Funny, Interesting, Unusual English Words -- Like Sardoodledom

Ghid, I have both dyslexia and A.D.D., so while studying can be fun for me, reading is next to impossible, unless I just want to read words and not read for understanding. I have tried just reading the Bible and have found myself not having any idea what I'd read. Such a pain. One time, I started counting how many times I had read a verse without understanding its straight-forward words, and I remember I was over 20 times, so I stopped counting. I finally gave up.

While I know you don't have any such problem, this is what works for me: I am reading the Bible through in chronological order, reading one version while listening to the same verses on CD in another version. Somehow, reading one version while hearing it read in another helps read with understanding and keeps my attention, keeping my mind from wandering. I have read nearly half of the Bible and am now on a several months' break, allowing me to have Bible study time.

It also helps some when I read the Bible through a piece of yellow plastic. I have no idea why.
 
TezriLi said:
It used to be banned for Catholics but not any more, as I understand it.
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When I said that the Church had banned Bible reading, I was trying to make a joke. I didn’t really mean that the Church had gone and done it. I should have used the smiley faces.

Now that I think about it, various translations have been banned beginning with the invention of the printing press. The Catholic Church's official text must be in Latin. For Catholics the official English version must be a translation of the Latin text. Reading a Protestant version of the Bible is likely a no no, but no one has ever told me what I can read or can’t read. How would anyone enforce such an edict.

:)
 
TezriLi said:
Ghid, I have both dyslexia and A.D.D., so while studying can be fun for me, reading is next to impossible, unless I just want to read words and not read for understanding. I have tried just reading the Bible and have found myself not having any idea what I'd read. Such a pain. One time, I started counting how many times I had read a verse without understanding its straight-forward words, and I remember I was over 20 times, so I stopped counting. I finally gave up.

While I know you don't have any such problem, this is what works for me: I am reading the Bible through in chronological order, reading one version while listening to the same verses on CD in another version. Somehow, reading one version while hearing it read in another helps read with understanding and keeps my attention, keeping my mind from wandering. I have read nearly half of the Bible and am now on a several months' break, allowing me to have Bible study time.

It also helps some when I read the Bible through a piece of yellow plastic. I have no idea why.
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Yes, I'm not likely dyslexic, but I have so much energy that I have wondered about ADD. However, sometimes I have so much attention that people need to shake me out of my trance.

Have you tried to read any of the dead white men?
 
Ghid said:
Yes, I'm not likely dyslexic, but I have so much energy that I have wondered about ADD. However, sometimes I have so much attention that people need to shake me out of my trance.

Have you tried to read any of the dead white men?
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Not officially. I was poorly educated and moved around a lot, missing blocks of ideas I should have received. I don't even know what I am missing!

However, as a girl and young woman, I read whatever I could get my hands on. While the A.D.D. was problematic then. the dyslexia was not so prominent through those years. (It was when I was little and has expanded as I have aged.) So through the years, I have at least read such excerpts, rarely a pamphlet, more rarely a book.

My time then was taken up with my children and education and the authors I HAD to read. Then, it was taken up with family and reading the Bible. Therefore, I don't think I can honestly say I have been that into the "dead white men." ;D
 
boltardy said:
Way out West is my favourite of the Laurel and Hardy films.

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My dad's mother watches a television show, Taxi Brooklyn, which reminds me of some of the action in the Laurel and Hardy movie, The Flying Deuces. In the Flying Deuces, the Foreign Legion court martials L and H. They try to escape in an aircraft. The infantry chases the aircraft around the airfield. I didn't think it was funny, but my brother laughed. Taxi Brooklyn has similar action in which the police officer and the taxi driver use the taxi to chase the bad guys through New York City traffic. The action ends with the suspect slamming into the taxi's door.
 
TezriLi said:
Not officially. I was poorly educated and moved around a lot, missing blocks of ideas I should have received. I don't even know what I am missing!

However, as a girl and young woman, I read whatever I could get my hands on. While the A.D.D. was problematic then. the dyslexia was not so prominent through those years. (It was when I was little and has expanded as I have aged.) So through the years, I have at least read such excerpts, rarely a pamphlet, more rarely a book.

My time then was taken up with my children and education and the authors I HAD to read. Then, it was taken up with family and reading the Bible. Therefore, I don't think I can honestly say I have been that into the "dead white men." ;D
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Here at school some students use recordings to read textbooks. And I think that electronic books, Kendle etc, can recite the text of most books. It is not as good as a real recording, it might be good enough. Have you tried that?
 
