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Patent/Patently/Patent Leather: A clear and obvious etymological connexion May 11, 2009

Posted by Olivia McDowell in Wisdom, Words.
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I am currently studying Intellectual Property law, so I tend to have patents on the brain. And today, my good friend The Cool Chick and I both realised that whenever we say “well that’s patently obvious”* (which is quite often), we are both visited by a mental image of shiny patent leather shoes. Being kindred etymology fanatics, we then decided that it would be particularly awesome if all three words shared a common derivation… and indeed they do!

[ click screenclips for full detail, while giving yet another appreciative round of applause for the Oxford English Dictionary]
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Patent

Where it all begins.

Lying open, unobstructed, readily accessible, obvious.

Circa 13th century, from the Latin patere (to lay open), then Littera Patens — meaning “open letter”— via the Anglo-French lettre patente.

In law, when one applies for the registration of a patent in relation to a process, one discloses all the material details for public inspection, in return for a time-limited monopoly (the letters patent) preventing others from using said process. Once that monopoly lapses, the use of said process is thereafter unobstructed: readily accessible and open to the public. (Wikipedia has a satisfactory layman’s summation).


Patently

Knowing the origin of ‘patent’, the adjective-to-adverb process is plain for all to see. Patently obvious, even….


Patent leather

Seth Boyden may not have invented the process of giving leather a shiny, ultra-gloss finish, but he certainly did patent it (circa 1819). Add immediate popularity, and the subsequent need for a shorthand appellation, and it was only a matter of time before people started referring to it as patented/patent leather.


From all the above, I think it is clearly, unobstructedly, openly, publicly obvious why both The Cool Chick and I associate blatancy with fashion accessories (and vice versa). And, as the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland would say, the moral to THAT story is: always trust an etymological hunch.

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* Yes, it’s a tautology.

Hellvetica (and the fundamental interconnectedness of all things*) April 7, 2009

Posted by Olivia McDowell in Art, Blogging, Design, Etcetera, FFFFOUND!, Helvetica, The Ether, Wisdom.
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“Helvetica as Metallica”, by Yann Serandour, via The Triumph of Bullshit, via FFFFOUND!, via Any Given Name, via VVVORK.


Severally reblogging like this really puts the “inter” in interwebs.

“Rather than connecting all things eventually, the Internet makes us realize that all things are, by nature, interconnected”

@fadereu**



* “The fundamental interconnectedness of all things” was how Douglas Adams defined holisticism in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. It’s such an apt summation that whenever I encounter the word “holistic” all I hear/read is “the fundamental interconnectedness of all things”. It’s like a special breed of babel fish, translating regular words into the more lyrical phraseology of Douglas Adams.

**Incidentally, I first saw this lovely iota of wisdom as a retweeted retweet via @wildmonkeysects, via @BinarySeed.

PLEASE don’t let your website resize my browser window March 26, 2009

Posted by Olivia McDowell in Art, Design, Etcetera, FFFFOUND!, Ire, Laughing, Pretty!, Technobabble, The Ether, Wisdom.
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{ DAMNYEAH via FFFFOUND! }

Squint for the (slightly NSFW yet somehow very polite) fine print.

Oh and to all those web designers out there, while you’re at it, if you don’t mind terribly, and it’s not too much trouble

a) EVERYBODY clicks ’skip intro’. EVERYBODY.

b) NOBODY wants to hear your company jingle playing on repeat. NOBODY.

So just don’t bother, and we can all be friends again. And you’d have so much more time to spend on doing nice things for yourself, like having tea and biscuits in the sunshine. And I wouldn’t have to mute the sound on my computer. Now doesn’t that sound nice?

“Stop spam. Read books” March 9, 2009

Posted by Olivia McDowell in Blogging, Etcetera, Pretty!, Spellcheck, Technobabble, The Ether, Wisdom.
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I used to get frustrated with those popup boxes that make you decipher undecipherable text for no apparent reason. And then I learned that there IS an apparent reason.

