relaysh

Sure, I could figure it out pretty easily; it looked like a hacked abbreviation of the word relationship. When I looked it up to see how out of touch with reality I have become, how completely out of the hipster loop I now am, I was pleasantly surprised — my favorite Web dictionary aid, OneLook, only produced one dictionary (and I use that term lightly here): Wordnik. So I am apparently not all that out of whack, linguistically speaking. Thank the verbal gods.

Relaysh is, in my opinion, a horrible-sounding, horrible-looking word, one that some poor soul thought would catch on. And who knows? Perhaps it still will. I’m crossing fingers and toes that it doesn’t, though, because I don’t think I’m alone believing that the human race would fare pretty well if it never heard that word out loud again.

But maybe that’s just me.

Happy trails!

SAK

Here in the Midwest, it’s been 2012 for just over 12 hours, but other parts of the world are further along (or further behind) in the new year. I thought it would be fun to explore ways that other people — and there are lots of other people — greet each other in new year’s celebration (italic font shows a phonetic transcription):

• Afrikaans — gelukkige nuwejaar (also voorspoedige nuwejaar)
• Arabic — aam saiid (also sana saiida)
• Armenian — shnorhavor nor tari
• Basque — urte berri on
• Bosnian — sretna nova godina
• Bulgarian — chestita nova godina
  
• Cantonese — sun lin fi lok (also kung hé fat tsoi)
• Corsican — pace e salute
• Czech — šťastný nový rok
• Danish — godt nytår
• Dutch — gelukkig nieuwjaar
• Estonian — head uut aastat
• Finnish — onnellista uutta vuotta
• French — bonne année
• Georgian — gilocavt akhal tsels
• German — prost Neujahr (also ein gutes neues Jahr)
• Greek — kali chronia (also kali xronia)
• Hawaiian — hauoli makahiki hou
• Hebrew — shana tova
• Hindi — nav varsh ki subhkamna
• Icelandic — gleðilegt nýtt ár
• Indonesian — selamat tahun baru
• Irish Gaelic — ath bhliain faoi mhaise
• Javanese — sugeng warsa enggal
• Kashmiri — nav reh mubarakh
• Korean — seh heh bok mani bat uh seyo
• Latvian — laimīgu Jauno gadu
• Luxembourgeois — e gudd neit Joër
• Maltese — is-sena t-tajba
• Marathi — navin varshaachya hardik shubbheccha
• Norwegian — godt nyttår
• Occitan — bon annada
• Polish — szczęśliwego nowego roku
• Portuguese — feliz ano novo
• Punjabi — nava saal deeyan vadhaiyaan
• Romanian — un an nou fericit (also la mulţi ani)
• Russian — S novim godom
• Samoan — ia manuia le tausaga fou
• Spanish — feliz año nuevo
• Swiss-German — es guets Nöis
• Tahitian — ia orana i te matahiti api
• Thai — sawatdii pimaï
• Tibetan — losar tashi delek
• Ukrainian — Z novym rokom
• Vietnamese — Chúc Mừng Nǎm Mới (also Cung Chúc Tân Niên; also Cung Chúc Tân Xuân)
• Welsh — blwyddyn newydd dda
• West Indian Creole — bon lanné
• Xhosa — nyak’omtsha
• Yiddish — a gut yohr
• Zulu — unyaka omusha omuhle

Happy trails!

SAK

St. Lucia is one such oasis — spa and all (photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lyng883/345148479/)

Happy trails!

SAK

To my surprise, the AP Stylebook didn’t mention it. Perhaps I’m the only person who doesn’t know the answer (doubtful) or the only one who cares (possible), but I had to do just a little digging to find the answer.

Where to next? (photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hjl/101443399/)

No — the document (or more often the stamp in a passport) that shows the authorization for a person to enter a particular territory is a basic noun, so it does not call for an uppercase ‘V’ unless it begins a sentence. The visa, by the way, got its name from the modern Latin charta visa, meaning “verified paper.” This is according to the Online Etymology Dictionary.

If you’re writing about the Visa credit card, however, you better use that uppercase ‘V,’ no matter where in the sentence the word falls.

Happy trails!

SAK

This is apparently how to spell that super-long word from “Mary Poppins”:

supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

The adjective — meaning something’s extraordinarily groovy to children and representing the longest word imaginable — isn’t in Merriam-Webster or Webster’s New World College dictionaries, but it is spelled thusly in several other dictionaries, so I’m claiming it as the correct spelling.

This one word is a designer's layout nightmare (photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/norriswong/376977842/)

At 34 characters, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is, indeed, long. Wikipedia, however, lists three other words longer than supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

Happy trails!

SAK

Guadalupe is in Mexico. And in Boliva and Peru and Arizona, plus a whole host of other fun locales.

Guadeloupe is in the West Indies. It’s the first overseas region of France.

Guadeloupe? Yes, please (photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sybarite48/5246346885/)

Whether you end up in Guadalupe or Guadeloupe, you’re bound to have fun, yes? Yes.

Happy trails!

