HISTORICAL NOTE, April 8, 2022: This post was saved as a draft on August 18, 2015, but never published. I think I wanted the list to be longer. I no longer feel this need, so enjoy!
Words that don’t mean what some people may think they mean:
Bemused. It sounds like “amused” so maybe it’s a synonym. It means perplexed or bewildered.
Penultimate. Some may think this means “uber-ultimate”. It actually means next to last.
Arid. This one gets confused with arable (fit for cultivation) but means pretty much the opposite in that it refers to land that is very dry. Like a desert or all of California, for example.
Inflammable. This is perhaps the perfect example of crazy English. If you think it’s like invisible and thus means “not flammable” you’d be wrong because it actually means flammable. What does flammable mean, then? The same thing. Why? English! Actually, you can blame the Latin origins, which treat the words similarly.
Recently YouTube announced that it was updating a lot of classic or alleged classic music videos to HD versions. Better picture, better sound! What’s not to like?
I am an unapologetic fan of Lady Gaga’s video for the song “Bad Romance” (this is not exactly an exclusive club, the video has over one billion views). I think the director, Francis Lawrence, and Gaga did a fantastic job in fusing the music and imagery together, something so seemingly fundamental for a music video, yet so often eludes others. The action and camera move sleekly to the music and vocals, and somehow the abrupt shifts in style work. The choreography is quirky, fluid and occasionally a bit predictable (Gaga is fond of the “jack off” gesture).
The lyrics are not spectacular, though a lot of people probably miss the three Hitchcock references tucked into one verse, but there is a verse that goes like this:
Walk, walk fashion baby, work it move that bitch crazy Walk-walk fashion baby, work it move that bitch crazy Walk-walk fashion baby, work it move that bitch crazy Walk-walk passion baby, work it I'm a free bitch baby
As you can see, the word “bitch” is used four times. Edgy! But that was 2011. In 2019 the word is not used in polite company anymore. It seems even ironic, self-claimed usage has fallen from favor. Gay men cannot say, “Bitch, please.” Women can not call each other by this term. It is, as a word, passe.
The HD version of the video has removed “bitch.” Or to be more accurate, it’s removed the last two letters. That’s right, the video now has Gaga very clearly saying “bit”:
Walk, walk fashion baby, work it move that bit crazy Walk-walk fashion baby, work it move that bit crazy Walk-walk fashion baby, work it move that bit crazy Walk-walk passion baby, work it I'm a free bit baby
What does “I’m a free bit baby” even mean? Is Gaga now saying we are all machine-made designs, composed of nothing but bits and bytes, living our seemingly real lives in a perpetual virtual reality? And that she has, Neo-like, broken from the virtual chains, claiming her independence as a free bit?
Or could they just not come up with something that rhymed with “bitch”, still worked and decided “bit” was close enough. It is an exercise left to the viewer.
It’s also kind of silly, like Spielberg changing the guns the government agents had to walkie talkies in the 20th anniversary release of E.T. (this version of the film has been dropped in subsequent releases, with Spielberg regretting the change). I can see the argument to improve the visual presentation of a piece of work, whether it’s a film or a music video. For example, some of the special effects and exterior shots of the Enterprise and planets were either redone or made from scratch for a new version of the original Star Trek series, for a 2006 re-release. The effects were deliberately toned down, to keep them in line with the aesthetic of the original show. There are purists who would object to any changes, but in general most would see these changes as refinements on the original. The artists were not adding or removing content, nor were they changing it other than to simply improve the look of the admittedly cheaply-made visual effects of the time.
The Gaga lyrics change is a lot more like Spielberg’s walkie talkies, trying to take back an artistic choice and to that I say, just live with it and move on. Altering the video won’t change–or remove–the original. Either make a statement on the remastered HD version (“I would not use the same language today and regret the wording”) or provide two versions, the original and the altered (which Spielberg did in 2002 with E.T. before dropping the altered version entirely).
It’s a small thing and I mostly call it out because “bit” is a nonsensical substitution. Yet it calls to me, somehow, and so I claim that I am also a free bit, baby.
I’m still deciding on what to use for writing this year’s novel.
