Word Nerd Monday: Ruggedized

Last week, while reading through a Request for Applications for grant funds put forth by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, I came across something completely unexpected. In a section describing what grant funds could be spent on, there was a line that read "...such as tablets that have been ruggedized."

Ruggedized?

Ruggedized?

I understood immediately what the word meant. Tablet devices are often used in the field by technicians to capture important data, but tablets are fragile things. A tablet with a hard plastic or rubber case, and maybe some kind of screen protector, would be able to withstand the rigors of the field. It would be able to get wet. And dropped. And bumped. In short, it would have been made to be rugged. Or, as they said, ruggedized.

But really, ruggedized? Not all that long ago, I think they would have described it as 'armored.'

The word made me laugh, because it sounded like the kind of word my friends would make up back when we were in high school. Ruggedized. According to Merriam-Webster's online dictionary, the first known usage goes back to 1947, so it is a relatively new word, but a valid one. It just struck me as an odd thing to see in a grant application. Which is funny, because if I had seen the word rubberized, I would not have blinked.

On a side note, when we talked about it at home later, The Magpie suggested that Viggo Mortensen had gotten ruggedized to play Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings.

Yeah, I think she's right.

That's all for me for today. What about you? What are some of your favorite, odd words?


NOTE: Image is totally borrowed from Pinterest. I have no idea how Pinterest works, how to attribute to a creator, or even who the creator is. If it's yours, I will happily give you credit. Or take it down, if that's what you want. Just let me know.

Monday Musing: Is it on, or off?

I have strange thoughts that come to me seemingly at random. In this way, I suspect I'm not all that unusual; most people, I suspect, have oddball, random thoughts about the world around them. Hell, some people make themselves a nice living off of these things:

Once in a while, I wake up with these things. Last week, for example, I woke up with the odd realization that, in the Grand Theft Auto universe, there are neither children nor pets. No dogs or cats running around, and definitely no kids. It's odd that I had never noticed it before, and it's odd that I woke up with that in my brain, as I wasn't even thinking about Grand Theft Auto (though, perhaps, it's an indicator of the addictive level of game play) at the time--at least, not in my front brain. Something must have been happening in my back brain, though. I suppose having players be able to mow down, shoot, blow up, and beat to death innocent children and pets is a line the folks at Rockstar Games just did not want to cross. (SIDE NOTE: Just a few days after waking up with this thought, an in-game version of comedian, Katt Williams made the same observation. Said Virtual Williams: "I ain't seen a dog, or a cat yet. Hmm, just thought about it didn't you? Go ahead, think back. No, that wasn't a dog. That were probably a short person like myself, bending over to pick up something." I found it rather amusing, given how close on the heels of my own revelation it came)

Later the same week, during dinner, I said something about a timer going off, and that just made me stop right in my conversational tracks. Why do we say things like, "The timer went off" or "The buzzer went off" or "The smoke alarm went off" when what really happened is those things actually went on?  Think about it for a second: you're cooking your dinner, you leave the pork chops in a little too long, and there it is, a house full of smoke, and then the awful sound of a smoke detector shrilling in your ear--but it's really not the sound of it going off, is it? It's the sound of it going on. The sound of the smoke detector going off is actually silence--blessed, wonderful silence.

Thinking about it logically right now, since I'm making this post up as I go and have no end in sight, I wonder if the phrase comes from the days of wind-up timers. When the timer stops running--when it goes off--you get the single stroke of a bell: Ding! That's a timer going off. Clock radios, electronic timers, those just keep running until you stop them; it's just a different phase of the operation.

I'm hoping I haven't inadvertently plagiarized someone's comedy routine here. It seems like the sort of thing that must have been covered, but I don't remember hearing it. Anyway, that's all I've got for today. What about you? Do you ever have these oddball moments of observation about our world? Please share!
 

