Not since the Vagina Monologues has such a comprehensive list of words for the female parts been assembled. It showed up on my Twitter stream, via The Blogess.
It’s an old trick, the dictionary hack. Hook up a server login page with a dictionary file and run all the words as passwords until you hit something. In this case, the program got to “H” for happiness, before the server opened up and all of the Twitter goodies fell out.
The details of the rudimentary hack reveal a startling lack of essential security within Twitter’s halls, and raises eyebrows about the potential for Twitter to be marketed as an internal collaboration tool for business use. The so called dictionary-hack has been a mainstay of hackers for decades, and the servers should have been configured to recognize the repeated login attempts. A lack of strong password enforcement (ensuring that passwords are complex) and a failure to “lock out” accounts after multiple failed attempts are a breeding ground for would be hackers and crackers - with a situation like that, it was only a matter of time.
As far as hacks go, this one was relatively harmless (though the Twitter execs trying to monetize the service may disagree with me on that point). Nobody’s bank account was drained. Nobody really believed O’Reilly was being outed by FOX News.
What’s interesting to me is how we use words as code. When we type them over and over into a server to get access to a website, they lose their meaning. Do you think that whoever set the “happiness” password felt happy every day while he or she typed it in? Devoid of context, words become little more than letter patterns, in this case motor commands from the brain. If there is any meaning, it’s “let me in, already.”
Say a word again and again, until the syllables run together, and you have a group of circular phonemes, not a word at all. (What the hell does “Om mani padme hum” mean, anyway?)
Names have a similar sort of meaning transfer. When I took the name Ruby, I thought a lot about its meaning. Now I rarely think about it, and I’m sure when my wife hears the word Ruby, she thinks of me before she thinks about a red stone with the hardness of nine mohs.
I am a word addict, but of all the qualities of words, the one I like best is that they mean something. They are the most basic metaphor of our human lives.
If there’s a moral to this story, it’s don’t use common words as passwords. I would argue further that we should not use anything with meaning as a password. Let’s keep those meanings sacred, shall we? After all, 8-letter/number/symbol patterns are infinite. The number of words in any dictionary, on the other hand, is decidedly finite.
My love affair with crosswords began in high school. See, when you’re cutting classes, it helps to have something to do to pass the time. I would do the Daily News or New York Times crossword, sometimes with my friend Denise. She would put two letters in a box to fit words that she wanted to place. It was infuriating.
That love affair revived a couple of years ago, and I dragged my wife in for a threesome. We’d trade the crossword back and forth when we were stuck, and sometimes — but not always — we’d get it all done.
It is my ambition to one day complete (solo, sorry honey) a Saturday New York Times crossword. Everyone thinks Sundays are the hardest, but that’s not true. It’s just the largest. From the Amazon listing for the Saturday book:
The Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle is the most challenging puzzle of the week, which is why it has gained such an eager following. The most serious solvers know that actually finishing the puzzle is no small feat.
No small feat, indeed. When I get any of the words in that puzzle, it’s a triumph. A girl can dream….
The word poverty originates comes from the Latin, paupertatem, via Old French, poverte.It is first recorded in Old English around 1225, as mentioned in a book published in 1868, Old English Homilies.
We use the word poverty, and its cousin, poor, casually, meaning broke, perhaps, or cash deficient. Yet we know true poverty when we see it, don’t we? In people who are homeless. Or people who debate between heating their houses in the winter and eating.
Growing up, I thought we were poor, my single mother and I, but she worked steadily, at the same job throughout my childhood, a good job by many standards — a job with the City that had good benefits. I didn’t have the same clothes or sneakers as some of my classmates, or a piano, and my mother slept in the living room of our one bedroom apartment in the Bronx. But in reality, by the definitions set out for us by the U.S. Government, we were not “poor.”
According to the U.S. Health and Human Services Poverty Guidelines for 2008, a family of two, like ours, would have to be making less than $14,000 a year in the contiguous U.S. to be below the poverty line. We lived in New York City. It is unfathomable to me to think someone could live on that amount of money and still eat, get clothing, and use transportation to and from a job on that income in New York.
Apparently it is also unfathomable to the human services providers, too, because you qualify for food stamps at 130% of the federal poverty limit, for WIC at 185%, and often for Medicaid (depends on the state) at 200%. According to Columbia University’s National Center for Children in Poverty, “Research suggests that, on average, families need an income of about twice the federal poverty level to meet their most basic needs.” So if the guideline doesn’t even determine what we consider poor, why set it at falsely low levels? Seems to me there can only be one reason: to deny people benefits. (But I’m a cynic. If you can think of another, please speak up.)
