I Won The Lottery!

The lottery numbers for the Super 7 came out on Friday. But I’m giving myself just one more day of fantasy, just a few hours more to pretend that my numbers came up and I can now buy that Cheez Whiz-coloured Ford Mustang convertible. Ten of them, in fact.

Sometimes when I’m awake in the wee hours of the morning, fretting about this or that, that one $5 lottery ticket turns it all around. I think it’s worth the price.

Lottery tickets are one of the few items that have actually become more in demand since the downturn of the economy. Everyone is hoping for that quick fix…just win the lottery and hell, I won’t NEED a job!

I’ve been buying them for years, just one a week, $5 and that’s it. Recently I won $10 and a free play, and that was very satisfying. Not exactly millions, but satisfying. I’m sure if I added up how much I’ve spent over the years, it would amount to quite a bit, maybe even a shocking amount. Let’s see: $5 x 52 weeks, times how many years? Nah, never mind.

I don’t like to think about the statistics. I think people come up with them just to depress us all. I don’t care if my chances of winning could be compared to being one grain of sand on a massive beach, or that I have a better chance of getting killed in a car accident or struck by lightening. Who comes up with these depressing statics anyway? Party poopers.

Then there’s the story about the 8 Lottery Winners who Lost Their Millions. I know I just put a link to the story, but do yourself a favour and don’t read it. Why would you want to find out how stupid people with a lot of money can be? You wouldn’t be that stupid, would you? Or finding out how greedy friends and family might become if they found out you had all that money? Who’d really want to know that? Reality is for suckers.

Part of me is excited and the other part dreads walking up to the ticket checker (I always go to the machine first to check my ticket, in case the lottery clerk turns out to be a liar and a thief!) to find out if I have won. Most of the time I get a “Sorry, not a winner.” Which of course means, “YOU ARE A LOSER!!” One time, I brought my ticket to the clerk when the machine wasn’t working. She had a bit of an accent, and she told me I’d won a free play…then I swore she said “You won the extra.” I stared at her and my heart leaped “I won the extra?????”. “No,” she said, dashing my hopes and making me feel instantly stupid, “You WANT the extra?”. Crap.

Although my fantasy does include a Cheez Whiz-coloured Ford Mustang Convertible, most of the time I just lie there and imagine the faces and responses of my family and friends as I hand them a big, fat cheque. I like to think about the people I’d help, and the joy it would give me to do something for them. I go through my list of people, one by one, and eventually I drift off to a wonderful sleep with a little smile on my face.

Five dollars to win the lottery each and every week is a small price to pay, no?

IJ

Eagle Eyes

A few years back I remember it was quite a phenomenon when you could watch anything “live” and “streaming” on the web, and on one occasion I heard about an eagle’s nest where a camera had been placed close enough so that you could see the eggs and watch them hatch.

I love birds. I’m not a birder, but I love seeing different ones and looking in my little book to identify them. I love their calls and their colours and I especially love eagles. When I’m on the ferry from Swartz Bay to Tswwassen and it heads through Active Pass, a kind of narrow pass between two islands half way through the trip, I look for eagles sitting in the tall trees along the pass. Sometimes they’re circling high above on a sunny day, catching the updrafts and soaring.

The year that I discovered the eagle camera, unfortunately, none of the eaglets hatched. Hundreds of people were watching and some of them were posting on a forum, so sure that they had seen an eaglet, but it was not meant to be. This year a friend who lives in Iowa, sent me a link to the Hancock Wildlife page which is only a few miles away from where I live, in Sidney, BC. I was again mesmerized as the little white eggs turned to fluffy, grey eaglets. Three of them! It’s rather unusual to have three eggs hatch, usually there are only two and often one of the two eaglets becomes rather dominant and the second often dies as a result.

But this year there are three. The above video was taken as the parent eagles returned to repair the nest before the arrival of their eggs back in February.

Spring is a reminder of renewal, rebirth, hope, and all good things. As much as I would love to live in a place that is warm all year ’round, I would miss the feeling of newness that comes with the return of spring. Just listening to the birds on the Hancock Wildlife website makes me feel better about everything.

Happy Spring 😊
IJ

The Love Of Words

Sup?

I don’t like to say I hate anything (hate is such a strong word), but I really do dislike lazy language and the mispronunciation of words like “supposebly“, or incorrect grammar such as “I seen him on the other side of the road.” Whenever you see news stories of people in harrowing circumstances, sure enough an eye witness can be counted on to say “I seen…”.

Another pet peeve is the over-use of the word “like”. “I, like, saw him, like, on the other side of the, like, road. Like.” I even prefer ‘umm‘ and ‘ahh‘ over ‘like’. But that wasn’t a complete sentence, was it?

I’m not perfect either; I certainly don’t have an English degree, and I often hum and haw over how to write a phrase or a sentence, using spellcheck more than I’m willing to admit. But at least I make an effort to say it or spell it correctly. This is why I consider people lazy when can’t take the time to do the same.

The fact of the matter is that language is not a static thing; it changes as we become more global, and continue to evolve. Those poor dictionary people are always having to remove this word, or add that word, and how frustrating is that? They have to contend with those who argue that this word should be put to rest and that one should never be removed.

As for the addition of words, “As soon as we see the word used without explanation or translation or gloss, we consider it a naturalized citizen of the English language,” says Peter Sokolowski, an editor-at-large for Merriam-Webster. “If somebody is using it to convey a specific idea and that idea is successfully conveyed in that word, it’s ready to go in the dictionary.”

Recently included words in the Merriam-Webster dictionary are edamame and pescatarian (if you don’t know them, look them up!).

Here is a new word that intrigues me: mondegreen. A mondegreen describes a word that is mistaken for other words, the most common examples found in song lyrics. “Kiss This Guy” is one of the more famous mondegreens. From Jimi Hendrix’s song “Purple Haze”, the actual phrase was “‘scuse me, while I kiss the sky.” The word mondegreen comes from an old Scottish ballad in which the lyric “laid him on the green” has been confused over time with “Lady Mondegreen.”

Fascinating, no? Well it is to me!

Every year there are publicized lists of new words and words that have become passé and are subsequently removed. The only dictionary that doesn’t actually remove words is the Oxford English Dictionary, which has more than 650,000 words and growing.

But a lot of kids especially don’t care much for ordinary, boring words so they make their own or shorten the existing ones. The internet and texting (which was caught by my spell check because it isn’t considered a verb or even a word!) has made this even more prevalent as they create more and more shorthand words and phrases so they don’t have to type or spell too much. “What’s up?”morphed into “Whassup?” and now it’s simply “Sup?” I use that kind of shorthand too, such as “brb” for “be right back” or “lol” for “laughing out loud”.

Another phenomenon is words being used for something other than their original meaning. Words with more than one meaning are called “homographs”, but I’m not sure if there is a different word that describes what I mean. I’ve used one right here in this blog: kid. I remember back when we started to use “kid” instead of “child”. A “kid”, as many young people may not know, is a baby goat. But the misuse of that word started before my generation. A 70’s expression was “mint” for something that was “cool” or “neat”. Now it’s “sick” or “dope”, both of which have a different definition than what they are used for these days. Does somebody have a word for that?

I think I’m going to commit myself to reading more about words and language, since it fascinates me so much. Maybe it’ll make me less grumpy next time I hear someone say “I seen him, like, on the other side, like, of the, like, street. He was, like, sick.”

IJ