Eternal leeks

My aunt grows these. Each leek has a lot of little seedling leeks growing around it. When you harvest a full-grown leek, you put the little seedlings back in the ground, hence: eternal leeks.

However, Google has not helped me out here. Maybe other people call these by another name.

It would not be the first time I found that outsiders don't know a word that was legal tender within my family. My grandmother coined the words "coeb" and "jubal", and I was at least twelve when I discovered that no-one else knew these little beauties.

A coeb (pronounced "koyb") is a little grain of sleep in the corner of one's eye. It's an initialism from Corner Of Eye Ball. Example usage: "You've got a coeb", then point.

The jubal is the entire area of the upper lip, starting from the bottom of the nose, all the way to the mouth. I think she invented it to disambiguate "upper lip", which can mean either the jubal, or the different-coloured flesh along the top of the mouth. A worthy task, disambiguation.

US Pronunciation of "processes"

Some of my US colleagues pronounce "processes" with "eez at the end, similar to the end of "analyses".

This bothers me.

I looked it up, and found this page, which includes an interesting Usage Note at the end of the first defintion: http://www.answers.com/topic/process

This site thinks that this is a hyperconnection from, indeed, the pronunciation of "analyses" and other words of Greek origin. That makes me feel better.

Thought leader

Today I received an email about a training course that I have to go on. It's a course to teach sales folk about how to sell the right kind of software. I'm going so I can learn about how the sales people do this, which might help me do better documentation.

Anyway, the description of the course includes this little gem:

"These sessions will not be about pitching product, but rather discuss security solutions and positioning with a thought leadership style approach."

Apart from the lack of hyphens at the end, this sentence has hairs on it. What is a thought leader? What is the style of thought leadership? So off I went to find out.

Wikipedia gives me these two quotations:

Elise Bauer:
A distinguishing characteristic of a thought leader is "the recognition from the outside world that the company deeply understands its business, the needs of its customers, and the broader marketplace in which it operates."

Phil Cosby:
"Leadership is deliberately causing people-driven actions in a planned way to accomplish the leaders agenda."

Right.

Here's a blog entry that defends the idea of thought leadership:
In Defense of Thought Leadership.

I can't stand this a second more, so I will go away now and write some more riveting documentation.

How to prevent citrus gall wasp

I don't have an answer for this yet.

Apparently the citrus gall wasp is a native to Australia, so you won't see this problem in other places.

The wasp lays its eggs in the new wood of a citrus tree, and the eggs cause a gall to grow. Eventually, they hatch and lay more darned eggs. The galls stress the tree, and if left untreated will eventually kill it, as well as continually providing a source of gall wasps to lay eggs in other trees.

However, the only treatment I've seen mentioned it to prune out the galls and burn them. This means that my young lime & lemon never get any bigger, because I have to prune out almost all of their new growth.

I've asked my question on this gardening forum: ABC Gardening Australia. I hope someone can help.

What's the story with Babylon?

I sing in a Sacred Harp group. Last Sunday, we sang a song that I find pretty confusing.

The words of the song include:

Hail the day so long expected,
...
Zion's walls are now erected
...
Babylon is fallen to rise no more

Although I went to Sunday School until I was twelve, I never heard the story of Babylon. Maybe the sex stuff was too much for the teachers.

All I knew about Babylon was that it had hanging gardens, which sound pretty cool to me.

So off I went to find out why we should be happy that Babylon is fallen (to rise no more!).

This page by Joseph McCabe gives an account of an account by Herodotus of a visit to Babylon. McCabe says that Herodotus said that women had to prostitute themselves in a temple, and that marriage was a once-a-year mass auction. McCabe thinks this wasn't true, but that Christianity has taken this account as the truth, and so Babylon has become a symbol or corruption and immorality.

Wikipedia describes the story of the Tower of Babel, built by a cooperative bunch of people who wanted to reach heaven. God destroyed the tower and made the previously uniform language into many, to prevent further attempts to reach heaven that way.

Wow. I think I need a rest from this. I might look into it further another time.

Purple wardrobe book

This one has me stumped for the moment.

When I was a kid, in the late seventies, someone gave me a book. It was a large-format hardback illustrated thing, with what seemed like a lot of text at the time.

The pictures were all purple line-drawings, which I found scary. I think some people had spirals for eyes.

There was a looming wardrobe involved, and I think the main character was a little girl whose name began with A. Not April, not Agatha. Hmmm.

My parents don't remember the book, and I haven't come up with a good Google search that will help me nail this one. Oh well, it will keep me occupied.

White Day in Japan

Last night I was watching Fruits Basket, a silly shōjo manga (Japanese animation aimed at girls) series. In it, there's a big fuss about "White Day", involving enforced gifts of chocolate and a trip to a hot-springs bath.

I wanted to know about White Day.

Wikipedia tells me That White Day is a commercially-generated holiday that acts as a counter-balance to Valentine's Day, which is a month earlier. On Valentine's Day, girls give chocolate to buys, and on White day, boys give gifts back to the girls who gave them gifts. Sounds like good business.

Etymology of "set"

In the shower this morning I wondered about "set". It has a buzillion meanings, and I wanted to know if all of these senses can be traced to a common ancestor, or if many different root words have been normalised to give us just one.

Off I want to the Online Etymology Dictionary again.

This time the entry was a bit thinner. It lists set as a verb, an adjective, and a noun.

set as a verb
Means "cause to sit, put in some place, fix firmly"
From Old English settan, with the same meaning

set as a adjective
Means "fixed"
From Middle English sett, "set".

set as a noun
Means "collection of things", with a lot of different senses within this meaning
From Old French sette "sequence", which was from Latin secta "a following". It's related to our sect.

So it looks like set really did come from more than one root. However, there are only three roots, and waaay more senses than that. I'll have to look in my OED tonight, but I think there are sixty or something.

Etymology of "wend"

A colleague just told me that he'd wend his way back to his desk, and then we wondered what wending was. Is it similar to winding?

So of course I looked it up on Dictionary.com, which led me to
Online Etymology Dictionary.

This Online Etymology Dictionary tells me that wend comes to English from Proto-Germanic *wandijanan via Old English windan "to turn, twist".

So there we go - wend is indeed related to wind, and both have a long pedigree.

BTW, I now use iGoogle as my home page, and I've added in the Dictionary.com gadget, so I can Look Words Up very easily. Wheeee!

Back to work.

Hide the left pane in Windows Explorer

I use Windows Explorer all day. Today I finally decided to look up how to hide that pesky task pane on the left.

This is the pane that appears when you have deselected both the Search and Folders buttons. It fills up the screen when all I want to see is a list of files in a folder.

I found the answer here: http://malektips.com/xpwex0004.html. Thankyou Google.

To hide the Tasks Pane in Windows Explorer:

1. Open Windows Explorer.


2. Click Tools -> Folder Options.


3. On the General tab, select the Show common tasks in folders option.

This means that I'll miss out on the cool stuff in this tab, such as helpful tasks for images, and the CD-burning tasks. I'm happy to live without these.