Subject: [Fictionary] CAXON ballot (due 2/14)

From: eLLioTT morEton <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 8 Feb 2023 03:49:08 +0000 (UTC)

Dear Fictionary,

The nine candidates for CAXON are listed below, without party
affiliation.  I have regularized the punctuation and capitalization at
the start of the definitions.  Usual one- and two-point votes, plus
any awards you may wish to give or comments you might feel moved to
utter, are due in a week, i.e., by the end of Valentine's Day.

Regards,
Elliott

________________________________________________________________________
caxon, n.  A glass cork, usually decorative. often used with model
ships in bottles.
________________________________________________________________________
caxon, n.  An early moveable-type printer, named for its inventor
Jakob Caxon, of Danzig; it enjoyed a brief period of popularity in the
late 1400s-early 1500s until losing ground to other printers due to
labor requirements.
________________________________________________________________________
Caxon, n.  A constructed language in which each word ends with a check
letter to prevent misspellings.
________________________________________________________________________
caxon, n.  The traditional hussar braiding of a horse's mane.
________________________________________________________________________
caxon, n.  The circular inverse of a rectangular lattice, with a
tangle in the middle, produced by inverting the complex
arithmetic-geometric mean.
________________________________________________________________________
caxon, n.  1.  A kind of wig, now obsolete.  2.  A case or chest of
ores prepared to be refined.
________________________________________________________________________
caxon, n. (informal) A cascade sonogram, or (less frequently) a
cascade sonography device.
________________________________________________________________________
caxon, n.  A tongue tattoo.
________________________________________________________________________
caxon, n. (arch.)  A square plinth on which an urn is placed.
________________________________________________________________________
Plus one bonus joke def from Ranjit:

joke def: a very loud wassail song
(from klaxon + no el, of course, plus 'wassail' suggests 'wail' for
extra noise)

---

From: eLLioTT morEton <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Feb 2023 04:03:05 +0000 (UTC)

Dear Fictionary,

I have CAXON ballots from

  Jean-Joseph
  Pierre
  Joshua
  Eric
  Ranjit
  Hutch

Any more?  The polls will remain open till 11:59 on Saturday in case
more people want to vote.

Regards,
Elliott

---

From: eLLioTT morEton <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2023 22:48:18 +0000 (UTC)

Dear Fictionary,

With all counties now reporting, the winner is Eric's urn plinth, with 6 points.  The OED's definition garnered even more votes, for a variety of reasons, but it can't play, so haul it away, Eric!

Regards,
Elliott

General comments:

Hutch:  I am apparently in a rather extraordinarily bad mood, which I wasn't even aware of until I started dissing on everyone's fictionition. Please don't take it personally. Note that I dissed my own fictionition too.

________________________________________________________________________
caxon, n.  A glass cork, usually decorative. often used with model ships in bottles.
__Joshua

0 points.

Honorable mention from Jim.

Jean-Joseph:  If it's not made of cork, I'd call it a stopper rather than a cork.

Hutch:  I've seen a few ships in bottles. They usually have corks made of cork or
are simply unsealed. A glass stopper would simply fall out and get lost.

________________________________________________________________________
caxon, n.  An early moveable-type printer, named for its inventor Jakob Caxon, of Danzig; it enjoyed a brief period of popularity in the late 1400s-early 1500s until losing ground to other printers due to labor requirements.
__Hutch

0 points.

Pierre: Caxton

Eric:  Caxton.
________________________________________________________________________
Caxon, n.  A constructed language in which each word ends with a check letter to prevent misspellings.
__Jim

2 points = 2 points for correct guess

Joshua 1

Jean-Joseph:  Thisa woulds undoubtedlyc resultl inv somew veryo strangez wordsw.

Pierre:  I doubt that a human could learn to speak such a language. Humans have enough 
trouble speaking a language that can be parsed unambiguously by computer.

Hutch:  I'm highly skeptical. A check number is easy to calculate, but a check
letter would be very difficult. One would be more likely, even MUCH more
likely, to incorrectly calculate the check letter than to mis-spell the
word.

__Nick

3 points = Joshua 1 + Ranjit 1 + Hutch 1

Ranjit:  1 point for horsies

Hutch:  1 point, for the other survivor of my bad mood. :-)

________________________________________________________________________
caxon, n.  The circular inverse of a rectangular lattice, with a tangle in the  middle, produced by inverting the complex arithmetic-geometric mean.
__Pierre

2 points =  2 points for correct guess

Jean-Joseph:  The what now?

Hutch:  Complete nonsense! I think this is simply a collection of math terms strung
together higgledy-piggledy.

________________________________________________________________________
caxon, n.  1.  A kind of wig, now obsolete.  2.  A case or chest of ores prepared to be refined. 
__OED

8 points = Jim 2 + Jean-Joseph 2 + Pierre 2 + Eric 2

Jim:  2 points, because this sounds like the kind of double-definition word Elliott would choose.

Jean-Joseph:  Two seemingly unrelated definitions, the second of which sounds distinctly odd. Makes me suspicious enough to award two points.

Pierre:  Two points. This sounds most likely to be real.

