $3,154.00.

"How kind, " I thought. "They're compensating me for six months of angst."

Huh!

Another trip to the bank, and I was face-to-happy-face with the person who'd been helping me all these months. I quietly slid the bank statement across the counter to him, pointed to the entry and watched for his reaction.

It was almost worth all the hassles!

Sigh ... (again)

Even though I'm now $3,154.00 poorer, I did get paid the original $31.54 ... eventually. And when I notified the bank's customer complaints officer ... er ... sorry, I mean the Customer Relations Consultant about the latest snafu, I also got the $10 fee refunded. This person had been on the receiving end of some of my scintillating repartee over the past months as we investigated what I always referred to in correspondence as the Mysterious Case of the Vanishing Cheque, so I felt we knew each other well enough to let her in on the finale.

But wait! There's more ...

The bank, mindful of its hefty profit (yes, I must confess I did remind them of it in one of my many missives), did actually also send me a gift voucher to spend in a store near me. Or maybe it was my new best friend, the CRC, thanking me for the six months of entertainment at the office water cooler viz: "You'll never believe what's happened now!"

Who said banks have no heart?

Just in case you haven't come across the word "snafu" before and think I made it up, I want you to know it's a real word. Well, as real as any word that started life as an acronym can be.

This amazingly useful word originated during World War II. It can be used as a noun, an adjective or even a verb, (I told you it was useful), and it means:

–noun
1.
a badly confused or ridiculously muddled situation.

–adjective
2.
in disorder; out of control; chaotic.

–verb (used with object)
3.
to throw into disorder; muddle.

It started life a little less politely when US soldiers came up with it as a way of "conveying the common soldier's laconic acceptance of the disorder of war and the ineptitude of his superiors, which seldom fails to delight." (dictionary.com)

The words abbreviated were: Situation Normal All Fouled Up (or words to that effect).

After reading this entry in The Write Way, Terry Lavelle wrote, "It (snafu) has a sibling you may be aware of – or interested to know about – or not.

"The word is “fubar”, and it means "’Fouled’ (to use your own euphemism) Up Beyond All Recognition”. I wonder how many more interesting words these military chaps have coined – and if any of them don’t have the letter F somewhere in them."

If you're a military type and do know of any more such words, I'd love to hear about them!

Confused?

I can remember being very confused in my first year Latin class, when our teacher kept talking about Caesar, "razing a Gallic tribe's town to the ground."

"Silly woman," I thought, "you can't 'raise' something to the ground!"

But of course, you can certainly "raze" it.

I think it's part of the quirky charm of English that we have two words that sound the same but mean exactly the opposite, don't you?

Raze means 'to tear down so as to make flat with the ground,' and it comes from the Latin radere, rasus (to scrape, shave) which is related to another Latin word rodere (to gnaw) from which we get our loveable rodent!

Raise, on the other hand, means 'to move to a higher position; elevate; to increase in intensity, degree, strength, or pitch' (among many other meanings). It comes not from Latin, but from the Old Norse word reisa (to raise).

Good news!

I just discovered that Write101 has been named one of the 101 Best Websites for Writers for 2005!

Woohoo!

Writer's Digest chooses 101 sites every year, and has done so since the turn of the century (the 20th century that is) ... and since WD has been knocking around, helping writers, since 1920, I think that means they're good judges of what writers are looking for ...

That news made my day, and I hope it makes you feel happy to be associated with a quality site, too :)

The Surgeon

We recently spent a couple of weeks driving down to Melbourne to visit our daughter, and while we were away, we also caught up with friends we've known for over 30 years. (I've introduced you to these friends before: http://www.write101.com/W.Tips180.htm )

Talk ranged far and wide, as it does when you have a long history with people, but as we were leaving, my friend lent me a copy of a book she'd just finished, and what a great read it is! It tells the story of how the Oxford English Dictionary was compiled ... Now, don't be like that ... This really is a fascinating tale!

It was in 1857 that the Philological Society met in London and proposed to compile a New English Dictionary, but it wasn't until 1928 (70 years later!) that the 12 volumes of the dictionary were published. And when you consider what was involved, it's amazing they got it done as quickly as this!

Just think for a minute how difficult it is to define a word.

Funnily enough, it's relatively easy to define the hard words, and for some odd reason, the longer the word, the easier it is to define e.g. if I ask you what 'multitudinous' means, you could quickly rattle of an acceptable definition such as, 'it means too numerous to be counted; lots and lots of something,' and you'd be right.