I mean, initially it was just about making sure that the typist was in fact a person, and not just a spam bot. Hence the name Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computer and Humans Apart*.  Bots, it seems, are great at bringing the internet to its knees, but aren’t so talented when it comes to reading distorted text.

These days, however, most websites use reCAPTCHA, and its intentions are infinitely more honourable: stopping spam AND ‘reading’ books. Now, I’m all for the simple eradication of spam, but helping to archive the annals of English literary history seems like more of a lasting service to humanity…

See, all over the world, Very Delicate, Old, and Ephemeral Books are being digitised and thus preserved for all eternity (thereby avoiding the risk of another Alexandria?). But this involves scanning said books, and then transposing the images into workable text. And if you’ve ever used “Optical Character Recognition” to edit scanned text in Adobe Acrobat, you’d know how successful THAT can be. Lowercase ‘r’ next to ‘n’ ALWAYS comes out as ‘m’.


When you fill out a reCAPTCHA prompt, one of those words is from one of those old texts, garbled by OCR (because OCR is a computer and can’t tell the difference between ‘rn’ and ‘m’, and presumably you know better).

The other is a known variable: a chosen word, mangled in the same way as the ‘unknown’ word. If you’re capable of deciphering this word, then reCPATCHA assume you’ve correctly translated the word they actually need.

So next time you’re asked to verify a posted link on fakebook, stop before you grumble, and remember that

  1. You’re doing a noble and relatively effortless deed, to help a noble and otherwise unconquerable cause, and
  2. This is perhaps the only time that as a human, you are more useful than a computer, and you should do what you can to reinforce that assumption.

Hell, I’m tempted to put every blog post behind a reCAPTCHA-protected link, just to move the whole process along**.


*I generally don’t approve of meaningless neologisms, but I’ve a soft spot for shamelessly twee acronyms.

** Don’t worry: I won’t.

Carroll and Poe; Ravens and Crows March 1, 2009

Posted by Olivia McDowell in Art, Design, Etcetera, Pretty!, Wisdom, Words.
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What is the difference between a raven and a crow?

{ By Season Zero, via Design You Trust }

Actually, ravens have one more pinion feather on each wing, so the difference between a crow and a raven is just a matter of a pinion!¹

Incidentally, Season Zero also also do this fanciful typeface:

And we cannot forget the Mad Hatter’s famous raven riddle: “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” This poser inevitably (and famously) goes unanswered: after all, it was a very odd tea party, and the conversation shifted rather swiftly to the issue of how best to butter one’s pocket watch. And so — as Martin Gardner notes in The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition² the Hatter’s riddle became the subject of endless “parlour speculation”, in Carroll’s own time and evermore. David B Jodrey’s answer — “both have inky quills” — is typical of the reader submissions in The Annotated Alice, while that genius Aldous Huxley suggested that “there’s a ‘b’ in both and an ‘n’ in neither, thereby proving that his humour wasn’t always political.

Carroll himself always asserted that the raven/writing desk riddle was wholly rhetorical: he never wrote it with an answer in mind. The point was that the two incongruous items were not at all alike. However when pressed, he would say of a raven that “it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front”. That is, a raven’s song is musically flat [like the surface of a writing desk]; and ‘raven’ is ‘nevar’ spelled backwards, with the wrong end in front (although in the original publications, an overzealous — and presumably humourless — editor changed Carroll’s intentional misspelling of ‘nevar’ back to ‘never’, thereby ruining the pun. And the moral of that is ‘Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves’).

Speaking of ‘never’, let us not forget that Carroll’s riddling raven wasn’t the only one to feature in 19th Century pop-culture. All hail the gothic masterpiece of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven!³ For in response to the raven/writing-desk issue, American puzzle fiend Sam Loyd made a simple and logical observation: “Poe wrote on both”.


And the moral to THAT is, if you love trivial minutiae and Alice in Wonderland, read The Annotated Alice.  Also, that one thing always leads to another: I started out with RSSed online graphic art, and ended up thumbing through classics.



¹ I’ve always loved this pun, and yet can’t remember where I heard it first (hints, anyone?).

