KellanStec.com

Hey everyone,

I just wanted to let you all know that recently there was a speaker at Wayne State College. He was speaking about creationism. Kellan has some write-ups about some of the points he made. Its good. KellanStec.com (Bookmark it and Subribe to the feed.)

Thanks for the recap of everything, Kellan, I wanted to go down and watch it with ya'.

Good Bye.

The other day I was listening to Coffee Break French from Radio Lingua. (If you have ever wanted to learn or practice French or Spanish, their podcasts are pretty amazing.) The lesson I was learning was how to say hello and goodbye. Now you wouldn't think anything amazing would come from learning the basics of a langauge, but one of the ways to say goodbye in French is to say 'adieu'. This is a lot like the Spanish 'adiós.'

Before I go on, I want to remind you of the post about SHIT. It was a nice story but wasn't true. I was then informed I was being a wet blanket for ruining the fun story of whence a word came. So I thought I would make it up to you.

Broken down, both the words adiós and adieu mean "To God." The teacher on the the podcast kept saying, "To God, just like we do when we say good bye." This seemed really strange. We all know what good means and when to use it: good day, good night, good bye. But the bye is the word that I never thought about. Turns out bye is short for "Be with ye."

This is a what Bartleby, American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language gives:

No doubt more than one reader has wondered exactly how goodbye is derived from the phrase “God be with you.” To understand this, it is helpful to see earlier forms of the expression, such as God be wy you, god b'w'y, godbwye, god buy' ye, and good-b'wy. The first word of the expression is now good and not God, for good replaced God by analogy with such expressions as good day, perhaps after people no longer had a clear idea of the original sense of the expression. A letter of 1573 written by Gabriel Harvey contains the first recorded use of goodbye: “To requite your gallonde [gallon] of godbwyes, I regive you a pottle of howdyes,” recalling another contraction that is still used.

It's also in the Online Etymology Dictionary.
So there you have it, something both interesting and not made up.

Aspartame is still okay to drink. Stop it hippies.
Also, make sure you check out Radio Lingua. It's very good, that and some flashcards. They have a ton of languages in the ONE MINUTE.... I haven't listened to much of those, but Coffee Break French and Spanish, and Show Time Spanish are awesome.

Maybe not so Intriguing.

We are well into that certain time of year again. The TV has been over taken. By basketball. For the next few months we have to deal with maybe the belief that bothers me the most, Slam Dunks are cool.

They're not. Several times a day I drop garbage of some sort into a trash barrel. Sometimes it is a small trash can. Maybe a little smaller than a basketball hoop. I know, not impressive, but what if I had to jump maybe a foot? No. What If I was running? No? One handed? Maybe I stole the trash from some one? Yeah, lame.









Youtube is weird.

In-State Tuition for Illegal Immigrants

On my bus ride home from campus I heard a couple guys behind me talking about the elction results, and I heard their enthusiasm for Tim Clare. The reason they were most excited was that he didn't want to give in-state tuition for illegal immigrants. They were pretty sure it would raise their own tuition money. This just supports the idea that I've been coming up with, you know, in my philosophical, Lord of the Flies kind of way. People are pretty much selfish douchebags.

I used to work with a guy named William. We unloaded trucks at Wal-mart, and he said the most absolutly true idea ever said to describe people. William is from the Sudan, and moved to the U.S. because of the wars going on. One day three of us white truck unloaders were walking with William, and on the other side of the aisle, three walmart workers from Africa. We asked him why he wasn't walking with his brothers, and without missing a beat he said, "You are my brothers too. People are just people. We just look different."

That is a quote I will never ever forget, and that I wish more people understood. Here's the deal, if your parents are illegal immigrants, or if you are, you probably weren't loaded with money to be able to pay out-of-state tuition. My family isn't close to trying to just make it by like some of these families, and we couldn't afford out-of-state tuition. But everyone who wants to, should be able to get an education and try to make their lives better. Maybe you don't want your tuition to sky rocket, maybe immigrants will start "stealing" even better jobs from us, maybe you are jsut a racist asshole who can't see the world from other people's perspective. People are people, and we all deserve the same chances.