TezriLi said:
Years ago -- I mean YEARS ago, before Kindle was even thought of....
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Seems like homographs such as wound like a string around a stick and wound like a cut in need of a band aid would offer a major problem for pronunciation. Has it become any better?
 
boltardy said:
Way out West is my favourite of the Laurel and Hardy films.
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I watched Way Out West. For me it works as an almost modern movie. The rescuing of the damsel in distress, the poor, oppressed Mary Roberts, seems a bit dated. In a modern version, she would struggle more against her oppressors.

L and H sing and dance, which makes me wonder if they had a nightclub act.

The bucket in the scene with the man with the mop looks like a wooden bucket. In the Flying Deuces, Stan washed clothes in a wooden tub. In the 1930’s people still stored things like sugar in wooden barrels. Some of my great grandmother’s friends and relations worked for the Sugar Trust. They made sugar barrels.

A black janitor, the man with the mop, appears in the scene with the bucket. I wonder if in the Southern version, a white man mopped the floor, so Southern audiences would accept the movie.

Lola Marcel and Mickey Finn, a married couple, sleep in separate bedrooms. That seems a bit odd.

The movie has more credits than I have seen in other pre-WWII movies. Laurel produced the movie. Maybe he should get credit for the more-than-normal credits

Violence and humor seem to go together in Laurel and Hardy and in modern television. My Dad’s mother watches police, whodunit, television shows in which the characters crack jokes over the dead bodies.
 
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If I understand you correctly, you are asking about whether homographs have changed in my lifetime? Not that I have noticed, except that they have become more fun to play with. For some, their origins have been before my time, so I've had to look into their origins in order to fully grasp their meanings. My favorite homograph is (but I think I have mentioned this here) cleave. Cleave to your spouse. Cleave that roast apart, then there is less to cook.
 
Ghid said:
...Violence and humor seem to go together in Laurel and Hardy and in modern television. My Dad’s mother watches police, whodunit, television shows in which the characters crack jokes over the dead bodies.
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My present husband was a machine gunner in Vietnam. One thing they did, just to cling to sanity in the middle of an insane war, was make humor. Police officers, doctors, etc. use humor in the same way. It lifts the thoughts above the horror of reality, so that one can see something other than the occasional awfulness of life.

When my first husband was killed, after some days of dealing with the distress of grief, I turned to occasional humor. I can't remember now what I said to my sister, but we turned to each other, our mouths dropping open at whatever it was, then we burst out laughing in the joy of realizing that although he was gone, humor had not left with him. After that, I occasionally used humor to purposely lift myself a little above the heaviness of grief.
 
TezriLi said:
If I understand you correctly, you are asking about whether homographs have changed in my lifetime? Not that I have noticed, except that they have become more fun to play with. For some, their origins have been before my time, so I've had to look into their origins in order to fully grasp their meanings. My favorite homograph is (but I think I have mentioned this here) cleave. Cleave to your spouse. Cleave that roast apart, then there is less to cook.
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Yeah, the two cleaves make a funny, but they have the same pronunciation.

I had no knowledge that conversion of text to sound has existed longer than me. Oh, again from back in the Dark Ages. :)

According to Gramps, he had an older-than-my-mother computer, which could speak text, but it did not know the different pronunciations of words like read.

Words with the same spelling, but with different pronunciation like read, pronounced like red, "Yesterday, I read a book," or read, pronounced like reed, "Today, I read a book" offer a greater challenge when listening to an electronic book.

I'm wondering if modern electronic books have any chance of getting the pronunciation correct.
 
We had a computer that my nephew could make do anything, even speech. But he was an incredible magician with computers.

I also like the English words bare and bear. Then, perhaps one could add to that an American Southerner saying, "Beer." And perhaps, if we did that, we could add bier.

Hebrew is like this, too, as anyone might suspect. SO many written Hebrew words are spelled exactly the same way, and one has to consider context in order to know the intended meaning.
 
TezriLi said:
My present husband was a machine gunner in Vietnam. One thing they did, just to cling to sanity in the middle of an insane war, was make humor. Police officers, doctors, etc. use humor in the same way. It lifts the thoughts above the horror of reality, so that one can see something other than the occasional awfulness of life.

When my first husband was killed, after some days of dealing with the distress of grief, I turned to occasional humor. I can't remember now what I said to my sister, but we turned to each other, our mouths dropping open at whatever it was, then we burst out laughing in the joy of realizing that although he was gone, humor had not left with him. After that, I occasionally used humor to purposely lift myself a little above the heaviness of grief.
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My mother calls it, making a Briscoe, after a character Lennie Briscoe, in a television show, Law and Order. She says that Detective Briscoe made wisecracks during tense situations in the plot.
 
