Monday, January 5, 2009
Drove to Daughter's today, made Welsh cookies. I think this may be the best batch ever. We made about six dozen, I brought home half.
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Heard on the car radio: "... want to see scrutable evidence ...". Wow! I know the word "inscrutable", but I'd never heard "scrutable" before. Makes sense, though.
Of course I looked "scrutable" up when I got home, and it's defined as "not inscrutable", which I find funny - double negative, you know.
But in the car, my immediate thought was, well, if I immediately understand something, did I "scrute" it? Would that be the root? So I looked that up, too, and the closest verb is "scrutinize", which is the process of determining that something is scrutable, I suppose.
I find it odd that all those words with prefixes and endings doesn't seem to have a root word in English.
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A pair on an NPR show were giggling about how Caroline Kennedy used the phrase "you know" over 200 times in a 30-minute interview. They talked about how annoying that can be, and said that the way to stop someone doing it is to, every time they say "you know", answer quite seriously "Yes, I know."
Sorry folks. That doesn't work. Ex#2 used to say "right" almost as punctuation. He'd breathe it softly after every phrase, or anywhere a comma would go, and at the end of every sentence. The average sentence had three to five "right"s in it. Annoyed the hell out of me. I told him about it and he denied it, so I started responding "Right." or "No..." every time he said it.
Then one day he told me that my interrupting him to agree or disagree with him all the time was very distracting. He still denied that he was saying "right", didn't believe me when I told him, even after I continued to respond to his "right"s.
Sigh.
So "Yes, I know" won't work on Ms. Kennedy. People with verbal tics don't know they're doing it. She'd just think you were being rude, and if you keep saying you know everything, why should she continue talking to you?
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Also heard on the radio - Waterford is declaring bankruptcy, is looking for a buyer. SIL Hercules works for a division of Waterford. It was announced to the employees over the intercom this morning. No one knows what it means yet.
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3 comments:
Mrs. Schlossberg needs to join Toastmasters. They'll drum that out of her right quick.
My desktop wigit dictionary defines "inscrutable" as "impossible to understand or interpret".
ORIGIN: Middle English: from ecclesiastical Latin "inscrutabilis" , from 'in' = 'not' + 'scrutari' = to search.
Yeah. But, there's no English word that's the base for the "in" and the "able". Like "flame" is the base for "flammable" and "nonflammable". That's why I wondered why "to understand" wasn't "to scrute". There's no "scrute".
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