The Baboon Congress

G.O.A.T.LING(go)

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Today’s guest post comes from Barbara in Robbinsdale.

It’s time, Babooners, for the next round of additions to our Glossary of Accepted Terms, or G.O.A.T.. Every so often the bin gets full, and it has been a particularly rich half year since we last did this. At some point they will be added to the already existing Glossary “up top”. This time I left in the dates, because it really is fun to find out what in the heck was going on that produced the entries.

About a horse apiece – Close to equal, as in: “with regard to red vs white quinoa, I’d say it was about a horse apiece. Both are good and I couldn’t taste that one was better than the other.” February 12, 2012

Alpha Baboon – DC, or Dale Connelly, as in “I am thankful for Trail Baboons and the friends here as well as our Alpha Baboon, DC.” November 23, 2011

Baviaansverwisseling [from the Dutch words “baviaans” (baboon), and “persoonsverwisseling” (mistaken identity)] – attributing something (i.e. a blog post) to the wrong Babooner. September 20, 2011

Cheek turnee – the recipient of the compassionate act of turning the other cheek, as in: “many of us can recall being the cheek turner but very few cheek turnees.” January 9, 2012

Emotional hangover – a state of mind “that only mashed potatoes can address,” sometimes following a day in which a community has lost one of its favorite members, i.e. Tom Keith. November 2, 2011

Etiquette – …”a lubricant that allows people of all sorts to interact without friction.” October 3, 2011

Feisties – Baboon mothers who are extraordinarily resilient, strong, or tenacious. “Great mothers, Tim, Caroline and Sue; a trio of Feisties.” February 16, 2012

Flaming extrovert – an extremely gregarious Baboon, as in “Being a flaming extrovert, however, pretty much guarantees a good time and with 21 nightclubs on this monster ship…” January 26, 2012

Forgetful-compulsive – a new personality disorder, coined by the Alpha Baboon, in which the patient has both memory and control issues, exemplified by the following: “I forgot that last week I had scheduled Steve’s post to publish today, and then yesterday I compulsively wrote a new one of my own.” February 28, 2012

Gemutliche – Warm friendliness; amicability – snug, cozy, comfortable… Descriptions of a special cat. November 11, 2011

Inert – a particularly inactive level of activity in a person, i.e., “I took Latin in high school…I rather enjoyed it even though the teacher was somewhat inert.” September 20, 2011

Line camarerie – what happens when like minded people stand in line together for an extended time. “I love line camraderie when it breaks out.” November 12, 2011

Mondegreen – mis-heard lyrics to a song, as in: “They had slain the Earl of Moray/And Lady Mondegreen” instead of …”And Laid Him on the Green.” Sept. 16, 2011

Oxford comma – the final comma preceding “and” in a list, lovingly used by a number of Baboons. January 26, 2012

Pancake of glory – one way of leaving the planet (esp. involving a falling piece of an Upper Air Research Satellite), as in: “Let it land here. I am ready to go out in a pancake of glory.” September 22, 2011

Poemizing – creating poetry, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, on the Baboon Trail; as in: “Nice poemizing, DC and Tim.” February 2, 2012

Rock Bend Folk Festival – a FREE music festival in St. Peter the weekend after Labor Day, to which the Baboon Krista in Waterville devotes a good portion of her August (and maybe July). February 21, 2012

Rush Baboonbaugh – a spokesperson that would defend the rights of Baboons, probably in an outspoken manner. February 13, 2012

Snarky snort – a snort with a devilish little “heh-heh” to it. January 7, 2012

Tortured Acronym Rule – putting up to three extraneous letters in an acronym to come up with a better word, i.e., “SWIFT is short for Statewide Integrated Financial Tools… although “Statewide” may be one word, it’s almost two words, and we like the acronym SWIFT better than SIFT, so we’re going to invoke the Tortured Acronym Rule.” December 13, 2011

trailing preposition, trailing apology : What’s a trailing preposition? “thats a preposition you do while you are here on the trail i presuppose but heck thats ok you can do anything here on the trail. you dont need to leave no dang trailing apologies.” February 2, 2012

