One of the gifts that I appreciated the most while I was growing up was this thick dictionary. Lol. (Geek! Sorry, you can’t UNgeek a geek). If you’ve been reading the blog for a long time, you would know by now that I’m not much of a writer and I don’t have a huge vocabulary. (There’s actually this one girl from Twitter who keeps on buzzing me each time I use and abuse the word “unsolicited”). Maybe that’s why I had to cling to this dictionary to survive all my English assignments. You see, there was no internet back in the day so resource books were precious! (…and I just gave my age away! Yeahhh!) One of the things that I loved about that dictionary is that it gives you the origin of the word.
Speaking of words, I’m just amused by how credible & incredible may have the same root word but are not necessarily each other’s opposites. Well, incredible may mean “not worthy of belief” although it’s more on the “Whoa!” and “Unbelievable!” side of the spectrum. Tracking the etymology of a word was so interesting to me that at a certain point in my life, I actually wished I knew how to speak Latin or Greek I probably didn’t have to memorize vocab words for my language classes! 🙂
If there was ever one thing that made Ponggo & I survive our Eurotour even if we only knew “Bonjour”, croissant and other uber common French food, and some ballet terms was this info that all European languages evolved from Greek or Latin and that it was somehow related to English. During the trip, it was our hobby to guess the root word of whatever we read and translated it to English while crossing our fingers and hoping that we read it right even if we were clueless as to how to pronounce them! Thanks to the fact that most of the places we went to were gardens & museums:
garden = jardin
museum = musée
The most fun place to do this guesswork was in Amsterdam with words like:
boat = boot
flower market = bloemenmarkt
church = kerk
new church, old church = nieuwe kerk, oude kerk
🙂 However, I must also share that thanks to my poor guessing skills I ended up consuming a half-baked croissant. Gahhh…. (I’m too honest when I blog….Too honest for my own good!). Oh well. Do you know that feeling that no one’s really reading your blog until someone comments on your entry? Then, you tend to think that only those who commented are the ones who read it until you meet someone who mentions a random line from what your wrote? Woops! Fine. I’ll stop here before I ended up spilling more beans!
XOXO,
Tipsy 🙂
More posts about (mis)Communication:
Speaking in Code
Asking for Suggestions
I’m Not Angry
Sweet to Sour
If Google Suggestions Were a Person…
Calling Each Other Back
The Googly Gooeys made it to the pages of a magazine in Singapore, Asian Geographic Magazine’s The Read. Yay! 🙂 This is the first ever time we get to appear on a magazine. 🙂 The Read is a magazine for Teens and this issue features Viral Ideas, Psy and K-Pop among other things. My favorite page is “By the Numbers: Peculiar picks of the strangest things in the English language” where I just found out that fear of 666 is called “hexakosioihexekontahexaphobiac” Hahahaha. Yes, I had to type that while glancing at the magazine so many times! 🙂
Here are more pictures of my favorite illustrations from the mag. While the rest of the teen magazines talk about bright & sunny topics, The Read isn’t afraid to tackle Botox, and other more personal topics 😉 Check out THE READ here 🙂
If vegetarians eat vegetables…..then what does humanitarians eat !?! 😀