Gerrymandering is the re-drawing of district lines in elaborate twisted ways to unfairly influence the weight of votes by district. It’s a cruel political move to dilute the power of demographic areas. In 1812, Governor Elbridge Gerry changed the shapes of districts to skew voting towards his political party. A newspaper commented that the new contorted shape looked like a salamander, and the term was coined. Gerrymandering is an eponym and a portmanteau at the same time. Yeah. That is pretty awesome.
Gerry + salamander = Gerrymander
I’ve been thinking about eponyms and portmanteaus a lot recently, because I need a dissertation topic, and those two kinds of word formations make me happy. However, I can’t think of a specific question I could ask and answer in 4 months, and I haven’t found any great research as a jump-off point, so for now I’m just pleased to find a word that combines these two concepts.
This week at the University of York I learned how to do ejectives and implosives in Articulatory and Impressionistic Phonetics class. Yay! Written in IPA, ejectives look like this: [p’, t’, k’] and implosives look like this: [ɓ,ɗ,ɠ]. Watch them now in a tiny video I just did to show off to my mom!
If the above video isn’t working, you can find it on YouTube itself.
I’m trying to figure out what I can do with my life that will benefit the world. Take as a given that I’m good for something, I just have to find or invent it. Two years ago, I started tagging words on Wordnik.com. I wanted to understand the unexpected spelling similarities between words that do not sound like each other. I used C and V to stand in for consonants and vowels in terms of alphabet graphemes, not IPA phonemes. Some linguists got mad. I understand why, but tagging convowels was an important outlet for me at the time, and I don’t regret that I’ve left a mark on wordnik. [and then suddenly…]
It needs to use collection and organization of knowledge, but always with a sense of fun somewhere in the middle. Intellectual pursuits that value creativity. Self-directed tasks, but regular collaboration and brainstorming. Ok, that’s good for now.
Once upon a time, I learned that seeing -fer or -phor in a word means ‘to carry or bear.’ I love it a lot, I made a great comic about it, everybody’s happy. Yesterday I read Chapter 1 for my Syntax class, and it mentions the term anaphora. Examples of anaphors are himself, herself, itself, and themselves. Hmmm, said the brain. This term carries something, but what does ‘ana’ mean? At first I thought it was a simple negator like ‘a-‘ as in atypical, but no! [and then suddenly…]
There’s a big library on campus currently under noisy refurbishment, but this is not a list of that York Library. That would be a really long list, and I don’t think you would learn much from it. On the other hand, the books that I decided to carry across the ocean with me were chosen based on weight, relevance to the program, and proximity to my heart.