SAK

Happy trails!

SAK

I went to a class a few years ago and learned how to use stained glass in stepping stones — er, steppingstones. I had such a great time at the class; it brought back the sense of creating something from scratch, much like what I experienced in college while studying theatre. One of the requirements of getting my theatre degree was to work in the scene shop, and I had a ball. Such fun to learn how to drill, cut, hammer, paint, affix, decorate and tear down sets with real power tools! Those were fun, creative times, and this particular steppingstone class, in which I learned how to use nippers, cutters and grinders, reminded me of those hands-on days.

Anyway, the point of all this is this: Since that class several years ago, I’ve made a couple of steppingstones on my own: One was a K-State Wildcat (I know! I know! It was a gift!) and one was an Armenian ‘A’ for my dad (who didn’t realize at first that it was an Armenian ‘A’ (which looks like an uppercase U with a tail); he was just so proud that I had made something for him, he didn’t care what was actually on the stone, and I thought that his reaction was absolutely worth all the effort). But just now, while flipping through my AP Stylebook for blog inspiration, I ran across steppingstone (again, one word — I’m flabbergasted).

So I had to verify this one-word concoction. And yes, both Merriam-Webster and Webster’s New World College dictionaries backed it up.

Happy trails!

SAK

It’s one of the great joys of being a human. Doesn’t matter if you sing on or off key. Doesn’t matter if you sing only in cars with rolled-up windows, stopping to wait for the next green light, or in shower stalls with warm water cleansing your body as your favorite lyrics soothe your soul.

Assuming you actually know the lyrics.

For some of us (ahem), that’s a big assumption. Take me, for instance. I’ve been a singer my entire life. I remember singing at the top of my lungs in my room when I was around 8 years old. Imagine my horror when I twirled around in ecstasy of performance, only to find my parents standing in the doorway, watching. The horror! How long had they been standing there? If I had known there’s an audience, well, that would have been something different.

But I digress.

I sang in junior high, then in the high school madrigal group and in every musical that would have me. I sang my way through college (although I started to realize the small-fish-in-big-pond concept around that time). I continued singing on my own as a full-fledged adult and into my married life. Hey, I married a guy who loves to sing, as well, and we can holler out tunes in our automobile, the likes which you have never heard. Seriously!

So one fine day, we’re tooling down the road and the 1981 version of “Bette Davis Eyes” made popular by Kim Carnes (but written in 1974 by Donna Weiss and Jackie DeShannon) came on the radio. We’re singing along, sometimes he louder, sometimes I. Then came the line, “All the boys think she’s a spaz, she’s got Bette Davis eyes.” I belted it out — with feeling. And then I commented about how amazing it is that someone actually got the word “spaz” into a song.

My husband looked at me sideways. He asked me to repeat the line. I obliged. Then the heckling began.

I suppose at some point in my 40+ years I could’ve looked up the words to the song, but why? I knew them. I did, truly. But apparently, not really.

(It all made sense to me — sort of still does, really, because I never thought Bette Davis was much of a looker and thought, well, yes, the boys think she’s a spaz. Her eyes weren’t the eyes of a “regular” gal, so “spaz” sounded right on, if not very nice.)

My loving husband informed me that “spaz” was not cutting it. The line is: “All the boys think she’s a spy.” OK, fine. “Spy” does rhyme with “eyes” slightly better than “spaz” does. And now all my friends and readers now know my dirty little lyrics secret. Ugh.

Let it be known, though, that I am not alone in my affinity for the mondegreen (which, btw, refers to screwing up the lyrics; it got its name from Sylvia Wright mishearing a Scottish ballad of “laid him on the green” as “Lady Mondegreen” in the 1950s).

Someone (name unmentioned here, but if you can guess, go for it) was tooling along in the car with me one fine day several years ago and was belting out Elton John’s “Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road.” I was singing along, too, as usual. Then came the phrase “Back to the howling old owl in the woods, hunting the horny back toad.” 

Elton John's horny back toad is probably a short horned lizard (photo: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Short_Horned_Lizard.jpg)

• Am not
• Are not
• Is not
• Have not
• Has not
• Do not
• Does not
• Did not

Ain’t is also entrenched in certain phrases that have become part of the modern-day lexicon:

• If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it
• Say it ain’t so
• Two out of three ain’t bad
• You ain’t seen nothing yet
• This ain’t no disco
  

Stemming from the mid-1700s, ain’t has made its way into popular songs (”Ain’t She Sweet,” Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Ain’t No Sunshine”), books (”If Mama Ain’t Happy, Ain’t Nobody Happy!” and “Telling Ain’t Training”) and movies (”Love Ain’t Supposed to Hurt” and “A Hero Ain’t Nothing But a Sandwich”). It’s used in journalistic prose as an indicator of casual tone. And it’s used by yours truly on occasion — partly in rebellion, partly to show devil-may-care attitude.

My mother would be horrified.

But there it is. My suggestion would be to use it sparingly, rather than as part of every third sentence — and that ain’t no baloney.

Happy trails!

SAK