>SUPERVERBOSE

This is something I sent out at work, and it got a good enough reception that I decided to post it here as well. We're in the midst of a massive project at CU, replacing the student system and a bunch of peripheral systems with Oracle PeopleSoft products. There is a lot of pressure, a lot of intensity... and a lot of status reporting. Some of that, especially as it travels up the chain, takes on a glossy, nonspecific quality. In talking about it with Laura, we were reminded of another place where that kind of status reporting happens...

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My ESPN-loving spouse started this train rolling, and it became unstoppable. Now I just have to write it all down. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:

Project Status Report, consisting entirely of clichés from sports interviews. (With substitutions, where appropriate.)

• It is what it is.
  
• There were factors beyond my control.
  
• We came to code, but I'm not gonna lie, it's been a tough match so far.
  
• This time around, the software problems just wanted it more.
  
• But I'm just gonna settle down, focus on doing my best. I can only control myself, you know what I mean? I'm gonna step up, and from this point forward, I'm just gonna focus on my game. I mean, work. That's what matters, sticking with my guys, doing my work. I'm gonna do everything I can to get this project to the Superbowl. I mean, completion.
  
• I'm a team player. It's not about me, it's about the whole team. We have to pull together.
  
• It's been tough out there, but we'll get our game back. It's still early in the project. We've got a lot of go-lives after this one, and we're just gonna take it one go-live at a time. We've still got a long timeline ahead of us. We're not circling any go-live on the calendar. Every go-live is important.
  
• Replacing student systems is a professional business, you've gotta understand that. Stuff that happens out there, it's not personal.
  
• It's easy to see the things that went wrong in this go-live, but there were things that went right. Anyway, this go-live is not over. We're gonna get back out there and give it our best, stay focused, and take it to the next level.
  
• We're gonna get back into the office next week, practice the things we need to practice, take another look at the PeopleBooks, and keep working hard.
  
• I'm only thinking about the next go-live on the schedule. It's not about momentum -- the project happens one go-live at a time.
  
• I'm just glad to be here. I want to help the project any way I can.
  

Okay, I'm glad that Women's Basketball magazine exists. Really, I am. But man oh man, does it ever have some bad writing. Check out this recent article opener:

As the 2009 NCAA women's basketball campaign gets under way, "change" is in the air.

Yep. That theme is not limited to aspirants who have been seeking residency at a house bathed in white at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, in Washington, D.C.

"A house bathed in white"? Such a poetic turn of phrase, but whatever do you mean? Oh, I see, you'll be qualifying that further. But wait, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave [That's "Ave" as in "Ave Maria", given that the abbreviation for avenue has a period at the end] in what city? You could mean any bathed-in-white-house that happens to have that address!

Or how about this one:

"You can't turn it on and turn it off. You have to play your best all the time."

That coaching cliché has been accepted as gospel truth since the first Olympics back in 776 BCE, if not the first mammoth hunt, and every player has heard it pronounced over and over again as though it is written in stone in some secret, sacred cave.

I love how the mammoth hunt part is presented as conjecture but the 776 BCE part comes across as straightforward fact. Thanks, time-traveling reporter! Oh, and I cheer for "secret, sacred cave", not just because of the wonderful sound of it, but because it's just the sort of place you'd expect to find something that's repeated over and over again to everyone.

This article also goes on to explain that the Detroit Shock have definitively disproven this eternal gospel truth. Talk about making history!

These articles remind me of nothing so much as some of the lamer student papers I've received. I'm just waiting for one to begin, "Webster's Dictionary defines 'winning' as..."

To top off my fortnight of word-related posts, I am channeling Rob Gordon and making a Top 5 list of my favorite words, either learned or relearned, from my recent trip through a small thesaurus. I love these words either for their sound, or simply for the fact that they exist.

5. niminy-piminy: Affectedly dainty or refined.

4. rejectamenta: Things thrown away or dismissed.
[I have got to incorporate this one into my repertoire. Though I suppose I should be careful, since it apparently has an excretory connotation -- not that most people hearing it would know that!]

3. absquatulate: To leave in a hurry; depart.

2. hemidemisemiquaver: In music notation, a sixty-fourth note.
[Every time I think of this one, I feel like shouting it out a la Zippy The Pinhead: "Hemidemisemiquaver! Hemidemisemiquaver! Hemidemisemiquaver!"]

And of course, the Number One favorite word has to be:
1. sesquipedalian: Having many syllables; given to the use of long words.
[I have to love something that so perfectly and beautifully enacts what it describes.]

Oh, and as I mentioned in the comics post, honorable mention goes to "defenestrate."

Welcome to the miscellany bin. This post holds all the words that I've learned from various places, ones whose categories couldn't gather enough critical mass to merit a post of their own.

( Words, words, words )

I don't tend to watch a lot of TV, but the shows I do watch, I tend to cover pretty thoroughly. There must be something in that habit that explains why almost all my TV vocabulary comes from two shows: M*A*S*H and The Simpsons. Turns out you can learn a fair amount from M*A*S*H and The Simpsons!

( Homer Sez: Increase Your Wordiness )

And finally, one of my favorite COMBO SCOREs of all time is spoken by one of my favorite Simpsons characters:

• arglebargle or foofaraw: Argument or disturbance over nothing
  [In "Last Exit To Springfield", in which Homer leads a power plant strike, newsman Kent Brockman asks: "Tonight, on Smartline, the power plant strike: arglebargle, or foofaraw?"]