I’m leaning against Scrivener for a few reasons:
the 3.0 version for Windows seems very unlikely to go live before November 1st. The older version works fine, but is not directly compatible with the current Mac version.
I am still not comfortable with how fragile it is with cloud storage. I get that it’s not that hard to just use Dropbox and remember to save, close and sync before returning to a project on a different system, but it’s 2018 and it just seems like this shouldn’t feel like a hack at this point. Plus my preferred storage solution of OneDrive is actively discouraged.
I am still not a big fan of the UI, though it is certainly better in 3.0.
That said, it has a lot still going for it, especially for a novel, so I haven’t absolutely ruled it out.
Speaking of Scrivener, the Scrivener-like Atomic Scribbler seems out of the running as its cloud-saving is even more fragile, and the author of the software offers dire warnings to those who would trust an online service in conjunction with it.
I’m also actually considering Microsoft Word. Since novels don’t use a lot of formatting, it wouldn’t get too bogged down and unlike Scrivener, cloud saving is easy-peasy across devices. But it’s still Word and despite having a billion features, it lacks a lot of things that are useful for novel-writing.
WriteMonkey 3.0 is still in beta, doesn’t (yet) support paragraph indents and is unlikely to even come out of beta this year, let alone before NaNoWriMo. Version 2.7 is still very capable and the text-only files it produces make cloud-saving simple and the files themselves very light and quick to load. This is probably still the leading candidate.
FocusWriter is like a stripped-down version of WriteMonkey that supports a lot of its core features and offers an easy-to-use interface. Since it can save in text format, it’s easy to switch between it and other editors that use text files without anything mucking up. I’m not entirely sure why I don’t consider it a stronger contender. It’s almost as if it may lack some feature I need but I can’t think of what it might be.
There are a billion other editors out there, but as I’ve recounted before, most have one or more features (or lack of the same) that make them unsuitable.
The three contenders above are also among the few that support both Windows and macOS, though the latter is less important since I’ve gotten a ThinkPad and seldom use my MacBook Pro now (every time I do I still want to start a rant about the keyboard). Scrivener and Word do offer the bonus of iOS versions, too, though in theory any iOS text editor could work if I stick to using the text-only format–though paragraph indents would likely remain a problem.
Unlike the story itself, I can pretty much put off making a decision about what tool to use until the last minute. And I just might!
Today there are entire sites dedicated to how iMessage mangles text through auto-correct. Sure, some of the examples are probably manipulated for maximum comic effect (though it’s really not necessary, as the worst of autocorrect hardly needs a helping hand to look bad), but the fact that there are entire sections of the internet devoted to this stuff speaks to how ubiquitous it is. (Also the best examples are the ones where people keep futilely typing the same autocorrected word over and over. You can almost feel the despair coming though their attempted messages.)
And then there’s Siri. Siri is great when it works properly, which for me is most of the time. But when Siri decides not to work, it gets really stubborn in insisting that you are speaking different words.
Here are two to start, the first I’ve mentioned before.
Pyramid: I try to tell Siri to play the album Pyramid. It tries to play the imaginary album Pure Mind. I was never able to get Siri to play Pyramid. I had to physically interact with my phone to listen to it. How 2007.
Winner: Siri
Pasta: I try to send the message “The pasta will be ready in two minutes.” Siri says, “The pastor will be ready in two minutes.” I keep trying different pronunciations/inflections/accents for “pasta” and get these results:
pasta = pastor
pasta = pastor
pasta = pastor
pasta = pastor
pasta = pasta
I don’t know what finally made it work and I have no confidence it will ever work again. I’m just glad I wasn’t sending the message to a pastor.
Winner: Me
I don’t have a sassy wrap-up for this (it’s my first entry, cut me some slack) but I will note that I just spent half an hour at that stupid autocorrect site, laughing more than I’d like to admit.
In this case, the times are of increasing illiteracy. Or maybe this is new lingo I’m unaware of. Spotted outside a restaurant last night on the north side of False Creek:
My other guess is that it was a reserved party for private perverts, though it wouldn’t seem especially private being in a public restaurant with large windows and outdoor seating. The little heart stands as compelling evidence, though! The privert people gathered all seemed happy enough.
