Friday, from about 11 a.m. to sundown, was totally wasted by Microsoft. Apparently Microsoft was fighting very very hard to try to sell me a subscription plan using something that Windows 10 recognized as malware. There will of course be no subscriptions. Basic Internet is provided, to everyone in the neighborhood except for the Bad Neighbor, by our sponsors, for the purpose of bringing money in to the neighborhood. The minute the Internet draws a penny out of the neighborhood, it will go away. But the defective extrovert brain...
I think our language needs a word to express a concept that ought to be familiar to anyone trying to sell anything. We don't really have a word specifically to describe things that merely didn't interest you before someone tried so hard to sell them to you that you now positively loathe them. We need that word. I propose "wix," from a company of that name that provided an example.
As in "That's enough advertising! We don't want to make our sponsors' products sound wix."
Or "Eww, cringe, that ad's like instant wix."
Or "His association with Bill Clinton, the King of Tacky, made Donald Trump the Grand Panjandrum of Wix even before 2016."
Gentle Readers who find it entertaining may want to practice using "wix" in sentences while they are in town, as in "That restaurant? I would have thought the wix factor alone would make anyone sick."
By making the word "wix" familiar we may eventually get even people with degrees in marketing to understand the importance of not letting the same person hear the same ad more than twice.
Music
Memorable moment in the career of Glen Campbell.
Phenomena, Natural
To some of us it may not seem terribly long ago that Wendell Berry was considered a young, reckless, maybe even dangerous hippie. Now he's venerable. It's newsworthy that he's still walking and writing...
Spelling
English spelling is notoriously tricky and illogical. There are benefits to this, if you think of them as benefits. One benefit is that knowing how to spell words in English is actually a competitive sport. Schools traditionally had "spelling bees" or "spelling matches" where everyone stood up and took turns spelling words until they gave an incorrect answer, when they had to sit down. The last person standing was the spelling champion. School stories of a certain vintage always described the climactic spelling match of the year, often held at the end-of-term party so that parents could participate too.
Spelling competitions are still held in the United States. Spellers' equivalent of the World Series is the Scripps spelling contest held every year in spring in Washington.
Spellers who go to the contest have to be very good at their game. They also have to be sponsored, which may explain a peculiar feature of the contest. One or two percent of all school children are spellers. Ninety percent of those spellers are girls. However, a majority of the spellers at the national contest are boys. Also, in the United States most spellers are White; however, in the final rounds at the national contest, a majority are Indian.
I was a speller, though not up to the standard of the kids who participate in the Scripps competition. From time to time I've been invited to watch the final rounds of the national contest, during which I'm usually found sitting there like everybody else, going "That's a word?" and "That's not English!"
Seriously, this year somebody went down on cara sposa, which is two Italian words and had no business in an English spelling contest. However, Italian spelling is logical enough that a real spelling champion should have been able to spell cara sposa.
The kids spelling words like "dodecatheon" and "hypaspists" buy special dictionaries with entries for scientific names in Latin and names of characters in all the literatures of the world. They learn how to spell all the names of holidays celebrated in religions they don't practice, all the trade and generic names for medications, all the technical words used in trades they'll never learn. They are ten to fifteen years old, their parents are in the audience crying real tears when they spell or misspell each word, and they are obsessed.
You can see all the words they spelled, and even follow a link to watch the show, at
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