#60550
03/13/2002 11:04 PM
|
Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 3,409
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 3,409 |
|
|
|
#60551
03/13/2002 11:18 PM
|
Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 6,296
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 6,296 |
Dear Sparteye,
I somehow missed your [silver shiny coin]Destinesia[/silver shiny coin] up above!
That is a very cool word for forgetting what you were going to say or do upon getting where you were going! Terrific coin there!
Best regards,
DubDub
|
|
|
#60552
03/13/2002 11:35 PM
|
Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 10,542
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 10,542 |
to me this sounds like a more useful word to use when you've forgotten where you were going, which happens to me quite frequently. -joe (I should be home now) friday http://home.mn.rr.com/wwftd/
|
|
|
#60553
03/14/2002 1:35 AM
|
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 1,773
Pooh-Bah
|
|
Pooh-Bah
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 1,773 |
I'm glad you like it WW, but I cannot take credit for coining it. I heard it elsewhere, and have adopted it as a term both necessary and evocative.
|
|
|
#60554
03/14/2002 1:45 AM
|
Joined: Aug 2001
Posts: 11,071 Likes: 2
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2001
Posts: 11,071 Likes: 2 |
It's common for my wife to say as we approach a house, "the TV's on", when we may be 15 metres or more away, and the audio is inaudible.
The audio may be inaudible but the "raster pattern" - the 15,600-cycles-per-second sweep signal (something like 650 lines per frame, 24 frames per second) can be VERY loud, and easily heard out in the street through an open window, if the set isn't shielded somehow.
(I used to be able to do that too but then I got older and lost some of my high-frequency hearing. Sigh.)
And inexpensive dimmer switches often hum with a 60-cycle frequency, the way fluorescent lights do (though I think it's the ballast, not the bulb, that does the humming?)
|
|
|
#60556
03/17/2002 12:05 AM
|
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 2,661
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 2,661 |
The audio may be inaudible but the "raster pattern" - the 15,600-cycles-per-second sweep signal...[rant alert] I hear it all the time! It is the same *issue I have with the "High Quality" sound of digital recording. The relatively slow sampling rate of first generation CD's at 40,000 (+-) that has to measure frequency, volume, wave shape etc... at that speed, it just disregards or has 100% error at frequencies over 16500. Shure it's missing the snap-crackle-pop and hiss of a standard cassette and/or vinil record player, but the musical sounds in those frequencies are just not there. A piano sounds like it is inside carboard box when it is digitally recorded. Cymbals sound like trash can lids (OK I'm exagerating)... you get the picture. People are now "trained" by not listening to these "ambient sounds" so now they just don't listen for them. A prime example that almost everyone I know will tell me they can hear (sorry Dr.Bill): as you walk from a hallway into a room, or as you walk from a small room into an open space... even with no sound, you can sense the size of the room by the sounds you are or are not hearing... (do so with your eyes closed)! Just another reason to enjoy live music... Now, If I could only get them to turn it down... grumble, mumble, fumble...[end rant] 
|
|
|
#60557
03/17/2002 12:24 AM
|
Joined: Oct 2001
Posts: 1,385
veteran
|
|
veteran
Joined: Oct 2001
Posts: 1,385 |
the traffic was neatly collating
Your choice of words was deeper than you knew, de Troy. While cars were collating "neatly", traffic was "busy". At some level you must have been aware that traffic which is not collating so neatly is colliding.
|
|
|
#60558
03/17/2002 2:11 AM
|
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 2,891
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 2,891 |
as you walk from a hallway into a room, or as you walk from a small room into an open space... even with no sound, you can sense the size of the room by the sounds you are or are not hearing...
