The strange, the bizarre and the unexpected

[RussDNails]

40 is definitely not what I would consider long in the tooth! I'm happy your daughter has made you proud and thanks for the words of encouragement.

I've been dabbling with Linux lately and it's making me nuts. I just wiped a perfectly good Win 10 laptop and installed Ubuntu and then Linux Lite--now the laptop is pretty much useless until I figure out some of the basics.

Ironically my work laptop is my favorite for Wordtwist and I've now been blocked by an admin from playing games on it, even at home. Now I'm plunking away on another old Win 7 laptop that was collecting dust in my closet. My typing speed is definitely taking a hit since the keyboard on this thing is the older "island" style that requires a lot more force than my newer laptop with "chicklet" keys.

Anyhow, back to plunking away before it gets too late.........nice chatting with you.......

[bwt1213]

I've run Ubuntu and it's pretty good. You can run Firefox and get into wordtwist; I ran that a lot of times, so I know it works. Please download the Open Office suite; I used to use that a lot when I was a quant (for those who don't know, that's short for "quantitative analyst", a term used to describe mathematicians/wizards who predict the stock market in real time, sometimes at nanosecond scales). Once you have a word processor and spreadsheet, all you need is a language. I recommend Python, which I used with R to do statistical analysis and modeling. Python can be used for almost anything. As far as "long in the tooth" is concerned, you're not there until you're facing the grim reaper, IMHO. I've done that. He doesn't scare me any more. If you see I haven't been here for a really long time, you can assume that I'm gone. Raise a glass -- not to me, to life -- and play some of my favorite songs. I'll let you guess which ones, since it won't matter a whit to me any more!

[RussDNails]

I've gotten as far as downloading Open Office, Chromium and Firefox on Linux Lite. Wordtwist works on Chromium and Firefox but this computer is an old brick so it's a little slow switching between games but not too bad. LL runs better than Win 10 did. I should never have put Win 10 on there in the first place as it was running Win 7 pretty well. Win 10 ran ok but very slow so I wiped it and decided to try installing a simple Linux version. Tried several installs including Ubuntu and Peppermint and none ran very well, just not enough horsepower left on this laptop. Linux Lite is actually quite nice and somewhat similar to Windows.

Wishing you many more years of Wordtwisting

[DrPlacebo]

I saw POSAUNE and tried it -- it's a word I've seen often in orchestral scores, because it's German for trombone. I didn't expect it to score points at all, not as an English word. It not only counted, but got a best scoring word record on the board.

[floppers]

sometimes, I see and try things that are very definitely Australian slang terms, and they work too. I'm thinking because English is such a derivative language, maybe some thing just slide in there?

[DrPlacebo]

sometimes, I see and try things that are very definitely Australian slang terms, and they work too. I'm thinking because English is such a derivative language, maybe some thing just slide in there?

Yeah, I'm often surprised by what loanwords do and don't count.

I keep trying NATTO (fermented soybeans) and not getting points for it. On the other hand, SAIMIN (Hawaiian noodle soup) does count, and so do a whole bunch of Indian military ranks that are used in no other country (I've gotten points for SOWAR, NAIK, and SUBEDAR).

[mdyak]

Indian names for foods such as raita and papadum always are accepted, I think because English is the main unifying language in India. Exactly why natto and other Japanese foods hardly ever count.

[floppers]

guys, really??? needed some" just made it through stage four covid lockdown" recognition for the "slide/trombone" reference. ....needy much? But yeah, Indian food is very standard fare here, and (unlike the French), we have no need to "translate" anything...so the word for raita is...raita....likewise papadum....we don't eat much in the way of Japanese, except Bento Boxes (great, but have no idea what we are eating...). My surrogate German Uncle once said,..."I was perfectly alright until "they" invented....I don't know what you call it in English (or Australian), but in Germany they call it "cholestorol"....

[crazykate]

guys, really??? needed some" just made it through stage four covid lockdown" recognition for the "slide/trombone" reference. ....needy much? But yeah, Indian food is very standard fare here, and (unlike the French), we have no need to "translate" anything...so the word for raita is...raita....likewise papadum....we don't eat much in the way of Japanese, except Bento Boxes (great, but have no idea what we are eating...). My surrogate German Uncle once said,..."I was perfectly alright until "they" invented....I don't know what you call it in English (or Australian), but in Germany they call it "cholestorol"....

Lol I had to scroll up to find the comment you were referring to, I don't think I even properly read it the first time. Sorry for missing the pun.

Also, cholesterol is actually called Cholesterin in Germany, so your uncle was either very confused or very facetious.

[quyxyz]

PSYCHOANALYSER is "Rare", but PSYCHOANALYSERS is "Wide"!?

[floppers]

Lol I had to scroll up to find the comment you were referring to, I don't think I even properly read it the first time. Sorry for missing the pun.

Also, cholesterol is actually called Cholesterin in Germany, so your uncle was either very confused or very facetious.

I think quite "confused", he was a cheese mongerer, and on the weekends his favourite activity was "testing" the different flavoured schnapps he kept in clay bottles in the freezer. I'm not sure if there was a correlation between his cholestorol issue and the cheese, but it got him in the end...he was a very fun Uncle, he had big, big, parties...and they always ended up playing "The Baby Elephant Walk", "A Walk in the Black Forrest", "Popcorn" and "Paloma Blanca", on high rotation, toward the end of the event. Seemed a bit like a 70's version of a middleaged rave, in retrospect....

I've never quite got the concept of "Wide"...

[bwt1213]

I have to say that I aspire to being that kind of uncle. As far as Germany is concerned, my first cousin (my father's sister's son) was the US Ambassador to Germany for more than 20 years -- John Christian Kornblum. He certainly spoke German far better than I can. I muddle along, and sometimes surprise myself. Languages are a minor hobby of mine; pity I don't know any of them well enough to count myself fluent any more. But I can probably make myself understood in four. That's really quite a minor achievement, I think. But they are four rather different ones -- English, German, Latin, and Korean. So, tell me more about the schnapps in those clay bottles and all the kinds of cheese. I live in Wisconsin, and there was once a law in this state that any meal served in a restaurant had to include a side of cheese at no cost.

[DrPlacebo]

To most people here on the West Coast of the US, Japanese food is likely to be much more familiar than Indian.

But that's beside the point. Food is one thing, because it crosses borders -- why the Indian military ranks? Subedar, the Indian and Pakistani armies' equivalent to Captain in most English-speaking armies, is literally used nowhere else in the world, and the only reason I know the word is from reading historical fiction.

[floppers]

Perhaps, it has something to do with the cultural background, and boundaries, of who is compiling the dictionaries. My wondering is infuluenced by a book my Mother is currently reading, titled "The Dictionary of Lost Words". According to the blurb the book is about a little girl collecting words discarded by a team gathering words for the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, and the words discarded relate mainly to female liberation, suffragettes, etc. Should the person/persons developing any collection of words have sufficent exposure to certain cuisines, cultures, cheeses or schnapps, I think their biases could influence which words "make the cut". Particularly if the exposure relates to schnapps...things can get quite giddy with enough exposure to schnapps, clay bottled, freezer dwelling or not.

English, German, Latin and Korean is an interesting collection, English and German have some derivation from Latin, but all four have very different structure, so...Touche! I'm thinking we all speak a little French.

[bwt1213]

Goodheartednesses is a word and worth 25 points. The singular isn't even allowed; apparently it's not a word.