I went through a long period of loving Dungeons And Dragons and other such RPGs, though I could never quite find the ideal like-minded, theatrical, story-and-character-loving group of peers for it, or so I imagined anyway. Maybe every group stays permanently out of character and treats the whole thing as a gold-grubbing exercise. (Darths And Droids is somewhat persuasive on this point.) Thank you, single-player CRPGs!

Anyway, I kept hearing that these games were going to make me lose the boundary between fantasy and reality, and send me wandering through underground steam tunnels, but instead I just learned some awesome new words.

( Can I cast Enhance Vocabulary on myself? )

Despite what Allan Bloom would have us believe, rock music can be a source of learning. Behold the many and variegated words (and phrases) I've learned from paying attention to popular music over the years.

( I Know There's A Word For This )

I do have a couple of COMBO SCORES to award as well:

• desultory philippic: A rambling, somewhat disappointing tirade
  [Simon and Garfunkel put "A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I Was Robert McNamara'd Into Submission)" on their Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme album and sent me to the dictionary twice!]
  
  
• scaramouche, scaramouche, can you do the fandango?: Clown from commedia dell'arte, can you perform a Portuguese folk dance?
  [Unlike many rock songs, which string meaningless lyrics together out of nonsense words, Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" strings meaningless lyrics together out of actual words.]

Today's installment focuses on some of the vocabulary I've gained from my lifelong enthusiasm for comics. I've been a Marvel comics reader since I was six years old, as well as an aficionado of newspaper strips, Mad magazine (in my tweens/teens, anyway), graphic novels, and these days, webcomics.

( Face front, effendi! )

Sometimes you get not just one brand new word but a whole string of them thrown at you. For those, I am awarding a COMBO SCORE, and I am pleased to give the first one to Avengers #93:

• Poltroon! Craven recreant!: Coward! Cowardly coward!
  [See, the Super-Skrull is fighting the Vision, and the Vision decides to flee rather than continue the fight. Because the Vision can pass through walls, the Super-Skrull can't give chase, and so he shouts this in frustration at the fleeing android. It's the kind of moment that makes me love those early Marvels.]

Also, I should give extra credit to Chris Claremont for teaching me a variety of foreign words. One of Claremont's enduring mannerisms was to make sure we were constantly reminded of each character's nationality by either transliterating that character's speech (e.g. "I dinna ken what ye mean, Dani!") or peppering it with foreign phrases, or, most often, both. Consequently, Japanese characters were always hissing that Wolverine was "gaijin" (foreigner), Colossus was constantly exclaiming "boizhe moi!" (my God!) and so on.

As revealed in the comments section of my original Words Infocom Taught Me post, we learn words from lots of unexpected places. Reading Eugene Ehrlich's Highly Selective Thesaurus has reminded me of many of them. Now that I've finished the book, I've decided to write a short series of blog posts, detailing words I've learned from various geeky sources. First in line is a fuller list of words from Infocom games, this time complete with definitions and comments explaining the context of each word, for those who don't know the Infocom canon by heart:

( >OPEN FROBOZZ MAGIC DICTIONARY )

It looks like Zork II wins the Infocom top vocabulary builder award!

One of Textfyre's marketing claims is going to be that interactive fiction teaches literacy: vocabulary, reading comprehension, that sort of thing. (It also teaches typing -- I have long claimed that Infocom taught me how to touch-type, because I was too absorbed in the game to look down at the keyboard.)

The vocabulary claim is certainly true for me. I always suspected that Infocom had a hidden agenda to broaden our vocabularies, because there were always a few words in their games that sent me to the dictionary. When I wrote my first game, I tried to inject a little tribute to this tradition, with a peninsular location I called "Chersonese." I was reminded of this recently as I thumbed through a thesaurus given to me as a gift.

In that spirit, I present an incomplete list of the words I learned from Infocom games:

EBCDIC (Zork I)
gnomon (Trinity)
menhir (Zork II)
oubliette (Spellbreaker)
reliquary (Beyond Zork)
reticule (Plundered Hearts)
skink (Trinity)
topiary (Zork II)

These are just the ones that turned up in a cursory search of my brain. Anybody else got others?

In the spirit of "blog = web log", I give you:

blush = blog crush

I'm not referring to a boy-girl, "let's go on dates" kind of crush, but rather the feeling you get after reading someone's blog who is just so so so cool and smart and funny and awesome that you really should be friends with them, except why would somebody as awesome as them be friends with a nobody like you?

My friend Trish has a blush on Derek of Penmachine. For a while there I had a little blush on Jefito.

Phrases found in three music reviews, all of which appeared on one page in the recent Onion:

two-year delay
self-proclaimed "white midget"
anti-stereotyping inveigling
girl-fight classic
a rival who layers on liquid-tan
Specials-style ska-pop
PlayStation-fueled beat-smithery
drop-the-bomb bass
love-it-or-hate-it affair
harp-laced fairy-folk
55-minute, five-cut album
stream-of-consciousness mood
Van Dyke Parks-supervised orchestral arrangements
belting, whispering, and soul-baring
too-difficult-for-radio wash of sound
radio-friendly past

That's leaving out standard designations like "hip-hop", "nu-metal", and "B-sides".

Via nothings

( Two Words: )