Typhonic winds of their own psychosis – in the realm of worrying: “Usually, there comes a point of ridiculousness where the person comes to realize how nutty they’re being. And, if not, at the very least, it’s entertaining watching them twist in the typhonic winds of their own psychosis.” September 22, 2011

Wasband – A person whowas one’s husband. Frequently used with glee at the past tense involved. (Not to be confused with Washboard.) February 8, 2012

Acronyms:

BuRP – Baboon Relocation Project (See Tortured Acronym Rule) January 10, 2012

IYCSSNTDSAAA – If You Can’t Say Something Nice Then Don’t Say Anything At All February 2, 2012

Pr³ – pressing priority predicament October 11, 2011

s&h – son and heir, esp. madislandgirl’s son and heir.

TWHQ – World Headquarters of the Trail Baboon Blog, as in: “it will all be worth it, just to say ‘I eat what they eat at TWHQ’ ”. January 13, 2012

When, if ever, do you use a dictionary or other reference? Paper or Digital?

109 thoughts on “G.O.A.T.LING(go)”

  3. use both, clicky one and the old red Webster’s Collegiate. Have noticed the s&h has started doing it too (rubs hands together and cackles softly to self)

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  4. Morning all – I’ve missed you. It’s been a gruesome couple of weeks (work) with a few more on the horizon. What a nice morning bit , BiR, to be reminded of some great past blog discussions. Thank you for doing this for us!

    Like Clyde, I am addicted to reference materials. I have a paper dictionary on my bedstand and several bookmarked sites on my computers (work and home) for dictionaries, etymologies, synonyms and antonyms (sp?… that doesn’t look right). And translations. And conversions from Celsius to Farenheit. And metric to standard, and back. And two different weather channels.

    These days the digital stuff is all over the place, but a few times I have gone downtown to read something that is only available as a reference. I loved sitting in a back quiet corner of the library with something I know can only be read the way I was reading it.

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      1. On my bedstand I have a ragged Merriam Webster paperback dictionary. Online, my first go-to is onelook.com. It links up many dictionaries with specialities so you can pretty much be assured that if you can’t find it there, you can’t find it. My favorite for synonyms and antonyms is thesaurus.com.

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  5. Good morning to all. I am terrible at spelling and need to check on my spelling all the time. I got help from Krista on getting the spelling checker back on the place I write emails. It was wrong due to an error in the program that some one had discovered and Krista found the instructions for correcting it. Thanks again, Krista.

    I don’t see any way to use a spelling checker when writing on this blog. To keep from being completely off on my spelling here, I check my spelling with a dictionary. Once in a while my spelling is so bad that I can’t find the right spelling in my dictionary. If that happens I often type my attempt at spelling the word into the Yahoo search engine and it can usually guess the right spelling and put that up for me.

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  6. I’d just like to add to the existing question (didn’t think of it till now):
    Any additions or corrections? Some of the definitions are pretty thin, as I was in a rush, and if anyone wants to amend (or would that be emend?), go ahead – I haven’t sent Dale the final version yet.

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  7. Nice work, Barbara. Every group needs a volunteer like you.

    What’s the word for ex-wife? Would that be “waswife?” It doesn’t have the inner logic of wasband.

    Year by year, I get more digital. I now own dictionaries but they don’t get opened. I’m too lazy. I can usually tease the information I need out of the internet.

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  8. Thank you for the glossarization (or G.O.A.T.LING(go)ing)! One of the things I loooove about this group is the mutual joy in wordplay.
    BTW, VS, I looked up antonym and it is spelled correctly even though, i agree, it looks odd).