Can you explain that to me again. I know *exactly what you are talking about but why does it happen?
|
|
|
#60559
03/17/2002 6:33 AM
|
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,146
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,146 |
Dragging this thread back to its roots by the scruff of the neck, and mixing metaphors as a by-product ... When the younger of my two sisters was about four years old, I was walking her home from Kindy one windy day. Along the route there was a park with a whole lot of young conifers growing at the bottom of it. The wind was making the conifers bend in turn, a kind of ripple effect, with the next ripple beginning before the last had ended, and the amount of bend per ripple being, of course, dictated by the strength of the wind gust. Sarah was fascinated by the effect and we went and sat on the swings to watch it for a while. "Oh look at the trees bouncing in the wind!" she happily exclaimed. I was fifteen years old at the time, and that impressed the hey out of me, even then. It was such an apt and exact description of what was happening. 
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
|
|
|
#60560
03/17/2002 11:59 AM
|
Joined: Oct 2001
Posts: 1,385
veteran
|
|
veteran
Joined: Oct 2001
Posts: 1,385 |
you can sense the size of the room by the sounds you do or do not hear
Echolocation. I believe this is the phenomenon you are looking for, Bel - highly developed in bats and dolphins and of practical value to humans as well, as the blind have proven. I understand the tapping of a blind person's cane is, or can be, an echolocation technique.
|
|
|
#60561
03/17/2002 4:13 PM
|
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400 |
yes, and there is something about "golden ratios" (which have been discussed in the not to distant past,) that tend to change sound-- echo reverate in a special way.. so churchs tend to use them-- Classic design for churches almost always involves a series of rectangles that each have a golden ratio.. the result is, churches have a special "sound". that, plus the fact that most churches have high ceilings.
St John the Divine cathederal in NY had an exhibit on sacred spaces-- there are several different shapes that have special effects on sound. in domes, ie, you have the ability to face a dome wall, speak to the wall, and have someone on the oposite side of the dome hear you, but not someone in the general space.
so, good planning, results in creating spaces that have a special sound, which results in a specific reactions.
many formal public building use the same technics as churches, for some of the same reasons.
|
|
|
#60562
03/17/2002 4:41 PM
|
Joined: Oct 2001
Posts: 1,385
veteran
|
|
veteran
Joined: Oct 2001
Posts: 1,385 |
churches with high ceilings have a "special sound"
Very interesting, de Troy. A vault of perfect pitch can vault a pitch, more or less perfectly, to the back of the church without anyone beside you hearing it. Does it help to have perfect pitch when you make your pitch?
Is this why all the sinners sit in the back of the church, the better to hear the pitch? Or do they just want to be close to the exit?
|
|
|
#60563
03/17/2002 5:23 PM
|
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400 |
Gee plutarch, i wouldn't know.. i have notice that churches are full of sinners, and being a good person (at heart) i don't have much truck with going to church!
they are interesing places to visit, like museums, and other places of interest in a city. and for the idea of perfect pitch, and pitching things.. i couldn't hit the broad side of a barn at 10 feet it, and if your talking about pitch as a sound.. well, me, (and a couple of others here abouts) have trouble carrying a tune.. there isn't a bucket big enough.
domes were first developed by the romans for churches/temples, and have been in the past 250 years, or so, adapted by governments -- and always, its the bigger the better.. just look at US Capital!
|
|
|
#60564
03/17/2002 10:00 PM
|
Joined: Jan 2002
Posts: 1,526
veteran
|
|
veteran
Joined: Jan 2002
Posts: 1,526 |
Kids can be pretty creative in describing their observations. When my oldest was maybe 4 or 5, I needed to quickly sew something. I grabbed the pin-cushion from its box and she gave me the big eyes while cautioning, "Be careful, Daddy! It's very pointiful!"
k
|
|
|
#60565
03/17/2002 10:24 PM
|
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 2,891
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 2,891 |
Your daughter coined a word - and it is very apropos. I like it.
|
|
|
#60566
03/17/2002 10:54 PM
|
Joined: Aug 2001
Posts: 11,071 Likes: 2
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2001
Posts: 11,071 Likes: 2 |
My oldest son at the age of three came up with fly-smacker
for what until then we had called a fly-swatter.
