July 6: Lake Wobegon Day

Today is the anniversary of the first broadcast of the radio show the Prairie Home Companion. The show was conceived by Garrison Keillor, who has hosted the variety show modeled after the Grand Ole Opry since its premier in 1974. Today’s Keillor’s show is broadcast over 580 public radio stations and has an audience of over 4 million.

In addition to music and commercials for imaginary products, each week’s show features a monologue by Keillor about his mythical hometown Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. Each monologue begins the same: “It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon,” but the stories that Keillor tells about the colorful Lake Wobegon residents are always different. Keillor’s colorful descriptions, humor, and realistic insights into the human condition bring his characters to life and bring listeners back each week.

In addition to using the same opening, Keillor also uses a stock concluding line each week for his monologue: “That’s the news for Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above-average.”

It’s the last part of Keillor’s concluding line, “all the children are above-average,” that has captured the imagination of sociologists who have adopted Keillor's fictional town in what they call the Lake Wobegon Effect. The Lake Wobegon Effect is the tendency for groups of people to overestimate their achievements and competence in relation to other groups.

The term entered the lexicon in 1987 when Dr. John Cannel published a study that revealed that every state claimed that their students’ test scores where above the national average. This humorous and absurd finding became publicized as the Lake Wobegon Effect. The fictional town in Minnesota became a metaphor of a state-wide phenomenon.

Often we think of metaphor as the exclusive tool of poets. The fact is, however, every good communicator understands and uses metaphor to connect the known to the unknown. Scientists, business people, psychologists, sociologists, and doctors all turn to metaphor to communicate their ideas, theories, and discoveries.

This is done so frequently that there is an entire book of these metaphors called The Babinski Reflex. The author, Phillip Goldberg, calls them metaffects:

“. . . a recognized effect, law, or principle whose official meaning can be transferred to another context. The Babinski Reflex, for example, is a term describing an automatic response in the foot of an infant, thought to be a vestige of our primate ancestry. As such, it resonates metaphorically with certain forms of adult behavior that might be considered primitive or infantile . . . .” (1).

Today’s Challenge: Metaphors Be With You
See if you can match each Effect below with its correct definition from Phillip Goldberg’s book, The Babinski Reflex.

Cocktail Party Effect
Eureka Effect
Butterfly Effect
The False Consensus Effect
Hawthorne Effect
Boomerang Effect
Bandwagon Effect
Barnum Effect

1. The effect of workers becoming more productive after being signaled out or made to feel that they are special.

2. The phenomenon in which attempts to change attitudes in a particular direction produce shifts in the direction opposite that intended.

3. The tendency of some people to withhold their opinions until they know the majority’s view, at which time they merrily announce that they feel exactly the way almost everyone else does.

4. The idea that small changes can become magnified over the course of a subsequent chain of events and culminate in a major, large-scale happening.

5. The tendency of people to accept as accurate, for them personally, a generalized statement (especially a flattering one) that might in fact characterize just about anyone.

6. The rejection of unwanted messages by the senses in favor of more pertinent or interesting information.

7. The tendency of a solution of a problem to come when not directly involved in trying to solve it.

8. The tendency for people to believe that their own desires, beliefs, and even personal problems are shared by the majority (1).


Quote of the Day: Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people. –Garrison Keillor

Answers: 1. Hawthorne Effect 2. Boomerang Effect 3. Bandwagon Effect 4. Butterfly Effect5. Barnum Effect 6. Cocktail Party Effect 7. Eureka Effect 8. False Consensus Effect

1 - Goldberg, Phillip. The Babinski Reflex: and 70 Other Useful and Amusing Metaphors from Science, Psychology, Business, Sports ... and Everyday Life. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc., 1990.

June 2: D-Day Crossword Puzzle Day

Today is the anniversary of the publication of a crossword puzzle that might have altered the outcome of World War II. In the spring of 1944 plans were being drawn up for the Allied invasion of France. This highly secretive plan was dubbed Operation Overlord by Winston Churchill and the invasion was set for June 5, 1944 by the commander of the operation General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The element of surprise was vital for the success of the invasion, but in May of 1944, British intelligence officers discovered that one of the Daily Telegraph’s crossword puzzles contained two important code names for the beaches of Normandy: Utah and Omaha.

The military became even more concerned when on June 2, 1944, three days before the planned invasion, a crossword puzzle appeared with the name Overlord and Neptune – Neptune was the name of the secret naval operations plan. The author of the puzzle, a schoolmaster by the name of Leonard Dawe, was arrested and questioned. Investigators where unable, however, to determine any explanation, besides coincidence, for the presence of the words in the puzzle.

