Blackjack Does Not Work That Way

When a politician is called out on something they said, and they stand by it, they are often said to be "doubling down".

This is fine.

Until they continue to stand by the original statement, and are said to be "doubling down" a second time. Or a third time. Or whatever. You'd be amazed how many times someone can double down in a given debate...

Since he took office, [Barack] Obama's strategy has been to double down on the nation's failed financial elite, from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to AIG to Bank of America.

This cannot stand any longer. Clearly, we need to review the rules of blackjack.

After you are given your first two cards of a hand- but only at that point- you are given the option to double down. When you double down, you double your bet, are given one more card, and then you are forced to stand on whatever you are given at that point. The dealer then shows his or her card, and the hand is over.

Let us review:

When you double down, you get ONE MORE CARD AND THEN THE HAND IS OVER. You do not get to double down twice. The hand is over. Stop betting. The rest of the blackjack table hates you.

This is also wrong:

[Rick] Perry, for his part, initially didn’t double down on the [Ben] Bernanke comments, but he was unapologetic this weekend after being asked about his comments reportedly making members of Congress nervous.

As we have already established, you may only double down immediately upon getting your first two cards. You can't draw extra cards and then double down. So if Rick Perry didn't initially double down, he could not have doubled down at all.

This is a correct usage:

The plaintiffs had argued that the deadline had not passed because the DOT had promised them this was a pilot project, but the DOT has emphatically denied ever saying that the PPW bike lane was a trial, and Judge Bunyan saw no credible evidence to the contrary. Jim Walden, the attorney for Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes and Seniors for Safety, has said his clients are reviewing their options. But these are people—especially those who live in fancy homes on Prospect Park West—are used to getting their way, and it wouldn't be surprising to see them double down and take this all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court is a definitive end to the bike lane debate alluded to here. They are the highest, and last, court that can be asked to rule on an issue. In metaphor terms, they are the one additional card before the hand absolutely ends. Well done, Gothamist!

A much more appropriate blackjack term, when there is the possibility of additional chapters to a story, would be the simple hit: drawing another card. It can be done repeatedly without necessarily ending the hand or providing an immediate win, loss or push. So, remember, fellow writers: unless there is a definite end to the process soon after doubling down, "Hit Me" before I hit you.

This has been a message from Concerned Citizens For Proper Gambling Metaphors.

Grief Bacon

Back in May, I brought up a quirk of the English language: its ability to basically kidnap foreign words and press-gang them into service as English words. Words are brazenly stolen from other languages and made into English all the time. If we have no word to describe something or someone, but some other language does, well, congratulations, foreign word. You're English now.

Today, per the suggestive influence of Mental Floss, we're compiling lists of words with no English equivalent. We'll start with their list. Then we'll add this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, and oh my word this one.

Some highlights from the lists:

Pana Po’o (Hawaiian)
To scratch your head to remember something you forgot.

Iktsuarpok (Inuit)
To go outside to see if anyone is coming.

Ilunga (Tshiluba, Southwest Congo)
Someone who will forgive an abuse the first time, tolerate it the second time, but never a third time.

Ya’aburnee (Arabic)
Translates as 'you bury me', this is telling someone you hope you'll die before them because of how hard it would be to go on living without them.

Tingo (Pascuense, Easter Island)
The act of removing everything you want from someone's house by slowly borrowing all of it.

Nylentik (Indonesian)
To flick someone with the middle finger on the ear.

Biritululo (Kiriwani, Papua New Guinea)
To settle a dispute by comparing the sizes of one's yams.

Kummerspeck (German)
Excess weight gained from overeating due to emotional problems. Translates as 'grief bacon'.

Koro (Japanese)
A man's fanatical fear that his penis is receding into his body and here is a link that'll tell you all about it if you don't believe me.

Taarradhin (Arabic)
To solve a problem in such a way that nobody loses face. Not the same as a compromise.

Guanxi (Mandarin Chinese)
A kind of informal social currency. Do things for others, you gain guanxi. Ask for things to be done for you, you spend guanxi.

