Darrenism-a-Day 2008

Darrenisms abound. Perhaps it is because I’ve fallen behind on my blog, or maybe Darren is making them deliberately in an attempt to reclaim the #1 ranking (thanks to a link in a DC art forum, Darrenisms have fallen behind my Artomatic post), but I think the reason for the recent Darrenism surge is simple: I’ve hired a new assistant to track Darrenisms. Darren thinks of Sara as his girlfriend but really that is her secondary role, her primary responsibility is to inform me of any new Darrenisms that slip out. I believe she has caught the last nine of them, so clearly we have the right woman for the job(s).

As a result of this new arrangement (and my tardiness in posting as Sara reported them) we can now celebrate this week with the inaugural Darrenism-a-Day campaign! These Darrenisms run the gamut from the original word-mash Darrenism (e.g. Astrocity) to celebrity Darrenisms, mixed idiom Darrenisms, and we’ll even be introducing slang Darrenisms.

To start things off we’ll show that Darren doesn’t limit his Darrenisms to the English language and will happily skewer some Hawai’ian words as well… each day’s Darrenism can be found at the bottom of the Darrenism archive (to ensure that it regains the lead from the Artomatic post!)

Philolanthropy?

As mentioned previously, I’m going through a phase of minor addiction to online edutainment. A few days ago I thought I might be able to manage my habit. I was coming to terms with losing my first Scrabulous game, and having finally beaten level 12 of the World Traveler’s quiz, I was ready to retire with my newfound knowledge that Vladivostok, Russia is just above North Korea and that somehow Norway inexplicably owns an island midway between South Africa and Antarctica called Bouvet. But then my little pusher, I mean sister, had to go ahead and ruin everything by offering me some of this great stuff she found at www.freerice.com... and I was hooked all over again.

FreeRice is essentially an adaptive vocabulary quiz. Each time you get a word right the next one is theoretically harder. Get one wrong and it gets easier. Nothing too exciting… unless you are a mild word nerd (philologist) like me with fond memories of the now-renamed “verbal” section of the SAT. But what makes FreeRice unique (to me at least) is the philanthropy angle. For every word you get right, the proprietors of FreeRice donate 20 grains of rice to the UN’s World Food Programme. Riiiiiggggttttt. But apparently it is legitimate. Now admittedly it isn’t the most efficient way to donate time or money to a charitable cause, and I think my circle of friends would contract dramatically if I started throwing out some of the higher level words in conversation, but that doesn’t stop me from feeling just a bit vogie each time I get a word right. I figure I’ve donated some food, learned a new word that could help in Scrabulous someday, and gotten one step closer to reaching vocab level 50 (level 48 so far – yeah it keeps track of that too. Did I mention it taps into my competitive vein?). And I’ll admit that the philologist in me enjoys learning a word that we’ve heard through our lives but probably had no idea what it meant, like kith (friends, as in kith and kin). Plus, while my friends may not speak these words, they do write them, like George's satori (enlightenment) and Dagny's affianced (betrothed)…

Facebook Free-Fall

I blame Chris. I didn't know why exactly, but I knew I didn't want anything to do with MySpace or Facebook. I was fairly proud that not only did I not have an account with either of them, I had never actually been to anyone's page on either site (the fact that MySpace is blocked at work probably made that easier). Then I traveled around West Africa this summer and I took my first step down the slippery slope which seems to have tossed me right off a cliff (I just finished watching the 2006 season of Everest on the Discovery Channel so that's the imagery I have in my head right now). I noticed that whenever we stopped at an internet cafe and I checked my email or uploaded photos, Chris seemed to be updating something on Facebook. When I got home I wanted to know how my malaria-stricken friend was faring as he made a solo trek through Sierra Leone, Liberia and Cote D'Ivore (did I mention he's hard core). Having seen him in operation I knew the best place to find out wasn't his blog... but on his Facebook profile!

The trouble (or blessing, if you worry about stalkers) with Facebook is that in order to view someone's profile you have to have a profile of your own (and get them to accept you as a friend). Despite my reservations I relented and created a blank profile so I could keep up with him. Oh I took precautions. I was very clear in my status message and in a note that I wasn't actually planning to use Facebook and asked everyone to please not "friend" me. And yet I suddenly got a flood of friend requests. It turns out the other trouble with Facebook is that no one can see your status or your notes without being your friend in the first place. Damn catch-22. I ignored the requests for a while (several weeks actually) but as they piled up I figured there was no harm in simply accepting them since then my friends would see my status and my note and realize I had no intention of being sucked into the Facebook world. Wrong again. Soon I was getting emails about people writing on my wall, asking me to compare movie tastes, and even challenging me to a game of something called Scrabulous. Again I resisted. For weeks.

