The Bunker

A business associate of mine is going to the luxurious Greenbrier resort in West Virginia to play golf. Greenbrier offers skiing and golf as well as a huge underground bunker which was built in the 1950’s to house congress in the event of nuclear war. Numerous presidents stayed at the resort over the years. It was decommissioned as a US bunker in 1992 but the underground bunker still exists.

My associate and I discussed the history of the resort and the underground bunker. He knew the history. I asked him if he was at all concerned that his golf ball might somehow land in the underground bunker, ‘cause, like, there are bunkers in golf, right? I asked him if there would be like a 3 stroke penalty if his errant ball somehow landed in the underground bunker.

 He didn’t seem to get it.   Too bad, ‘cause he coulda been the talk of the resort with material like that.

Sometimes Y

 Today we’d like to take a look at women’s names that begin with the letter Y. These would include the names Yvette and Yvonne. Often these are pronounced with the “Ya” sound, as in “Yavette” and “Yavonne.  Now, you can pronounce your name however you want, but in the cases of Yvonne and Yvette, the Y is the sole letter in the first syllable of the name. Being the only letter, it has to be a vowel and thus would not have the “Yaw” sound. The Y would need to be followed by a vowel to have the “Ya” sound. By itself the Y would typically have an “eh” sound.

The people who say “Yavonne” or “Yavette” are asking too much of the Y here. They are asking the Y to be the vowel and the consonant.  That’s not allowed. Huh-uh. Certainly, Y is sometimes a vowel, but it’s never a consonant and a vowel in an individual word.

But hey, you can do whatever you want with a name. But what are we teaching our kids when we pronounce names like that? The only time pronouncing names like that is remotely OK is maybe if you’re from Ypsilanti.  

Goolagong Show

I ran across a hyphenated name recently where the name after the hyphen was the woman’s maiden name. That struck me as odd. Isn’t the maiden name always before the hyphen? Whatever…When Australian tennis star Evonne Goolagong got married in the 1970’s her name became Evonne Goolagong-Cawley. As a worldwide star in a sport that was extremely popular at the time, this kind of set the standard for the hyphen. Women around the world thought, “If Evonne Goolagong can keep the name “Goolagong”, I can certainly keep my maiden name”.

Baseball star Pete Crow-Armstrong has his name on the back of his jersey. In order to fit all the letters in, his name is arched like Mt McKinley-Denali. It starts down by his belt, goes up to his neck and then back down to his belt again. I’m thinking that Evonne Goolagong-Cawley is the reason tennis players don’t have their names on their backs.   

Dog Tales

I spoke to a friend last week who claims his dog was born in 1998. That would make the dog 28 years old, or 196 in dog years. I did an internet search for oldest dog and found a dog in the early 20^th century who lived close to 40 years. But really, can’t anybody make that claim? It’s not like there’s a dog census out there. With the difference between dog years and human years, it can get pretty confusing.

Hey, you can make your dog be any age you want. More power to ya. But, if you’re gonna say your dog is 40 years old, it sure better be able to do some tricks. Some serious tricks.

Wedding Dress(ing)

 

Readership has really picked up lately here at Uncle Tommy’s. We’ve tried to speculate as to the reason(s) for the increase. It could be any or some combination of the following:

•             Excitement associated with the World Cup
•   Excitement about Taylor Swift’s historic marriage

I suppose it’s possible that this blog, like the ranch dressing and free soda refills enjoyed by international soccer fans, has great appeal to the soccer fans AND to fans of Taylor Swift.

To attempt to make sense out of all this, I’m doing research for a post digging into whether or not there were free refills on ranch dressing at Taylor and Travis’s historic wedding.

Spice Girls

 

Looking for something to do after the exciting holiday? Maybe it’s time to take a look at your spice rack. The average American kitchen has 27 different spices in their spice cabinet. It’s hard to keep track of such a wide inventory of spices. And it’s even harder to keep track of their expiration dates. Many of these spices are rarely used – when’s the last time you actually used clove? Or Rosemary leaves (the only spice name sentence that I’m aware of)? One needs an excel spreadsheet to track these items and who has time for that?

So, should we be purging items from our spice cabinet? I say, no! Don’t do it! Does ginger really go bad? How about garlic powder?

In a worst case scenario, the expired spices can be used as a deodorant. I assume that’s how the brand “Old Spice” got its name. Running this blog and all, I don’t have time to research that but if somebody could look into it that’d be great.

(I’m guessing you might have to find a different use for that expired garlic powder…)   

The Audible Letter

More U.S. history: Why do some American’s put the “r” in Washington? “Warshington”, they say. Linguists say it’s a Midwestern accent thing.  They say the tongue slides through the r to get to the s. Apparently the tongue knows the alphabet…

What we have here is the opposite of the silent letter. This is a letter that’s not in the word, but it gets pronounced as opposed to the silent letter which is there but it’s not pronounced. This is not taught in our schools but maybe it should be. And we need to name this phenomenon. It’s been around long enough (250 years in the case of Warshington). Some possible names:

“Extrar” – Do we need to go any further?

“Englirsh” - This could be it

This could cause problems for Wheerl of Forturne. We're gonna have to work through that.