h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The name even makes sense. Of course, I suppose an American would like a piece of programmatic art like that. We have so many of them.

Anyway, I got 8/8 in the matching, and 4/6 in the other, so I'm feeling smug this week.

I'm wondering why maritime dialects are so interesting. The ones in North America's barrier islands and the islands in the north of Germany are unique, as well. And then there are the island and coastal Frisians of the Netherlands - they're even on the other side of the sound shift, alongside of English...as you can see from this cow-buying video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeC1yAaWG34

I've just learnt that one of the K words has a rude or insulting other meaning of which I was previously unaware. My Chambers Dictionary says '(Offensive N Am slang, n and adj)'. Obviously my intention is purely one of demonstrating words of the Isle of Wight Dialect, not to cause any offence. I suppose with a finite number of letters in use across numerous different languages and dialects around the , this happens, however I was unaware that the word had a different meaning across the pond otherwise I would not have included it.

The Koan was fairly universally hated perhaps largely as a matter of timing. It cost a lot to make, and then didn't work, and then cost a lot more to repair at a time when St Mary's Hospital, now the Island's only hospital, was under threat of having many of its services cut to save money. I can't remember the specific details but for arguments sake let's say they announced that £250,000 had been spent on a broken rotating rock at a time when they were proposing that in order to save money, patients would have to be treated on the mainland and so, if there was an emergency at 1am in winter, patients would have to wait in an ambulance up to 5 hours for the next car ferry for the mainland and then spend an hour in the ambulance on the car ferry before then driving to the hospital – or be ferried over in the air ambulance helicopter if it was a real emergency. It did not go down well. (Eventually they realised that using air ambulances and ferries was not an economically viable option, but they still keep announcing it in contingency studies). Of course, the Koan was not bought with the NHS budget, but there was a feeling that the money it cost should have been used to save lives.

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Oh, hey, yeah - I can see that about the koan. I was assuming - why, I don't know - that somebody donated the frivolous 'art'.

Not only am I absolutely sure you didn't think about that word, but I didn't, either - until the filther told me, 'You have a naughty word in there, nyah, nyah, now go and find it, I dare you.'

Each language should be judged on its own merits. Because if I were to call the coder who designed that filther a 'Schmuck', whether that is an insult or a compliment would depend hugely on whether I'm speaking German or Yiddish.

I had a good argument on h2g2 a few years ago when I wrote an entry which mentioned a king of England, but was censored. King Cnut lived 995-1035 and ruled England, Denmark, Norway and bits of Sweden, but because his name can be an anagram of something else it was censored.

Mind you this isn't unique to h2g2; after I left uni my wife (then fiancée) and I briefly lived with the inlaws in Leeds and I worked in NatWest's Yorkshire International Banking Centre, but the computer system they used completely censored two Yorkshire towns – Scunthorpe and Penistone.

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We have had many problems with that Scunthorpe, I believe.

Well, you could always have spelled it in Danish, which would be Knud. Which looks like what Terry Pratchett said was the opposite of 'drunk'...hm...

I was always partial to Harthacnut, or Hardeknud. His name means 'tough knot'.

Talking of spelling, there's an error in the title...

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How did that get in there? Either autocorrect, or brain freeze...