gwax's rumblings

There is, to my knowl­edge, one, and only one, word in Modern English that con­tains no vowels.

For the sake of clar­ity, vow­els are the let­ters ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘o’, ‘u’, and, when rep­re­sent­ing vowel sounds, ‘y’, and ‘w’.

As a brief aside, if you don’t believe that ‘w’ can serve as a vowel, com­pare the pro­nun­ci­a­tions of “plow” and “snow”; ‘w’ serves as a vowel in the lat­ter case. Noting that ‘w’ can be a vowel elim­i­nates “cwm” and “crwth”.

There is, how­ever, one word that does not use any vow­els or other let­ters to rep­re­sent vowel sounds; its vowel is implied. The word is “nth”.

There exist won­drous pecu­liar­i­ties to lan­guage, which allow for some truly bizarre lin­guis­tic con­structs. As an indi­vid­ual who gen­er­ally rev­els in con­fu­sion, dis­cord and chaos, in addi­tion to the use of par­en­thet­i­cal clauses and pre­am­bles, I am, of course, thrilled by lin­guis­tic con­structs that either work in spite of seem­ing not to or don’t work in spite of seem­ing to.

In doing a spot of research while writ­ing this par­tic­u­lar post, I hap­pened to dis­cover that wikipedia has a pretty great list of lin­guis­tic exam­ple sen­tences, which I highly rec­om­mend min­ing for enter­tain­ment purposes.

Preamble aside, I have two par­tic­u­lar con­structs that I want to men­tion, one a sen­tence and the other a phrase:

Buffalo buf­falo Buffalo buf­falo buf­falo buf­falo Buffalo buffalo.

That is, that that is is, that that is not is not is that it it is. That is, that that is is that that is not is not. Is that it? It is.

The lat­ter of these two, I men­tion because its use in a recent episode of Rocketboom, which I’ve taken to watch­ing, brought it to my mind. The for­mer, I have known and loved for a while and men­tion because I have not done so in this space prior to now. There are, of course, plenty of other sen­tences that I enjoy for sim­i­lar rea­sons, some involv­ing “had” or “that”, that were excluded for the sake of brevity.

Please feel free to return your seats to their upright posi­tion and your tele­vi­sions to the reg­u­larly sched­uled program.

Tomorrow has not been yes­ter­day yet for quite some time to be.

How much snark should a snark shark snark if a snark shark can snark snark?

A snark shark should snark as much snark as a snark shark can snark, if a snark shark can snark snark.

I am not cur­rently at lib­erty to dis­cuss where I have been or what I have been doing, which is not meant to imply or sug­gest that where I have been or what I have been doing is of suf­fi­cient impor­tance or note­wor­thi­ness as to war­rant or jus­tify its serv­ing as the topic for a dis­cus­sion were I to be at lib­erty to dis­cuss such mat­ters, which I am not.

Sandwich the mon­key Jesus.

Did you know that there is a National Fenestration Rating Council? They rate windows.

Today’s cod­word is halibut.

The mock­ing­bird flies south on Tuesdays.

Have you found the pat­tern yet?

The illu­sion of sand­wiches can be a com­pelling thing.

Two mon­keys walk into a bar.

The first mon­key says, “Eek, eek!”

The sec­ond mon­key says, “My good bar­keep, my com­pa­triot here will have a banana daquiri and I shall have a glass of your finest whisky.”

And the bar­tender replies, “He he, monkeys!”

When remov­ing the last bad­ger from the jar, a spat­ula is your friend. However, when deal­ing with canned bad­ger, the best method is to cut around the bot­tom of the can and push the con­tents out.