weird words

A selection of amusing words that have come up in the new Blogger word verification:

Balador

• Pologami - playing in multiple polo teams without the others knowlege 
  

Joe

• gemastry - the ancient oriental martial art of combat using only precious stones
  
• paphtess - descriptive of a small Greek village which has lost its only seller of Ouzo.
  

The Silver Eel

• hasmshno - to refuse a third doobie.
  

Yvonne

• genesco - a little-known painter of the Italian Renaissance?
  
• thethlys - a flower that grows by the River Lethe, whose fumes induce forgetfulness
  
• rerbach - a small boy who gathers up lost things at eisteddfods (from rerum, things, + bach, little). [Brithenig]
  
• ty lazos - a house of lepers. [Brithenig]
  
• Synyanit - small eastern European god of shopping ennui.
  
• aftible - an ansible that sends messages back through time 
  
• raptism - an initiation into rapper culture
  
• wealorme - Anglo-Saxon for a serpent that brings blessing.
  
• foddr - a photo-sharing website for cannon-fodder?
  
• alpowar - a very large battleship (by extension from man o'war).
  
• misher - Yiddish for someone who habitually causes confusion wherever they go.
  
• hoaktax - a tax upon hokum, hocus-pocus and hoaxes (otherwise known as "There's one born every minute").
  
• appirthy - pithy and apposite
  
• anthst - fear of not finishing anthologies.
  
• stompew - to misbehave in church.
  
• tantred:
  
  1. an aunt who dresses eccentrically (as in When I am old I shall wear purple/ With a red hat that doesn't go...)
     
  2. a particularly florid tantrum
     
  3. past participle of the verb, to tantra.
     
• imphros - a small lantern carried by an even smaller hobgoblin to guide faery ships safely into port (the opposite of a will o' the wisp).
  
• pronapa - in favour of Californian wine

Snow Crash

I am currently reading Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (written in 1992). In the first ten or so chapters, he managed to predict Second Life, World of Warcraft, Google Earth, and people being disillusioned with online social interactions because they are less real than face-to-face interactions. According to Wikipedia, one Google Earth co-founder claimed that Google Earth was modeled after Snow Crash, while another co-founder said it was inspired by Powers of Ten.

He also independently coined the use of the word 'avatar' for an online persona (although somebody was already using it in a virtual reality program called Habitat that he didn't know about when he was writing it). I am pretty impressed with this. Mind you, it says in the acknowledgements that he is a programmer himself and had read the Apple Macintosh user interface development guidelines, so I guess that gave him a head-start in predicting stuff. Of course the political situation in the book is different to current reality, but still entirely plausible.

If you haven't read Snow Crash, I highly recommend it. It makes William Gibson look like an amateur. It's also really well-written.

what kids really want

According to a series of interviews by the BBC, what children really want from their education is more time to learn about other cultures and the world around them, more innovative use of technology, more social networking, and more support services. I'm surprised there was no mention of the environment, but was heartened by the interests expressed.

I think education should start by discussing the world as it is, and then use that as a starting-point to explain how it came to be that way. For example, when I was at school we studied the Tudors and the Stuarts - presumably because that was the period when the current arrangements of Church, State, Parliament and so on came into being - but if that was the reason for studying those periods of history, no-one ever said so explicitly. If they had, people might have found the topic more interesting.