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AWADmail Issue 715

Sponsor’s Message: One Up! is way faster and funner than Scrabble. No board. No complicated rules. 20 or so wicked fun cutthroat minutes. Rinse (off your brain), and repeat. Congrats to Email of the Week winner, Shelley MacMillan (see below), as well as all AWADers: you get a yuge buy-one-get-one-free brain boost bargain, today only. TWOFER ME UP!

From: Anu Garg (words at wordsmith.org)
Subject: Interesting stories from the Net

Little Bird Uses a Linguistic Rule Thought to Be Unique to Humans
The Seattle Times
WebCite

Google Honors Georges Perec with a Doodle
Google.fr
Also see lipogram

The Superior Social Skills of Bilinguals
The New York Times
WebCite

How an Eight-Year-Old Boy Invented a New Word
BBC
WebCite

When I was a child, one Christmas all I wanted was Which Lane Chicane. It was a small racetrack with two racecars. The track was an oval that had a narrowing where the two cars switched inside/outside position. Many a racing mishap happened there! I never knew chicane was a word, but I remember that happy Christmas well!

From: Ina Alvarez (i.alvarezfra yahoo.de)
Subject: Re: A.Word.A.Day--chicane

I’m Mexican and live in Germany. In German, the word Schikane is used when someone takes advantage of his/her position to cause unnecessary difficulties for someone else, by stopping or slowing him/her down to accomplish something, also in terms of being malicious and cruel. That is, in some way it mixes the meaning of the English word chicane mentioned in A.Word.A.Day: To trick by narrowing someone’s road to slow him down. For example: when Cinderella wishes to go to the ball to meet the prince, but the stepsisters rip her dress which she has to fix if she wants to go. That is Schikane, Cinderella is being schikaniert (in German: Cinderella wird schikaniert). It’s a kind of mobbing.

And of course, a “chicano/chicana” is a person who was born (and lives) in the USA, whose parents are Mexican. Sometimes also used for Mexicans who live in the USA very long.

From: Sarah Berman (bermansarahj gmail.com)
Subject: Re: A.Word.A.Day--derogate

Disney fans rejoice! I first heard this word in Disney’s 2009 The Princess and the Frog. When Prince Naveen’s bumbling assistant, Lawrence, first meets Dr. Facilier, the voodoo man, he scoffs at the latter’s abilities to perform magic. Dr. Facilier begins his intro song, “Friends on the Other Side” (video, 3.5 min.), with “Don’t you disrespect me, little man. / Don’t you derogate or deride. / You’re in my world now, not your world, / and I’ve got friends on the other side.”

Needless to say when I received this word, the song immediately became stuck in my head. Thanks for the earworm, AWAD!

From: J Hansen (jrhindsh gmail.com)
Subject: ludic

Ah, Ludo Bagman, the former great quidditch player, later involved in nefarious betting schemes with the goblins. Now the name makes sense.

From: Elizabeth McIntyre (via website comments)
Subject: ludic

I remember long ago a music teacher saying, “No serious piano student can ignore Hindemith’s Ludus Tonalis.” I don’t know if he understood his own joke or not.

From: Dharam Khalsa (dharamkk2 windstream.net)
Subject: Anagrams of this week’s words

From: Anu Garg (words at wordsmith.org)
Subject: Limericks

Some voters now hope to restrain
Trump’s so far successful campaign.
But there’s yet to appear
the adroit engineer
to finesse an effective chicane.

To become a Republican heavyweight
You let civil discourse disintegrate,
Insult your opponents’
Most private components,
Just denigrate, deprecate, derogate.

In the steamy back seat of his Buick,
They got nekkid, excited, and ludic.
She said a month later,
“You’ll soon be a pater.
Thanks tons; I’ve just texted your new chick.”

She said, “I’m so sorry I’m late.”
This led to one big ALTERCATE.
Since, “Punctuality,
Was important,” said he.
This was the end of their blind date.

When a rhyme for orange is sought,
It’s much tougher than ever first thought.
When a task is tall,
We should start small,
Rhyming kumquat, loquat, and complot.

From: Phil Graham (pgraham1946 cox.net)
Subject: AWAD of puns

Chicane ‘round the mountain driving six white horses. (video, 2 min.)

Is derogate in this ramshackle fence?

Slang for a UK bathroom is ludic.

Ms. Jenner has changed her mind. They’ll have to altercate.

“Let’s hire a land surveyor to complot our acreage.”