Monday, August 16, 2010

Before Anyone Else Says It

When someone expresses her/his irritation by making a lateral click (made by sucking the molars on either side of the teeth) and simultaneously opening her/his lips into a grimace, followed by a hissing intake of breath through the molars, let it be known that I first described it thus:

"She/he expressed her/his irritation by making a noise like a match being struck."

If you understood the sound I was talking about, you'd see that my way of describing it is elegant and accurate.
This could be shortened to the more abstract and colloquial

"Her/his mouth struck a match."

Hmmm, I wonder why I hear this sound so often.

Friday, August 6, 2010

Virtual Keybored

Typing with a virtual keyboard is like eating with chopsticks. It gives you enough time to think about the material, it improves digestion because you chew over each morsel, and it separates the relatively clean from the potentially microbe-covered (funnily, your hands are relatively cleaner than a keyboard and potentially microbe-covered when using chopsticks).
Chopsticks and chopstick etiquette have remained unchanged for more than 3000 years; keyboard layout hasn't changed since the invention of the QWERTY layout in 1873 - both have become part of the tradition of our global cross-culture.
I had the good fortune of using both cultural devices recently - both are disarmingly simple but test one's patience when attempting to master them. Perhaps more difficult would be playing 'Chopsticks' on the keyboard. Hopefully you didn't think of something like this when you read previous sentence:

The weather is hot and chopsticky and i'm feeling keybored.