CSotD: What is in a name, and other ponderables

Creative spelling, as seen in this Moderately Confused (AMS), is an editor’s nightmare, but one that fortunately has morphed out of control in tune with the technical revolution. I used to run honor role listings in the paper, and, for a while, I’d come across some ridiculous version of a common name and call the school to confirm it.

But the good thing was that they were sending the honor role straight from their own computer records and had already fought that battle. If nothing else, it meant that, if someone complained that we’d misspelled KayTellunn’s name, we could refer them back to the guidance office.

Incidentally, in the Irish language from which the name comes, Caitlin is pronounced “HASH-linn” with the initial H a back-of-throat rasp. I’m sure there’s a linguistic term for that sound and I’m equally sure I’m not going to look it up.

But I once got a press release about a young Explorer who had completed an award and who was named a version of Catherine that boggled the mind and stretched over a dozen letters, most of them silent. Her mother called, furious that I had misspelled it, and I dug out the release from the Scouts and told her that’s how they had sent it to me.

This did not mollify her in the least: It was my responsibility to guess what alphabet soup she had bestowed upon the poor child.

Though as this Baby Blues from 2007 suggests, if you’re only going to choose from a handful of names, I guess you have to differentiate them somehow.

Speaking of eccentric terminology, today’s Argyle Sweater (AMS) was both humorous and appalling, which is one of my favorite combinations and reminded me that, in one dogowners’ online group — an email list, if you remember such things — the dog’s favorite treat in a mixed-animal household was referred to as Almond Roca.

Not sure that’s the sort of publicity Brown & Haley Co. was looking for, but the visuals lined up well.

Juxtaposition of the Day

Grand Avenue — AMS

Free Range — Creators

What are little girls made of? Nature or nurture?

I suppose it has to do with whether you send your daughter to Space Camp or take her to Disney World, though there’s no law against doing both and letting her sort it out.

I’d also point out that, while Mike Thompson’s Grandma is distressed over the child’s choice, Bill Whitehead glories in it.

For a female perspective, I’ve set the Wayback Machine to 2003 and offer this Rhymes With Orange (KFS), which not only suggests ambivalence but celebrates it.

When my boys were little, we didn’t have a no-guns rule, but a lot of their friends’ parents did. The result was that visiting friends always wanted to play guns while my boys would often rather throw a football around or play soccer.

I wonder if parents of little girls who try to shape them by withholding Barbies experience that same thing, or if perhaps the sample is too small to draw conclusions?

I’m not losing sleep over it. We’re doing what we can here in the Granite State through the McAuliffe/Shepard Discovery Center and across the country with a kabillion hands-on science centers.

And if the parents won’t take their daughters there, there are plenty of school field trips that will.

Jeremy gets busted in this morning’s Zits (KFS), and I hope there are repercussions, because plagiarism, even plagiarism by proxy, is supposed to earn you a zero and perhaps a little time in detention.

It’s not that AI is going to copy Stephen King or anyone else, however. It’s that, from what I’ve seen so far, it produces tepid drivel that would shame a reasonably bright sixth-grader.

For example, if you go to IMDB.com, you’ll find that they are filling in gaps with AI, which comes in handy if you’re looking up a movie and want to find out what a jackass with no taste might think it’s about.

Ditto with the Brave browser, whose search engine will let you know what an uneducated simpleton thinks is the correct answer. I have no idea what the Justice Department plans to do to Google, but I am afraid it’s going to plunge us even further into the Idiocracy.

In 10 years of mentoring young journalists, I had only two cases of plagiarism, and they weren’t hard to spot. One was a kid who genuinely didn’t get it, the other from an over-scheduled kid who was desperate to make deadline and desperately ashamed of what she’d done. Other’n that, what my bright kids wrote sounded like what a bright kid would write.

But I had a GF who taught a course for incoming underprivileged freshman to boost their writing skills, and she told me that a kid who didn’t seem all that articulate had turned in a brilliant essay and, while she couldn’t bust him on it, she didn’t believe he’d written it.

I suggested she assign an in-class writing project, which not only gave her a better look at all her students’ raw skills but revealed that this kid was, in fact, a terrific writer.

He dropped out before the actual school year started. So it goes.

Lio (AMS) suggests the next step in all this, but the trick isn’t to sell pre-carved pumpkins, though the grocery store is full of pre-painted ones.

Rather, the big money will come from combining AI and 3D printing, so you can ask the machine for a witch riding across the moon on a broom and it will carve just that. No mess, no fuss, no fun.

It might be expensive for something you’ll only use once a year, so we’ll set it up in a kiosk at the mall: Free carving with every purchase of a $50 pumpkin.

If I begin work on the Kickstarter now, I’ll be ready for 2025!

Arlo & Janis (AMS) have the best mortality gags in the business. They just had a Kris Kristofferson tribute arc, whose death got me thinking that, logically, people who were grown-ups when you were 15-years-old are probably going to check out before you do.

At this point, I’m more amazed at how many of the people on my playlist are still alive.

Casady (80) and Kaukonen (83), for example.