the view from Saturn’s shadow

My latest finding of “dictionary translation”, at a pet store:

ONE-STORY CAT CAVE
UNE CAVERNE À CHATS D’HISTOIRE

I’d make it caverne à chats à une étage.

Funny that I missed this three years ago — Joseph Hertzlinger has a provocative idea about drugs:

I don’t think a suggestibility drug such as marijuana should be encouraged. . . . I suspect that marijuana might be particularly dangerous from the point of view of inducing groupthink. I have not had any direct personal experience but I have noticed that it is defended as reinforcing the approved habits in the social group of the user. [examples elided] If we put that together we can see that marijuana is a conformist drug – probably because of its ability to make people suggestible. (That might explain the thoroughness of the collapse of trendy drug use in the ’80s. Once its use declined, the remaining users would start conforming to the new trend and stop.) . . . Declare that any drug whose use declines will be legalized. That will encourage drug users to keep their friends off the drug and will eliminate the “everybody does it” defense.

Me: “Hamachi sashimi.”

Cashier: “It depends on what kind of fish, sir.”

nun isn’t weatherproof

Number Systems of the World: lists of number-words from 0 to 100, ranked, somewhat arbitrarily, by “complexity”. (Cited by LanguageHat.) To me the most remarkable is Alamblak (#7) whose number-words are all compounded from the words for 1, 2, 5 and 20, thus 56 is yima hosfi tir hosfirpati rpat = twenties two, fives two-one, one.

I’d love to have an English translation of the German comments in fullgen.c, a program that counts the polyhedra that can be made of pentagons and hexagons (i.e. fullerenes), so that I can modify it. (None of the output modes are quite what I’m after, and I think it may miss some solutions.)

Would I pay for a translation? Well, I’m obscenely broke these days, but I might.

There are scholars of slang who hunt for earliest documentable uses. Does anyone do the same for puns?

In 1971, Larry Niven and David Gerrold published a novel The Flying Sorcerors. Recently for the first time I found that pun made circa 1959 (but I’ve forgotten the context). And just now I heard an even earlier one: in “Broom-Stick Bunny”, 1956, Bugs says, “You’re not gonna believe this: I just saw a genie with light brown hair chasing a flying sorceress.”

I don’t know how many times this has happened. I’m on the phone with some chirpy Career Gal, she says something to which I say “Yes, fine,” and then she warbles “Okay??”, leaving me somewhat bewildered and impatient.

It has been observed (alas that I failed to blog it, else I could tell you by whom) that “language is a code used only by code-breakers.” So perhaps I have imperfectly cracked the tacit protocol of such exchanges. Am I expected to refrain from giving my consent until it’s explicitly asked, or has the “No Means No” campaign resulted in a presumption that Yes also means no unless repeated?