Forty years after D-Day the mystery was finally solved when National Geographic discovered that one of Leonard Dawe’s pupils had been eavesdropping on the conversations of Allied soldiers and had noted the words, not for malicious reasons, but simply because he thought the words were odd enough to work well in his teacher’s crossword puzzles (1).

Today’s Challenge: Not Quite Crosswords
Given a clue and the number of letters, try to determine the words in the ten problems below. For example: "Presidential Plant – 4 letters" would be Bush; "Presidential Car – 4 letters" would be Ford.

1. French Dressing - 5 letters

2. Musical Bikini – 7 letters

3. Crazy Bunch – 7 letters

4. "I found a palindrome!" – 3 letters

5. Silent Staple – 9 letters

6. Storm or Drain – 5 letters

7. Fruity Gossip – 9 letters

8. Peanut’s Gallery – 6 letters

9. King’s Peril – 9 letters

10. Month that Inspires Awe – 6 letters

Quote of the Day: Coincidences are spiritual puns. - G. K. Chesterton

Answers: 1. beret 2. G-string 3. bananas 4. aha 5. paperclip 6. brain 7. grapevine 8. comics 9. checkmate 19. August

1 – National Geographic http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0206/feature1/

May 21: Hemingway Day

Today is the birthday of Ernest Hemingway, born in Illinois in 1899.

He began his writing career as a journalist when he was 17, working as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star. When America entered World War I, he tried to enlist but was rejected on the basis of a medical condition. He traveled to Europe anyway and became an ambulance driver for the Italian Army. He later wrote one his best known novels A Farewell to Arms (1929) based on his experiences in the war.

After World War I, he returned to the states, but soon was back in Europe as a journalist for the Toronto Star. Living in Paris, he met other expatriate American writers such as Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald who encouraged him to write fiction. He took their advice, writing about his experiences as an American living in Europe in The Sun Also Rises (1926). He traveled to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s; this was the setting of his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). He won the Pulitzer Prize for his short novel The Old Man and the Sea in 1953, and the next year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Hemingway committed suicide on July 2, 1961.

Hemingway's characters reflected his own experiences and personality. War, adventure, drinking, bull-fights, big game hunting and fishing were his favorite topics, and, when he wasn't writing, these were his own favorite activities.

Hemingway's writing style is known for its clarity, simplicity, and terseness. His characters' dialogue is straightforward and honest, except for the occasional understatement. In talking about writing, Hemingway said: "All you have to do is write one true sentence, a true simple declarative sentence" (1, 2)

Today's Challenge: Hemingway On Writing

Reading quotes by Hemingway is like attending a master course on writing. Read the 8 quotes below about writing. Notice not just what Hemingway says, but also how he says it. Is he practicing what he preaches? What do you notice about his word choice and the structure of his sentences? Finally, which quote do you like the best and why?

1. Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

2. All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

3. Try and write straight English; never using slang except in dialogue and then only when unavoidable. Because all slang goes sour in a short time. I only use swear words, for example, that have lasted at least a thousand years . . . .

3. The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shock-proof shit-detector.

4. It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg Address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.

5. All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

6. I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

7. If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.

8. All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Quote of the Day: All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. --Ernest Hemingway

1 - "Ernest Hemingway." The Nobel Prize in Literature 1954. Nobelprize.org
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1954/hemingway-bio.html

2 - Adler, Mortimer. "Biographical Note on Ernest Hemingway" from Great Books of the Western World. Edition 60: Imaginative Literature: Selections from the Twentieth Century. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1996.

May 14: Native American Words Day

Today is the anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, the first English speaking settlement in the New World. Three ships arrived on May 14, 1607 at a wooded island island in the James River. Life was not easy for these English settlers, and they almost succumbed to the same fate as an earlier group of settlers at Roanoke. That group had landed off the coast of North Carolina in 1584 and by 1590 had vanished without a trace. The settlers at Jamestown were more lucky; in 1610 Lord De La Warr (Delaware) arrived in time to resupply the 35 remaining colonists (1, 2).

The natives peoples of what is now the United States spoke hundreds of different languages, and although English has never been declared the official language of the United States, it certainly has supplanted all native languages. There are, however, a few words from the native peoples that were adopted into English; most of these were adopted in the period of early colonization by settlers like those at Jamestown. For the most part these words are from the Algonquian dialects and reflect Indian names for plants and animals or unique artifacts and social practices of Indian life.

The word moose is one example to describe the very large northern deer. Another example is succotash which originates from the Algonquian word meaning 'cooked corn kernels.'

Today's Challenge: New World Words
Below are examples of native words in their original spellings. See if you can detect the modern English equivalents of these words.

