Matching Game!

Here's a vocabulary matching game. Some are easy and I've mentioned them before. Match the British word on the left with the correct definition on the right:

ice lolly                                    tired

bin                                           pacifier

neep                                        eraser

tattie                                        eggplant

banger                                     underwear

chips                                        Sprite

crisps                                       sidewalk

pudding                                    undershirt                               

biscuit                                      popsicle

crackers                                  flashlight

boot                                         amazed

knackered                                french fries

courgette                                  potato

aubergine                                 diaper

lemonade                                 procrastinate

lorry                                        sausage

dummy                                    trashcan

jumper                                     dessert

pants                                        rutabaga

pavement                                 cookie

vest                                         zucchini

torch                                        trunk

rubber                                      sweater

nappy                                       potato chips

faff                                          Christmas party favor

gobsmacked                              truck

Twentieth Word: halcyon

halcyon- 1540s,  in halcyon dayes (L. alcyonei dies, Gk. alkyonides hemerai)14 days of calm weather at the winter solstice, when a mythical bird (identified with the kingfisher) was said to breed in a nest floating on calm seas. From halcyon (n.), late 14c., from L. halcyon, from Gk. halkyon, variant (perhaps a misspelling) of alkyon "kingfisher"


This word is fitting for two reasons. One, the album by Deerhunter that we listened to a lot on our trip is called Halcyon Digest. Two, halcyon means happy, joyful, carefree. Welcome to Skye.

The Isle of Skye was beautiful. My impressions of it from GoogleMaps street view were that it was mildly hilly but this couldn't be further from reality. From Glen Coe through Glen Shiel and up to Kyle of Lochalsh the highlands kept growing and Skye burst up from the waters to tower over the horizon. The first thing that greeted us was the Cuillin range. Beautiful, red-tipped cones that wind around the southern portion of the island. We had beautiful weather for the drive up but rain welcomed us onto Skye. We took a one lane road from Broadford along the southern fringe of the Cuillins to Elgol, hardly a town, to view the craggy mountains beyond the bay. See facebook for pix.

The first day consisted of our drive up, the drive to Elgol and back, and winding our way through the rain to our wonderful hostel on the western coast. After dinner the weather cleared up and we drove to Talisker Bay. Gorgeous cliffs, lots of sheep, and salty sea air. and a waterfall :)

We expected rain the entire time we were on Skye but Wednesday morning I woke up early to glorious sun and warm weather. While the others slept in, I took a walk down the lane our hostel was on just to catch views of the peninsula we were on. Living in the city, with the constant din of traffic, sea gulls and drunks shouting,makes me appreciate walks like this. Stillness, the glassy waters of the bay, sheep munching on grass, walking down the middle of the road the only person awake.

Excited by the prospect of sunny weather, the four of us packed into our tiny 2-door and we drove off to Portree, the largest, um, village in Skye. We took in the scenery while listening to great music like Beirut, Fleet Foxes, and Mumford & Sons. Portree is a charming harbor town with great views of the Isle of Raasay. We got coffees and delicious and cheap baked goods and strolled around town. Tummies satisfied, we headed to the Old Man of Storr. I expected this rock formation to be one of those where you pull off the road into a car park and you lean against the railing to take pictures of the monolith beyond. Nope. We parked on the side of the road and took the 2 mile trail up and up and up through the woods until we came out at the base of the Storr. As Sarah's blog will attest, we said "only a little further" about five different times and wound up spending a good two hours pretending to be mountain goats. The views were beyond words. They were beyond my picture-taking abilities too. I kept being struck by how mountainous everything I could see was. I don't know why I expected the mountains to flatten out as you get further from Fort William.

We drove up to Kilt Rock and the Quirraing which is stunning in it's own right but we were all needing bathrooms and were tired out from our previous hike. We continued our drive around the northern tip of the Totternish peninsula and decided on heading back to the hostel for dinner and resting. We spent our evening playing cards and listening to the live folk music provided by our hostel owners and some guests. It made me miss Scotland already.

Thursday morning we headed through a dreary Skye to Dunvegan castle. We didn't go in- it was so cold and wet outside and at that point we were so sick of driving. We took a beautiful drive on our way back to the bridge to Skye and headed home. Alex managed driving a stick shift with his left hand and driving on the left side of the road very well. Don't tell the rental company but I tried my hand at it too and it wasn't too bad.

Scotland is plain gorgeous. That's it. I feel so blessed to have been to places like Hungary, Romania, and Scotland- places that people often overlook. As any of our guests can tell you, Scotland is wonderful. It's hard not to think about our time winding down here but I am so glad we went to Skye. I am trying to make this place as much my own as I can before we go. It's gotten under my skin and I don't think it will let me go without a fight (heck, I'll be fighting too!). So that's all for now. Enjoy the facebook pictures.