I’m taking three steps against poverty, starting today. I urge you to find three things you can do to stop poverty, however you or the government defines it. Here’s what I’m going to do:
Educate myself. In addition to the research I did for this post, I’m going to read a book that’s been on my to-read list for too long: Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich.
Vote. You heard it here first. And I’m not a non-profit, so I can say vote for That One, please. If you don’t, please don’t tell me about it.
This word, maverick, derives from a surname — a surname that survives to this day.
“I’m just enraged that McCain calls himself a maverick,” said Terrellita Maverick, 82, a San Antonio native who proudly carries the name of a family that has been known for its progressive politics since the 1600s, when an early ancestor in Boston got into trouble with the law over his agitation for the rights of indentured servants.
In the 1800s, Samuel Augustus Maverick went to Texas and became known for not branding his cattle. He was more interested in keeping track of the land he owned than the livestock on it, Ms. Maverick said; unbranded cattle, then, were called “Maverick’s.” The name came to mean anyone who didn’t bear another’s brand.
The rest of the article goes on to detail some terrific activities of this lefty family, including serving in the Roosevelt administration, defending draft resisters and atheists, attacking the Iraq war, and serving as a board member for the Texas ACLU.
Says Terrellita, “Every time we hear it, all my children and I and all my family shrink a little and say, ‘Oh, my God, he said it again.’”
There are lots of words that derive from names. Here are a few others:
Boycott - after Captain Boycott, an Irish land-agent who was shunned by neighbors — they would not speak to him, buy from him, nor sell to him — after refusing to lower rents for his tenants
Dahlia - from Anders Dahl, an 18th-century Swedish botanist who introduced the flower
Dunce - from John Duns Scotus, an unstupid philosopher whose ideas went out of fashion in the 16th century, and were from then on thought to be idiotic
Guillotine - after Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a French assemblyman during the Revolution, who called for a universal method for capital punishment
Lynching - after Charles Lynch, a judge in Virginia at the time of the Revolutionary War who exacted strict punishment against English loyalists
Mausoleum - for the tomb of King Mausollos of Caria, a monument of such stature as to be one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
Quixotic - after Don Quixote, the famous character in the Spanish novel of the 1600s
Tawdry - from St. Awdrey, who gave her name to a fair at which you could buy lacy clothing that was later deemed cheap and of poor quality
Maybe some descendants with these names also cringe when they hear their birthright misused, who knows?
One thing is abundantly clear, however: McCain is no Maverick.
When my wife and I were watching clips of Katie Couric and Sarah Palin, I commented that her responses were more like poetry than prose. They were non-linear, free association style riffs, and with her (affected?) midwestern lilt, it sounded like a spoken word performance.
Apparently I was not the only one who noticed. Slate writer Hart Seely added some line breaks to her quotes and came up with “The Poetry of Sara Palin”:
“On Reporters”
It’s funny that
A comment like that
Was kinda made to,
I don’t know,
You know …
Reporters.
(To K. Couric, CBS News, Sept. 25, 2008)
It reminded me of an oldie but goodie, the George W. Bush quote poem I had hanging in my cubicle for some time. It still gives me joy to read, so forgive me for reproducing it here. This one is slightly different than the Sarah Palin poetry, in that it is a multitude of quotes that are rearranged to create the poetry. But each one has been verified.
MAKE THE PIE HIGHER
I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It’s a world of madmen and uncertainty
And potential mental losses.
Rarely is the question asked
Is our children learning?
Will the highways of the Internet
Become more few?
How many hands have I shaked?
They misunderestimate me.
I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.
I know that the human being
And the fish can coexist.
Families is where our nation finds hope, where our wings take dream.
Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize society!
Make the pie higher!
Make the pie higher!
I have to admit, when my ex-girlfriend first told me about Car Talk, I was skeptical. As she was the consummate driver, we were probably in the car when their show came on the radio, and she was probably, in her undeniable wisdom, telling me how great Click and Clack were. And I probably said something like, “A show about cars?”
But I listened, and she was right (she would say I was often wrong). It was more than a show about cars.
Tom and Ray Magliozzi, or Click and Clack, as they call themselves in honor of aging cars, are brothers who have been solving people’s car dilemmas on the radio since 1977. They became mechanics in 1973, originally opening a do-it-yourself garage that became The Good News Garage, a more traditional garage. Says their NPR biography:
In 1977, Tom and Ray were invited to the studios of NPR member station WBUR in Boston, along with other area mechanics, to discuss car repair. Tom accepted the invitation, and when he was invited back the following week, he asked, “Can I bring my brother, Ray?”