Igunaujannguaq (Inuit)
A game that translates as 'frozen walrus carcass' in which a person is passed around overhead and tries to remain stiff throughout.

Suck It, Word-A-Day Calendars

Madison's postponed to tomorrow; roads are too uncertain. Last night it was literally snow on top of ice on top of snow, and it does me no good going into Madison if I'm just going to wind up in a ditch outside Marshall. So, we'll give it a day, let the roads get cleared, they should be good tomorrow.

In the meantime, let's make the most of it here. Let's learn some words. There are a lot of ways to do this: hear a new word in normal conversation, poke through the dictionary, the aforementioned word-a-day calendars.

Today we are doing none of those things. We're going to be dirty rotten cheating cheaters about it. This is the brute-force method, if you will.

What I want you to do is to think of a word that has a prefix. Actually, think of a bunch of them. Un-, in-, im-, sub-, dis-, de-, an-, non-, ex-, re-, whatever. Here's a big list of prefixes. Go nuts.

Now lop off that prefix.

Do you recognize the word now? If you do, pick another word and go again. If not, you just learned a word. (Probably. As with most English rules, there are always exceptions. Sometimes that prefix-looking sequence of letters isn't a prefix at all but an integral part of the word. Sometimes a word clearly does have a prefix, but then the root word isn't a word.)

A couple examples to get you started:

Coordinator---Ordinator (one who ordains, a director)
Disgruntled---Gruntled (in good humor)
Deodorant---Odorant (something that creates an odor)
Innocuous---Nocuous (likely to cause harm)
Unabashed---Abashed (to be shamed, to be guilted)
Degree---Gree (a prize or favor; alternatively, a step or rank)

Your turn. I'm not going to do all the work for you.

Random Alphabet Generator

Look down at your keyboard. Go on. I'll wait. You'll most likely see a format of letters going:

QWERTYUIOP
ASDFGHJKL
ZXCVBNM

It's completely random. There's a reason for that. C.L. Sholes, the inventor of the typewriter, knew he didn't have a machine that could keep up with fast typers. In 1860's Milwaukee, you didn't have that kind of technology yet. Typewriters jam when people hit too many keys too fast. (We had a typewriter in my house during my childhood that nobody used. It was primarily used to see how many keys you could stick at once.) Sholes knew this; an earlier model had gone straight alphabetical, and had all manner of jams on his hands.

Thus, the QWERTY format was created for the sole purpose of jam prevention. If it slowed down typers, oh well. Jams slow them down more.

It's not the only attempt to arrange a keyboard, though.

In 1932, Auguat Dvorak of Washington State University made this letter layout:

PYFGCRL
AOEUIDHTNS
QJKXBMWVZ

It served two purposes: first, all the vowels are next to each other on the left side- so as to encourage a kind of cadence between vowels and consonants- and second, the middle row is king. The Dvorak board does about 70% of the work in the middle row, as opposed to 40% in the QWERTY board.

Another shot was taken with the Colemak board, again trying to maximize the middle row:

QWFPGJLUY
ARSTDHNEIO
ZXCVBKM

Many other attempts have been made, though mostly only swapping a few keys from the QWERTY format, or to accomodate some other language.

And- because jamming is no longer an issue- some places have made straight alphabetical keyboards. But neither they, nor any other English-language keyboard, is in wide use.

Why? The QWERTY board came in the 1860's. Dvorak, the major competitor, wasn't until 1932. That's 70 years or so of people getting used to QWERTY, which became the major issue with every subsequent keyboard. It's muscle memory. Ultimately, the exact order of the alphabet serves no functional purpose and isn't in the ABCDEFG order for any purpose even approaching rationality. You can put the letters in any random order you want and it doesn't really matter. The only thing that matters is whatever order people know and remember. If they remember ABCDEFG in one place and QWERTY in another place, so be it.

QWERTY, in fact, has an advantage on ABCDEFG: it used to have a point.