Remember Gabrielle Giffords, the U.S. Representative from Arizona who was shot in the head in January? Her husband is an astronaut. In fact, her husband is the astronaut who is scheduled to command the space shuttle Endeavour on it's final flight on April 19, 2011. In a press conference on Monday, husband Mark Kelly announced his intention to continue training for the flight operation rather than continue his leave of absence from NASA to remain by his bedridden wife's side. This has stirred a minor controversy. (The anti-government riots in Egypt are so yesterday's news!) Which brings us to this:

Sigh. Put aside the careless misspellings and questionable grammar that are oh-so-common in the Times-Herald, and you still have a problem. I suppose we should be thankful that the numbers are summed correctly. Reporters are trained to never ask "yes" or "no" questions, but I guess that doesn't mean that they can't report them.

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The 2010 New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year is "refudiate," meaning "to reject." My spell-checker wants to change that word into "repudiate," which makes sense, since "refudiate" is nothing more than a typo in a Twitter feed back in July. We now have a new, completely unnecessary word in our dictionary. This bit of political genius/manipulation will now be bloating the reference aisles on our national bookshelves with as much bullshit as is typically reserved for the self-help section.

The enemy here is not, surprisingly, Palin. This bit of trivia may be lost to history, but Sarah Palin herself attempted to correct her initial typo to "refute," the word she presumably meant to Tweet. Rather than let Palin get away with her mistake on Twitter -- where grammar goes to die -- her followers and detractors forced her into owning the mistake as intentional in order to save political face. She's relatively innocent in this fiasco. Sure, she could be smarter and not send messages to the public realm without reviewing them for mistakes, but that's probably asking too much.

No, the enemy here is the New Oxford American Dictionary. Damn you, Oxford University Press dictionary editors. Throwing a political figure's mistaken and jumbled words words back at them is a tried and true political tactic with great lineage. ("Potatoe" and "misunderestimate" spring to mind.) Mudslinging may have a storied tradition in American politics, but let's not start treating the weapons used as anything other than what they are: mud. If Oxford University Press includes words like "refudiate" in their dictionary, all they are doing is dirtying their own reputation.

Therefore, I refudiate the inclusion of the word "refudiate" to my automated spell-checker's personal dictionary. It already has a hard enough time with the perfectly cromulent words that I've already added such as "truthiness," "unfriend," and "wriphe." I mean, come on, it's not like my hard drive has all the space in the world.

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I know that most of you are sick and tired of hearing about UGA's terrible football season. But I'm not done talking about it because I just read this:

"The model that we would establish in the future would have seven home games every year. If you look at the models of other schools that have played for the (BCS) championship lately, there's always one tough nonconference game."

The article is ostensibly about UGA dropping a pair of games against Oregon in the 2015-1016 seasons. I agree with McGarity's reasoning for dropping the series, scheduled by his lying, womanizing predecessor. He argues that the time-consuming cross-country travel is perhaps inappropriate for college athletics, even if he does come across as someone with a typically substandard UGA-caliber education:

"We think we're going a long way this week [to Boulder, Colorado], try Eugene, [Oregon]. That's even further."

I'm pleased to hear that McGarity passed geography, even if he did fail grammar. Sounds like it's not just the students who could use a little more time in the classroom, McGarity.

Yes, the UGA program is in trouble. The players can't put together 4 quarters of consistent play, partially in thanks to the coaches' inability to create a practical gameplan. [Bobo!] The team wilts from opposition and collapses under pressure. The "student-athletes" are incredibly spoiled and undisciplined -- the tenth UGA player this season was arrested earlier this week for an under-aged DUI! And the solution to this problem as proposed by our newest AD, ostensibly hired by UGA President Michael Adams for his strength of character, is "let's play more easy teams"?

In that case, I've got something to say, too: Fuck you.

If I wanted to cheer for a team who scheduled weak opponents for boringly lopsided cupcake home games as a flimsy excuse to sell tickets for an extra game that no one cares about, I'd pull for scum like Alabama or Florida. If your solution to our character problems is to sacrifice some smaller and financially poorer school in order to artificially inflate our players' and boosters' egos, I want no part of it.

There are still plenty of schools who aren't willing to sell their souls in order to scrounge up a few meaningless football wins. And if this foolish babble is indicative of UGA's new Athletic Director's direction, one of those schools will be the proud benefactor of this fan's fanaticism.

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According to MSN.com, the Air Force has a Special Forces technology development program codenamed BATMAN. That sounds pretty cool until you read that BATMAN is an acronym for "Battlefield Air Targeting Man-Aided kNowledge." As a Special Forces operative, are you really going to trust equipment built by a bunch of comic book geeks who can't even spell "knowledge"?

They couldn't come up with a word starting with the letter "n" to finish that acronym? Napalm, network, necromancers, necessities, neo-warriors, nightcrawlers, nodes... nothing? iNexplicable and eNigmatic kNavery like these iNaccurate Names really twist my kNickers in a kNot.

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I've been busy this past week installing a fence at my brother's home in Dublin, GA. I've been calling it a cyclone fence, but you probably know it as a chain link fence. Turns out that cyclone fence got that name from the Cyclone Fence Company of Waukegan, IL, a trademarked brand now owned by U.S. Steel.

So I've been committing the same error as people who call a copy a Xerox, facial tissue Kleenex, a hook and loop fastener Velcro, and soda Coke. (For those paying attention, the grammatical error of substituting the specific for the general is called a metonym.) Worse, Cyclone Fence was initially a northern brand (though the concept of the chain link fence was invented by the British), so I have unwittingly been using a Yankee word! I apologize to ya'll for this error and will try to correct my usage in the future.

