0593 - Nomenclature

Because Anguilla is in the Caribbean, where quite a bit of Spanish is spoken (as it is along the U.S. border), some of the Cable TV broadcasts are Spanish broadcasts with English voice-over. This makes for a slightly offbeat baseball opener, but one can learn. Did you know that the Spanish word for “Pitcher” is “El Lanzadore”? Quite a fine word. And the Spanish for “Bullpen”? That is “El Bullpen”. You can’t win them all. This week, Readers, we shall relax from the heavy lifting and report some weird names from our always-growing collection. Next week, deep moral thinking is scheduled. We can’t do the deep stuff this week because the Staff is laughing at the hats the ladies are wearing at the Royal Wedding ceremony.

First on our name list is a country recently in the news with a name that is an imposition. The name is: Kyrgyzstan. We are not going to put up with this, particularly when the capital is Bishkek. Therefore, by the powers vested in us, we declare the trade name of this place to be “Bish”. Use this and save proofreading hours, as well as paper. How’s things in Bish today? Not too bad (the standard Anguilla reply to “How are you?” or “How’s it going?”).

Moving along, our Revered Investment Guru, who watches a lot of CNBC, reports a fellow named Dr. Ghola Amusa – this seems insufficiently serious for an expert. Then quite sadly, there is the poor murdered little girl who had been given the awful name “Jetseta”. Here in Anguilla we have a seasonal plenty of Jet Setters, but all are well. In fact the airport (designator AXA) is full of private jets, although American Eagle which screamed for a bigger airport has only one flight a day, leaving at a time preventing any connections to the States.

[This, by a commodious vicus of recirculation (special award to the reader who can identify that phrase) brings us to the off-topic issue of what’s wrong with General Motors. You may have noticed that GM’s stock fell out of bed, and its bonds are approaching junk status. GM responded by (1) pulling all its advertising from the L.A. Times for dissing its cars and management, and (2) announcing it would make more SUVs, apparently so as to guzzle more gas. We have news for GM management (if that’s the name for who’s running GM): you make bad cars. Born and bred to GM, the OO years ago gave up all GM cars for being poorly made. The present Outbacks support the Sea Blast here perfectly, and just keep running. They are put together in Indiana. And what’s the trouble with airlines? they are not a business, and they hate their customers. They are also broke.]

Back to our subject, these days the intractable enemies of intelligible English are the evil group who write technical instructions. They all seem to have dropped out of English class after Nursery School. Try this in an ad for a TLM-8700 Tunable Laser Module (like the one you keep on the kitchen table): The ad claimed “Mode-hop-free tunability”. Who doesn’t want that?

And by the way, after our Robert Mugabe Slimy Pol Award last week to Tom DeLay, very few TV stations picked up the award, but there were quite a few stories about DeLay, who is becoming sort of a Slimy Pol poster boy. Good. May he slink away.

Oh, and if GM is thinking of pulling its advertising from these columns because we said we don’t like their cars, let them go ahead. We will not be intimidated. Also BTW, can you identify the pair of names promised for next week’s most serious topic?

Next time: Moritz&Thomas [OO #594]

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