Listen for a Change

This 30-second commercial, has been fascinating me for months.

I see it when I do my Duolingo Spanish lessons. I am such a nerd for this app. I do Duolingo every day, and while I am far, far, far from understanding Spanish, every once in a while, someone will say something and I will understand a word or two!

I am also a total sucker for this app’s tricks. Currently, I have186 crowns and 3,765 gems and I am on an 8-day unbroken streak. I feel a pang when I miss a day and mess up a streak but I don’t, though the app always tells me I could, spend a dollar or two to reinstate my streak.

But the commercial.

For Audible, the audio book company.

It’s just so well done.

I see it often because I am a cheapie and use the free Duolingo version, which requires me to watch ads. I always even agree to watch more ads to get more gems just because gems must be good, right?

Pretty slick that I am using Duolingo to learn Spanish and I get the commercial where a trucker is using Audible to learn Spanish.

But there’s this whole other story going on. The cute-as-a-button trucker is learning Spanish because he has a crush on an equally adorable waitress at a diner he apparently stops at a lot, and she on him. The commercial starts with his Audible book explaining that “para” is used "when you are talking about something for someone.” He goes into the diner and nervously asks her, in Spanish, for a table for dinner. She, beaming at him, says his attempt is “pretty good.” The ad finishes, as they walk away together, by asking, “Could Audible inspire you to start something new?”

Aww. Love it.

¿Hablas español?

Me, nope.

I have been using my Duolingo app for months and seem to be stuck at 24% fluent, which is, by the way, a very generous estimate of my abilities on the part of the phone app.

The dual-language or language-immersion schools, both public and private, in Houston are so cool.

Wrote about them recently -- which you can find here -- for The Buzz Magazines.

Another fun article. :)

Eggcorns

I always thought those funny turns of phrase people unwittingly say were malapropisms. But malapropisms are when someone, instead of using the word they meant, use another that sounds similar. Sometimes it can be funny but only because it doesn’t make sense. It’s like their spoken auto-correct went wrong.

What I’m thinking of are eggcorns. That’s when somebody uses a word or adjusts the word they use, not just because it sounds similar, but because it does make sense. The name “eggcorn” comes from a woman who thought that the word “acorn” was “eggcorn.” It made sense to her.

As Jan Freeman, who blogs about language, wrote six years ago when “eggcorn” was officially recognized as a word by the Oxford English Dictionary, “Because they make sense, eggcorns are interesting in a way that mere disfluencies and malapropisms are not: They show our minds at work on the language, reshaping an opaque phrase into something more plausible. They’re tiny linguistic treasures, pearls of imagination created by clothing an unfamiliar usage in a more recognizable costume.” She points out that eggcorns often go on to become an accepted part of our language. In other words, they help language evolve.

When Merriam Webster added eggcorn to its dictionary more recently, NPR and Time  published more examples and pointed out another nifty word: mondegreen, which is when people mishear song lyrics in ways that make goofy sense.

My favorite eggcorn was when my young daughter, referring to the kind of doctor women go to, called them “vaginacologists.”

She also came home from school one day excited to tell me all about the “Heimlich remover.”

My father, years ago, was talking about someone who had gone into a mental-health facility called Star Haven. He heard it as “Stark Raving.”

I love these.

Farty, An Adjective

What does “farty” mean to you?

Because I searched “farty define” and the correct definition is not on the internet!

All the definitions on Urban Dictionary are wrong.

Free Dictionary thinks when you call a person a fart, you are saying they are contemptible, annoying or irritating. No.

It is hard to put into words what “farty” means. But it isn’t a generic insult. It’s not even necessarily an insult. “Farty” is related to “old fart,” “arty farty” and “farting around.” It’s when someone moves slowly and deliberately doing something they don’t have to do at all.

I saw a post by someone who kept track of the books in their Little Free Library. Little Free Libraries are cool but you do not have to keep records of them.  Nevertheless, this person wrote, “I tracked in the very beginning, but then became overwhelmed by the amount of time that I was spending and stressing over it.” He or she bought software to do it.

Farty.

The other day, my husband watched, fascinated, this man – the poster child of fartiness –  use an old-fashioned scythe rather than a lawn mower to cut his grass. (I suspect he made the video because people in his real life had heard quite enough about scything.)

Farty.

And incidentally, yes, I’m being farty right now.

However, I leave you with a few fun facts I learned:  The word “fart” is ancient; people have always had a word for it. In fact, we used to have two words, “farting” for farts that make noise and “fisting,” for silent farts. “Fisting” even had some onomatopoeia going on. So much better than the ungainly “silent but deadly.” Unfortunately, the word now brings to mind the thing you make of your hand or the sex act. Oh, well.