PSA + pop quiz

[pauraque_bk]

PSA

bowdlerized is someone whom many of you know and love. I am sure none of you would ever want to cause her harm. Therefore, it pains me to report that she is suffering from a brand of persecution I know all too well: Rampant misspelling of her LJ name.

"Bowdlerized" means "expurgated", and is an eponym of Thomas Bowdler, expurgator extraordinaire. The word should not be spelled in any other fashion, as there has never been any such person as Tohmas Bowlder.

To repeat:

B O W D L E R I Z E D

Now none of you has any excuse. Any further offenses will be punishable by spanking. Or withheld spankings, as the case may warrant.

---

Pop Quiz

I'm curious about something. Please fill out this poll with your current impression of what the answers are. DO NOT look up the answers first. That's not the point. I want to know what you THINK is true.

This will be skewed, since there are a lot of academics and linguistics geeks on my flist, but eh.

[Poll #388778]

Comments

[pauraque]

You mean Incan quipu? I know next to nothing about the Inca, but was under the impression that the quipu were purely numerical and calendrical. Has the standard thinking changed on that?

I know a whole lot about just one thing.

"A lot about a little" certainly describes my knowledge too.

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Nope -- or, at least, according to some Andean paleolinguist I was chatting up at a conference 18 months ago in Chile, the field of quipu studies is now evenly split. The older version is that quipu were purely tax records, so that they recorded mostly who gave how many potatoes to whom, when, and where they ended up. A newer interpretation suggests that they may have started out that way, but later developed into a form capable of containing more complex narratives. He offered a lot of evidence for the newer view, but the only one I really understood was that for almost 70 years, archeologists (et al) argued the same thing about Maya glyphs -- that they were only calendrical and numeric.

I saw a huge exhibit of them in Santiago; they're truly beautiful and full of details that might or might not signify (variations in distances between knots, color of thread, thickness of thread, type of knots, how many threads are attached to each other in what configurations.) A great puzzle.

Had you heard, too, that somewhere in inland lowland Yucatan there's a stele containing some Mayan prince's proad boast that he ate a lot of fresh seafood? In the Late Classic as now, I guess, fine dining was a status marker.