    I am a pretty decent speller but one reason is that I usually look up words if there is any doubt. I have my old blue Webster’s Collegiate 7th Edition (1963) within grabbing distance on my computer desk. It is happily well worn.

    Not to put too fine a point on it, but “wasband” was originally added on Feb 7th.

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    2. Mine’s red… Webster’s New World Dictionary / College Edition (1964)…. given to me by my mother on the occasion of my high school graduation. At the time, I may have been a little less than thrilled (fellow graduates were being gifted cash, trips to cool places, and all sorts of short-lived rewards). I was college-bound and came to learn what a powerful gift I’d been given. The front cover has since detached itself from the book and much of the ink on the tissue paper thin pages shows signs of fading where many hands have turned them, but it’s a gift that continues to give some 40 years later.

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  9. I am an information resource omnivore: online, bound books, ask a SME (subject matter expert) – whatever it takes to get the information I need. I could try, I suppose, to go a week without looking something up on wikipedia or allmusic.com or imdb (mostly wikipedia), but I might get twitchy. I just heard a statistic that almost half of the online population does a google search every day (just below the number of Facebook users who sign in to Facebook at least daily). I would be in that percentage of “people who do a google search about every day.” Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com are my preferred sites for online word research (I’m especially fond of the visual thesaurus that shows constellations of related words on the Thesaurus.com site). But then I still have my paper copy of Strunk & White “Elements of Style” (which has to be in print – online wouldn’t be right), an assortment of other paper reference books (including a red Merriam & Webster) that get pulled out when I’m at home. Used to keep Strunk & White at work, but since I do less technical writing now, it is not as necessary a tool during the work day (hmmm…maybe I should bring it back in – just got to thinking that I have become the de facto Live Action Strunk & White for my team…I could hand them the book and say, “look it up” – that would push forward my dream of someday becoming a reference librarian.)

    Speaking of librarians and books and looking things up…off to go say goodbye and congratulations (bon voyage?) to the red-headed librarian at Washburn library who is retiring today. My local library (which I wrote about back in June) won’t be quite the same without her there.

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      1. Not always just one…sometimes I have to have more than one Google search in a day. I have been known to go on Google binges where I disappear for hours into a sea of 1s and 0s and don’t remember much of that time later. But I can stop anytime…(twitch)…really I can (twitch).

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    2. Anna, I had to get a new edition of “Elements of Style” just for the Maira Kalman illustrations. Now both copies are side by side on the shelf. 🙂

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      1. I was given the new edition as a gift and I find I still go back to my classic “Elements.” I know where to find things in that one.

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  10. I won a copy of Essential Songwriter’s Rhyming Dictionary in the lyric writing contest. Haven’t had many chances to use it so far. Last week I was delighted to be introduced to the spouse of a colleague with the words”She was a finalist in the lyrics contest.”

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  11. A creative word challenge for those who want to participate, related to my novel, based on my childhood. The main character is named Clair. This name does a lot for me in the story:
    It’s slightly odd and old-fashioned.
    It’s a boy’s and a girl’s name.
    It’s a one-syllable name with a hardish sound to it. The character’s last name is Kunst, chosen for its Germanic character, and it too is one syllable with a hard sound. “Clair Kunst” works in lots of ways for sound.
    It gives me an uncommon diminutive form–Clairy, which has some purpose for me.
    The problem is that name is just too much like Clyde. Also, the two who have read the book say the name was jarring at first but then later it seemed to work for them.

    So can you think of another name instead of Clair or anything like it such as Claude or Cliff?
    My wife says Joe, but Joey does not quite work for me.

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    4. Keep ’em coming, please. Interesting to think about.
      Clark is like Clair. Charlie is out, name of another main character.

