Airing of Grievances

[fauxklore]

Celebrity Death Watch: First, a few celebrity obituaries to note. Peter O'Toole and Joan Fontaine were actors. Ronnie Biggs was a train robber. Al Goldstein was a pornographer. Janet Dailey was a romance writer.

There are two I want to note in a little more detail. Mikhail Kalashnikov designed the AK-47, the most widely proliferated firearm of all time. He appears to have died of natural causes.

Charles M. Vest was the president of MIT a bit after my time. He is notable for having actually listened and acted on the data re: discrimination against women faculty members.

A Brief Rant re: Coffee: Coffee is a magical substance, when treated properly. Being treated properly does not include being grown in bulk in unsuitable climates. Or being burned by overroasting. Most of all, treating coffee properly does not include adding flavoring agents to it. Coffee IS a flavor and should, therefore, not come in flavors.

A Brief Rant re: Winter Storms: Winter storms do not have names. I don't care if you think they should, but they don't and you do not have the right to change this.

A Brief Rant re: Midwestern Vowel Deficiency: Actually, this may be sheer ignorance, not the lack of distinguishing vowel sounds amongst people from the vast middle of the country, but it annoys the hell out of me. When you have the bare bones of an idea and you are elaborating on it, you are flEshing it out. FlUshing things out refers to exposing them, as in sendng the dogs after the grouses you are hunting, which is quite a different metaphor. (Interestingly, someone else at work was complaining about the same thing just last week.)

A Brief Rant re: Brief Rants: Frankly, life is pretty good when my grievances are about people abusing coffee, storm names, and vowels in metaphors.

Comments

[ron_newman]

"Blizzard of '78" is an evocative name to anyone who lived through it here.

Last February's blizzard was much less notable, but people in the Boston area readily adopted the Weather Channel's name for it, "Nemo" .

[fauxklore]

"Blizzard of '78" is infinitely more dignified than calling it, say, Sisto, which is what the Weather Channel would have done.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

As a New Englander, I apparently distinguish more vowel sounds than most Americans -- or, indeed, most English speakers anywhere in the world. Many of these distinctions are artificial and post-date orthographic standardization; the New England accent created distinctions based on how words were spelled, even if they had previously been pure homophones -- for the most part, we only treat homonyms as homophones, and will create vowel distinctions otherwise.

[ron_newman]

Does New Englandish distinguish marry, merry, and Mary?
(or for that matter, carry and Kerry, Barry and berry, dairy and Derry, fairy and ferry, etc?)

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Yes to all of the above. Also the "w"/"wh" things -- "what" and "Watt"; "whales", "Wales", and "wails"; "whether" and "weather"; "which" and "witch".

[fauxklore]

New Yorkers make the same distinction in vowel sounds. I remember being rather astonished in college when one of my suitemates (who was from Pittsburgh) pronounced "pole," "pull," and "pool" identically.

I don't think I do the "w" vs. "wh" thing, though I think I am supposed to and just never got it right. I do pronounce both "t"s in words like "button" and "Manhattan," which was considered peculiar in my Long Island childhood.

[ron_newman]

hmm. there are places where "what" and "watt" have the same vowel sound?

[fauxklore]

As far as I know, "what" and "watt" pretty much always have the same vowel sound. The question is whether they have the same consonant sound. For some of us, "wh" is supposed to be pronounced sort of as "hw," a little whistling sort of thing that I am sure has a name if one knows about linguistics.

I'd also say that particular example has slightly different "t" sounds, but I think that is less common.

[ron_newman]

To me, "what" rhymes with "rut" ... a short-u or stressed-schwa vowel sound.

"watt" rhymes with "rot" -- a short-o sound.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Sort of? "What" is more like a schwa most of the time, but in some of the collapsed vowel accents, so's "watt".