In Which I Make a Horrible Admission: Locker Room Banter

(Author's note: I wrote this piece yesterday in Writers' Circle. I'm very much troubled by the recently-unearthed audio of Donald Trump on the "Access Hollywood" bus with Billy Bush. This has been very difficult to write, and pressing the "Publish" button is a little scary. I fear I may not have articulated things that well. Let's hope I have.)

Words matter. Words have the potential to influence the thinking of others, to change their actions and behaviors, maybe even their lives. But sometimes words are just words, not uttered or written with any particular intent beyond entertainment. They're used to funny, or to shock, or to gain attention. Whether we're aiming for influence or just throw-away entertainment, we still need to think about what we say, how we say it, and to whom.

Image from Wikipedia

I'm a guy. I hope this comes as no surprise to you after all this time. And as a guy, I've engaged in my fair share of locker room banter. Also golf course gabbing. Barroom bombast. I have told--and laughed at--jokes that cover every -ist and -ism out there. Racist, sexist, misogynist? Been there. I have slurred and slandered, engaged in stereotyping and objectification. Gay bashing? That, too. In certain situations with certain people, this side of me comes out.

I say all of this not because I'm proud of it. I'm not. I say this not to excuse it, because there's no excusing it. I say this because it's simply the truth. And the other truth is, in the right setting with the right people, I will almost certainly engage in "locker room banter" again. It's the simple truth of the matter.

What would you do if you heard me say these things? Would you become angry, tell me off, then leave and tell everyone you know that I'm an utter ass? Perhaps you would chuckle politely, then change the subject and find an excuse to leave soon thereafter, never to see me by choice again. Or maybe you'd join in with gusto. It depends on what kind of person you are. What will you do now that I've confessed these things to you? Will you comment? Stop following? Spread it far and wide on Twitter and Facebook and bring the hammer of Internet Outrage down upon my head? It all depends on what kind of person you are.

And now we come to Donald Trump. The recently-unearthed "Access Hollywood" clip has Trump bragging about putting the moves on a married woman, just kissing women, whether invited or not, and that as a rich, famous person, he can do whatever the hell he wants. Trump has brushed all of this off as locker room banter, and, in his typical fashion, has used his best second grade "I know you are, but what am I" rhetorical style to say that Bill Clinton is far, far worse (and he may well be, but this is not about Bill Clinton).

Do we let Donald Trump off the hook for his ten-year-old crudities on the "Access Hollywood" bus, or for the things he's said while guesting on the Howard Stern show five, ten, or twenty years ago? Do accept his excuse that he was just playing a role, or playing up (or down, as the case may be) to a particular crowd, and that it doesn't reflect who he is as a person? At this point,

And what's my excuse? What's the difference between me and Trump on this (besides the millions of dollars and millions in audience, that is)? I'd like to believe the difference is that one of us means what he says, and puts it into action, while the other is just engaging in locker room banter. I can tell you that I have never forcibly kissed a woman or put my hands on one uninvited. Nor would I. Meanwhile, there's mounting evidence that Trump's words to Billy Bush were not just him being "braggadocious." The allegations that continue to surface about Trump--from former business partners, from cast and crew of "The Apprentice," from contestants in the various pageants he has run--indicate that he these are not mere words.

Locker room banter is not going to go away. Men and women (but mostly men, I suspect) will continue to engage in it, and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that--provided it remains just that: banter. Words, not action, exagerration, not reality.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for commenting.

A(nother) Matter of Perspective

Many years ago, a friend told me something his little cousin said whenever someone called the kid a drip. 'Drip' is not big on earth-shattering scale of insults, at least not now; even then, it was pretty uncommon. Still, I guess the kid heard it enough that he had this pat phrase, just in case:

"A drip is a drop, a drop is water.
Water is nature, nature is beautiful.

Thanks for the compliment!"

I don't know about you, but I just heard that in my head in the sort of sing-songy voice of an 8-year-old. I digress.

I imagine at the time I kind of chucked over the phrase, but as "drip" is really not in use anymore, I never had occasion to use it myself. It just sort of got incorporated into my memory, to resurface once in a blue moon just to let me know it's still there if I ever need it.

