October 28, 2006
random Elliot update
Some recent factoids about Elliot.
Elliot recently added two more words to his arsenal: baby and bubble. These, along with ball, more, milk, water, bear, and dog (or close approximations of the words), make up most of what we can understand. He does say dada and mama, but rarely to our faces. Most animals are dogs (including our cats Frito and Trixie), except his stuffies, which he calls bears (even though most of them are dogs).
Things Elliot can do when asked (at least some of the time):
-bring us items (like his cup of milk, or a ball or blanket)
-take off his socks and put them in the hamper
-clap
-dance (although typically there needs to be music on)
-look up (especially useful in the bathtub)
-point to various objects (and he knows a lot of them! Floor, ceiling, window, fan, lights, plants, cats, boxes, tables and chairs, etc. Interestingly, if I ask him to point to mama, he won't, but if Gary asks him, he points to me. Same when Gary asks him to point to daddy.)
-open and close drawers
-put items back into a drawer or box (although for putting legos away he prefers to fling them into the box, which makes a pretty loud noise. This means he shuts his eyes before the lego has left his hand, and, it seems, sometimes before he has really aimed properly.)
Back in September Elliot went through a fidgety phase, in which he was unable to sit on our laps and sit through an entire book. Usually after the first or second page he would slide off and find a toy to play with. Luckily this lasted less than a month, and now he will find books, bring them to us, and climb into our laps to be read to. He does still get bored sometimes with the selection, but usually he will go in search of another book. So far we are only reading board books, partly because of durability, and partly because they are a good length (usually ~16 pages).
I predict it will take a long time for Elliot to learn to talk on the phone at home. Not because he can't use the phone; on the contrary, he is proficient at locating every phone in the house, picking it up, and holding it to his ear. He is also really good at pressing buttons, and the model we have has a large silver button to pick up, and hang up, the phone. He is really good at pressing this button. Recently he's also learned some of the other buttons on the phone, but so far our phone bill hasn't seemed unusual, so I'm not worrying yet.
On the other hand, I predict he'll be able to kick my butt playing computer games in about 2 weeks. He knows how to hold a game controller, and has figured out that if he presses buttons on it, stuff happens on the screen. One of my programming tasks is to write a simple computer game for him.
And here are 2 recent photos from daycare:
Did you grow up in a bear garden?
The suffix "-oid," descended from the Greek, means resemblance, not shrinkage. Thus: android, an artificial human; asteroid, a heavenly body resembling a star, or so they thought when they named it; ovoid, resembling an egg; sarcoid, resembling flesh, etc.
The word factoid was invented by Norman Mailer in "Marilyn," his 1972 his book on Marilyn Monroe.
Mailer wrote, concerning another biographer of Monroe, that "his material is reamed with overstressed and hollow anecdotes untrustworthy by the very style of their prose, a feature writer heating up the old dishes of other feature writers, and so a book which has fewer facts than factoids (to join the hungry ranks of those who coin a word), that is, facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority. (It is possible, for example, that Richard Nixon has spoken in nothing but factoids during his public life.)"
However, this potentially useful word was so instantly and widely misunderstood to mean "small fact" that today Norman Mailer and I are the ONLY TWO PEOPLE who know what it really means.
A small fact is a factette, a factino, a factinho, a factele or a factchen.
Posted by: Jessica at October 30, 2006 07:39 PMWikipedia lists Jessica's definition, and then continues with:
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Other meaning
Factoid is now sometimes also used to mean a small piece of true but valueless or insignificant information, in contrast to the original definition. This has been popularized by the CNN Headline News TV channel which during the 1980s and 1990s used to frequently include such a fact under the heading "factoid" during newscasts - synonymous with the neologism factlet. In the United Kingdom, BBC Radio 2 presenter Steve Wright uses factoids extensively on his show.
As a result of confusion over the meaning of factoid, some English-language style and usage guides recommend against its use.
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I think one thing we can all agree on is the following statement:
The assertion that "factoid" means "a small piece of true but valueless or insignificant information" is, itself, a factoid.
Posted by: Gary at November 1, 2006 10:35 AMIf I call Gary a smart-ass for his last comment, is that a factoid too?
Posted by: Warren at November 1, 2006 12:39 PMNo, that's an opinion.
So CNN is behind this.
I see nothing trivial about the misuse of "factoid." That people don't know the meaning of "-oid" is discouraging. I was serious about Mailer and I being the only two who know what the word means. Ask him.
The accounts of Elliot's life and thought are not insignificant anyway. And introducing them as "facts" is unnecessary and defensive, as though we expected maybe fabrications.
Posted by: Jessica at November 1, 2006 06:55 PMI agree with the style guides that counsel avoiding "factoid." I avoid all words in transition, such as "enhance," which formerly meant "enlarge" and now more often means "improve"; or (alas) "actionable," which in law means "having grounds to sue" but in business has come to mean "achievable" or "possible."
In my next post, I will discuss the current fashion of converting transitive verbs into intransitive.
Posted by: Jessica at November 1, 2006 07:20 PMHmm, what a fascinating but completely off-topic comment chain.
Ken Jennings - Jeopardy champ supreme - went into an in depth discourse on the misuse/misinterpretation of the term "trivia", particularly as it relates to his apparently boundless scope of knowledge in many varied subject areas.
Perhaps some input on "hemorrhoid" and what they resemble??
Posted by: Ginnie at November 10, 2006 01:33 PMWho ate the last factoid and didn't throw out the bag?
Posted by: N at February 23, 2007 04:05 AM