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    5. Carter, Kelly or Quinn?
      (remember I just went through 3 weeks of trying to get my daughter to come up with a name for her baby… so I’m on a roll)

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    6. Here’s an insight I was slow to get: the name Fran kicked off the name Francis, which made me think of a classmate I was wondering about. So I dug out my yearbook and then, duh, it occurred to me to scan male names in the yearbook, which gave me several ideas.
      Which is why you ask, because often people’s answers are not the answer but a way to find the answer. None I found are exactly as good, so if any others come to mind, thanks.

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  12. as no surprise to anyone i do not use a dictionary. if as i ma flying along i do not have a word that i can spell i use a different word and i come back to it next tie. i have to laugh when it comes up. i am flying along and philanthropist comes to mind but i dont know how to spell it , well i could look it up but that feels like cheating so if i cant fake it well enough to make an understandable presentation i like the wizzard of oz change it to a good deed doer. i have the guy in my office who wrires biz docs for me who comes up with words that mean that but sound better than the stuff that comes out of my mouth. i will dictate things and tell him to tweak it for me so i dont sound like such a dolt using the same descriptive term twice in the same doc. should be fun reading this weekend.
    i am hoping for my daughters team to lose in the basketball tournament in 15 minutes here. they ar e in the loser bracket and if the win they advance and muck up the game night deal i will turn it over to linda and barbara and be back at 830 but if they lose i go at 8am tomorrow and i can tape cbs sunday morning and get on with my life.

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      1. they won. great game. i will be here to get it started and back a while later. soup and wne will flow in my absence and i will be looking ofrward to returning to a house of gaming baboons

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  13. Here is a word definition I just found online some artists created fro fun:
    Atelodemiourgiopapyrophobia – the fear of imperfect creative activity on paper.
    Word origins: ‘Atelo‘ from Greek ateles literally ‘without end’, meaning incomplete, inchoate, imperfect. ‘Demiourgio‘ from Greek ‘demiourgia’ literally workmanship, handicraft, meaning creative activity. ‘Papyro‘ from Middle English / from Old French papier / from Latin papȳrus, papyrus plant, papyrus paper / from Greek papūros.

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      1. Hee hee. I was going to suggest the simpler albipapyrophobia, fear of white paper, which is hitting me hard right now.
        Hi, PJ. I’m with you. Had the worst pain of my life at 4 a.m. today.
        Did we hear about Joann not going into work in the snow. Was it an issue for her/them?

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      2. No it wasn’t — a couple other folks missed as well, so I didn’t feel so bad. They like me enough to keep me it seems. Thanks for thinking of me. It’s a busy place — I do calls all day to check on the status of truckers and their shipments. Talking to truckers all day is interesting, but tiring if they have heavy foreign accents — which many do. Sometimes they’re grumpy, too.

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  14. Just a reminder that our friend Margaret (Plain Jane) is still hospitalized in great pain. She lurks here but isn’t able to do email most of the time. Good wishes, Margaret. Good wishes from us all.

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    2. Yes, PJ, good wishes for a speedy recovery and relief from your pain. Please get well soon and join us when you can.

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  15. Greetings! Great list, Barbara! I don’t use reference materials much, I’m sorry to say. I assume I know how to spell just about everything — and I’m usually right. Looking up stuff on Wikipedia or IMDB is like asking to be sent down a black hole — it’s a time sucker! So much interesting stuff and one link leads to another, and another, and ….

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      1. Thanks for asking. All is well — it’s just a job. Not exciting or interesting; just banging out the calls to check on shipments. It’s a nice place to work though. People are very friendly, outgoing and mostly young it seems. They’re on the phone all day brokering delivery of shipments. I don’t think any of them are over 45 — most are way under 40 it seems. But there’s free soda and coffee; and on Fridays they cater in lunch for everybody from a different restaurant. Yesterday was Green Mill Pizza which I haven’t had in decades. Yum!

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  16. I use google and bing more than once a day. I like bing for the interesting photos and fun links. Google works really, really well – almost scary how well that works. Things we thought we’d never know are right at our finger tips these days. I’m not wild about the way they’re tracking our searches but I figure mine are just random enough that they might think I’m a batty old lady with nothing to do but ask the internet weird questions. That’s okay. I could also waste a lot of time reading quotations on the various sites devoted to daily quotes.

