Category: Cerebri Laevi

Elsewhere today, somebody used the word skosh in a blog comment, although he spelled it scoce. It took me a second to recognize it, at which point it occurred to me that I’m not sure I’ve ever actually seen the word in print (under any spelling). The word is fairly common in spoken English: “Move…

In my continuing quest to muddy the evolutionary waters of English, I offer the word “xenorepulsive.” I was discussing with my wife today the issue that “racist” has become an increasingly broad, and hence useless, word. Liberals tend to use it to mean any sort of hostility or negativity based on people of a different…

Sarah Palin has brought herself attention recently by following in the footsteps of George Bush: By mashing two words together. Specifically, she tweeted that peaceful Muslims ought to refudiate something or other with regards to the proposed mosque near Ground Zero in New York. This got me wondering about the two words that she’d apparently…

Yesterday, somebody I know mused about the antonym of procrastinate. There isn’t a verb I’m aware of for doing something immediately or for doing something before it’s due. However, it’s possible to build one. Procrastinate comes from Latin. Pro- means toward or for. Cras means tomorrow, while crastinus is the possessive. -Ate is a standard plural…

I’ve been rather obsessively working on my Battleships program the last few days, and have quite a bit to show for it: The autosolver works now, as does the random puzzle generator. The random puzzle generator is nowhere near as speedy or elegant as the one in Fathom It!, but it’s a start. For the…

Yesterday, I was discussing the German imperative with my wife. Due to habits formed in high school and college language courses, we tend to use the formal version of imperatives even with our toddler unless we think about it (for instance, “Kommen Sie hier!” vs “Komm hier!”). This got me thinking about how German has…

I’ve been thinking lately of making my Battleships program more robust by having a complete autosolver and a random puzzle creator. The first step was programming a step that would do the simple stuff: If a row has n remaining water cells and n remaining empty cells, all the remaining cells have to be water….

HLSL is a C-related language that exists for the purpose of adding filters (or “shaders”) to images for various graphic effects. It is the primary way to manipulate the appearance of completed images within VS2010 projects. (Note that I deliberately use certain terms, such as shader and filter, interchangeably in these posts, to balance the…

English modals are a strange enough beast among themselves, but adding in negation leads to especially treacherous waters. This post will restrict itself to the four most common, and possibly most confusing: May, can, must, and have to. May “May” as a modal is ambiguous between permission and possibility: 1. You may have some dessert…

Doing some code clean-up on Battleships this morning, I was reminded of a detail of C# logic precedence that I’ve used to my benefit elsewhere (including within the program), but which caused a brief hiccup in one instance. Specifically, while the logical and and or operators are transitive, that’s not strictly true of && and…