Caveat: Rhopalic

A ‘rhopalic’ sentence is a sentence or a line of poetry in which each
word contains one letter or one syllable more than the previous word, according to Dmitri Borgmann in Language on Vacation. Here is an example given:

"I
do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing
handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality,
counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes
intercommunications’ incomprehensibleness." – attributed to Ramnath Ragunathan

Each word is a letter longer than the preceding. The first word has one letter, the last has 20 letters – and there are 20 words.

[Hat tip to Marginal Revolution blog.]

Caveat: I hate computers

It was kind of a lousy Sunday.

My desktop computer crashed: hard crash, the kind of crash that requires a reinstalled operating system. I still have zero idea why this happened, either.

I didn't particularly enjoy solving this problem on my day off. But I thought I handled it pretty well – given that the system "restore" program that I got to run on my desktop was in Korean!

And in fact, I can take some further pride in the fact that, because of my now deep-seated backup habits, I lost exactly one week's worth of stuff. Nothing more – no lost novels, this time, no lost photography archives or lost masses of scanned pictures or lost music collections. Basically nothing lost – one week's worth of notes for a story, about half a page, that I had started and probably never would have finished, anyway, and a few photos, half of which are already included in this blog anyway. Everything else was backed up on spare hard drives or my server.

So for that, I feel grateful. But not so much for the lost day. I hate computers.


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