    I use thesaurus.com, dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster online and a variety of other links. I also have three tattered thesauri (I looked that up 🙂 ) and two old hard cover dictionaries. One of the dictionaries, the red American Heritage Dictionary, was given to me by my orthodontist (family friend) on my graduation from high school. The other is a family heirloom: the double volume Funk & Wagnall’s New Standard Dictionary © 1938. It has blue covers and marbled blue-red-yellow page edges. A – L are in the first volume and M – Z are in the second. It’s heavy so I don’t use it much but it has wonderful plates and illustrations. The other thing I use at work is the Gregg Reference Manual.

    Have fun playing games and swapping soup, ‘booners!

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    1. Does anyone else remember Laugh-In where they would salaciously say, “Look that up in your Funk & Wagnalls”?

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      4. In my little world, I like to believe someday shows like Laugh In will be on TV again… I had an autographed picture of Flip Wilson when I was in about 4th grade. Lost it somewhere.

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    2. I think that one deserves inclusion in the glossary.

      The obvious rhymes (he says without the benefit of no damn fancy rhyming book) are “first wife” or “worst wife.” I like a word that has contradictory connotations, and only the speaker/writer knows which is most apt.

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  18. When I was a little girl, we had a black dictionary, cloth cover, that I loved to sit and look at. It had maybe a dozen color plates, hand-drawn pictures of flowers, birds, work animals, world flags and costumes… I’ve seen one since at our friends’ cabin in Herbster (on the S. Shore not far from Steve’s cabin. I covet it.

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    1. my moms house had a solid heavy duty easel stand in the living room for the dictionary. if you didnt know it you looked it up. rule. but they were snooty about it and not fun. the dictionary was a pretty gold leaf fancy schmancy kind of deal and i dont remembere anyone ever ooking anything up even once in my time at grandma and grandpa house. but then again i didnt spend a lot of time there. they were kind of snooty about everything else too. wen words and the imprpoer use of them get used as weapons it is a crime. i was just visiting with my mom at the basketabll game where i went to high scoola nd she was the art heacher and she was telling my wife about the challanges she had with the staff for my education ( the rest of my family was not problem but i had major challanges) the english teachers in particular were a bunch of either cool old progressives or up tight grammarians or feeble old bats who needed to get out of administaation so they put them in teaching their last couple of years ( i had two of those ) she reminded me that one teacher wanted to fail me for the year because on the paper i turned in at the end of the year i had the bibliography page all wrong . the indent on the listings was improper and that is the reason this dingbat want to fail me. the principle and counselor over ruled her but imagine.
      this group is so forgiving that i laugh at the stuff that flies off my fingerips and wonder why i dont proof read before i hit send but that is the other end of the spectrum isnt it
      clyde, vic not very german , kris or jan

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      1. If you ever start proofreading your posts, tim, we will lose a lot of fun. Sometimes your typos are funnier than what you intended to type.

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  19. Thank you for playing my name game today. Maybe I should do like Hollywood does and let you choose between my two endings.
    I had fun thinking about each of your choices. Since you know nothing of full context, you pushed my thinking a lot. I did think about each of your ideas. All the C names are out since the point is to not have it seem like the name Clyde. The diminutive part of the name is very important, much moreso than the gender-neutral part. (The underlying theme of the book is not what I once thought it would be.) Names like Quinn are just too modern. Frank is possible indeed, but Frankie is too obvious a diminutive. Vic from tim was interesting, Victor, and Vickie, but Vickie pushes it too feminine, or maybe not. Frank as the word frank really fits, but not victor. My wife has suggested Vernon–Vernie, which may work. Vernon was her beloved uncle who died in WWII. I now like Warren–Warnie. The rabbit connection to warren has strong resonance. Bruce, Albert, and Lloyd also jumped out at me from my yearbook.
    Thinking about a new name after living with this one for 44 years is like meeting someone from your distant past who had a sex-change operation–all fine, just takes your mind awhile to get around it.