1. isquoutersquash
2. ocheck
3. arathkon
4. segakw
5. pakan
6. pawcohiccora
7. aposum
8. mohkussin (3)

Quote of the Day: Power is sweet, it is a drug, the desire for which increases with habit. --Bertrand Russell

Answers: 1. squash 2. woodchuck 3. Raccoon 4. skunk 5. pecan 6. hickory 7. opossum 8. moccasin

1 - McCrum, Robert, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil. The Story of English. New York: Penguin Books, 1987.

2 - Flavell, Linda and Roger. The Chronology of Words and Phrases. London: Kyle Cathie Limited, 1999.

3 - Success with Words: A Guide to the American Language (Reader's Digest). Pleasantville: The Reader's Digest Association, Inc., 1983.

May 13: "Brand" New Words Day

Today is the anniversary of a registered trade mark that gave the world an alternative to zippers and buttons: Velcro.

One man’s annoyance can be another man’s eureka. When Swiss inventor George de Mestral returned with his dog from a walk, he noticed that he and his dog were covered with cockleburrs. Instead of being annoyed, he studied the burrs under a microscope where he noted their hook-like shape.

Engineering artificial fasteners that replicated the ones he found in nature took a few years, but Mestral was eventually successful in creating his easy to use hook and loop fastener. He registered his invention in 1958. For the name of his product, he blended two French terms: "vel" from velvet and "cro" from crochet (little hook).

Today the Velcro Industries is a successful international company, but like other successful companies, Velcro is challenged by a paradox: they want people to use their trademarked name as much as possible to promote their product; however, because the name is used so often and the product is so successful and so ubiquitous, the name of the product becomes a generic, non-capitalized word. As a result, companies like Velcro are in a constant battle to protect their trademark and in turn their bottom line. The lines are blurred even more when a word, like Google, becomes used so often that it becomes more than just a noun. No doubt the legal department at Google and the neologism department at the American Heritage Dictionary are both busy tracing the growth and development of this word.

The following statement from the Velcro website is an example of the kinds of reminders and warnings that companies put out to protect their brand names:

The goodwill and integrity which are reflective of the Velcro companies are ingrained in the VELCRO® trademark. This makes the trademark a very valuable asset to the company and to our customers who purchase the VELCRO® brand fasteners.

Many terms that we all use frequently in our everyday language were once trademarks …. All of these terms lost their distinction as trademarks because their owners allowed them to be misused by the public. That's why the Velcro companies pay close attention to how the VELCRO® trademark is used.

As stated by the Velcro website, there are several brand names that were once registered trademarks, but today they have lost their capital letter and entered the dictionary and the English lexicon as generic terms, such as cellophane, excalator, and the yo-yo.

Today's Challenge: The Law and the Language
See if you can identify which of the words below are registered trademarks and which are generic trademarks. All of the words below are from Success with Words: A Guide to the American Language, and all are capitalized to make your choice a little harder.

1. Q-Tips
2. Thermos
3. Nylon
4. Vaseline
5. Xerox
6. Zipper
7. Raisin Bran
8. Kool-Aid
9. Formica
10. Chap Stick (1)

Quote of the Day: There is nothing either good nor bad but thinking makes it so. William Shakespeare.

Answers: The generic terms are: 2. thermos 3. nylon 6. zipper 7. raisin bran

1 - Success with Words: A Guide to the American Language (Reader's Digest). Pleasantville: The Reader's Digest Association, Inc., 1983.

May 12: Limerick Day

The English language is a maze

You can get lost in it for days

Exploring the mother tongue

Can be lots of fun

So, read today's post on Word Daze

Today is the birthday of Edward Lear, born in 1812 in London, England. Before he was a poet, he was a painter, illustrating birds for such noteworthy clients as Charles Darwin.

In 1832, while on an assignment to paint animals in the Earl of Darby's private zoo, Lear began composing humorous verse for the Earl's grandchildren. He put his poems together in his Book of Nonsense, published in 1846.

Lear is remembered for his famous poem "The Owl and the Pussycat," but his most noteworthy contribution to the literary world is the limerick.

Here are some limericks from Book of Nonsense.

1.
There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, "It is just as I feared!--
Two Owls and a Hen,
Four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!"

10.
There was an Old Man in a tree,
Who was horribly bored by a Bee;
When they said, "Does it buzz?"
He replied, "Yes, it does! "
It's a regular brute of a Bee!"

12.
There was a Young Lady whose chin,
Resembled the point of a pin:
So she had it made sharp,
And purchased a harp,
And played several tunes with her chin.

The limerick is a universally popular verse form, popular with children as well as adults. Besides the fixed form of five lines, rhyming AABBA, the content of the Limerick is characteristically comical and nonsensical. The adult version frequently feature lewd content. One other common feature is the naming of a character and geographic location in the first line.

