If ya don't use it, ya lose it!

The education text I am translating has revealed an curious development (if it can be so called): I had apparently not only reliably forgotten how to break words up into syllables, but in my mind, I had replaced the process of so doing—syllabification—with the word hyphenation (which has to do, inter alia, with dividing words at the end of a line).

I blame every word processing program since my first love—WordStar—for this. I might add I am, frankly, not overly weepy over this lapse, having suffered quite enough, thank you, during my years of pounding the keys of my late father's Smith-Corona manual typewriter.

So, finding myself in a position where I needed to divide a word into syllables, I picked up the English dictionary on my shelf (Shorter Oxford) and found it curious that entries were not displayed in syllabified form. Having rid myself last year of all the other English dictionaries that had been cluttering my shelves since forever, I turned to the Web and in short order found that Merriam-Webster entries are hyphenated.

Cheers...

Be still, my throbbing heart...

The subject of an email received recently from, of all organizations, Network Solutions reads:

You are eligible for a FREE email account!

Just... wow!

I know the word "free" is supposed to work magic in the marketing arena, but this just makes me so sad. I am truly underwhelmed.

* * *Semi-apropos of which, my first acquaintance with the subject line of this post was in the form of my mother's incantation of "be still, my beating heart" in similar contexts, where—as I naively understood it—she wished to sarcastically underscore how underwhelmed she was with something. As the years passed, however, I increasingly refused to wrap my mind around that, because what her words were pretty much equivalent to was "Let me die right now," and not "I'm all worked up. (Not!)"

And so, whenever I was bitten by the urge to express sarcasm in this way, I'd use "be still, my throbbing heart," as if to stress that I only wanted to calm down from all the (non-)excitement, and not actually expire completely.

And then it occurs to me, as I'm writing this post, that the conventional version—often attributed to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, but apparently first cited in something called Zelmane, by William Mountfort, from 1705—is perfectly usable as sarcasm as well, in the sense of "Okay, my life is fulfilled. I can die now!" In fact, just thinking of it in that manner brought to mind some cartoon snippets I recall from my childhood, in which some animated character would say something like "Oh, now I've seen everything!" and thereupon pull a cartoon gun out of thin air and blow his or her brains out (see, for example, here).

Gee, it's weird where a little mental freewheeling will take you.



Cheers...

Estate sale bargain...

While driving around, Galina and I saw a sign for a Thursday–Friday estate sale, and decided to stop by, despite the fact that quite often, such sales are "professionally" arranged by a third party, which must account for the rather impressive prices one finds on what's being sold.

I'm not sure just what the difference was, but I'm assuming that all the junk in the garage that was reasonably priced was the stuff the professional organizers could not be bothered with. I found a Decosonic 828 food sealer in the pile, and when I asked if it worked or not, was told there was no outlet in the garage where we could test it, but if I wanted to take the item "as-is," I could have it for half price, which turned out to be a dollar.

So I bought the thing, and it made all the right noises and the wire sealing element appeared to work, but I could not find any apparent source for the manufacturer's bags (not even on eBay). Improvising, I got a fairly reasonably seal using a Ziploc freezer bag (although it seems to be about as good a seal as I get using my "immerse the bag in water" technique), so maybe if I get a suitable bag, I might get a better seal.

But for $1, it seems not that bad a deal.