A little something for my word nerds

Hello, and welcome to another weekly installment of UOPTA. We're about halfway through November now, and I don't think I've heard a single Christmas carol yet. That's weird, right? Every year over the past decade, I've felt like that's started earlier and earlier, but not this one. Maybe the whole Change in 08 thing is really happening. In any case, I have a random assortment of word-related things to write about today, and I feel like jumping right into it. Here goes.

As it's been well documented in this space, I care a whole hell of a lot about words. They often perplex me with their adamant refusal to adhere to rules. In fact, there are very few rules at all that are absolute. I love the English language, but I doubt that would be the case if I had to learn it in a classroom setting. I have a couple of examples of recent head-scratchers for you.

First off, my boss had sent my co-worker Rob an email that Rob was reading on his Blackberry. (Hmmm, this will be hard to tell via the written word...oh well, bear with me.) He looked up and said to our boss, "Is that how you spell 'cognizant?'" Our boss turned to me and said, "How would you spell it?" I said, "C-o-g-n-i-z-e-n-t, or actually, maybe a-n-t." "I wrote it the same way you first spelled it," he said, "but my spell checker said it was wrong and changed it to 'cognoscente.'" "What's that?" I asked. We all agreed that it didn't sound right at all to us, but maybe we'd just been wrong all this time. It bothered me enough that I went to the trusty Merriam Webster site to check it out. Sure enough, spell checker ended up with egg on its...monitor, I suppose. 'Cognizant' is the adjective meaning, "knowledgeable of something especially through personal experience." The word 'cognoscente' exists as well (which was new to me), and it's a noun meaning, "a person who has expert knowledge in a subject; connoisseur." Therefore, instead of realizing that he just had the wrong vowel in the word, it completely changed it to a different part of speech and ruined the sentence. Don't you hate it when that happens? You're there to protect us, spell checker. Maybe this is the first sign that the machines are readying themselves to take over. Let's hope not.

Ok, if that last story was the definition of 'boring' for you, then you may want to skip this next one, because it's similar but more involved. I'm giving you fair warning. And don't worry, I'll talk about monkeys later to lighten the mood. So, I made a little note to myself a few weeks back saying, "Regimen - I probably thought there was a T at the end for a long time." I don't specifically recall thinking that, but I can just hear myself saying that someone was "on a strict regiment." So I looked it up, and now I'm confused and a bit frustrated. Yay! Here's what I found out. 'Regimen' (which is starting to look like nonsense to me) is "a systematic plan (as of diet, therapy, or medication) especially when designed to improve and maintain the health of a patient." That makes sense to me, and that's how I use the word. 'Regiment' is "a military unit consisting usually of a number of battalions." So that word exists, and it is notably different from the T-less version. "But wait," I thought, "what about the adjective 'regimented'? Why is there a T in that?" Good question, Peter. So I looked it up and was directed to the verb, "to regiment." "Uh oh, this looks like it might be muddying the waters. I don't like to muddy," I thought. There were two definitions of the verb, incidentally. The first was, "To form into or assign to a regiment." Ok, so that's clearly related to the military version with the T on the end. Got it. Then the second definition: "To organize rigidly especially for the sake or regulation or control." Crap. That sounds like 'regimen' to me, which is the only way I've ever used it. So basically, the dictionary is telling me that the verb can represent either 'regimen' or 'regiment' even though those words are clearly different. I can't get behind that; it makes absolutely zero sense to me. It's like saying that even though 'air' and 'heir' are completely different words, the verb 'to air' could mean both "to ventilate" and "to inherit." And poof - my brain is now mush.

(Apparently it wasn't mushy enough to stop myself from making a connection from my last example. I can't hear "to inherit" without thinking of the kick-ass play, "Inherit the Wind." Then I realized that wind is a form of air, so by using synonyms, that play could be called "To Heir the Air." And you wonder why I have trouble sleeping.)