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    1. I am inclined to question the problem with the name being like Clyde. That might be a problem for you and four or five others, but the book itself is itself, and it is larger than you. Presumably, most readers of a book are unaware of or inattentive to the name of the author; that should be irrelevant. But I’m arguing about a book I haven’t seen.

      Chris, Chrissy

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    3. Steve, you and both know the unlikelihood of this book every being published, so I presume most of the few readers will want to think of the main character as me. But you are right.

      VS, I have known two utterly repellant human beings in my life, one is my ex-partners wife. Smug and self-satisfied about her superiority to the point of being completely insensitive. She is wafer thin and superior about that and terrified that her children would be fat, so essentially she did not feed them after they reached about age 8. Her husband snuck them food, they snuck food, they ate at friends’ houses. The result is the older boy is anorexic to some degree, the girl is what she calls fat about 20 pounds overweight at 5’10”. The last child sneers at her and jerks her chain about food and everything. She thinks with religious conviction that poor people should starve to death. Guess to which political point of view she belongs. She has not met with any of her in-laws since the day they got married, for various snotty superior reasons, such as her
      mother-in-law is overweight. I could go on and on. Anyway, she is called Virg.

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      2. There were 14 swappers and four others there for the fun. I won a prize for the soup with the longest name — a little cookbook for Jiffy box mixes and a little French cookbook called “Gateaux et tartes” (whole thing in French). My friend who does the swap picks up things at garage sales all year for these prizes!

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      4. Smoky Tomato with Chipotle in Adobe, Israeli Couscous and Cilantro Sour Cream. I actually found the recipe on the internet…I had a can of chipotle in adobe and was looking for something to do with it!

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      5. Mmmmmmmm! Love that Israeli couscous, don’t you? Daughter works at TJ’s and she’s always alerting me to new things they carry that I don’t find elsewhere.

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    2. It was a fun night, Linda, Robin, Husband and I showed up, and tim didn’t have to leave fter all. Played Scrabble and Mexican Train. There was enough wine. 🙂 Linda and tim had soup to swap, and the rest of us are dealing with guilt at taking without giving. (We’ll get over it.) Thanks, tim!

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      1. Yes, thank you much tim for hosting and Linda for soup! Such a fun evening and happy to meet you 🙂 We’ll try to eat down our freezer before the next soup swap so there will be some room to stash more. I did feel a tinge of guilt for taking without giving. Hopefully there will be a next time when Barbara and I can reciprocate.

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      2. it was a fun night. the soupe will even itself out. hope you enjoy it. phc this week was a replay of he joke shows past. jim ed poole was there for a joke or two. nice to hear his smiling voice 1 more time.

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      3. I had some of tim’s chili for dinner this evening and baked a little cornbread to go with it. The chili is even better the second time around.

        A word of warning, though, about playing Scrabble with BiR – she landed “FAX” on a triple word score last night. A woman to be reckoned with.

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  21. Thought I’d already posted this, but cannot find:

    Looks like the clear winner for “former wife” (from among waswife, werewife, wuzzywife, X-misses, bitch, erstwife) is Erstwife.

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  22. Husband is happy and proud that Ertswife was appreciated and says he feels he is an honorary baboon. I recently made a celeriac, leek, and fennel soup that was surprisingly good, and if I were in Minnesota I would share it with all of you. Daughter also surprised us today by eating three helpings of risotto with celeriac. What a strange root! None of the checkout people at the grocery store know what it is, and I have memorized the numeric checkout code for it so that we can tell the checkout person what it is and don’t have to wait while they call back to the produce department to find out what it is. Have a great evening, fellow baboons.

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