Say What?
So far as I've heard, "Gaelic" is pronounced ga-lik (a as in apple) when it's referring to Scottish Gaelic and it's pronounced gay-lik when it's referring to Irish Gaelic.

Nineteenth Word: Dissertation

dissertation: 1610s "discussion, debate," from L. dissertationem, from dis- "apart"  + serere "to arrange words"

I suppose it's time to introduce you to my new on-again-off-again friend Dissertation. We met a while back, mid-April I believe. My professor introduced us. She's obsessed with compound words. Not any old compound words, mind you, but the kind you find in newspaper headlines. Things like 'Greek Debt Talks Widen Euro-Zone Divisions'. I think she's collecting them. You know, when I met her I thought we had a lot in common: a shared interest in words, linguistic persuasions of the lexicalist kind - I mean, I had just finished up a course on English Word Formation. Loved it! So I thought, sure, I'll give her a chance. Well, she dropped a bomb on me a few days later. I thought she was a Lexicalist but I come to find out over a nice cup of tea that she is kind of against that. She said she has onomasiological tendencies. Tendencies, ha! That's like the president of the NRA saying he has "conservative tendencies"! I was really mad that she had been lying to me this whole time. In hindsight though, there were signs. She kept hinting at it, giving me new "reading material". 


You should be glad to know she hasn't converted me. But I'm giving her side a chance. Truly, I like wrestling with her assertions and coming up with counter examples. But really, that's not my tendency as a linguist. I tend to hear a new theory and try and work with it (although this one's a toughie). We've been working through our differences for over a month now and while her theory is pretty progressive, it's still relatively new and there are definitely some holes. What's interesting to me though is she still hasn't given me any good reasons to think her collection of newspaper headline compounds actually work within the framework of her theory. So I've decided to take that task on and run a study, with the help of all of you, to see if we can make some headway. 


Let me explain a few terms you came across in the above paragraphs (if you're still reading, that is). Lexicalism is a theory of word formation (you know...forming words...) in which there are distinct processes like compounding (sailboat), attaching suffixes and prefixes (industrialize, restart), and several others. Lexicalism, the name, comes from the idea of the mental lexicon, which is just the dictionary we have in our heads of all the words we know. My word formation class focused on this school of thought. 


Onomasiologists, however, don't believe that compounding and suffixation etc are separate processes. Semantically (semantic has to do with meaning), all these processes have the same relationships. In other words, the words are related in the same way whether or not you compound or attach a suffix. For example, driver is "someone (the -er suffix) who drives" while a chairman is "someone (man) who chairs". both man and -er mean "someone who does something (a verb usually)". driver is formed adding a suffix while chairman is a compound. It seems the processes aren't different semantically. 


It seems that onomasiology makes sense from this standpoint and it would be pretty complicated to explain why I still hold the Lexicalist view. But I am trying to see how far Onomasiology can stretch as a theory to account for data that hasn't been studied - compounds that consist of 3 or more words (one of my favorites comes from The Atlantic: 'Russian Robot Collie Patent Sketches'. yes, Russian patent sketches for a robot dog. or is it patent sketches for a Russian robot dog? or is it sketches for a Russian patent of a robot dog?) See, the semantics -relationship between words- gets a little weird when you have so many parts.... So that's where you come in. I'm going to test your instincts as to what compounds like 'Russian Robot Collie Patent Sketches' mean. And then I'm going to see how well this Onomasiology Theory stands up to my data. 


Bless you for sticking with this til the end. I promise I won't make you read my dissertation ;)

Eighteenth Word: London

London - 
Chief city and capital of England, L. Londinium (c.115), often explained as "place belonging to a man named Londinos," a supposed Celtic personal name meaning "the wild one" (www.etymonline.com)

So, like a guest ale on at the local pub that you've never tried, here am I, Alex, to treat you to tales of shenanigans and misadventures of the trip that Adam, Mike and I had in Longdong. Adam and I traveled all day by plane, train and automobile to get to London where we met Mike. It was like we had the band the back together again. We looked it too, what with our stylish facial hair and their hip black glasses. We said our yo mans, hugged, did our secret handshakes etc. and started walking to the hostel. Thus commenced the walking of the trip. We did a lot of walking.