If you skipped that last section, I apologize, but you'll likely want to skip this one too. Hey, I've got a theme and I feel compelled to see it all the way through. So, the same co-worker Rob asked me how to spell a word because it was coming up as misspelled on his Word document. "D-i-s-p-e-r-s-a-l," I answered. He looked very confused. "It's not b-u-r in the middle?" he asked. Then I looked confused. Being a resourceful young man, I consulted the Internets. As you may suspect from the morals of my previous parables, my victory in the knowledge category was nullified by my loss in the sanity column. I learned that to 'disperse' is "to cause to break up" or "cause to become spread widely." You know, like to disperse a crowd. Well, 'disburse' is "to pay out...especially from a fund." This may be common knowledge to people who deal with paying bills from a corporation, but it was news to me. Here are two words that sound exactly the same and can mean similar things. If I have a wad of cash and give some of it to several recipients, I feel like I've just dispersed my funds. However, I have technically disbursed them instead (or possibly done both at the same time). In my humble opinion, that's just stupid. If you don't make the words sound exactly the same then we're in the clear, but make them indistinguishable to the ear, and you get two people making confused faces. Nobody wants that.

My last example of wordnerdiness is a curious example of how the human brain prefers things to be neat and symmetrical. Let's take a look at the word "orangutang." Guess what - it doesn't really exist outside of being a band name. A Google search for "orangutang" comes back with, "Did you mean orangutan?" That's the real name of the animal - orangutan - but our ears prefer the matching sound at the end. It's the same reason some people say "heighth" instead of "height"; so it will match length and width (and depth for that matter). I wish I still had examples from the linguistics courses I took in college, because there were a few more that I found fascinating. Oh well, maybe they'll come to me at a later date. Let's look on the bright side though: I wrote about monkeys as promised.

And before we get to the Car Watch, I have one more word thing that is different from the previous items. Which do you think is a crueler word: stutterer or lisp? Tough call, right? I debated this with my Bratty Kid Sister recently, and I settled on lisp being the bigger slap in the face. If someone has a stuttering problem, there's nothing that says they'll automatically stutter on any given word. Someone with a lisp though will lisp on 'lisp' each time because that doesn't come and go like a stutter, right? Don't get me wrong, it would be awful to hear a stutterer stuttering on 'stutterer,' but I think it's the lesser of the two evils there. Please weigh in if you have a vote either way.

And with that, we've arrived at our destination of the Car Watch. Please remain seated until the captain has turned off the fasten seatbelt sign.

I was behind a car with a license plate frame a day or two ago, and it left me unsettled. It read, "Young lust" on the top and, "Which one's pink?" on the bottom. While I'm 99% sure that there's something R-rated going on there, I can't exactly figure it out. What am I missing here? My brain is trying to leap to a conclusion, but the closest I got was some half-baked theory about lust being a "red emotion" that is still pink in its earliest stages. Right now, the color green has really cornered the market on symbolizing newness, so maybe pink's trying to encroach on that territory. If so, then it's not really dirty. Why the question mark though? Ok, you now have two assignments: Stutterer or lisp, and what the hell does that frame mean?

My homey Rockabye sent me a license plate he saw: "JNKY." Wow, that's not something I would expect a person to advertise so publicly. How would you like to have a daughter picked up for a date by a dude with that plate? How'd you like to close a business deal with someone and then walk him out to his car, only to see that license plate? Do you think "MTH ADCT" was taken and this was the next logical choice? I can understand when people say that they're coffee junkies or soap opera junkies, but by not getting more specific, I'm gonna have to go with drugs on this one, Bob.

Lastly, I saw the same car two days in a row on my way to work. The plate read, "OMG SHOE." It made me laugh both times, so I had to put it in here. Of all the things that I would expect to see after the shortened version of "Oh my God," that's not in the top 500. Now I can understand that there are many people (mostly women) who go gaga over shopping, especially for shoes. But who exclaims over one shoe? Unless the driver is referencing Woody Harrelson's character in "Wag the Dog," I think it has to be one of three things. The first is that it's an inside joke that no one else would ever guess. Aside from that, it's either for someone whose nickname is Shoe for some reason (like they made a bong out of one in college once and the name just stuck after that), or the driver loves shoes but couldn't think of a way to make it plural and still get the point across. I think I'd prefer the inside joke to the other two (although a picture of the bong would satisfy my curiosity).

Ok, I've started weirding myself out and should stop typing now. That's it for this week, folks. I'll be back next Friday with more stuff, and I welcome your comments and emails (ptklein@gmail.com) in the meantime. During that week, we have some happies to dish out: Happy Half-Birthday to our friend Lisa on Sunday and Happy Full Birthday to our friend Suzanne on Monday. And lastly, Wednesday is the old dating anniversary for my lovely wife and myself, bringing us all the way to the gaudy number of 13 years that she's been putting up with my oddities. A round of applause for the lady! Have a great weekend and week, friends. Shaloha.