Hiccough
Posted July 11th, 2009 by Howard TaylerI think that “hiccough” is the original, non-intuitive spelling of the word we all pronounce as “hiccup.” And my server had one last night.
Maybe it’s wrong to call it a hiccough, or even a hiccup. After all, when humans have involuntary diaphragm spasms they usually don’t forget to do important things that are on their schedules, like post the next day’s comic. They just gripe about how this always happens when they eat too fast, then get on with whatever else they were supposed to be doing.
Anyway, the day’s comic is up, and people who know more about the server than I do are looking closely at the diaphragm, and checking to see if perhaps it has been eating too quickly. I suspect cyberalzheimer’s, or perhaps CRONic Fatigue Syndrome, but I’m no expert. I’d just kick the darn thing in the hex-nuts and then tell it to turn its head and hiccough.
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July 11th, 2009 at 10:21 am
I would still count it as un-interrupted updates, after all, SOMEWHERE in the world it was still the tenth…
July 11th, 2009 at 10:57 am
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=hiccup
July 11th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
@Acolyte so the “hiccough” spelling is older than the “hiccup” spelling, but not as old as the original onomotopoeia from which the current “hiccup” directly evolved.
“Hiccough” is kind of an etymological version of the coelacanth.
July 11th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
Did we lose a comic? I can’t find the one where Lunesby introduces herself to Schlock and ends with the line “That would fall in to the ‘too many’ column. Fills it right up, even.” I thought I’d ask, since we’re talking about sever hiccoughs and all.
July 11th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
When you hit “next” from the July 9 comic, it jumps directly to today’s (Saturday July 11) comic, but you can click on the 10th directly and it’ll take you there.
July 11th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
ok since nobody has said it yet…
A tired CRON job?
ouch… bad cartoonist. :-P
July 11th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
Schlock just liked Friday so much he wanted to celebrate it twice.
July 11th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
Of course you know how to pronounce “ghoti” and “tiogh”?
July 11th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
Acutally, you are an expert, you just don’t admit it anymore because you’re a little out of practice.
July 11th, 2009 at 10:38 pm
Sergeant.Schlock: Oh, not this again.
The weird “gh” spellings occur at the end of a syllable, never at the start. “O” is only pronounced as a short I in one word, which results from an umlaut moving from the final syllable to the stressed syllable. “Ti” is only “sh” before a vowel. Although it is “s” in Kiribati and Kiritimati. “Ghoti” must be pronounced something like “goaty” or “goatee”. (It can’t be “goss”, because Gilbertese doesn’t have “gh”.)
July 12th, 2009 at 6:13 am
Well, it’s just a fun experiment. It was done by Englisch linguists (whether they were cunning or not) to show how weird this language sometimes pronounces letter combinations.
Worcester, Leicester, Gloucester… wooster, lester, glosster.
Fish=ghoti, ship=tiogh.
As a side note: Marc Okrand made the Klingon word for fish “ghoti”
Not that other languages wouldn’t have stuff like that: in some German names the combination “oi” is just a long “oh”, when rightfully it should be “oy”.
July 12th, 2009 at 11:28 am
Speaking of hiccoughs, and being in my cups, I thought I’d congratulate you on proactively preventing more hiccoughs by renewing your domain last week. Of course, you’d be less prone to coughing and cupping if you’d renew it for more than a year at a shot. . .
July 12th, 2009 at 10:09 pm
Sergeant.Schlock: My point was that, as crazy as English spelling is, it’s not quite crazy enough for “ghoti” to be pronounced “fish”.
Also, although in context “tiogh” was clearly “ship”, it’s not nearly as plausible as pronouncing it “show”. Pronouncing it “chug” works even better, for those of us who pronounce “Tuesday” “Chewsday”.
July 12th, 2009 at 11:12 pm
@sam: I see your “chug” (or “chuck”?) and raise you a “Pahlaniuk”…
(Paulanick)
July 13th, 2009 at 2:01 am
@sologretto You never had a tired cron-job? Well there are so many stories that could tell you about cron jobs… I like cron-jobs, even for things that would work better as a daemon but the shear thought of the daemon processes looking at my live processes with there hunger in there dead eyes and suggestively stroking them with there un-naturally thin, scaly “hands” just makes me shudder. And there is a clear link between the number of daemons I write and then number of zombie processes I have (braaaaiiiinssss). Hence, I use cron-jobs excessively. Now one would think that this is a good and rational choice, a working, living process must be better than a daemon? Right? Right! Well that is if it where not for the cron-union. They are among the more rabid unions, in the world. I have had the “competitor” anacron assassinated so many times that it is getting hard to find processes willing to work as anacron. Once I tried replacing my minutely ping-statistics-script with collectd, but all I got in the logs where horse-heads. And since cron jobs are living, breathing processes they have the same need as any other living thing, they need to sleep, eat and some times take a dump. In addition to the things they need there are other things that they do. Some times they just stand there and chit-chat instead of doing there work. Every manager of cron jobs has asked him or her self “why do I suddenly have 4000 sleeping processes?” just to realize they are cron-job idly chatting with one another without doing there job (some people might call it dead-locks, due to non existent handling of race-conditions and so on, but i know better) Everyone has felt the agony after trying to gently wake them all up having to decide that the only course of action left is processocide, “killall -TERM” . The first times it is hard to see there lives fade away, you need a stiff drink and crying in some ones arms for an hour or so. But after a while you get numb and realize it is all about survival of the fittest, it is all about life.