Robynettely

Not really a word, more of a phrase or a clause. But all of a sudden, I keep seeing it used all over the place. Maybe it started when one of my colleagues asked me to "reach out" to another colleague for information on a project I'd been supposed to be working on, but in fact knew nothing about. And the other person replied "It's too late to be reaching out," which I thought was a totally appropriate response. Now I'm seeing it everywhere, and I wonder, what does it mean? I don't want any colleague I've never actually met "reaching out" to me. Just send me an email. Please.

I really ought to title this Word of the Season , since that's about how often I do it. Anyway, I was reading a book, all innocent-like, and this word just jumped out at me: ineffable . Immediately I thought to myself, what a wonderful word! It's like the F-word, nicely couched in a prefix and a suffix! Especially if you take that prefix off, and you wind up with effable, which is F-able, only polite. Except effable isn't in my dictionary, so I guess it doesn't work that way. I did look up ineffable, though, and was satisfied that it is an adjective meaning (according to the Oxford Paperback Dictionary that I keep on my desk) Too great for description in words , or That must not be uttered . The prefix in- can apparently mean "in" (how clever!) or "not". So effable would mean speakable . And I see now that Dictionary.com does have that. And its root is Latin, not Saxon, so it has no connection with the F-word at all. Too bad, really.

I must hear it every day: At work: "There's a disconnect between what marketing wants and what R&D is prepared to deliver." At Karate: "Your arm and your hip have some sort of disconnect." In yesterday's newspaper: " there’s a “serious disconnect” between citizens and city hall." I hate this tawdry, overused word, and I dread the day I catch myself using it in a sentence. In other news, I have to decide whether to do NaNoWriMo this year. I want to write the parrot novel, but I'm afraid I don't have the skills for such stunt-writing.

I would hate to name the sequel to Apocryphal this, because I don't think I can say it. Also, that would imply I would have to write a sequel to Apocryphal, and I think I need to re-draft Apocryphal first. (If redraft is the right word -- I may need to start again and rewrite the whole damn thing from scratch.)

At work, we were trying to think of a new name for a product we make that shows lots of little images (because we were being sued because of our old name). Thumbnails seem similar to the complex or compound eyes that bugs have, and we started looking for technical terms for that. Comparing our products to a fly eye turned out to be a bad idea, because flies are kind of short-sighted, and blurry vision didn't seem like the kind of thing we'd want to imply about our product. Dragonfly eyesight, on the other hand, is excellent. This name never got used on the product, not because it's not absolutely genius, but because we never suggested it to marketing. We're tech writers, you know. Last I heard, the product was going to be named something about Airwolf. It would be an awesome name for a collection of short stories.

Yeah, that's two words. And I just made it up. But the boy had four days off in a row (Good Friday, the weekend, and then Easter Monday), which has disrupted his schoolcadian rhythm, his ability to get into gear to go to school on time.

I first encountered this word a few weeks ago on Leah Bobet's blog , but I skipped over and paid it no nevermind. Anyway, it caught my eye again today when I was reading a short story . So I googled it. In November, I did like an hour of research of first-nations (specifically ojicree ) mythology when I was writing the zombie karate novel. How did I not find this? How did I not learn about wendigos (wendigoes?) when I was learning mythology in high school English? And manitous? One of my friends goes to Camp Manitou every summer. How did I not know? Was I asleep? Is this proof of my ADD which no one else agrees I have? What? I'm not needing to culturally appropriate or anything, but it would have been cool to know. Also, this is awesome: http://groups.google.ca/group/alt.fan.heinlein/msg/0920b2f01ac0a248?hl=en . Not sure I ever finished a Heinlein novel. I know I didn't finish "The number of the beast" on account of I found it totally sexist. When I was 15.