Easy peasy.

But what if I ask you to define 'take.'

Have a look at the quick definitions at onelook: http://www.onelook.com/?w=take&ls=a
See the problem editor, James Murray, and his team had with the OED? Now imagine having to come up with definitions for over half a million words as they did!

Previous dictionaries had concentrated on hard words, but Murray wanted to 'fix' the language as it was used, so they decided to include all words. (By 'fix' they meant 'set it in time,' not 'mend.')

The other aspect involved in compiling this particular dictionary, and one that made it unique and contributed to the time it took to complete, was that it insisted on "gathering quotations from the published or otherwise recorded use of English, and employing them to illustrate the sense of every single word in the language ... Quotations could show exactly how a word has been employed over the centuries, how it has undergone subtle changes of shades of meaning, or spelling, or pronunciation, and, perhaps most important of all, how and more exactly when each word was slipped into the language in the first place." (The Surgeon of Crowthorne or http://www.write101.com/goodbooks.htm )

Just mull on that for a moment and consider the implications ... gathering quotations (Murray decided on a minimum of six for every word; more for words with many meanings) for every word in the language at the time.

Obviously this was not something a few mates could do over a beer in the back shed, so the Philological Society advertised throughout the realm for volunteers who would read the suggested books and compile lists of quotations for every word. And this is where the story gets interesting because one who answered the call was Dr W. C. Minor, the surgeon of Crowthorne.
Minor was an American Army surgeon who'd spent time patching up soldiers in the American Civil War, suffered a serious mental disorder, murdered a man in Lambeth Marsh while staying in England, and who worked on the dictionary while an inmate at Broadmoor Asylum in the village of Crowthorne.

Told you it was fascinating, didn't I?

I won't spoil the rest of the story for you, you'll just have to read it yourself, but this week's quiz has some interesting words from the book ... see how well you do!

If you want to see the current OED, here it is: http://www.oed.com/ or buy your very own copy here or here: http://www.write101.com/goodbooks.htm

The Most Beautiful Word in English

Asphodel

This is "any of various chiefly Mediterranean plants of the genera Asphodeline and Asphodelus having linear leaves and racemes of white or pink or yellow flowers" and Wilfred Funk listed it as the most beautiful word in the English language. (Yes, that Wilfred Funk of Funk and Wagnall's fame).

The others he fancied are as follows: fawn, dawn, chalice, anemone, tranquil, hush, golden, halcyon, camellia, bobolink, thrush, chimes, murmuring, lullaby, luminous, damask, cerulean, melody, marigold, jonquil, oriole, tendril, myrrh, mignonette, gossamer, alysseum, mist, oleander, amaryllis, rosemary

Lots of flowers in there, but not the one I happen to think is lovely, and that's carnation.

I've always liked the word as well as the flower and the smell! There's something wonderful about the spicy scent of old-fashioned carnations, don't you think?

What's your favourite word ... and why?

A Pun! A Pun? My Kingdom for a Pun!

We all love puns ... those wonderfully witty plays on words.

So let's see how active your little grey cells are at the moment ... I've posted a list of homonyms from Alan Cooper's wonderful list below and your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to come up with some puns using some or all of the words listed.

Easy peasy!

The prize is a copy of my modestly named quiz book: A Word for Everything. This is a collection of quizzes gleaned from my newsletters from the past 6 years.

To enter, just click the Add Comment link, enter your pun (don't forget your name and country).

IMPORTANT: make sure when setting up your account with blogger that you allow me to email you.

The List ... use some or all of these in your pun:

brewed - fermented
brood - family

carat - unit of weight for precious stones, equal to 200 milligrams
caret - proofreader's insertion mark
carrot - edible orange root
karat - one 24th part of otherwise pure gold


cereal - grains
serial - numbers in sequence


dual - two things
duel - a fight between two over honor


elicit -to draw out
illicit - unlawful


ewes - more than one female sheep
use - to apply
yews - more than one yew tree


might - possible
mite - tiny creature


place - a location
plaice - a flounder


taper - edge-shaped
tapir - hoglike, Malaysian mammal


verses - paragraphs
versus - against


whirred - made a whizzing or buzzing sound
word - a speech sound

(Homonyms and definitions from: http://www.cooper.com/alan/homonym_list.html)

OK ... off you go ...