It's OK to kill a coworker if they set their phone's ringtone to the Chicken Dance, right?

Not just OK - required.

Also, what Dana said.

It's OK to kill a coworker if they set their phone's ringtone to the Chicken Dance, right?

Only if you beat them to death with the phone.

O Texans of the board, a question.

I know whenever we do "funny city pronunciations for $1000, Alex!" we always do Natchitoches, LA, because it is indeed funny. So, um, the dictionary is telling me that Nacogdoches, TX is pronounced basically the same way, except they are not all French and actually say the last syllable.

1. Intel on the ground: how alike do those names actually sound?

2. Who was in charge of spelling in that region?? And can I have him/her beaten with a rhyming dictionary, please?

Huh. Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee died.

[link]

The article's a great read, if you've got a high tolerance for weird Louisiana politics.

Mr. Lee also put his deputies to work in some unconventional ways. One of the strangest started out as what many considered a joke.

The Parish Council was in the midst of a long-running and rancorous debate in 1995 over how to stem the rapidly growing nutria population, which threatened to undermine the parish's all-important drainage network, when Mr. Lee sauntered to the microphone at a council meeting and appeared to grab an idea out of thin air.

"I could do it for $50," he told the council. "I could buy a lot of .22 (bullets) for $50, and my SWAT team could shoot them."

Simultaneously summing up Mr. Lee's appeal and his waistline, former University of New Orleans Chancellor Gregory O'Brien once considered naming the five most influential people in the New Orleans area and remarked, "Harry Lee would be three of them, and I'd be hard pressed to name the other two."

***

I know whenever we do "funny city pronunciations for $1000, Alex!" we always do Natchitoches, LA, because it is indeed funny.

nack-uh-tish.

So, um, the dictionary is telling me that Nacogdoches, TX is pronounced basically the same way, except they are not all French and actually say the last syllable.

It lies. That's nack-uh-dosh-ez.

2. Who was in charge of spelling in that region?? And can I have him/her beaten with a rhyming dictionary, please?

Natchitoches is Indian, I would think.

There was a great piece on Harry Lee on NPR this morning.

Some awesome words for Pam Anderson from The Fug Girls

I expect that both places had similar Indian names, but the pronunciation and spelling got filtered through the French and Spanish, respectively.

Mom on a Segway is nothing -- there used to be a guy on the Somerville bikepath near here that would push a stroller from his unicycle!

Yeah, and a lot of native languages were oral, not written, so you'd be looking at transliteration anyway.

a lot of native languages were oral, not written, so you'd be looking at transliterations anyway

Transliteration is one writing method to another--if the native language is only oral you need a different word.