The phrase--it's not really a phrase, I guess, but I'm not really sure what to call it--came to mind again yesterday after an exchange with another friend. He's a sarcastic sort of person who forces you to watch your every word. He will take you quite literally just to prove a point. He's a lot of fun to be around, though he can also be quite exhausting.

He's been volunteering to help set up an event that my organization is running this week, and he was giving me the business over me spending "a disproportionate amount of time" with someone who dropped things off. In explaining why it took me so long to extricate myself from this person, I said, "I don't want to come off as an...."

"As a what?"

Now, lots of people might not think the word 'asshole' is a swear, but it's also not a word I throw around in conversation with everyone, everywhere. I was hesitant to use it, even though my friend had used the word "fuckhead" just the day before in relation to a common acquaintance. I tone down my language considerably among some people and in some situations. But I said it.

"I don't want to come off as an asshole," I said.

"Why not?"

This pretty much stopped me in my tracks. Was he really asking this question? Seriously? It took me a second to answer, because I was looking for the hole I was undoubtedly about to fall in. Finally, I just said, "Who wants to be seen as an asshole?"

He said, "You don't want to be indispensable? Reliable? Efficient? I would think it would be quite the compliment!"

"I never thought of it that way before," I said. It seems we can put a positive spin on just about everything, doesn't it? Have a nice weekend, all.

Hyperbole!

I'm in a cranky mood.

We all but ran out of coffee, so I'm drinking lo-test. I pop on Absolute Write and feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day--"How many pages should be in a chapter?" "Should I include a prologue?" Someone I've never heard of wants to be Facebook friends. My g-mail is getting spammed. Opening up blogger, I keep getting the 'Get the latest blogger buzz' crap instead of the list of blogs I might want to actually read. Annoyance after annoyance after annoyance. But mostly, it's the coffee thing that's bugging me.

Something really bugging me today is the way people are willing to screw around with words to make a political point. Or, more likely, to muddy the waters. Yesterday, someone on an environmental listserve I follow at work linked to a surprisingly-old story about Rob Astorino, the Westchester County Executive who will be running for governor against Andrew Cuomo (or Zephyr Teachout (yes, that IS her name), if the unthinkable happens in the Democratic primary next week) in November. I should point out, the folks on this listserve do not like Astorino. At all. Here's the lurid headline:

In Lawsuit, Independence Party Alleges Astorino Threatened to 'Decapitate' Leadership

A quick scan of the linked article reveals some potentially troubling things about Astorino. The Independence Party in Westchester County is accusing him of racketeering, conspiracy, wire and mail fraud—all serious allegations indeed. But what really seemed to piss people off the most is this quote from Astorino:

"Every enemy he’s made, every person he’s screwed, is now working with us to decapitate these two."

The story didn't get too much play on the listserve, but there's a guy around here, a very, very intelligent guy, who  featured a story about this on his own blog yesterday. He didn't talk about racketeering. He didn't talk about wire and mail fraud, he didn't talk about conspiracy. After a series of personal insults on Astorino, he said this:  "Threatening decapitation when journalists are being decapitated in Syria—for being journalists—is not a great way to endear oneself to the voters."

Really? That's the most important thing in this story? As I said, this guy is an intelligent guy, but I wonder if he has any concept of 'context'. Or hyperbole--which is ironic, considering the blogger in question is a hyperbole machine.  

For the record, I am not an Astorino supporter. I'm not particularly big on any of the candidates, for a variety of reasons which I will keep to myself. I do think this lawsuit is politically motivated--the statewide Independence Party has endorsed Cuomo, and Cuomo is running ads now that can truthfully say Astorino is being sued for conspiracy, racketeering and fraud. I'm not prone to conspiracy theories as a rule, but this one seems fishy to me.

I can't wait til election season is over.

NOTE: I feel it's important to point out two things about this lawsuit: first, it was dismissed last year and revised and refiled in June. Second, Astorino's comments about decapitation were made in 2013, more than a year before James Foley's execution.