Ghid said:
Yeah, the two cleaves make a funny, but they have the same pronunciation.

I had no knowledge that conversion of text to sound has existed longer than me. Oh, again from back in the Dark Ages. :)

According to Gramps, he had an older-than-my-mother computer, which could speak text, but it did not know the different pronunciations of words like read.

Words with the same spelling, but with different pronunciation like read, pronounced like red, "Yesterday, I read a book," or read, pronounced like reed, "Today, I read a book" offer a greater challenge when listening to an electronic book.

I'm wondering if modern electronic books have any chance of getting the pronunciation correct.
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I was playing with other side a couple of weeks ago, voice recognition. Using the Android voice recognition, the aim was to write a crude app that would turn the lights at home on and off. My first thought was that as I know all the lights by a letter and number system, I'd use that, eg. "A 1 on", etc.

One thing that surprised me was that no matter how often I tried it would interpret "A 1 on" as "A 1 on" but "A 1 off" as "A one off".

That didn't matter for my app as I just intended hard coding what the voice recognition app came back with. All I needed was consistency and I couldn't get that. I found it difficult saying some codes slowly enough so it didn't try to make the codes into words and the words it came up with for my commands could vary.

Anyway, I gave up with that idea and went on to naming the lights instead, eg. "kitchen light on". That got me pretty much where I wanted to be except for the hall light. I've always called the room the hall but to get consistency with the voice recognition, I had to change my mind and refer to it as the "corridor light".

Not much of a demo app btw. It works fine for me on my own but when trying to show others, they talk and it picks up a mix of their voices and my commands...
 
@Ghid, with regard to the black man appearing in a movie with a mop, back when there was so much white-against-black prejudices, this would not have bothered Southern audience. They would not have minded at all to see a black man in the place of a servant. What did bother many was seeing an adult black man dancing with little Shirley Temple. When a black person appeared in rolls other than serving, then it caused trouble.

One time (and I am sure this happened more than once!) the Rat Pack https://www.google.com/webhp?source...S586&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=rat pack members was checking into rooms where they were going to perform. They were told that all the white members of the Rat Pack could check in but not Sammy Davis, Jr., a black man. I think it was Frank Sinatra who gave the desk clerk the Rat Pack Gospel: "Either we all sleep here, or there will be no show." They all slept there!

When I lived in Mississippi, they had their highly-publicized centennial parade in Jackson, where I lived, on March 28, 1961. We were all sent letters from school saying that we would suffer the wrath of the principal if we didn't go to school instead, but I was told at home that there would only be one centennial parade, celebrating the end of the Civil War, in my lifetime and that I could skip school and go. I went. (I looked for photos on the Internet but did not find much.) There were black people in the parade all right, but not where we would wish they were. Things were still bad in 1961. My school also had no black students.
 
Shakespeare ---

My softball coach, who also teaches physics, thinks that the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford wrote the epic poems, sonnets, and plays called Shakespeare. The English teachers have no patience to consider the possibility. This video offers and even handed discussion.


www.youtube.com/embed/uakLX5zyD54
 
TezriLi said:
@Ghid, with regard to the black man appearing in a movie with a mop, back when there was so much white-against-black prejudices, this would not have bothered Southern audience. They would not have minded at all to see a black man in the place of a servant. What did bother many was seeing an adult black man dancing with little Shirley Temple. When a black person appeared in rolls other than serving, then it caused trouble.

One time (and I am sure this happened more than once!) the Rat Pack https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&rlz=1C1RNVG_enUS581US586&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=rat pack members was checking into rooms where they were going to perform. They were told that all the white members of the Rat Pack could check in but not Sammy Davis, Jr., a black man. I think it was Frank Sinatra who gave the desk clerk the Rat Pack Gospel: "Either we all sleep here, or there will be no show." They all slept there!

When I lived in Mississippi, they had their highly-publicized centennial parade in Jackson, where I lived, on March 28, 1961. We were all sent letters from school saying that we would suffer the wrath of the principal if we didn't go to school instead, but I was told at home that there would only be one centennial parade, celebrating the end of the Civil War, in my lifetime and that I could skip school and go. I went. (I looked for photos on the Internet but did not find much.) There were black people in the parade all right, but not where we would wish they were. Things were still bad in 1961. My school also had no black students.
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So, Way Out West's producers would not have cut the man with the mop for Southern audiences. Wikipedia says that Davis was Jewish, so maybe the hotel clerk objected to that. :)

You must have lived in Mississippi during the end, or the major part of the civil rights movement.
 
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