P.S. I'll post a picture of Trey's fence once I've developed my the pictures still in my kodak.

[UPDATE 08/03/10]: Pictures. Note the DirecTV dish in all three pictures for site reference.

Start of Day 1: It doesn't look that big, right? Next time you shovel the concrete.

Start of Day 2: I lost track of how many fence posts after I was attacked by the fire ants.

Start of Day 3: Another day, another $12.74 worth of rebar to fix what we did wrong on Day 2.

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Facebook wins again: the 2009 New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year is "unfriend", a term that apparently defined "to remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook." Now in addition to promoting the decay of polite society, Facebook is ruining my language.

"Unfriend" was chosen over such universally accepted words as "netbook," "sexting," "tramp stamp," and "teabagger," which it turns out is now used with a complete lack of irony to describe participants in the Tea Party movement. (Let's just say that "teabagger" means something completely different where I come from.) This proves the voice of Facebook dominates that of the traditional mass media, at least within the offices of the New Oxford American Dictionary. And yes, Google assures me that the publisher of the NOAD, the Oxford University Press, does indeed have a Facebook page. Not that I'd go to Facebook to confirm it. Sure, that may be bad journalism, but I've got my principles.

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Yes, comic books can also be textbooks! Though it may not seem so at first, Reed Richards, the so-called "Mr. Fantastic" and self-described genius, is correctly using the word "myself" in the above panel.

According to my Unabridged Second Edition-Deluxe Color Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary (which surprisingly has color on only 16 of 2,305 pages), the word "myself" is defined "a form of the first person singular pronoun, used: (a) as an intensive; as I went myself; (b) as a reflexive; as I hurt myself; (c) as a quasi-noun meaning 'my real, true, or actual self'; I am not myself when I rage like that." While the Quicksilver may use the first example sentence and the Incredible Hulk the third, Mr. Fantastic is clearly interested in hurting himself, so to speak.

In Reed's sentence, "myself" is an intensive pronoun referring to the sentence subject, "person." If Reed had said "I have that qualification myself," there would be less confusion, but super geniuses just don't talk like common people. For the sake of clarification, consider the following sentence diagram (don't look at me like that; sentence diagramming is way more fun than Sudoku):

So there you have it: proof that repeating anything that Mr. Fantastic says is not only melodramatic fun, it's also grammatically correct. It really gives us all something to think about, doesn't it?

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A follow-up to my last post:

In my last entry, I referenced vulcans. I've wondered since if the word should have been capitalized.

Mr. Spock, the logical first-officer of the U.S.S. Enterprise and inspiration for my comment, is the result of a mating between a humanoid of the planet Earth and a humanoid of the planet Vulcan. Mr. Spock is frequently referred to as a capital-"V" Vulcan by his colleagues. And here is where I made my erroneous assumption: the English name of his actual race is never clearly established.

Calling Mr. Spock a Vulcan is the same as calling Captain Kirk an Earthling, i.e. a resident of the planet Earth. As residents of a particular planet, Vulcans and Earthlings deserve their capitalization. However, Captain Kirk is as much an Earthling as a kangaroo rat, fruit bat, or camel spider. (Note the lack of capitalization of the common names of those species.) Captain Kirk, more specifically, would be described as a human. Based on the context of dialogue overheard exchanged between Mr. Spock and his ship's doctor, one Leonard "Bones" McKoy, I assumed that Mr. Spock must represent a race commonly called vulcan, hence my lack of capitalization. But this now appears to have been a mistake. Damn it, Bones, you're a doctor, not a linguist!

A little research reveals that Vulcans call themselves V'tosh or whl'q'n in their native tongue. Clearly, words that hard to pronounce would be bastardized or ignored by English speakers. In fact, the language, like the people, the planet, and practically everything else associated with them (including nerve pinches!), is simply called Vulcan by almost everyone the crew of the Enterprise ever encounters. Were I an apologist, I'd blame these quirks of language on the weak programming of the Universal Translator. (Clearly vocal recognition software is as crappy in the 24th Century as it is today. But any computer is only as good as its programmer, right, Dr. Daystrom? [See Star Trek episode 53, "The Ultimate Computer" for details.])

So, in hindsight, I should have capitalized the word Vulcan. On the up-side, I don't have to apologize to anyone, as being a logic-driven Vulcan means never having to say "I'm sorry."

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As the year end approaches, brace yourself for the deluge of retrospective lists for 2008. For example, it's only the second day of December, but the dam is already bursting:

• Yahoo has announced that "Britney Spears" was their most-searched subject for the fourth consecutive year (which may say more about the remaining users of Yahoo than Britney Spears' popularity).
• Ask.com announced that their top question in 2008 was "how do I get pregnant?" (pushing "what is the meaning of life?" to fall to lowly 7th place).
• Merriam-Webster has announced that the word of the year for 2008, based on online web searches, is "bailout," not "change." (Always a bridesmaid, "misogyny" barely cracks the top 10.)
• iTunes announced that Coldplay sold more digital album downloads than anyone else in 2008. (I suspect that no one even keeps track of cd sales anymore, but I'm sure that there is a list in the works that will prove me wrong.)

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Found on the internet: a blog about confectionery fiascos. I especially appreciated the Grand Theft Auto San Andreas birthday cake for the 4 year old.

And if you're in that sort of mood, you may also appreciate the "blog" devoted to "unnecessary" quotation marks. I did.

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