Turkey-Day Trivia & Other Tidbits

Student Loan Girl — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 15:07:00 GMT

Whether you’re making the trip home for a feast and four-day weekend with the family, or staying put and keeping it low-key with friends, frozen pizza, and a steady stream of college football, equip yourself with these feathered factoids, and you’re sure to take the Thanksgiving spotlight with your impressive command of fowl fable and lore.

Or with what is obviously your slightly freaky turkey fetish. Whatever works.

The Turkey Trivia Trove

Did you know that:

Turkeys can drown if they look up when it’s raining?
Turkeys have great hearing, but no external ears?
The fleshy growth from the base of the beak is called the snood?
Turkeys sometimes spend the night in trees?
The heaviest turkey ever raised was grown in England and weighed 86 pounds?
Only male turkeys make the familiar “gobbling” sound? (Females make a clicking noise.)
The turkey once vied with the bald eagle for the title of national symbol of the United States? Benjamin Franklin argued on behalf of the turkey.
Wild turkeys can run at speeds of up to 25 miles per hour and fly for short distances at up to 55 miles per hour?
Turkeys have heart attacks? (When the Air Force conducted test runs with jets that broke the sound barrier, entire fields of nearby turkeys would drop dead.)

For even more turkey “did you knows,” check out these websites:

Test Your Thanksgiving I.Q.

If you’d rather show off your towering turkey know-all by dominating the competition Jeopardy!-style, challenge your small siblings, vegan roommates, and other worthy adversaries with these Thanksgiving-themed quizzes:

Thanksgiving Pop-Culture Quiz from FamilyEducation.com
Turkey Day Quiz from InfoPlease
Aristotle’s Thanksgiving on the Web Turkey Trivia Quiz

465 Ways to Say “Thank You”

You may already know how to say “thank you” in Spanish, French, Italian, or German, but if you’re looking to extend your linguistic borders, try saying it in Welsh, Zulu, Thai, or any one of another 465 languages. Here’s just a small sample:

Arabic: Shukran
Chinese (Mandarin): Xie xie
Dutch: Dank u
Finnish: Kiitos
French: Merci
German: Danke
Greek: Efcharisto
Hebrew: Toda
Hindi: Shukriya
Hungarian: Köszönöm
Inuktitut (Alaska): Taikkuu
Irish Gaelic: Go raibh maith agaibh
Italian: Grazie
Japanese: Arigato
Korean: Komapsumnida
Lakhota: Pilamaya ye (said by a woman), Pilamaya yelo (said by a man)
Navajo: Aheéhee’
Polish: Dziekuje
Russian: Spasibo
Scottish Gaelic: Tapadh leat
Spanish: Gracias
Swahili: Asante
Swedish: Tack
Tagalog: Salamat
Thai: Khawp khun
Welsh: Diolch
Zulu: Ngiyabonga

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Happy Birthday to :-)

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 01:13:00 GMT

To send e-mails or chat online without emoticons would be like listening to your computer’s artificial voice read an excerpt from the Harry Potter books—you may get the plot, but Harry’s spells are no longer frantic and Voldemort’s hissed threats no longer ooze evil.

This month, we celebrate September 19,1982, the birth date of the “smiley” emoticon, and all you chatting kings and queens out there may want to pay your respects to a man who revolutionized the way we communicate online with three simple keystrokes.

Scott E. Fahlman, a computer science research professor at Carnegie Mellon University, first introduced :-), or “the smiley,” on a departmental electronic bulletin 25 years ago. Fahlman considers his post to be the foundation of emoticons, otherwise known as emotional icons.

Scott Fahlman.

“I’ve never seen any hard evidence that the :-) sequence was in use before my original post, and I’ve never run into anyone who actually claims to have invented it before I did,” Fahlman writes on Smiley Lore :-), the university Web page he’s dedicated to the origins of the electronic smiley face. “But it’s always possible that someone else had the same idea—it’s a simple and obvious idea, after all.”

Following the Smiley Craze

Fahlman could never have imagined what would follow after his quick, impulsive post. As use of the smiley spread throughout his department, then from college to college, and finally across the country to the global e-space, writing in online formats changed forever.

“It has been fascinating to watch this phenomenon grow from a little message I tossed off in 10 minutes to something that has spread all around the world,” Fahlman says in an Associated Press article (“:-) Turns 25,” Sep. 18, 2007). “I sometimes wonder how many millions of people have typed these characters, and how many have turned their heads to one side to view a smiley, in the 25 years since this started.”

The online bulletin with Fahlman’s post wasn’t saved and remained lost for years following the smiley explosion, Fahlman says on Smiley Lore. Neither Fahlman nor anyone else had any idea how popular that little sideways face made up entirely of punctuation would become, or that a two-sentence message would eventually be archived as a piece of communications history.

With the help of Mike Jones from Microsoft, an exhaustive search of Carnegie Mellon’s backup tapes uncovered Fahlman’s original post, which reads, “I propose the following character sequence for joke matters: :-). Read it sideways.”

Today, 25 years later, Internet users have thousands of emoticon options to choose from. Emoticons help to convey tone of voice or shades of meaning in online conversations that could otherwise be easily misconstrued without hearing a speaker’s intonation or seeing a facial expression to differentiate the excited from the angry, the serious from the sarcastic.

For example,

See you later ; )

means something completely different than

See you later

Smiling Strong for 25 Years

For some language purists, the use of emoticons cheapens the written word. They point to masters like Shakespeare and Faulkner, who crafted exquisitely descriptive phrases to paint vivid images and convey undertows of emotion, all without the use of emoticons.

But it’s hard to compare chat-speak to literature when online chatting and e-mail act more as stand-ins for speech than as writing.

“What emoticons do is essentially provide a mechanism to transmit emotion when you don’t have the voice,” says Clifford Nass, a Stanford University communications professor, in a quote in the AP article.

Whichever way you view it, the online world, from teen chatterboxes to forty-something CEOs, has embraced the smiley and other emoticons to such an extent that our words would now be lost in translation without them.

So the next time you stick out your virtual tongue or send a cyber wink, give a small thanks to the emoticon father himself, Steve E. Fahlman, for giving you the tools to do so.

Still a little lost when it comes to figuring out what that B-) and :--} in your e-mail mean? Check out this emoticon dictionary from Nerd Times.

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Student Loan Blog : language

Turkey-Day Trivia & Other Tidbits

Happy Birthday to :-)