Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

Glenn said:

This is an interesting problem for machine translation from French: lawyer salad was a common mistranslation from the French for avocado salad. Both lawyer and avocado in French are avocat.

In one of his books, Poul Anderson described an alien beast that was so voracious and stupid it would eat its own vomit and feces.   He called it an "advokat".   I recognized it as Danish for lawyer.

I learned a song out of our textbook in music class in elementary school called "King of the Cannibal Islands". It contains nonsense lyrics in the chorus, and from my recent searching apparently it was a popular camp song and dates all the way back to 1813.
I wonder if any of these other songs/lyrics are related?
A good thread about the song, with various interpretations is here:
http://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=9724

In my family no one wanted the last piece so they would not BE the old maid. The last piece was always called "Elmer" (I have no idea why).

Re: signatures, and subsequently, handwriting

As an adolescent I spent hours perfecting my handwriting while  inscribing the names of current heart-throbs on my pee-chee. I was also required by my dad to  hand-write an  error-less  weekly letter to my grandmother.  

However, now, in the last days of my fifth decade, my handwriting is nearly illegible and my  signature consistently inconsistent. I mix upper- and lower-case letters randomly, vary my slant from right to middle to left, even within the same word as well as in the body of my writing, and I find I often eliminate letters which I know I should have included but have no knowledge of why I didn't. This is not a mental-deficiency problem (I like to believe), but probably comes from the lack of time and inclination.

Why write when I can type and email? Why sign when I can use PINs. But I do find it rather dismal that the flourishes and graphically designed dots over the i of my youthful autograph are diminished to a drawn-out, unreadable, wavy line that is supposed to represent and signify, well, me.

I must work on that. Sometime.