We got to the hostel and napped a bit before heading out and exploring our area. We were in the Southwark borough, pretty close to London Bridge. We found a pub with a good happy hour special and drank some real ales (slightly chilled, lightly carbonated English brews, cask conditioned and served. Oh, okay, I won't steer off course yet.), had some dinner and ended our Thursday night at a place called the Trinity, an empty-ish pub next to our hostel. It was there that we ran into Dana, a "short-blonde-druggie-hipster-chick" as Adam described her. She was an American that had studied there a couple of years and so knew the city, and was returning to visit some friends. She was super talkative and excited to give us a local's guide to the city. She gave us her map and circled a bunch of places that we should go, for example: Holland Park, an adult playground, with a zipline and a huge tire swing where peacocks run free; Primrose Hill, where we can see great views of the city; Fabric, a pub/club six stories underground with an amazing laser light show. Okay, I guess I don't remember any other place she told us to go, because those were the only places we were really interested in. 

Friday was our big day. We wanted to hit Holland Park for the zipline and peacocks, and since it was past Hyde Park we'd go through that too. After that would be Primrose Hill, and after that we'd grab a drink with Audrey and her boyfriend Lee at near Victoria Station, where they were coming in to London to visit with Lee's aunt for a few days. So. We started walking from our hostel to Westminster Bridge to see that and Parliament Square and Big Ben. Beautiful. Tons of people. From there we walked through St. James's Park and Green Park, then into Hyde Park. On the way we got a frisbee and played next to a lake. It was a beautiful day. We found this tree that was like a house, and we hung out in it for a while before we kept going. So many monuments to writers, important philosophers, Albert, King whats-his-name, the war, yer mom, you name it. We finally got to Holland Park, after going through I don't know how many neighborhoods and parks and stuff, and it seemed like basically a normal park. We found a map of it on a sign and found where the "adventure playground" was, and headed that way. On the way there was an orangery, which I'm still not sure what that is, but it looked cool - old buildings, modern sculptures, giant chess board, you know, normal orangery stuff,  I'm sure. 

Finally, after walking for probably 4 hours,  we arrived at the playground. It was a bit of - okay, a big - letdown. Tons of toddlers with their late 20s early 30somethings mums. Yeah, there was a zipline. Yeah, a big tire swing. But we were hoping to bring beers here and laugh at peacocks fighting while playing on giant adult-sized seesaws. Me and Mike made the best of the tarzan swing while trying to glance away from all of the moms' stares before we said bye-bye. Looking back, we maybe shouldn't have trusted Dana so much. What with all the talk of acid and ecstasy, I'm pretty sure the peacocks must've been a hallucination. Oh well. We saw a lot of London we'd probably never see otherwise. We made it to Primrose Hill (by bus) and that was pretty. At least that wasn't a hallucination. 

Friday night (ha! and you thought our day was over! shhyeah, right!) we wanted to visit the CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale) Pub of the Year 2010-11, The Harp. It was near Covent Gardens, and we couldn't really find it. We had gone to another pub before that and we were kind of lost as to which direction the pub was in. I was on the phone with Julia and she was on the computer figuring out where we were in relation to the pub ("wait, so you're still on Long Acre?!") and so eventually we just gave up. Continuing down the wrong street, we found this little tiny alley (only about two feet wide) and walked down that, just because. It opened up eventually and there were people drinking in the alley and a door that was propped open. We went in and found the coolest little pub, with 10 or so real ales on and sweet decor. We went out front to see what pub we were in, and of course, you guessed it. The Harp. *Brrrriiinggg!* We stayed there for some nice Sambrooks ales, but because we couldn't find it, it was almost closing time, and couldn't stay long. We left to have a beer on a footbridge over the Thames. "Epic," as one passerby commented.  On the way back, we were taking photos of Mike doing embarrassing things like jumping off of things and stuff, and Adam took the camera and ran off down some stairs. He said he thought we were following him, but we went around to meet him at the bottom. When we got there, he wasn't. We called, and waited, and got mad, and worried, and eventually after an hour or so, took a bus back to our hostel. When we got back to the hostel around 2:30, he wasn't there. We started really worrying then, like what if he got mugged, etc? There were some bikes you could rent by the hostel, and we jumped on them and headed down the route we thought he probably took, maybe down London Bridge, and around that vicinity. No luck. After an hour or so we decided Mike would head back to the hostel and text me if Adam was there. He was. Asleep. Awesome. What a sweet Friday, huh? 

Saturday. Since I've already written an entire book and you stopped reading up before the Harp, I'll put this in nice easy bullets.

-Westminster Abbey costs £16 per person to get into. Plus a really long line, not worth it, for us.

- I saw a zombie dwarf running down London Bridge. Freaky.