And then one day I was having lunch with the Scrabulous challenger who berated me for not accepting her request to play. Apparently when you challenge someone you actually start the game and she'd started with a high scoring word and was excited to see if I could catch up. The next day I accepted the challenge. And ever since I've been in Facebook free-fall over that 10,000 foot cliff without the sherpa's safety line.

See Scrabulous is fantastic. It's like Scrabble... but so much better. I've always had a thing for words... and games... and yet ironically while I enjoy an occasional game of Scrabble I haven't played it considerably more than any other board game growing up (perhaps I am still bummed about being denied the word "revoided" in a travel Scrabble game on my trip to the UK in 2000 - here let me use it in a sentence for you: "The cashier scanned my Corn Flakes twice, so she voided one of the transactions... but it failed to clear the charges so she called over her manager... who revoided it". See perfectly valid! But I digress...). So why is Scrabulous better than Scrabble? Well for one thing you essentially have an unlimited amount of time to plot your perfect move. But what really does it for me is the built in dictionary lookup that is available in "regular" games. I can check all sorts of weird combinations of my letters and magically stumble across the perfect word which I never even knew existed! There is just something exciting about typing in an endless combination of letters that you really need (ok so "need" is relative) to form a valid word and suddenly having the valid word appear in glorious green print. Instead of only playing safe words that you know everyone will agree on (like revoided :-p) I can discover that "aa" is a word (a type of lava flow - which I somehow knew from Geology classes), as is "oe", and that "qaid" is a useful "q" word that doesn't contain a "u". Other words I have discovered from Scrabulous (I'll update this list over time... unless I manage to shake this addiction)

• Grister - Someone who grinds things, I believe. This was also my first ever "Bingo" (80 points for that word) where I used all 7 of my tiles (revoided would have been my first which is why I fought so hard for it).
  

• Torii - A word I didn't use in the game but found while trying different letter combos. This was probably my favorite because a couple days later I was looking through Emily's blog about her trip to Asia and she had a picture of a Torii (the Shinto gate shown in her picture)
  
  
• Vogie - An obscure Scottish word used in the 18th and 19th century which means... happy! You can never have too many words for happy, so I am bringing vogie back (and I'm not the only one)
  
  
• Ut - A Middle English precursor to "do" (as in do re mi - the song certainly makes more sense now that they changed it to do). But more importantly it allowed me to play my second bingo "entreat" on the only spot on the board where it could fit.
  
  
• Askoi - The plural of Askos, a modern term for a form of ancient greek pottery used to pour liquids.
  
  
• Oxyphenbutazone - Some molecule that is far more famous as the highest scoring single play word in American Scrabble. No I did not type that in randomly. I saw it on the Scrabulous high score board and did some investigating.
  
  
• Inchers - My highest scoring bingo thus far (for 113 points), doesn't really seem like a word at all until you put a number in front of it, e.g. 9-inchers.
  
  
• Dildoes - Ahem. Scrabble word lists aren't censored, so if you've got the letters... Anyway, aside from the good laugh we got out of this bingo—which incidentally played off of the word "Fakes"—we learned that this word can be spelled as either dildos or dildoes (though blogger thinks they are both misspelled, I guess they do censor). Who knew?
  

I might have been safe if Scrabulous was the end of it, after all I can only play as fast as my opponent is willing to so I should be able to squeeze some sort of a life in between... but today... today Alexandra doomed, er challenged me to the Traveler's IQ Quiz. This was even more fun than Scrabulous, and I could play as much as I want (yes there is a Scrabulous mode where you play against the computer but I'm not stupid enough to try that... I hope). This is a geography quiz where you have a map of the world and they throw out cities (or historic landmarks/battles etc.) and you click as close as you can to their location on the map in under 10 seconds. They plant a flag where you click and then toss in another flag at the actual location and award you points based on how many kilometers you were off (I'm proud to say my closest guess so far was 20KM off... on the location of Fenway Park!). The questions get harder for each of the 12 rounds and you have to score enough each round to advance. All three tries today I missed out on getting the 55,000 in round 11 to make it to the 12th and final round (my second try I missed 55,000 by 197 points!). And now I am off to try one more time before bed to reach round 12...

Somebody please set up an intervention...

Darrenisms

Darren is hilarious. Oftentimes this is intentional on his part. Sometimes it isn't. Darrenisms are one of those cases where he is unintentionally hilarious. Several years ago I began documenting Darrenisms (at his request - I'm not just a mean friend). Since then they've lived lonelyly in a text document on my computer (yes the Dell demonspawn). In honor of a brand new Darrenism today we agreed to liberate Darrenisms from obscurity and share them with the world to document them for... prosperity.

Update: There is some debate about what exactly qualifies as a Darrenism. In the broadest sense it is just when Darren says something unintentionally funny, usually consisting of mismatching a word/phrase/name. We generally skip ones where he just misspoke and is able to correct himself (unless we find it particularly funny). Obviously we all do this (e.g. for years I thought celibate relationships were plutonic rather than platonic), it's just that Darren is a good enough sport to have us document them. Thanks Darren.

