Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Unequally Yoked

Home
Catholic
7 Quick Lit Takes (8/19/11)

7 Quick Lit Takes (8/19/11)

Last updated on: November 1, 2012 at 2:24 pm by Leah Libresco

7 Quick Lit Takes (8/19/11) 2012-11-01T14:24:39-04:00 Leah Libresco

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

If you’re coming here from Conversion Diary*, you may be interested in yesterday’s post “Checking My Biases” which is a direct response to Jen’s “First You Must Be Willing To Lose it All” post.*

–1–

I’ve been a little delinquent about posting 7 Quick Takes for the past few weeks, so I’ve picked a topic I know I can get excited about and it’s time to clear out my cache of literature and language related links.

And in fun offline book news, I found a sci-fi book club in DC! I’ll be reading Asimov’s The Caves of Steel for September. On to the links.

–2–

A good first stop would the Test Your Vocab quiz which estimates the total size of your vocabulary. I found through TYWKIWDBI (Things You Wouldn’t Know If We Didn’t Blog Intermittently). If you’re in a competitive mood, I scored 38,800, but the real fun is looking up some of the strange words you missed and then checking out the graphs they’ve done of their results.
And if you’re a general sucker for good data visualization of unusual datasets, you should already be following the OkCupid blog (a dating website that shows you the results of their data mining).

–3–

During my Quick Takes drought, I somehow let the announcement of the Bulwer-Lytton award winners slip by without comment. Edward George Bulwer-Lytton wrote the infamous opening “It was a dark and stormy night” in his novel Paul Clifford, and, every year, contestants work to come up with worse opening lines. The winners are at the link, but I’m sharing Bulwer-Lytton’s full first sentence below (the famous phrase is only the first clause).

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

–4–

Well, whaddya know. In the course of googling to find the Snoopy picture above, I discovered there are two Bulwer-Lytton contests. The Lyttle Lytton contest works just the same way, except contestants are subject to a maximum word cap, which strikes me as a good idea. The 2011 winners are up over there, too, and here’s my favorite:

A wind was blowing from east to west, as if it were the sun, blowing instead of shining.

The Little Lytton contest also awards prizes for bad opening and closing sentences found in the wild.

–5–

Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Dish made up a list of words with no English equivalent. Schadenfreude is perhaps the best known of these, but perhaps you’ll help me popularize the following?

The Spanish-Mexican word “Tocayo.” It is only used by people with the same name. So that one person named Ricardo might call another person named Ricardo “Tocayo.”
The German “doch”. It simply means yes, but to a negative question. For example, the question, “You aren’t going?” in English. If you answer “yes”, it is ambiguous (“yes, you aren’t going”, or “yes, you are going”). Doch removes that ambiguity. It always means (in this case), “Yes, you are going”.

And, yes, the obligatory Avenue Q video is below:

–6–

I’m a steampunk aficionado, but even I think the person who came up with the term ‘Mannerpunk‘ ought to go have a bit of a quiet lie down til s/he gets over it. According to Wikipedia, the term applies to comedies of manners set in a fantasy world, which I’m all in favor of, but either the name’s got to go, or the wikipedia page needs some illustrations of mannerpunk costuming.

If you can’t be bothered to cosplay, I can’t be bothered to care.

–7–

And, finally, I’ll close with a reference to that book (I am still trying to keep up with the King and I project, though I fell behind in Psalms). I found Jim LePage’s Word project — an original illustration/interpretation of each book of the Bible — on First Things, and I’ve shared my favorite below.

[Seven Quick Takes is a blog carnival run by Jen of Conversion Diary]

7 Quick Takes

Previous Post

August 18, 2011

Checking my biases

Next Post

August 23, 2011 High Energy Theoretical Ethics

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category 7 Quick Takes Apologetics Atheism Book Conversion Debate Tactics Debates Epistemology/Philosophy Housekeeping Ideological Turing Test Marriage Morality in Practice Parsing Catholicism Possibly Heretical Radio Reviews/Recommendations Sequence Index Spiritual Practice Uncategorized

Select a Month April 2017 March 2017 January 2017 December 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What city did Jesus grow up in?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Capernaum Jericho Nazareth Bethlehem