- We walked a ton again, this time down Piccadilly Circus, Regent Street, and Oxford Circus, just kind of shopping and seeing things. Got some cheap stuff at Primark. Busiest, scariest Primark ever. 

-We went back to the Harp Saturday night and saw Matthew Fox (from LOST) there. Cool.

- I guess that's it.

Overall, London was awesome. By Sunday we were limping like senior citizens from all the walking, but I think for the most part, that was okay. We saw a lot of London for how short a time we were there, and we had a lot of fun. London's got so many different parts to it - an old, majestic part, a cool hipster part (though we never did make it to Fabric), a modern business-y part, a super commercial part with tons of street performers swallowing balloon animals and stuff. And there's tons of cool parks. But you know, any city remotely like that I think is gonna be cool when you're with guys like Adam and Mike. You can't help but have fun, even when your feet feel like they're gonna fall off. 

Say What?

London : Longdong, Fundon... anyone got any other good ones?  

Sixteenth Word: York

York-a city in northern England, O.Eng Eoforwic, earlier Eborakon (c.150), an ancient Celtic name, probably meaning "Yew-Tree Estate"


My family spent Saturday through Wednesday in Edinburgh. We saw all the typical sights: the castle, the palace, the parliament, Calton Hill, the Meadows, Arthur's Seat, Craigmillar Castle, the Royal Mile and Princes Street Gardens. We had tea at cute little Clarinda's on the Royal Mile after visiting the palace. This place is your grandma's house with pencil sketches of dogs, pictures of girls with dolls, and doilies everywhere. We all discovered "cream tea" which is actually a scone with butter jam and whipped cream served with a cup of tea. Delish! We met up with Sarah over the weekend because her group from Calvin was visiting. We had birthday dinner Saturday night. Linnea and Alex made chicken risotto.

Monday we went to North Berwick for my birthday. It's this adorable seaside town with the National Seabird Center. We got to see puffins and all kinds of seabirds that nest out on the rocks in the Firth of Forth. Bass Rock is 3 miles off the coast and is 300 feet tall. It was huge! and so beautiful. It was a rather grey day but eventually cleared up and we beach combed and hunted for seashells in the afternoon. Whereas the Highlands reminded me of the Pacific northwest in a way, North Berwick reminded me a lot of Cape Cod and the east coast. Tuesday we went to the place where Alex cooks, David Bann, for dinner before going to see Alex perform in Rent.

Thursday, we took the train to Newcastle, rented a car, and drove to Housesteads, a Roman fort built in 124AD. We walked along Hadrian's wall, the wall dividing the Roman south from the Scottish/Pictish (?) north. Alex went back to Edinburgh because he had performances all weekend and the rest of us took the train to York to meet up with Sarah and  Mike.

York is so cute! It has a charming little old town, a beautiful minster, and the flowers and trees were all in bloom. Sarah showed us all the typical sights. We visited the minster and it's crypt and walked through the Shambles (a street on which all the buildings are droopy, saggy, falling apart and yet remaining upright-apparently Diagon Alley in the HP books was modeled after it). We rented a river boat and cruised down the Ouse for an hour. We got gelato and ate Yorkshire puddings the size of dinner plates. It was quite a charming town.

On my favorite day in York, we rented a car and drove north to the Yorkshire Moors. We stopped at Rievaulx Abbey which is set in an idyllic valley with sheep, rolling hills, and only about five cottages nearby. The abbey is a huge ruin, the largest I've seen yet and by far the best I've been to. I LOVED it. It was so beautiful (made better by the 65 degree weather!). We traveled through the villages of Helmsley and Hutton-le-Hole. We eventually ended up at Castle Howard (not actually a castle but a grand country estate). It had beautiful grounds that we enjoyed in the warm weather! Back to York for dinner.

Our last day, we stayed in town. Mom and dad went to the Yorkshire museum while Sarah, Nene, Mike, and I got gelato (yes at 10am). We visited the Minster and its crypt, ate at Sarah's favorite cafe Middleton's, and walked the city walls. Another glorious day. To escape all of the Saturday crowds, we rented a river boat for an hour and cruised down the Ouse. York is definitely a place to visit when in the UK. It is very charming and  cute. Made all the better because we could see where Sarah has spent the semester.

I know this blog is way past due but my life after my parents left Edinburgh has consisted of papers, papers, papers. Then Laura, my cousin, visited last week (much fun!) and Adam is here this week and next. I've got an exam Tuesday and my dissertation proposal due a week from Monday ("Meaning Predictability in Compounding and Phrasal Attribution"). We're on the final leg of our journey now but I'm sure we'll make the most of it this summer :)

Fifteenth Word: Caledonia

Caledonia Roman name of part of northern Britain, taken from the name of former inhabitants, of unknown origin, perhaps Celtic; since 18c, applied poetically to Scotland or the Scottish Highlands.