The video below is from July 16, 2007. It's about making English the native language. Basically some day we may all have to learn Spanish, languages evolve and spread, and it's going to happen, and it's just one of those things you just need to get over. Go with the flow. O, Vaya con el flujo!

Girl, 13, stoned to death in Somalia as 1,000 watch; charged

Here is another one of those just mind blowing stories, that seem like they happened back in the biblical days. But it isn't.A 13-year-old girl who said she had been raped was stoned to death in Somalia after being accused of adultery by Islamic militants, a human rights group said.

read more | digg story

Crazy Sprinkler Lady

I don't know if anyone has seen this yet, it's been around for a while. Just thought It should be one more place.

read more | digg story

A friend full of "shit."

The other day as I was over at a friends house I heard a nice little story about the origen of a word which we are all very familiar with. The word that was heard all over Nebraska in the overtime of the Husker game with Texas Tech. (That is just poor writing, no one wants to see that typed.) The word is shit, that is all the build up I can manage. Here's a nice email I found saying basically the same thing as my friend.

Subject: Fabulous bit of historical knowledge

Ever wonder where the word "shit" comes from. Well here it is:

Certain types of manure used to be transported (as everything was back then) by ship. In dry form it weighs a lot less, but once water (at sea) hit it. It not only became heavier, but the process of fermentation began again, of which a by-product is methane gas.

As the stuff was stored below decks in bundles you can see what could (and did) happen; methane began to build up below decks and the first time someone came below at night with a lantern. BOOOOM!

Several ships were destroyed in this manner before it was discovered what was happening.

After that, the bundles of manure where always stamped with the term "S.H.I.T" on them which meant to the sailors to "Ship High In Transit." In other words, high enough off the lower decks so that any water that came into the hold would not touch this volatile cargo and start the production of methane.

Bet you didn't know that one.

Here I always thought it was a golf term.

I found an etymology dictionary here.

I had heard in my language classes, that any exciting story about a word origin is probably wrong. Most of our words are going to be traced back to Old English, Latin, Greek, et cetra.

When I first heard the story I thought the word would have been much older than English sea trading. Or at least older than the Modern English language. The oldest use I saw of it was,

Lues animalium, quæ Anglice Scitta vocatur, Latine autem fluxus interaneorum dici potest.

Scitta is the word of interest. The sentence is something about cattle having diarrhea.

It is used again in the 14th century as a verb.

þey wolde ... make hem a pitte ... whan þey wolde schite ...; and whanne þey hadde i-schete þey wolde fille þe pitte agen."

I have no idea what that says, but again you can easyily choose the words, schite and schete. The combitnation of letter "sc" from Anglo-Saxon would later become "sh" in Modern english. It also stays very similar in other languages.

German Scheiss,
Dutch schijt,
Old Norse skita,
Lithuanian sikti,

The second problem I found with the story after doing some research is that acronyms were not really used untilthe 1900's. The first acronyms were made popular by the military(A.S.A.P., POW) Son of a bitch has been a phase since the 1700's but never used as SOB until 1918.

And the third reason that came to to raise a red flag off the bat was methane. Sure it hangs around shit. Here is what a physics teacher had to say about it.

M]ethane gas would not 'build up' in the hold of a ship. It is lighter than air and in any unsealed space would dissipate upward fast enough that an explosive mixture would not accumulate.

So I am just going to some it up with the bulleted list I stole from Douglas Harper and his entry about the topic.

the word itself is a good 1,000 years older than the common use of acronyms;

the original form of the word (Anglo-Saxon sc-, which regularly evolved into M.E. sh-) does not correspond to the supposed acronym;

the verb is the original form, the noun derives from it; the acronym supposes the noun came first;

no one has produced a single instance of this supposed acronym from any old mercantile record or ship's manifest;

in fact, no one has ever established that there was a custom of shipping manure;
the word has cognates in many other languages, including ones outside Germanic, for which no acronym theory of origin makes sense;