• 6/1/04 After watching Terminator 3, Darren referred to the character Sarah Connor as Sarah Day O'Conner. Well neither is a big advocate of gun control...

• 6/6/04 Inadvertently invented the word Astrocity (Atrocity and Monstrosity combined) - Referring to the Satellite Dish on our neighbors house*
  

• 7/25/04 In Cognito instead of Incommunicado regarding my vacation to California and lack of communication

• 9/3/04 Darren became disenfranchised (rather than disenchanted) with eating Salmon as a result of working at the Four Seasons. This discussed over a game of Mexican Train at Darren's parents following a Salmon dinner

• 10/25/04 Darren asked me for neoprene to sooth his blister, then realized he wanted the Neosporin

• 11/20/04 Darren discussed religious prosecution instead of persecution

• 11/20/04 Darren talked about how his mom was all for asimulation instead of asimilation

• 9/13/07 Darren talked about taking a picture of his bike for prosperity instead of posterity
  
  
• 10/7/07 On the car ride back from skydiving, Darren explained that he didn't want to bring up his "nesting" theory of women because the last time he mentioned it the girls got all in a fizzy over it. Fit and tizzy? Or do we believe Darren's justification that it's like you know "fizzy", all excited and bubbling over...

• 10/21/07 In what may become a new subcategory of Darrenisms - the celebrity Darrenism (see Sarah Day O'Connor above) - Darren asked when Schillinger was pitching again for the Red Sox. Not too funny unless you know that Darren is confusing Sox pitcher Curt Schilling with Vern Schillinger who is the head of the Aryan brotherhood gang on Oz. It's a reasonable mistake I suppose, they are both Republicans...
  

• 10/24/07 Baseball tends to bring out Darrenisms. Two classic examples both resurfaced during the Sox World Series Game 1 victory. First, Darren said if they hadn't held up Varitek at 3rd the Red Sox would have scored 4 points in the first. He later commented how he'd seen a news bit on Pedroia and how the fan said he was voting for Pedroia (Darren somehow tried to justify this by saying it was a player instead of a team... as if you vote for a player and root for a team). While these technically aren't Darrenisms in the sense that they aren't difficult words that have been swapped or combined, he's substituted those terms on a number of occasions so we are recording them... for prosperity.
  
  
• 11/4/07 Over dinner at Aladdin’s, Darren invents the word Keginator… which as far as we can tell has the exact same definition as a Kegerator (unless the Terminator will be returning in keg-like form in the Sandra Day O’Connor Chronicles). Of course to be fair to Darren, he isn’t the first person to make this mistake.
  
  
• 11/16/07 Darren described how he'd had an alteration made to a biking jacket, but the resulting fix closed up the back pocket. This was a problem because the jacket was designed to fold into that pocket in order to form a nice little snatchel to carry it around. Perhaps it was a satchel that snaps shut (he said it was). Vulgarities aside, perhaps he's coined a new term for a snapping satchel. As a bonus, when the zipper eventually broke on the jacket, he returned it to the bike store (forgetting about the alteration in the back).
  
  
• 11/30/07 While discussing how we would embed the Festivus pole in the ground, Darren kept referring to rubar. Rhubarb, or rebar? Sure they both go in the ground but I envision the Festivus pole toppling over as the rabbits in our yard munch away the rhubarb support. Still it might be appropriate as a great "feat of strength" for some rhubarb stalks to hold up a pole...
  
  
• 12/29/07 As the Giants led the undefeated Patriots at halftime, Darren commented that the team beating the Pats had lost at home to the Redskins earlier in the season. "Well, that's the polarity of the NFL...". I gave him a chance to catch himself. He went with "Well, that's the plurality of the NFL...". The Giants wound up losing, so maybe there isn't that much parity in the NFL anyway.
  
  

• 2/20/08 When we attempted to capture a photo of the moon watchers, and Mary cringed from yet another camera flash, Darren asked “Mary, why are you so dramatized?”. While she may have been a bit dramatic in appearing traumatized by the flash, I can confirm that she wasn’t permanently dramatized.

• 4/3/08 Sara explains that she used to be good at tennis, but hasn't played in a while, so Darren remarks that she "quit tennis cold cut". Turkey is a type of cold cut (and no one seems to agree on what cold turkey means anyway), but most importantly... Sara, the first step is to admit that you have a tennis addiction.
  
  

• 4/28/2008 While I was away in Russia, I delegated Darrenism monitoring to Sara. She handled the tremendous responsibility admirably and recorded two new instances. While the context of the first one is unclear, Darren and Sara agree that for some reason he used the word “enjoyful”. The second is more fully documented since she caught it in his blog…

  Darren admits he wasn’t excited about the Greenbrier race… and that his only constellation was that MattyD would be suffering along with him. He’s since fixed the post , but highlighted the correction… for prosperity.

