This will be my 50th post of the year

...and it's not even the end of April yet, so I am on track to create 150 posts this year. It is tiring just to think about. Last year I managed to produce only 79. Whether my posts are important or trivial, fun or boring, intelligent or stupid is not for me to determine, and in any event making that determination is way above my pay grade.

Only you can make that determination, just as only you can prevent forest fires.

After not leaving the house for over a month, I have now been to the grocery store twice wearing one of the masks that our daughter-in-law sewed for us. There was no way I was going to make it there during the Exclusively Senior Citizens Hour (7 to 8 a.m.) but I managed to get there around 9:45 the first time and 11 the second time. There were remarkably few customers either time so I didn't have to be concerned about social distancing much. I also wore Latex-free disposable gloves at Mrs. RWP's insistence. I didn't have to worry about other people looking at me funny as they looked just as funny.

For those of you with inquiring minds, I did wear other things besides just gloves and a mask.

Now that you have that lovely visual in your head, I will sign off for now.

There really isn't anything to blog about today but that 150 goal is ever before me.

P.S. -- In my humble opinion, this post makes no sense at all.

Scary times here, there, and everywhere

Mother Nature must have been having a bad day.

The photo above was made around seven o'clock in the morning last Sunday (April 19th) in the town in Alabama where our daughter and her family live. It was taken in the Piggly-Wiggly parking lot (that's a supermarket chain) two blocks from our daughter's house, looking toward downtown. You can see the steeple of the First Baptist Church in the distance.

Shortly after the photo was taken, all hell (as they say) broke loose. The bottom dropped out. They're now saying it was a "Hailnado" with 80-mph straight-line winds. Not technically a tornado, but it's hard to tell the difference. Many trees and power lines are down and some houses were destroyed. The trees in our daughter's yard lost many limbs and one tree was split down the middle. Several windows in the house were broken from heavy hail, two of the cars were damaged, and the root cellar was flooded with two feet of water because the electric power went out and the sump pump stopped working. As a result, the water heater and furnace will have to be replaced. The repairman can't get the parts he needs until next week. In the meantime, our daughter's family is without electricity and hot water. Neighbors are bringing them food and letting them use their showers.

That was in Alabama. Georgia also has a problem.

Our governor is an idiot.

Brian Kemp, the 83rd governor of Georgia, has decided to re-open our state bit by bit to get the economy going again. Georgia is the first state to attempt this. The problem is that our pandemic statistics have not declined for 14 straight days as the Coronavirus Task Force stated was necessary before a state could begin a slow phasing back to what is now quaintly referred to as normal, something we may not see again for some time.

Not only have 14 days of improvement not occurred, the first establishments allowed to re-open are -- clutch your pearls, ladies -- tattoo parlours, massage parlours, beauty salons, nail salons, and bowling alleys. You know, really essential stuff. How you give a person a tattoo or a massage or a new hairdo or a manicure while maintaining six feet of social distancing between human bodies has yet to be determined.

During the shutdown, people couldn't go to church, but they could still buy liquor.

I repeat, our governor is an idiot.

This is just my opinion, of course, but it probably could be proven scientifically.

Another very interesting read

...at least to me, is the following article I found yesterday:

English Is Not Normal

Please note, before you get your knickers in a twist, that the article is about English (the language), not The English (the people), in which case the verb would have had to be Are and not Is.

I should get extra credit for using the conditional past imperfect, or whatever it's called, in the previous sentence.

I hope I am not boring you with these articles. I just am extremely geeky and nerdy when it comes to words and language.

Those of you who want to say that the nerdiness and geekiness is not confined to just words and language, please stifle yourselves at this time.

P.S. - Two hundred and forty-five years ago today, Paul Revere made a famous ride that was made even more famous than it might have been otherwise by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow with such words as "Listen, my children, and you shall hear / Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere; / On the eighteenth of April in Seventy-five, / Hardly a man is now alive / Who remembers that famous day and year." and also "One if by land and two if by sea, / And I on the opposite shore will be, / Ready to ride and spread the alarm / To every Middlesex village and farm"....

I thought you would want to know.

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet

Shakespeare said that.

Today I want to talk about names, last names to be specific. I will give you a couple of examples from my own history that will lead you, hopefully not by the nose, into a little light reading meant to take your mind off being quarantined lo, these many days.

When Mrs. RWP's father arrived in Boston from Italy in 1917, his name was Dhimitri Kuçi, but on his grave marker in Florida it is James Cudse. His passport was Italian but he himself was from Albania. How his name got changed is a mystery. My theory is that somebody along the way -- an immigration official, an employer, a naturalization know-it-all, a friend -- suggested it as a way of dispensing with the cedilla. My future father-in-law, an easy-going sort of guy, went along with it. Nobody seems to know for sure. That still doesn't explain how the K became a C.

His wife's name was Ksanthipi in Albania (not unlike the Greek woman named Xanthippe who was the wife of Socrates) but her grave marker says Carrie. Go figure.

If you had asked my dad (non-bio) what kind of name Brague was, he would have said "Welsh" without hesitation and trotted out the family lore story, unproven, of seven brothers who came to the United States from Wales and all but one of whom moved on to Australia. This story is apocryphal at best. I always said, "Dad, with that -gue ending the name has to be French; it probably came over to the British Isles after the Norman Conquest" (which, if you didn't know, occurred in 1066 when William the Conqueror defeated Harold at the Battle of Hastings).