The show is a combination of commisseration about cars — from brand names to mechanical quirks — to real problem-solving. Their advice is human and opinionated, and often the brothers disagree with one another. More than once I’ve heard them settle bets between spouses and friends. And my own personal favorite part of the show is the Puzzler. For example, this one from July 28 of this year:
There is a series of nine numbers: 335 443 554 __ followed by a blank. What’s the blank, and why?
Thanks to Doug at Car Talk who was kind enough to write back to me with what Tom and Ray were reading! Authors themselves, Tom and Ray have a new book out: Ask Click and Clack - Answers from Car Talk.
Traffic is something I think about frequently, and at great length. I think (and speak) in phrases punctuated by expletives worthy of my Bronx childhood, as I address other drivers from the safety of my vehicle, which is invariably crawling along I-5 or SR-520.
Mary Roach from The New York Times says of Traffic, “My solution to the nation’s vehicular woes would be to make this good book required reading for anyone applying for a driver’s license.”
The driver of this book has a blog, How We Drive, that’s worth checking out, too.
The book Tom is reading, The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil, held me hostage. I looked it up on Google Books, and I found there were a good number of pages available to me. Within minutes I had lost track of the task at hand, and I was convinced that our destiny was to become human-computer hybrid beings.
The Singularity, as Kurzweil describes it, is the consequence of the speed with which technology is advancing. He predicts that technology and biology will merge. On page 9, Kurzweil says, “There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine, or between physical and virtual reality.”
Futurism of this sort is perfectly familiar to us — in the realm of the fantastic, books and movies that we categorize as science fiction. But this is not a novel, and it’s not sci-fi. There is a Singularity Summithappening this October 25 in San Jose. Speakers include representatives of MIT, Berkeley, Intel, and IBM. It’s put on by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, whose mission is: “In the coming decades, humanity will likely create a powerful artificial intelligence. The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) exists to confront this urgent challenge, both the opportunity and the risk.”
Bill Gates said of Kurzweil that he is “The best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.” And Janet Maslin in The New York Times says the book “is startling in scope and bravado. Mr. Kurzweil envisions breathtakingly exponential progress, and he is merely extrapolating from established data.”
It does not escape my notice that Tom is reading a book by an author named Ray, and Ray by one named Tom. Even in their reading material, Click and Clack are inseperable.
I used the word schadenfreude not long ago in an IM conversation regarding Sarah Palin. It was the early days of her addition to the ticket, and I was relishing her scandal, yet simultaneously ashamed of my glee at someone else’s difficulties. Sort of.* The next day, the person I was messaging told me she’d seen that same word multiple times within the last 24 hours in friends’ blog posts. At first I blamed the collective unconscious. Avenue Q was too long ago — even when it finally made it to Seattle — to be a direct influence. Then I realized it was likely Sarah Palin who was making us all feel joyous at another’s pain.
[Editor's note: As I said, this was in the early days of her campaign, when it seemed natural to assume that someone who'd advocated the losing proposition of abstinence-only education would feel saddened when, as expected, it didn't work at all -- even in her own privileged Christian home.]
If you’re not completely clear on the word, or just need some video entertainment, here’s someone’s Disney-altered version of the Avenue Q song, “Schadenfreude.”
Of course, my schadenfreude regarding the Palins was limited to Mom. Toward poor Bristol, I felt something quite opposed to schadenfreude.
Back when I was working in the mental health system, there were strict rules around the use of prefixes, when it came to the client’s feelings, especially their pain. We were allowed to empathize, but never sympathize.
What’s the difference? It’s slim, to be sure, and I would argue that friends can do either, and both, at the same time. But to maintain a professional distance, empathy was required over its fraternal twin, sympathy.
1. a. To put into or onto: encapsulate.
b. To go into or onto: enplane.
2. To cover or provide with: enrobe.
3. To cause to be: endear.
4. Thoroughly. Used often as an intensive: entangle.
1. a. Together; with: synecology.
b. United: syncarp.
c. Same; similar: sympatric.
d. At the same time: synesthesia.
2. a. Same; similar: sympatric.
b. At the same time: synesthesia.
The base of both words is the root, path, which is related to pathos, the quality of evoking compassion or pity. It comes from the Greek, páthos, or suffering.
So if we were to understand the words based on their components, empathy would be to get into a feeling with someone, while sympathy would be to feel it with them, or at the same time. This is pretty close to the meanings of the words. From Dictionary.com:
empathy- (noun)
1. the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.
sympathy - (noun)
3. the fact or power of sharing the feelings of another, esp. in sorrow or trouble; fellow feeling, compassion, or commiseration.