Eric:  I like how the definitions are so disparate. Two points.

Hutch:  I'm trying to figure out how a wig could be related to a chest of ores. I
suspect I'm missing someone's joke.

________________________________________________________________________
caxon, n. (informal)  A cascade sonogram, or (less frequently) a cascade sonography device.
__Ranjit

1 point = Eric 1

Eric:  Mellifluous. One point.

Hutch:  I'm always skeptical of scientific or technical fictionitions. Come to
think of it, that applies quite neatly to my own printing press
fictionition as well.

__Jean-Joseph

2 points =  2 points for correct guess

Hutch:  The very idea of tattoos makes me cringe slightly. The idea of a tongue
tattoo absolutely makes my skin crawl. If this is the word, I may have to
vomit.

__Eric

6 points = Jim 1 + Jean-Joseph 1 + Hutch 2 + 2 points for correct guess

Jean-Joseph:  A pedestrian definition. These often turn out to be right, so one point.

Ranjit:  2 points for inth plurn - i mean urn plinth

Hutch:  Well, I've disliked everything else. 2 points

joke def: a very loud wassail song
(from klaxon + no el, of course, plus 'wassail' suggests 'wail' for extra noise)
__Ranjit

Hutch:  I had suggested this was the meaning of "caxon". Obviously, I had mistaken
it for "klaxon".

---

From: Jed Hartman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2023 15:18:46 -0800

Hmm. It looks like my votes didn’t reach Elliott. Enclosing a copy below.

—Jed

> On Feb 15, 2023, at 8:49 PM, Jed Hartman <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> 2-point vote:
> 
> I doubt it’s real, but it *should* be! (Now I want to create such a system for English!)
> 
> 
> 1-point vote:
> 
> Another one that I think is implausible but should be true.
> 
> 
> bonus 0-point joke vote: I was very amused by Ranjit’s “klaxon + no el”.
> 
> 
> —Jed
>

---

From: E Cohen <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2023 18:48:42 -0500

So pleased that my clever ploy of a boring definition took the day.

New word candidate,

     DARB

If you think you know it, let me know in the next three days -- by next 
Monday night, the 27th.

-- Eric   |   @GoudyBoldItalic   |   post.news/goudybolditalic

---

From: Hutch <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2023 19:13:44 -0500

I don't remember the real definition ever winning before. I assume it
probably has, but I don't remember it happening.

On Fri, Feb 24, 2023 at 5:48 PM eLLioTT morEton <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Dear Fictionary,
>
> With all counties now reporting, the winner is Eric's urn plinth, with 6
> points.  The OED's definition garnered even more votes, for a variety of
> reasons, but it can't play, so haul it away, Eric!
>

I'm still trying to figure out how a wig and a collection of ore could be
related???

> Jean-Joseph:  Two seemingly unrelated definitions, the second of which
> sounds distinctly odd. Makes me suspicious enough to award two points.
>

BB,
Hutch

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---

From: Pierre Abbat <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2023 20:48:15 -0500

On Friday, February 24, 2023 5:48:18 PM EST eLLioTT morEton wrote:
> caxon, n.  The circular inverse of a rectangular lattice, with a tangle in
> the  middle, produced by inverting the complex arithmetic-geometric mean.
> __Pierre
> 
> Hutch:  Complete nonsense! I think this is simply a collection of math terms
> strung together higgledy-piggledy.

It's not nonsense. Here are graphs of the loop of խ(x+yi) for x=-1/16, -1/64, 
and -1/128. The maximum value, which occurs when y=0, is respectively about 
50.3, 201, and 402. խ(z) is defined by a functional equation: խ(2z) is the 
arithmetic mean of խ(z) and խ(z+πi), and խ(2z+πi) is their geometric mean. It 
approaches 1 as x→-∞, is continuous on the left half-plane (the square root is 
chosen to make it so), and is real and monotonically increasing on the 
negative real axis. I've been studying this function for over a year and still 
haven't figured out why it looks like the circular inverse of a rectangular 
lattice with a tangle in the middle. Do any of you know a mathematician who'd 
be interested in this function? It also has a barrier beyond which it cannot 
be analytically extended, yet is not defined as a lacunary series.

> caxon, n.  1.  A kind of wig, now obsolete.  2.  A case or chest of ores
> prepared to be refined. __OED
> 

Like the time I picked "creem" with three completely unrelated defs.

> Hutch:  The very idea of tattoos makes me cringe slightly. The idea of a
> tongue tattoo absolutely makes my skin crawl. If this is the word, I may
> have to vomit.

I searched afterward, and there is such a thing as a tongue tattoo.

Pierre
-- 
loi mintu se ckaji danlu cu jmaji

---

From: eLLioTT morEton <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 25 Feb 2023 05:15:25 +0000 (UTC)

Terribly sorry --- it did arrive, dated Feb. 15th, and I somehow
overlooked it.  Many apologies. --Elliott

---

From: E Cohen <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 25 Feb 2023 17:22:29 -0500

> be analytically extended, yet is not defined as a lacunary series.
Ah. Had not known you did math, now I know one kind of fictionition not 
to try.

