Recent comments by user

Marina, on the “Coast To Coast” radio program …

Marina, on the “Coast To Coast” radio program last night (Sat) on KFI, the guest was Philip Carlo, author of “Confessions of a Mafia Boss” and other books. On the show, Philip mentioned several times convincingly that “WOP” stood for “With Out Passport / Papers”
http://www.philipcarlo.com/

You and I and prospero811 and others know that “With Out Passport / Papers” is a false etymology. I know that you do not discuss politics as it is divisive and etymologies has it’s own political issues and the emotional comments can be seen below.

As prospero811 has already mentioned that the false etymology came after the fact and from listening to the radio show, I might speculate that there may have been either a conscientious or subconscious effort to change the meaning of “WOP” in the 1920s to something less derogatory perhaps via the mafia and then political channels.

Request:
Is it possible to make a video on how words become transformed through false etymologies whereby the false etymologies eventually become canonized as true meanings through war, politics or other means? Maybe chose a few words that you are aware of that are examples of this. Thank you for your wonderful efforts and great videos.

pedantickarl also commented

P.S. (Thinking out loud)
I light of the emotional outcries against the false etymologies, how do you see popular authors who spread false etymologies either intentionally or ignorantly? What can be done? Or, is it that the pen indeed is mightier that the sword? Should authors be responsible? I guess, once the horse is out of the barn, there might be little that can be done?
Gail may have it right, but ♥ Marina ♥ is perfecting it Hotly.
My Dear Teacher,
It must take some effort to collect all of the word requests and keep track of them. Would a specific page used only for requesting words make sense? It would make it easier for you to keep track of them?

I was thinking of seeing a results page that would show a histogram (similar to the voting page) of all of the requested words and which ones have been done. People visiting that page could also then vote for their favorite word yet to be done.

I think the words that you choose for your videos are words that tend to surface in various current events, which I think is great.
(e.g. GTA IV, Hooker, Nuclear, Lesbian, etc)

I know that it takes a lot of work to produce a video and there is probably a three months lag from a word request to a video? Just letting you know that your work is very much appreciated. ♥♥♥
Hello cognation73,
I have a similar interest and I had just recently requested origins of Cyrillic, Slavic and a brief cultural tidbits about Russia.

In one of her videos, Marina had mentioned difficulties in pronouncing the “w” sound and she used the example of pronouncing “video” in the “Molotov Cocktail” video. (Very cute; about 3 min mark)
This is another ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ video.
http://www.hotforwords.com/2008/05/05/molotov-cocktail/

Although Belgian, I was fascinated with Helmut Lotti’s musical program “From Russia With Love” shown on PBS. I loved the music and the Russian costumes and the people.

P.S.
You can call me kraut, or teutonic twit (Blazzing Saddles), but don’t call me late for dinner.

Recent comments by pedantickarl

Sexual Words in the Dictionary
Damiana,
I answered Rijk over here regarding the question of spam.

I only list a few known items that can cause your comment to be flagged as spam. I can tell you from personal experience that when I post a comment on my own blog as a non-logged in user, all of my comments are flagged as spam and I can only guess that it is either related to my domain or it is related to the username being on a list (black list) from other postings elsewhere. I would have to research the spam filter’s rules to see what’s going on.

In your case, if you created another username such as Damiana1 for example, and if your comments were still being flagged, it would indicate a blacklisting of your domain or cookies. Clear your cookies and see what happens. Of course you will lose your personalizations and you would have to key your username and passwords back in again.

As background information, here is the Wordpress information on the spam filter called Akismet.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Combating_Comment_Spam
Tissue + Sneeze
Hi CK,
My reference to accessibility refers more to the idea of usability in terms of browser standards and ability to present a consistent user experience across all platforms and browsers. Handicapped accessibility certainly is one of those elements and comes under a variety of guidelines such as WAI, UAAG, ATAG, ADA and others.

Hearing impaired Closed Captioning is usually done by people with the skillset and technology to create accurate captioning. It is not a trivial task unless a TA has that skillset or the time. Of course you don’t have to be a TA to volunteer to do this kind of work. Anyone with the time and skill set can do it.

All one needs is to get permission from Marina to replicate the video and then to insert the captioning which can be either hard captioned (visible at all times) or Closed Captioned using YouTube’s player technology.

A two minute video would take me about 20 min to an hour or more to transcribe and add the captioning. The reason for the time is that some words require to be looked up, insert corrections as needed and verify the proper transcription. Someone with a transcribing skillset would be able to do it much more quickly than I could. There are tools that can help, such as speech to text converters. I have not tried it on these videos yet.

Many of the hearing impaired institutes hire people to do these kinds of tasks, and I think many of them are very busy. There is always the question of demand and how many hearing impaired users would this help.

I would think that anyone aligned with the hearing impaired community would take the lead in this endeavor in order to create and implement a plan for captioning.
Tissue + Sneeze
Hi Jan,
I added a summary of Marina’s 9th visit to the O’Reilly Factor show in the Forum. You can also see my previous summaries of all of Marina’s visits to O’Reilly.
COP15
Hello Rijk,
I don’t think you meant, “… my super-girl got spammed…”
I think you meant to say that a comment posting by my super-girl was flagged as spam?

I don’t think the number of comments per thread would cause a comment to be flagged.

There are a few things that I am aware of that can cause a comment to be flagged as spam. Some of them are:
1. Repeated editing when trying to apply an illegal HTML code.
For example, lets say that I want to add some HTML code and it didn’t turn out right. Then, I edit the comment again and tweak the code to try to get it right. After a certain number of attempts, that will cause a comment to be flagged.

2. Adding too many links can cause a comment to be flagged as spam.

I’m sure there are others, and I don’t know all of the violations that can cause a comment to be spammed. Another factor could be the domain that she is logged in from. Sometimes the spam filter can falsely flag a user as a spammer due to association with other known spammers in that domain. (ref black lists for example)

All of the above have happened to me on this site and also on my own blog.
Interview for Associated Content
Wonderful article Jan. I enjoyed reading your second article on Marina. I remember reading your article last year which was published in July ‘08. There have been many changes along the way for Marina in almost a year and a half and your new article reflects those changes very nicely.
The first article that you wrote in July 03, 2008 is located on this site here.