Tag: complaining

Celiac Awareness Day (was yesterday)

Since I don’t like “awareness” days of any kind, I chose not to celebrate or announce it yesterday. What is the point of an awareness day when most of today’s society is aware of situations and they just don’t care? Or don’t have the means or time to take action?

Instead of a boring list of what does and doesn’t have gluten, and why you should care, here is a fun article for the Day After Celiac Awareness Day:

Gluten-free Celebrities

1. Rachel Weisz – didn’t even know who this was until I googled her. Apparently she was in a lot of movies and married Daniel Craig.

2. Elisabeth Hasselbeck – LOVE her. She’s on The View and wrote an amazing g-free diet book that I highly recommend to anyone, even non-Celiacs (see the lovely quote from the book below.)

3. Ryan Phillippe – hottie actor from my youth. Has he been in anything good recently?

4. Geri Halliwell – Ginger Spice, my 2nd favorite Spice Girl (Posh, Ginger, Sporty, Scary, Baby – in that order).

5. Emmy Rossum – didn’t know who this was either, an actress who sings? She’s in the movie Dare, which just happens to be in my Netflix queue. Maybe I’ll watch it now.

6. Chelsea Clinton – daughter of the former president. She’s not that interesting, probably because she’s a vegan and that’s just weird.

7. Bill Clinton – former prez. He insulted my dad and Italians one time when my dad met him and chatted him up. Slightly more interesting than Chelsea.

8. Zooey Deschanel – LOVE her. Can’t wait for the new series New Girl to start on TV this fall. I loved her mostly in Elf, Weeds and Failure to Launch.

Each meal left me bloated and gassy, with  sharp, explosive pains in my abdomen. No matter what I ate, I would soon be doubled over with cramps, awful indigestion, diarrhea – or all of the above simultaneously. I soon became all too familiar with the location of any and all bathrooms.

-The G-Free Diet: A Gluten-Free Survival Guide, page 5

Celiac Awareness ribbon

I didn’t know the Celiac awareness color was light green when I made this blog. How fitting.

New Words!

The world’s greatest (this may be a biased opinion) dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary, just added some new words and I could not be happier. The UWM English Department taught us to love and respect the OED.  When we were supposed to find the origins of words, we did not go just anywhere… we checked the OED. I thought it was sad that my subscription ended when I was no longer in school, but I found ways around that.

The OED (and any dictionary, really) is always adding new words and often no one (but weird English majors) bothers to pay attention. This time, people are paying attention. The Huffington Post had a great article  about the new words being added and even more interesting are the comments on the article.

People HATE new words and they hate their inclusion into the dictionary even more. I will always find that amusing because people use new/slang/improper words every day but they still maintain that these “fads” are ruining the English language. If it weren’t for fads, we would all be speaking Old English.

One of the best complaint comments was about how someone in the future will look back on our society and see that we included “sexting” in the dictionary and they will have a “WTF” reaction. If you don’t see how that’s ironic, I’m not sure there’s hope for you. Also recently included in the OED are internet acronyms like “LOL” and “OMG.” I love English.

Three (of the 400) new words added to the Concise Oxford Dictionary (which I use all the time because it’s amazing):

Retweet
verb: (on the social networking service Twitter) repost or forward (a message posted by another user)

Sexting
noun: the sending of sexually explicit photographs or messages via mobile phone

Cyberbullying
noun: the use of electronic communication to bully a person, typically by sending messages of an intimidating or threatening nature.

According to The Telegraph, “the new words were selected after being entered into a database of 2 billion words drawn from contemporary websites and texts to prove their ubiquity”.

The dictionary’s editor Angus Stevenson told Channel 4 News that “new words often reflect the era in which they were added to the dictionary,” and commented on the impact that social media and the Internet have had on language.

It’s worth noting that the term “retweet” was not widely used until 2008 (two years after Twitter was founded), when users began prepending their messages with “RT @username”. Now with more than 175 million users, Twitter terminology has become common language, and the Oxford University Press undoubtedly agrees.

Other new words added to the Concise Oxford Dictionary include “woot” (used to express enthusiasm in online communication) and “kinematograph” (an early film projector).

THIS JUST IN: OED *removes* words to make room for new ones! I love it. Discuss.