---

From: Jean-Joseph Cote <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 25 Feb 2023 18:35:33 -0500

I'll contact you off list with the address of my high-powered 
mathematician friend, who dabbles in all branches thereof.

Jean-Joseph

---

From: Jean-Joseph Cote <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 25 Feb 2023 18:42:08 -0500

On 2/24/2023 5:48 PM, eLLioTT morEton wrote:
> Pierre:  I doubt that a human could learn to speak such a language. 
> Humans have enough trouble speaking a language that can be parsed 
> unambiguously by computer.
>
Lest anyone wonder, those check letters on my comment do form a 
consistent system of checking for English words (useless though it may 
be). I actually worked it out in Excel rather than tossing on extra 
random letters. It's only a checksum, though, not something more 
sophisticated like a CRC, so it won't, for example, catch "i before e" 
misspellings.

---

From: E Cohen <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 25 Feb 2023 19:31:24 -0500

> sophisticated like a CRC, so it won't, for example, catch "i before e" 

But do human languages do this kind of? Like, if it's this kind of vowel 
in the first syllable then it has to be this kind of vowel in the next, 
and if they don't match then something has gone wrong?

---

From: eLLioTT morEton <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2023 04:11:35 +0000 (UTC)

On Sat, 25 Feb 2023, E Cohen wrote:

> But do human languages do this kind of? Like, if it's this kind of vowel in 
> the first syllable then it has to be this kind of vowel in the next, and if 
> they don't match then something has gone wrong?

Hi, Eric!

Indeed, human languages have redundancy that reduces the chances of
comprehension errors.  You can't just combine the sounds of a language
any old way.  Each language has its own phonotactic restrictions on
how they can be arranged, so that knowledge of a sound's neighbors
constrains what the sound can be.  People actually use this kind of
knowledge to help clear up perceptual ambiguities.  For example,
English words can start with /dr/ and /sl/, but not with *dl/ or
/sr/. and if you take a sound X that's acoustically intermediate
between /r/ and /l/, and put it in the environment dXa, English
speakers report hearing /l/, whereas if you put the same sound in the
environment sXa, they report hearing /r/ [Reference 1 below].  When
listening to words that start with /rd/ or similar un-English
clusters, English speakers report hearing an extra syllable and have
trouble distinguishing (e.g.) /rda/ from /r@da/ (@=schwa), whereas
speakers of Russian (which has word-initial falling-sonority clusters)
do not [2].

Vowel harmony of the sort you mentioned (phonetically-based
restrictions on what vowels can co-occur in the same word) can be used
by listeners to detect word boundaries [3]; e.g., if /e/ and /o/ can't
co-occur, then when you hear /kepola/, you know that it has to be /ke
pola/, not /kepo la/.  But as far as I can tell from half an hour's
rummaging on Google Scholar, no one has found, or even looked for,
vowel harmony being used resolve perceptual ambiguity.  I wonder why
not?

Regards,
Elliott

[1] Massaro, D. W., and M. M. Cohen (1983).  Phonological context in
speech perception.  Perception and Psychophysics 4:338--348.

[2] Berent, I., D. Steriade, T. Lennertz, and V. Vaknin (2007).  What
we know about what we have never heard: evidence from perceptual
illusions.  Cognition 104:591--630.

[3] Suomi, K., McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (1997). Vowel harmony and
speech segmentation in Finnish. Journal of Memory and Language, 36(3),
422-444.

---

From: Pierre Abbat <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2023 00:20:30 -0500

> speakers of Russian (which has word-initial falling-sonority clusters)

Did that experiment use /r/ (a trill) or /ɹ/ (the usual rhotic in the English 
accents I'm familiar with)? I don't know a Russian word beginning with /rda/, 
but I do know a Russian word /rta/ (рта, mouth's).

I once read of an experiment in which "banket" was presented to one ear and 
"lanket" to the other. They invariably heard "blanket", not "lbanket".

> vowel harmony being used resolve perceptual ambiguity.  I wonder why

In Finnish, "aou" occur together, and "äöy" occur together, but not with each 
other — except in compounds like "syyskuu" (one of the months) and imitative 
words like "kroohpyyh". In Turkish, likewise, "aıou" don't normally occur 
together in a word with "eiöü". But there are a few native words which have 
such combinations, like "anne" (mother; the Azeri cognate is "ana", which 
obeys vowel harmony). Also compound words, as in Finnish, can have mismatched 
vowels, and borrowed words aren't always forced to comply. So "tirbuşon" 
(corkscrew) is borrowed from a French compound, where "tire" has a front vowel 
and "bouchon" back vowels.

Pierre
-- 
sei do'anai mi'a djuno puze'e noroi nalselganse srera

---

From: E Cohen <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2023 09:43:26 -0500

No-one has said they know it, so DARB is a go!

Please define by the evening of March 14, that's ten days from now.

DARB DARB DARB!

---

From: E Cohen <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2023 19:42:26 -0500

A reminder that DARB defs are due by the evening of March 14, that's 
only four days from now.

Send yours in now while you're thinking of it. Unlikely you'll get much 
more clever in the next four days.