?

Log in

Or connect using:
q_pheevr
Userpic

A Roguish Chrestomathy

the pultaceous wisdom of a word weevil

Name:
Q. Pheevr
External Services: 
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GH/AT d-() s:+>: a>? C++ UI(S) P+ L !E W++ N+ o++ K? w-- 
M++ PS++ PE- Y+ t(+) 5? X- R !tv b+++ DI+@ D---(--) G
e++++(*) h(*) z?
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

(Need a translation?)

What man art thou, that, thus bescreened in quoted printables,
So stumblest on my counsel?

The suspicion arose and gradually grew into a conviction that we were here dealing with a type of fever which had not been previously described. It became necessary to give it a name, and Q fever was chosen to denote it until fuller knowledge should allow a better name.

—E.H. Derrick

X is a recognised term for an unknown quantity. But Australia already had an X disease, now known as Murray valley encephalitis. However, the rest of the alphabet was open. Query also signified the unknown. Q (for query) fever it became.

—E.H. Derrick

weatherwords

The WeatherPixie

So come fill up your glasses with treacle and ink
        And anything else that is pleasant to drink,
                And be easy and free when you're drinking with me;
                        I'm a man you don't meet every day.
Vigésimo primer de febrero abrió sus ojos Qnavry Pheevr.

the probability of two such lines
arising by pure chance is lower still
                          —Morris Halle

What cares the world for the pultaceous wisdom of a word weevil,
or the dolesome dynamics of an etymological vermicule?
—Geo. Herriman, 7 March 1926

B R E A K F A S T:

Toast was a pointless invention from the Dark Ages. Toast was an implement of torture that caused all those subjected to it to regurgitate in verbal form the sins and crimes of their past lives. Toast was a ritual item devoured by fetishists in the belief that it would enhance their kinetic and sexual powers. Toast cannot be explained by any rational means.

—Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

Butter is a matter of fact, and nothing that the Veda has to say about butter adds an iota to our knowledge of it, except about what can be done with butter ritually for a purpose escaping our perceptions and deductions.

—J.A.B. van Buitenen

«Are we not threatened with a flood of information? And is this not the monstrousness of it: that it crushes beauty by means of beauty, and annihilates truth by means of truth? For the sound of a million Shakespeares would produce the very same furious din and hubbub as the sound of a herd of prairie buffalo or sea billows.»

—Stanisław Lem, Imaginary Magnitude (1973)

<arkie>
Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein,
I jus' love ol' Wittgenstein,
I love my Moore and I love my Quine,
But I jus' love ol' Wittgenstein.
</arkie>

Listed on BlogShares

gender_petition

LaTeX, ∀i gator(π), [putting things in brackets], arrant pedantry, bach, blank verse, c clef, canlit, cello, comic strips, constitutional law, cool colours, curry, decent coffee, diagonal syncretisms, drama, dsch, f clef, feature geometry, feminism, formalism, goethean juvenilia and inedita, green ink, jan mukařovský, jaroslav vrchlický, karlův most, klezmer, language, linguistics, morphosyntax, music, neo-elizabethanism, old borax, phonology, recherché puns, recondite whimsy, recursion, researching squandered weather, semantics, structural ambiguity, suspect scholia, the queen's gambit declined, theatre

Statistics