It was so much more satisfying a description of the object - and the action -
that the whole family immediately adopted the word, and we use it to this day.
Word and object both.
Said son is now 34.
|
|
|
#60567
03/17/2002 11:11 PM
|
Joined: Jan 2002
Posts: 1,526
veteran
|
|
veteran
Joined: Jan 2002
Posts: 1,526 |
I like it. And if the usage becomes wide-spread, I will be honored to have had this first-person account of the etymology.
k
|
|
|
#60568
03/22/2002 8:18 PM
|
Joined: Feb 2002
Posts: 833
old hand
|
|
old hand
Joined: Feb 2002
Posts: 833 |
Like a zipper. Zipperly? Zipperesque? "The traffic was collating/zipperling." "The cars followed a zipperesque pattern." Eh. Something like that. 
|
|
|
#60569
03/22/2002 10:21 PM
|
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400 |
like a zipper....
i am thinking about it, and as we invent new things, and new ways of moving things and people, we have to invent new vocabulary, or change meanings..
to me, like a zipper might be applicable to so something getting locked in (alternately) since to me, one clear cut aspect of a zipper is the idea of locking/unlocking.. since one they had merged, they were free to move to other lanes.. zipper doesn't work for the image (actual example) i had in mind.. it might work.
i suppose people piled up thing for eons.. but a "pile-up" is most definately like what happened in georgia last week.. when 100 odd cars and trucks crashed into each other over a one mile stretch of road.
It that universal?
i have heard that ozzie call highway convoys "road trains" and the first time i heard it, i understood the meaning, but didn't think it was clever enough to copy..
i like the english term "bleeper" for what we call beeper, cause about half the times it goes off, you want to say bleep-explitive deleted!
like the story about spec's, and how century old specifications about wagon wheels effect space travel, old words get recyclied to new uses. Taxi-- for instance..
Taxis, from greek for arrangement or division, got pulled into an mechanical device to 'arrange' a fare for a cab, so called taximeter cabs., shortened to taxicabs, to taxi's
and cabs for hire tend to move about slowly, looking to pick up fares-- and then stop to let people in or out, so airplanes taxi to and from the gate (going slowly, and stopping to let passengers in out out..
the root word, taxis, still is use in the meaning of arranged, as in taxonomy...
|
|
|
#60570
03/23/2002 3:23 AM
|
Joined: Feb 2002
Posts: 833
old hand
|
|
old hand
Joined: Feb 2002
Posts: 833 |
Ummm.....I think actually when an Aussie talks about a "road train" he (or she) is referring to just one truck. These are (hope I am using the next word right) articulated transports with more than one trailer. They can be up to 55' long and are a common sight in the Outback. In fact there are road signs about road trains all over the Outback - because road trains are such beasts to pass on a single-carriageway highway.
I even saw a sign that said, "Warning: Road trains on roundabout" in Alice Springs. Eek!
But as far as I know, the term "road train" refers to a single vehicle, not a convoy.
|
|
|
#60571
03/23/2002 3:41 AM
|
Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 3,409
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 3,409 |
|
|
|
#60572
03/23/2002 4:00 AM
|
Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 3,409
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 3,409 |
|
|
|
#60573
03/23/2002 4:46 AM
|
Joined: Dec 2001
Posts: 688
addict
|
|
addict
Joined: Dec 2001
Posts: 688 |
Some are truly huge, but this one appears to be typicalI wouldn't want to try and pass that on a two lane road. Especially with him driving on the wrong side of the road like that!
|
|
|
#60574
03/23/2002 2:30 PM
|
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 11,613
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 11,613 |
Thanks for the piccie (hi, CK), Max.
I wouldn't want to try and pass that on a two lane road.I'd do it! 'Specially if I were in the car I have fallen in love with: a Mitsubishi Spyder (not the Toyota Spyder; sorry, Aunt mav ). Odd that two separate (are they?) companies have a model with the same name.
|
|
|
|
|