Edinburgh never fails to greet my guests with terrible weather. For a lucky few, the weather has only misbehaved for the first day. My family happens to be some of the lucky few. Fort William, however, knew we were coming to visit before seeing Edinburgh and put on a spectacular display of whipping wind and rain.  The family arrived two Thursdays ago and Alex and I met them at the airport where we rented a van to drive up to Fort William for two days.

The drive up was gorgeous: full of "oohs" and "ahhs" and one giddy "Oh, run!" from Linnea about the first frolicking lamb she saw (we don't get much of those in the US). Sadly, it is lambing season and the lambs received a majority of the "ooh look!"s from my family (they were really cute though....).

The highlands were huge. The mountains were at least twice the size I expected them to be. Their foreboding immensity was not only accentuated by the driving rains, whipping wind, and menacing grey clouds but by their treelessness. No one cared about the weather when it came to taking pictures. Too gorgeous for words! I've seen a lot of the world but the Scottish highlands would be part of my top recommendations. Something about this place resonates with me. I guess mountains always do....

Around late afternoon the weather quieted down and we reached Fort William. We drove to Inverlochy Castle, a ruin, which we romped around in and on and through. Quite fun and, I believe, the first castle experience for the family. We drove to our chalet next which had a great view of Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in the UK. The air was humid but thick with the smell of campfires. We were in our element! After unpacking, we walked around the horse farm that the chalet owners run. Beautiful horses and an idyllic setting for a farm. Alex and Dad cooked us a "gorgeous" dinner of local mussels, scallops, and monk fish which we had picked up in Glencoe.

The next day we took a train over the Glenfinnan viaduct which made its debut in the second Harry Potter film. So what if it was raining. Harry Potter beats rain, always. It was so much fun. We walked around Glenfinnan and up to the viaduct. It was a fun but soggy morning. After getting lunch in Fort William, we drove through the Great Glen (gorgeous again!) as the skies cleared up. We hiked to a distant waterfall tucked back in the mountains. It was a wonderful and challenging hike up through the mountains. Unfortunately, my camera decided not to save about half my pictures from this hike and then it died entirely. Bah. At least I have memories! Such a fun two days. Blogs about the week in Edinburgh and the trip to York yet to come.

Say What?


A' Ghàidhealtachd which means Highlands in Scottish Gaelic. It's pronounced (I think) geh-uhl-dechg where the 'ch' is like the one in Scottish "loch" . 

Fourteenth Word: Outwith

As a sort of "Say What?" substitute, the title of this blog is for my dad who recently had an encounter with this word. Outwith means 'beyond' or 'outside of.' You will hear it used especially if you call any businesses outwith their normal business hours. It's mostly found in Northern England and Scotland.

Jordan, Alex, and I took advantage of this 55-degree sunny day (and as a celebratory end to classes and some papers) by going to the Pentland hills to the southwest of the city. We took a 45 minute bus ride out and promptly got ourselves lost. After a quick GoogleMaps search, Jordan (and Al's intuition) got us back on track. We wandered through the neighborhoods of Balerno Village, passed through a neighborhood woodland walk, and meandered past farmland to finally arrive at the trail head towards Harlaw Reservoir at the base of some of the hills. I was struck by how much of our walk thus far reminded me of Michigan. The trail we took looked like the one you would take to Hoffmaster beach in MI. The roads we wandered down reminded me of Lowell. I feel so at home in the countryside because it is so familiar to me.

The reservoir walk was a beautiful trek around the waters with trees on one side and sheep-grazing fields on the other. I will admit I can't help taking pictures of stone walls. Probably because they are less common back home. But the texture, color, moss, lichen, shape, how they settle right into the landscape, make them such good subjects for photographs. We found some strange ruins that seemed to still be in use for something but they looked so cool against the hills that we had to walk through them. We wanted to climb some hills but Alex had to be to work so we just enjoyed our walk around the waters. The day was indescribably beautiful (especially for Scotland). Don't get me wrong, Scotland can provide some beautiful days but a long, dark, and dreary winter makes these days even more beautiful.

Getting out into the countryside adds so much depth to my experience here. Not even the countryside, a different neighborhood will do. Just knowing places. Getting out of my immediate experience so I can really experience. I am so looking forward to going to Fort William next week with my family. The highlands are beautiful. I've posted some pictures on facebook of our day. I hope they make you want to come to Scotland some day. It seems like such a forgotten place to the rest of the world, but it is so beautiful!