Episode #008, 27.11.2011: niggardly

Sound: /ˈnɪɡədli/ (UK) or /ˈnɪɡɚdli/ (US)

niggardly, adjective and adverb. Parsimonious, stingy, sparing, scanty, giving or given grudgingly or in small amounts.

In a sentence: “When I asked him about money, he niggardly gave me a quarter.”

Am I racist? No. First of all, I am doing a podcast about words. And I think a choice of words does not always reflect a philosophical opinion.

Niggardly is a very interesting word and it got a lot of people in trouble. It has, in fact, nothing to do with the word nigger, except that it sounds similar.

Niggardly comes from the Old Norse verb nigla, which means “to fuss about small matters”. Niggle, which is a minor complaint or problem, has the same root. Nigger, however, comes from the Spanish or Portuguese word negro, which means black.

So, if you hear the word niggardly, don’t be offended. It’s not racist. Similarly, man can also mean the entire human race, herstory instead of history doesn’t make sense etc., etc.

Words are very interesting. You can express your opinion with them, both explicitly and implicitly. But if you think, somebody said something “offensive”, ask him about his opinion, look a word up in the dictionary or ignore it. Too many people were drawn into controversies because of things they said, even though had people asked them, they would have told them that they didn’t mean to be racist, sexist or otherwise discriminatory. And who are these people who get so easily offended? Don’t they have anything better to do than getting their feelings hurt because somebody said something?

I do love rants! So I wanted to give you one arguing for free speech.

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Funny video: How the English language was developed

Episode #007, 20.11.2011: shenanigan

shenanigan, noun. Wiktionary gives three meanings:

1. Trickery, games; skulduggery. To "call", "claim" or "declare" shenanigans is to rhetorically label something as officially deceitful, improper, or otherwise incorrect.
2. A deceitful confidence trick or mischief causing discomfort or annoyance.
3. Mischievous play, especially by children.

In a sentence: In the movie Juno, the main character of the same name uses this word, “I mean I'm already pregnant so what other kind of shenanigans can I get into?”

Note that this word is much more common in the plural form.

The origin of the word is not really known, but at least four explanations have been suggested. Most interesting, it could come from the Palatinate German dialect. (For our German listeners: Palatinate is Pfalz.) In this dialect, schinägeln, that means “to work hard” closely resembles shenanigan.

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Intro and outro music in the podcast: The Jam by General Fuzz (generalfuzz.net)

Episode #006, 13.11.2011: equivocation

equivocate, intransitive verb. Use ambiguous words to conceal the truth, prevaricate. Hence equivocation.

In a sentence: “In his book, Kant uses a lot of equivocations.”

This word originated in the 15^th century and comes from the Latin word equivocare, which means to call by the same name.

 An example of equivocation is:

A feather is light.

What is light cannot be dark.

Therefore, a feather cannot be dark.

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Episode #005, 6.11.2011: Spotlight: How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

Hi, this is Marco the German and this is the first spotlight episode, where I will discuss a topic that, hopefully, is of interest to you.

Today’s topic is a question, which has been asked many times by many people: How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

First of all, what is a woodchuck? A woodchuck is a type of ground squirrel that is found in North America. As it is also called groundhog, the amount of wood a woodchuck would chuck, if it could chuck wood, is equal to the amount of ground a groundhog would hog if a groundhog could hog ground. The groundhog or woodchuck is very popular: There is even a holiday, called Groundhog Day, and there is also a movie about that holiday.

To chuck means to throw with carelessness and to hog means to “greedily take more than one's share“ or to “clip the mane of a horse“ (wiktionary.org).

The standard answer to the question is of course: A woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.
Fortunately, answers.com has some more good answers. According to that website the answer depends on three things:

1. The woodchuck's desire to chuck said wood.
2. The woodchuck's need to chuck the aforementioned wood.
3. The woodchuck's ability to chuck the wood when it is a woodchuck.

There are also many other answers, like:

• Approximately 3.9675 pounds every 5.6843 seconds. So there.
• Using the formula: (W + I) * C where W = the constant of wood, which is well known to be 61, as agreed in many scientific circles. I = the variable in this equation, and stands for the word "if" from the original problem. As there are three circumstances, with 0 equaling the chance that the woodchuck cannot chuck wood, 1 being the theory that the woodchuck can chuck wood but chooses not to, and 2 standing for the probability that the woodchuck can and will chuck wood, we clearly must choose 2 for use in this equation. C = the constant of Chuck Norris, whose presence in any problem involving the word chuck must [be] there, is well known to equal 1.1 of any known being, therefore the final part of this calculation is 1.1. As is clear, this appears to give the answer of (61 + 2) * 1.1 = (63) * 1.1 = 69.3 units of wood.
• How Chuck Norris got involved: A woodchuck would only chuck as much would as Chuck Norris would allow it to, because the woodchuck shares Chuck's name. Therefore, Chuck must punish it and make it chuck as much wood as Chuck can. So, a woodchuck would chuck as much wood as Chuck could.
• During my study of Woodchuck I came to the conclusion that woodchucks don't chuck wood but only drink beer. However, this beer can frequently motivate them towards actions that can closely resemble the chucking of wood.
• It would chuck the amount of wood that she sells seashells on the seashore divided by how many pickles Peter Piper picks.

Obviously there were some tricky tongue-twisters in this episode. If I was talking way to fast, please check out marcothegerman.blogspot.com, where you will find a script of this podcast.

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