For more on Lear and the limerick see poets.org

Today's Challenge: Literary Limerick

On Limerick Day write lots of limericks. Write one as a love note and put it on the refrigerator or write it on your child's lunch sack. Write a limerick advertising a product that you think is worth buying. Write a limerick about your best friend, your pet, or your boss. Finally, select a favorite literary character and write a limerick about him or her.

Quote of the Day: One of the most responsible things you can do as an adult is become more of a child. --Wayne Dyer

September 13: New Words for People Day

Today is the anniversary of the appearance of a new word in a letter to the editor in The Tampa Tribune on September 13, 1995. The word is gater, meaning a person who lives in a gated community, is an example of one of many neologisms that pop up each year to describe people in new situations in the ever-changing world in which we live.

The website Word Spy, founded by Paul McFedries, searches out all kinds of new words and phrases that have appeared in print but not yet in the dictionary. McFedries site documents hundreds of the neologisms, several of which are defined beginning with: "A person who . . . ." Here are a few examples:

-mucus trooper (MYOO.kus troo.pur) n. An employee with a cold or the flu who insists on showing up for work.

-salad dodger (SAL.ud daw.jur) n. An overweight person; a person who shuns healthy foods.

-thresholder (THRESH.hohl.dur) n. A young person on the threshold of adulthood, especially one who is anxious or depressed about leaving home or taking on adult responsibilities.

-zinester (ZEEN.stur) n. A person who writes, edits, and publishes a zine; a person who reads only zines (1).

Today's Challenge: A Visit to the -er
The words below are all examples of neologisms that refer to different types of people. See if you can match up each word with the definitions below.

fleshwriter
i-dotter
woodpusher
phrasemonger
piggybacker
kipper
typosquatter
fiver

1. A person who donates five percent of their income to charity and/or spends five hours per week doing volunteer work.

2. The person for whom a ghostwriter writes a book.

3. A fastidious, detail-oriented person.

4. An adult son or daughter, particularly one aged 30 or more, who still lives with his or her parents. From kids in parents' pockets eroding retirement savings.

5. A person who uses phrases or quotes that were coined by other people.

6. A person who uses a wireless Internet connection without permission.

7. A chess player of limited skill.

8. A person who registers one or more Internet domain names based on the most common typographical errors that a user might commit when entering a company's registered trademark name (e.g., amazom.com) (1).

Word of the Day: neologism
A neologism is a new word that comes into use. In the age of the internet and ever-evolving technologies, neologisms are more prevalent than at anytime in history.

Quote of the Day: One company, Amsterdam-based www.trendwatching.com, has a global network of more than 7,000 "springspotters" who troll their own neighborhoods and report back which trends, products and behaviors are brewing. --Shawna Vanness

Answers: 1. fiver 2. fleshwriter 3. i-dotter 4. kipper 5. phrasemoner 6. piggybacker 7. woodpusher 8. typosquatter

1 - http://www.wordspy.com/

September 12: Suffix Day

On this day in 1896 the first Olympic marathon was run in Athens, Greece. The origin of the word marathon comes from Greek legend. According to the story, a Greek foot-soldier Pheidippides was sent as a messenger from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens to announce the Greek victory over the Persian army. As he approached Athens, having run a distance of nearly 25 miles, Pheidippides collapsed and died. He did not die, however, without completing his mission; with his last gasp he uttered “niki,” the Greek word for victory.

Incidentally, the word niki is derived from the name of the Greek goddess of victory: Nike – a name that would later become the trademark of a running shoe manufacturer in Oregon.

The word marathon evolved over time to mean more than just a long distance race. Beginning in the 1920s, dance marathons became a fad. The term dance marathon then became blended to become dancethon. Later –thon became a popular suffix for describing a variety of activities that people do for long periods. According to Geoffrey Nunberg in The Way We Talk Now, the first telethon was held in 1949. Milton Berle spent 16 hours on air, and one of his guests was a young comedian who would raise the telethon to an art form, Jerry Lewis. Telethons were followed by pledgeathons, callathons, bikeathons, bowlathons, walkathons, and swimathons (1).

Word of the Day: Toponym
Marathon is an example of a toponym: a word that began as a specific place name (a proper noun) and evolved into a common noun. Like the word marathon, many words we use in English have attachments to specific places and events from the past, such as afghan, bikini, bourbon, and angora.

Quote of the Day: The starting line of the New York City marathon is kind of a giant time bomb behind you about to go off. It is the most spectacular start in sport. –Bill Rogers

1 – Nunberg, Geoffrey. The Way We Talk Now. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001.