² I had to make sure I wasn’t just imagining this, which meant finding my copy of The Annotated Alice. Which these days means several minutes fossicking through my newly colour-coded bookshelf. But once located, I immediately, instinctively opened the book to the relevant page. We can put this down to 1 part coincidence, and 4,000 parts Loving The Book And Knowing It Like The Back Of My Kid-Gloved Hand. It’s Chapter 7: The Mad Tea-Party/ Note 5, by the way.

³ In high school, when I presumably had nothing better with which to occupy my limited powers of recall, I memorised my two favourite poems: The Jabberwocky (from Through The Looking Glass and What Alice Found There), and The Raven. And on poetry day, when I finally had a use for this oddity, they wouldn’t let me recite the latter: it’s 18 verses long.

Related posts: That reminds me…

Con-fuschias says… February 27, 2009

Posted by Olivia McDowell in Etcetera, Laughing, Spellcheck, Wisdom.
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*

No, not really. Confucius says:

A man who has committed a mistake
and doesn’t correct it
is committing another mistake.

{ via Quotes of the Day on twitter }

So contextually adapted, the Ancient Chinese wisdom is this: No blame will be apportioned to those who misspell and make typos, for it happens to us all (and some are too busy to proof, and some just don’t know ‘their’ from ‘there’). But those who recognise said error — and just leave it there to fester — are guilty of editorial negligence and ought to be ashamed of themselves.


PS. Is it terribly wrong that in my mind, ‘Confucius’ looks less like this…

{ via Pegasus News }

…and more like this?


{via news.com.au and Rolawn }

Err, yes, that’s Con[man]…fuschias.
What can I say? A rebus is a terrible thing to waste.


* Post-it photo — and the Post-it party from whence it came — courtesy of my sister.

Happy Darwin Day! February 14, 2009

Posted by Olivia McDowell in Wisdom, Words.
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{ via Students For Freethought }

To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.
— Charles Darwin

Was he referring to his own task correcting an errant belief in Lamarkian evolution — or to the need to proof his own thesis drafts? Either way, I thank Mr Darwin, on the bicentenary of his birth, for reminding me that ‘proofreader’ is a fine and worthy career aspiration.

Happy belated Darwin Day!

The only time I can abide maths… December 9, 2008

Posted by Olivia McDowell in Art, Etcetera, FFFFOUND!, Pretty!, The Ether, Videorama, Wisdom, Words.
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… is when there are no numbers involved. When words + logic = wry genius.


{ Mother Jones via FFFFOUND! }

However, this has confirmed earlier fears that my mind is in fact nothing more than a .gif file comprising an endless stream of word equations. No really, it works just like this.

PS. The Polar Bear one is my favourite. Also, “Obsession = thinking + thinking + thinking” (because it’s SO TRUE).

At least it’s not a hanging chad November 8, 2008

Posted by Olivia McDowell in Democracy, Grammar Attack, Obama!, Spellcheck, Wisdom.
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2 comments


Change we can believe in - amazon.com

…The dangling preposition has just started to bother me. I’m preeeetty certain that all this time it should have been “Change In Which We Can Believe”.

…But I also think we should all just let it slide, because I’m NOT going to share the same grammatical bandwagon as McCan’t/Failin’ supporters.

ALSO, re: This letter on Salon

@ Blueflash
Damn snappy, dawg.
PS. I am not saying Obama is stupid. Obviously “Change in which we can believe” would just add to his uppity-elitist-arugula-eating image in a way that would not benefit his campaign.
I’m just saying that his platform is not exceptionally complex and his campaign style has not been particularly intellectual.

— Rosenkavalier, 11 August 2008
(my emphasis)


I hope this is sarcasm, or if not, that the humble pie is good at this time of year.



First published at tumblr Proof (v.)

A cloud of optimism November 8, 2008

Posted by Olivia McDowell in Art, Democracy, Etcetera, Obama!, Pretty!, The Ether, Wisdom, Words.
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President-Elect Barack Obama’s Acceptance Speech: A Word Cloud
{ by davidwatts1978 on flickr }


First published at tumblr Proof (v.)