My mother was a Silberman although it may have been Silbermann back in Germany, but it was never Silverman. My mother said (I don't know whether it is accurate) that Silberman was a German Jewish name and Silverman was Russian. In America, people always get the two names mixed up. I have said on many occasions, "Silberman, with a B, not a V" and it is darned irritating to have to do so. In fact, when I was doing family research using the 1940 census, one of my mother's brothers had completely disappeared. I found his family (Sol, Naomi, Joan, and Eileen) in the right town but spelled the other way, with a V instead of a B, by a none-too-attentive census-taker. Back in those days, census takers went house to house with a big book and wrote everything down in it themselves. None of this do-it-yourself, mail it in stuff.

Longtime readers of this blog may remember reading about the Brague River in southeastern France or the Château de Brague winery in the Bordeaux region of western France. Both of these examples bolster my theory if only in my own mind. I suppose that in Europe my surname rhymes with Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia (if there still were a Czechoslovakia), but here in the good old U. S. of A. it has always rhymed with, well, you know what.

Anyhoo, all of that is neither here nor there, except as a lead-in to the article I now present for your entertainment and reading edification:

Why 40% of Vietnamese People Have the Same Last Name

So if the readers of this blog were Vietnamese they might be Adrian Nguyen, Rachel Nguyen, Pam Nguyen, Bonnie Nguyen, Kathy Nguyen, Graham Nguyen, Red Nguyen, Sue Nguyen, Ian Nguyen, Kylie Nguyen, Michelle Nguyen, Tasker Nguyen, and Ho Chi Pudding.

Until next time, as they say in Ethiopia: Abyssinia.

I would be Rhymes With Virus if my name were Miley Cyrus

I would be Rhymes With Corona if my name were Desdemona.
I would be Rhymes With Polio if I were an ambassador without portfolio.
I would be Rhymes With Zulu if I lived in Honolulu.
I would be Rhymes With Haydn if my name were Joseph Biden.
I would be Rhymes With Moll Flanders if my name were Bernie Sanders.
I would be Rhymes With Frowning if my name were Robert Browning.
I would be Rhymes With Bordello if my name were Othello.
I would be Rhymes With Pudding if my name were Cuba Gooding.

I will stop before the mob forms.

Today is the 110th anniversary my mother’s birth.

The prefixes a-, in-, and un-, to say nothing of non-

Before we get to prefixes, I want to tell you about an exchange I had recently with our blogger friend Yorkshire Pudding.

In some of his recent posts he used the term The Plague in reference to you-know-what. I told him in a comment that every time he had mentioned The Plague in the past week it had startled me because, although I am not narcissistic in any way (yeah, right), I thought he was referring to me.

He replied as follows:

Sorry for any confusion or unintended offence caused, Sir Robert. However, my legal advisory team point out that you do not have exclusive use of the term "plague". Perhaps it would be simpler to change your blog title to "Rhymes With Vague" or "Doesn't Rhyme With Potato".

Fond regards,
Damnable Pudding

I just want to get your opinion. What do you think of his suggestion?

I would tell you what I think of it, but this is a family-friendly blog.

I’m kidding. I laughed.

Now on with the post.

Adding the prefix a- in front of a word negates it, turning the word into its opposite. Atypical means not typical, asymmetrical means not symmetrical, apolitical means not political. Since theism means belief in God, an atheist is someone who believes there is no God. If Gnostic means having knowledge, knowing, then an agnostic is someone who doesn't know.

The prefix in- also means “not”, as in indivisible (not divisible), ineligible (not eligible), inconceivable (not conceivable), indecisive (not decisive), intolerant (not tolerant), incredible (not credible), inconvenient (not convenient), and so forth.

When the word being modified begins with certain consonants, however, the prefix in- is changed into a double consonant. To name a few examples, illogical, illegible, illegitimate, illicit, immodest, immaterial, immortal, irreverent, irresponsible, irredeemable. Hillary Clinton especially liked irredeemable.

Something different happens if the word begins with p. If something is not possible we don’t say inpossible or ippossible, we say impossible. Same thing goes for improper (not proper), imprecise (not precise), impolite (not polite), impenetrable (not penetrable), impermissible (not permissible), impervious (not pervious) —- yes, friends, something can be pervious. Look it up.

And sometimes when we want to say that something is the opposite of something, we use the prefix un-, as in unacceptable (not acceptable), unbelievable (not believable), unyielding (not yielding), undocumented (not documented), unlearned (not learned), unopposed (not opposed), untold (not told), unknown (not known), unworthy (not worthy).

There is a notable exception. If something can catch fire, it is either flammable or inflammable. Both words mean the same thing. To avoid/cause (pick one) confusion, if something cannot catch fire we say it is non-inflammable. Plus there are non-starter and non-negotiable.

Go figure.

I just wonder why there are so many ways to say not.

We say regardless, but all the experts agree that we should not say irregardless. There is no such word as irregardless, despite the fact that I just typed it on my keyboard.

A little thing like experts never stopped my dad (non-bio). In a burst of ignorance and creativity, he. came up with a new word. [Note. The word that means a new word is neologism. —RWP]. Throughout the part of his life that included me, I never once heard him say either regardless or irregardless. He always said — brace yourself — ilregardless.

I think that ilregardless makes every bit as much sense as impossible and impermssible. In fact, its very existence (if only in my own memory) proves it is neither.

My dad (non-bio) was some kind of genius! What kind has not been determined.

Lilibet's finest hour