Still pretty similar ideas, but the clinical distinction was definitely one of distance. To empathize was to imagine how the client felt, while maintaining your own place in the relationship with the client. To sympathize would be to feel it right along with them, for example, perhaps telling stories of when similar things happened to you.
So while I have no sympathy, mere hints of empathy, and some schadenfreude for Mrs. Palin, I do feel some combination of sympathy and empathy for Bristol.
For example, I feel sympathy for her being pregnant for the first time, and aprehensive about what might happen next. I am able to get right in there and feel it along with her, as I am going through the same experience, at least as far as those aspects of it are concerned.
But I am twice Bristol’s age. I have a partner, and my baby was not only planned, but in some sense, engineered. My partner and I are both degreed and employed. Mine and Bristol’s situations are not, in fact, similar enough that I can truly sympathize with her. Yet I can empathize with being too young to make lifelong decisions like marriage and children. I can empathize with having no choice but to go obscenely public with what I will generously call her decision to become a teenage parent.
*Perhaps I should disclaim my schadenfreude, tell you that I am outraged by the McCain campaign’s insertion of a woman — any woman — on the ticket, in the hopes that as a lowly woman I would see no difference between Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton. Perhaps I should ennumerate all of the ways in which Palin’s ideology is an assault on my life and everything I believe in.
But probably I shouldn’t, since this blog isn’t about politics. It’s about words.
Listening to NPR on the way to work this morning, my wife and I heard Ammon Shea, author of Reading the OED on Morning Edition. That book’s been on my reading list for awhile, as I am a fellow logophile who has been tempted to get neck deep in at least a few dictionaries, the venerable Oxford English Dictionary included.
The segment, which you can listen to on NPR’s website, is on the word bailout. The reference is to the dispute over whether or not the U.S. government is bailing out Freddy Mac and Fanny Mae by effectively taking them over with a large cash infusion.
As we probably all know, words have some weight, and I believe the argument is over whether or not the Treasury is putting too much into a lost cause. What Ammon Shea concludes is that whether or not you like the word, it’s appropriate to the situation — and you can tailor your definition by choosing the dictionary from which to draw its meaning.
Says Ammon:
Those who oppose the plan can point out that the Cambridge Dictionary of American English defines bailout as “the process of saving a company, plan, or other thing from failing by providing lots of money.” This would bolster their claim that the Treasury is subsidizing poor business practices and potentially throwing away billions of dollars that could help needy Americans.
Treasury secretary Henry Paulson could counter with the definition from the New Oxford American Dictionary. A bailout can also be an instance of giving assistance to a failing economy. That would bolster the claim that the government is acting to save the larger economy, and not simply trying to help the privileged few.
The dictionary wars continue on, and if you’re like me, you quickly lose track of which side is which, as the meanings blur together and collide.
For me, the most interesting part of the dictionary is not the fine lines between one meaning of a word and another, but the etymology of the word. In this case, the etymology is not out of current usage. To bail [out] still means the same thing it did when first used in the 1600’s: to dump water out of a boat that is leaking. The alternative, of course, is obvious — the boat would sink.
As an aside, I did learn about a new dictionary from the segment, the Merrriam-Webster and Garfield Dictionary. Who’s Garfield, you ask, and how did he get in on that exclusive dictionary team? Well, he’s a cranky orange feline, of course. [Editor's note: Personally, I prefer Garfield Minus Garfield.]
Like many people in the US, I’ve long accepted the definition of Jihad as a Muslim holy war — actual military war sanctified by Allah because it serves Muslim goals.
It turns out that like the Bush Administration, I was wrong. (It may be the only way in which I am like the Bush Administration, but that’s another story.)
This morning on the way to work, I heard this story on my local NPR affiliate, KUOW:
After years of using the word “jihadist” to describe terrorists who carry out attacks against civilians and the U.S. military, the Bush administration has finally realized that doing so actually pays those groups a compliment in the eyes of some Muslims.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush administration has relied on terms like “jihadist” and “Islamic extremists.” But jihad has very positive connotations in the Islamic world. It is akin to religious duty: when someone wants to better themselves, they embark on a jihad. Whether it’s to quit smoking, pray more, and in some cases, fight off anyone preventing them from practicing their religion.
Jihad is not, as I have believed, about militarism, but about duty to God. I guess, though I am not much for any of the capitalized deities, I can understand that, if only from the perspective of having the sincere drive to better myself however I can.
Like, for example, being a better blogger, one who posts on a regular basis instead of letting entire weeks pass between posts. I will try harder, I promise, though I am still pretty loathe to call it a blogging jihad.
Posted by Rubesy under 
etymology, sexy words, words 
No Comments »