• 6/7/2008 Sara must be spending more time with Darren than I am lately because I keep hearing about Darrenisms second-hand from her. The latest, from his bike weekend at Big Bear, was his thank you to a teammate who had a spare part (or tool?) he needed. "You're a Lifesend" Apparently Darren was so thankful that neither Lifesaver nor Godsend sufficiently captured his gratitude.

Darrenism-a-Day 2008

• Day 1 - 6/21/2008 At our friend Colleen's post-wedding brunch, Darren began describing an upcoming show that we have tickets for at Wolf Trap. The show is called Face of America: Hawai'i Revisited. It's a celebration of Hawai'i and will include traditional Hawai'ian music and dance. It'll probably feel like the luau I went to on Maui and I am sure there will be Hula dancing. But really why use so many words to describe all of that when you can be much more succinct and describe it like Darren did... we're going to see a Hulau.
  
  
• Day 2 - 6/22/2008 Sara complements the cheese cutting board that Darren bought his mom for Christmas. "Where did you find that Darren?"... "Cracker Barrel". Frankly I'm with Darren on this one, it's much more logical that something cheese related would come from a store called Cracker Barrel than one called Crate and Barrel. Look, their logo is even cheese-colored!
  
  
• Day 3 - 6/29/2008 While playing tennis with Sara (who has yet to kick her tennis addiction cold cut), Darren began discussing a new kid's tennis racquet, which is both cheaper and better than his current racquet. It is so good that it is endorsed by sisters Vanessa and Serena Williams. Who knew Vanessa was such a tennis fanatic (or that they were long lost sisters!). Actually the entertainer has had some name conflict issues, it's just generally not with Venus.
  
  
• Day 4 - 6/29/2008 After working up an appetite playing with a non-Vanessa-Williams-endorsed racquet, Sara and Darren headed to Panera for lunch where Sara's new favorite Darrenism was born: Darren declared "I'll try one of those sandwiches on... Poonani bread". Yep, I officially won't ever be able to look at a Panini the same way again. Ever. We literally had to stop and get out of the car at Assateague to take a photo of the sign: "Need lunch for the beach? Panini's"
  
  
• Day 5 -7/7/2008 The Tour de France is underway and in addition to watching each stage on Tivo, Darren spends a good deal of time reading the cycling news sites. He particularly enjoys reading the online updates from the riders themselves and told Sara that there are quite a few more of these now because it is so much easier for the riders to post them using their BlueBerrys. Although I imagine some may be using the new version of Apricot's iPhone.
  
  
• Day 6 - 6/28/2008 Going out of order a bit here, to bring up an idiom Darrenism that he made at Front Page. The waiter rattled off the beers on tap, and Darren ordered... a gin and tonic stating that "none of those beers struck my boat". That answer did not float the waiter's fancy (and don't they usually strike boats with Champagne?)
  
  
• Day 7 - 7/13/2008 While Darren and Sara were discussing nipples (don't ask), Darren declared that male nipples are not as androgynous as female nipples. The erogenous mixup is even more enjoyful since nipples are androgynous traits.

Thanks to Darren and Sara for making this week o' Darrenisms possible, hopefully you enjoyed them (and whether you did or not, enough of you at least read them to put Darrenisms back on top as the most visited post here!)

Back to our irregularly scheduled Darrenisms

• 8/12/2008 While watching the Olympic gymnasts, we got a new celebrity Darrenism when he reflected back on the heroic vault of Kerri Struthers. I guess they do both have distinctive voices... (on several occasions he also referred to breaststroker Brendan Hansen as Brendan Fraser. Sports stars definitely seem to confuse Darren the most... sports stars and Supreme Court justices).
  
  
• 8/15/2008 On our 9 hour road trip to Ohio we played the noun game. An old road trip game where you simply go around the car stating a (non-proper) noun that starts with the designated letter until someone accidentally repeats or can't think of one. The letter was "A". We'd gone around a few times throwing out words such as "Apple, Aardvark, Ant, Anteater". Darren's next word was... Irrigation, though he did try to pronounce it "Airrigation".
  

*My current favorite

Check back for all the Darrenisms yet to be born...

"Most Redundant Post Ever"

A few months back someone posted on Slashdot that a previous statement was "the most redundant sentence ever". The next post correctly corrected them and pointed to the Buffalo article on Wikipedia. Clearly the original post wasn't as redundant as the grammatically correct sentence Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. Or perhaps a bit more understandably Buffalo bison [that] Buffalo bison bully bully Buffalo bison. Apparently this example will show up in a book I just borrowed to read, Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. In hindsight the sentence may not have been redundant at all, but rather just repetitive.