0 Word treasure hunt on a square-rigged ship: What is a moonraker?

What is a moonraker? Also called a moonsail, a moonraker is the small sail, sometimes set in light winds, above the skysail.

What is the skysail? Used in a favorable light wind, it's the light sail above the royal.

What is the royal? Also used in a favorable light wind, it's the small sail above the topgallant sail.

What is the topgallant sail? It's the sail above the topsail. Sometimes divided into upper topgallant sail and lower topgallant sail (depending on the era of the ship).

What is the topsail? It's the sail above the course. Sometimes divided into upper topsail and lower topsail (depending on the era of the ship).

What is the course? The sails that hang from the lower yards of a square-rigged ship, now usually restricted to the foresail (the principal sail set on the foremast and the lowest on that mast) and mainsail (the lowest and largest sail on the mainmast, pronounced mains'l).

So, what is a moonraker? It's that tiny sail six or even eight sails up. Generally only used on tall ships built for speed. I enjoyed flipping through A Sea of Words: A Lexicon and Companion to the Complete Seafaring Tales of Patrick O'Brian (by Dean King with John B. Hattendorf and J. Worth Estes) to figure it out.

More info on square-rigged ships on Wikipedia.

Detail: Word treasure hunt on a square-rigged ship: What is a moonraker?

0 Scrabble Complaint, Stuff, and Things

Graceling now exists in Norwegian. Yay! ----->

Published by Cappelen Damm and translated by Carina Westberg, whose excellent translation questions spurred my recent post about how Seabane Isn't Real.

This is another randutiae post. Ready?

• I really like Rebecca Rabinowitz's short post called Some things to consider when writing fat characters.

• Some recent words my Scrabble app has rejected: Bearthin. Adjective. The particular degree of thinness of a bear coming out of hibernation. Trocheey. Adjective. Adjectival form of "trochee." Meowlion. Noun. Really, isn't every lion a meowlion? Evebait. Noun. Perhaps a sexist synonym for "apple." Unshovel. Verb. Arguably if a walk is unshoveled, someone or something has unshoveled it. I would go so far as to say I've spent entire mornings unshoveling the walk. I did recently have the satisfaction of changing "otter" to "garotter," but I lament the lack of style points in Scrabble. I feel, and have always felt, that it should be more like figure skating, in which the technical and the artistic scores are combined. And you should be able to argue your opponents into accepting words that aren't really words but should be. That is the kind of Scrabble people play in heaven.

• My sister, codename: Apocalyptica the Flimflammer, sent me the link to this really lovely video about a woman in Japan named Ayano Tsukimi who makes life-sized dolls of people in her village who have died or moved away, then sets them up around town.

• Writing update: I continue to write at least one page a day of the new book. It continues to be awful. Last night, a friend asked me specifically what I meant by that, and with his help, I determined that (1) the book itself is awful, (2) the experience of writing the book is awful, and (3) awful things are happening to the people in the book. We did determine that the people themselves aren't awful. I guess that's something (though it does make it worse that awful things are happening to them). :)

Detail: Scrabble Complaint, Stuff, and Things

0 The Hungry Games Randutiae for a Sunday

I like the movie of Catching Fire SO much more than I liked the movie of The Hunger Games. (No spoilers here.) I'm happy about the directorial change to Francis Lawrence, who doesn't rely on way too much shaky cam to create tension (which I blogged about when the first movie came out). I have to say, though, that I think I'm going to need a sedative or something for watching Mockingjay Parts 1 and 2. If they stick to the plots and characterizations depicted in the books, parts of it are going to be so hard to watch.

The word of the day today at dictionary.com is "pilcrow", which is the punctuation symbol for "paragraph": ¶. I'm rather fond of this symbol, because I use it frequently in my work, when I've got sentences crammed together and realize there should be a paragraph break between them, or worry that my own formatting is so messy that I'll forget to put in the paragraph break when I transcribe from my handwriting to the typed document.

 From my Bitterblue notebooks.

From a current revision.

The pilcrow makes me think of the manicule, which is the little hand with the pointy finger that means "pay special attention to this text":  ☞. I've never used this in anything, but I kind of love it. if I were very rich and had an extra room and nothing to do, maybe I'd decorate the room with pages from old, handwritten manuscripts that contained beautiful, fancy, hand-drawn manicules, like some of the manicules this image search brings up.

Finally, in case you thought my subject line was a dictation error, I present The Hungry Games:

Detail: The Hungry Games Randutiae for a Sunday

0 Sleep, Pretty Darling, Do Not Cry... and Other Thursday Randutiae

• Happy Pan-Universal Be Who You Are Day!

• Someone who uses voice recognition software and draws should start a VRS comic strip. The objects that appear suddenly in my scenes because my VRS has misunderstood me are visually amusing. I just dictated the line, "'I will,' she said with a sob," and my VRS typed, "'I will,' she said with a saw." I feel like a spontaneous saw could really add something to a conversation.

• Gentlemen of Cambridge: to the man, when faced with a long, narrow corridor of sidewalk between snowbanks, you have waited at your end and let me pass first. This has literally happened to me twelve times since the storm (which I know because at a certain point I started counting). In this northeast USA city (meaning, a city where strangers tend not to pay much attention to each other and rudeness is not particularly unusual), I am startled and touched by this thoughtfulness, then startled that I am touched. Thank you for your gentlemanly behavior.

• Have you seen the video and (even better, IMO) photo of extreme surfer Garrett McNamara riding a 100-foot wave in Nazare, Portugal?

• My Word Roundup last week led to some great conversations with friends. A couple things to share: here's Andrew's recent blog post about what is and what isn't a skeuomorph. Andrew is a designer and knows of which he speaks :). (Thanks, Anindita!) And -- AND -- a conversation with JD about writing backwards etc. led to this video. I know you're all busy, folks, but I strongly recommend you take the 7 minutes to watch this Mobius Story, by mathematician and artist Vi Hart. It is super. Thanks JD!

 

• Housekeeping: in an attempt to get more organized on the blog -- and less self-promotey in my blog posts -- I've started posting book news behind my News link again.

• I just can't take Captain America seriously. He has a big A on his head. It stands for America.

• And in the end... some of you will have recognized my subject line today. I can't stop listening to the back half of Abbey Road, the medley that starts with "You Never Give Me Your Money" and goes through to "The End." So much oddness and wisdom in that 16 minutes. Abbey Road is one of about five albums I grew up with from the time I was a baby, pretty much imprinted into my DNA. Listening to it is (almost) a way to get back home.

Detail: Sleep, Pretty Darling, Do Not Cry... and Other Thursday Randutiae