About

I'm Mike Pope. I live in the Seattle area. I've been a technical writer and editor for over 35 years. I'm interested in software, language, music, movies, books, motorcycles, travel, and ... well, lots of stuff.

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A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.

— Aristotle



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Blog Statistics

Dates
First entry - 6/27/2003
Most recent entry - 9/4/2024

Totals
Posts - 2655
Comments - 2677
Hits - 2,727,083

Averages
Entries/day - 0.34
Comments/entry - 1.01
Hits/day - 345

Updated every 30 minutes. Last: 7:21 PM Pacific


  10:57 AM

Friday again! I had to skip last week because I took a wee trip to Canadia to drop my bride at the Vancouver (BC) airport.[1] So today I'm just going to have to have to compensate with Extra Words.

The first new-to-me term this week (er, fortnight) is faxlore and a related term xeroxlore, which I got from the linguist Gretchen McCulloch (again). These refer to stuff—jokes, cartoons, funny stories, etc.—that are (were) distributed via fax machine and photocopiers, respectively. (I like this in the Wikipedia article: "compare samizdat in Soviet-bloc countries.") Obviously, these aren't yugely useful terms anymore, but I think the reason I seized on them was precisely that I am old enough to be able to remember faxlore and xeroxlore examples taped to colleagues' office doors or pinned to cubicles, and can remember the smeary look of a cartoon that had been copied from a copy of a copy. And! I lived through the transition when the exact same material stopped being sent around in hardcopy, so to speak, and started circulating as emails. Exact same.


Prototypical faxlore cartoon

Number 2 new-to-me word this week (er, fortnight) is depave. The literal meaning of this word is obvious: to remove concrete and asphalt. But I was interested in its use as the name of a movement that promotes this practice both for aesthetic reasons and for the practical benefit that it helps alleviate problems with runoff and flooding. The term made me think of the kind-of similar term daylighting to refer to uncovering streams and creeks that had been buried by urban development.


Busily depaving

Spring and summer in Seattle were (are) perfect this year, and our fruit trees have produced vast quantities of blueberries, apples, and pears. This has led me to this week's surprising-to-me etymology: bumper crop, where bumper means "abundant." In this collocation, bumper is used an adjective, which is pretty rare. (In fact, it's possible (?) that bumper crop is what someone has referred to as a stormy petrel, a phrase in which one of the terms—here, bumper—doesn't appear without the other one. Only CROPS can be BUMPER, to phrase it their way.)

Anyway, how did bumper come to mean "abundant"? Well, bumper is also an old (obsolete?) noun referring to something unusually large ("Cf. whopper," sayeth the OED), and to a vessel filled to the brim, where "vessel" here can even mean a crowded theater. This sense of the noun goes back as far as the 1600s. A related verb to bumper means "to fill up." But where did that sense come from? Well, bump might have originally meant to hit hard, which led to swelling or bulging, which led to the sense of fullness. And if I try to eat all of this fruit, I, too, shall experience a sense of fullness.

Like this? Read all the Friday words.


[1] That might seem weird, but Seattle-type folks know that when heading to Europe, flying out of Vancouver can be substantially cheaper. Border crossings, such an experience!

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