We’ve been trying to come up with good romantic nicknames. It isn’t as easy as it sounds. Most of the lists lying around online are rather dull. Here’s what we’ve got so far:

• Chuckle-cheeks.
• Goose-bumps.
• Pookie-snooks.
• Poptart.
• Jiggles McJiggypants.
• Twinkle-toes.
• Nuzzle-nose.
• Snoopy.
• Poopy.
• Snugglepuss.
• Dumble-dear.
• Fox-trot.
• Sweetmeat.
• Happy-feet.
• Fishbreath (use only if you can say it lovingly enough to distract from its actual meaning).

We’ve obviously got a lot of work to do.

The good people at rinkworks.com have the following suggestion for making romantic pet names:

Mix up the syllables “pook,” “wee,” “hon,” “oop,” and “ums,” (never use the syllables “skuzz” or “elch”), rhyme a lot, and make liberal references to baked goods. […] “Sweetie Pumpkin Pookums” is a perfectly acceptable and effective pet name, as are “Moopsie Cutie,” “Hunny Wunny Cakes,” and, for the extravagant, “Snookie Wookum Weetie Bunny Pie.” (It may seem odd to novices that cooked rodents would be romantic, but they are.)

They’ve even provided a handy pet name generator to help you come up with a name for your… err… Wuggywoogledumpling.

Previous posts have sparked an interest in “foo-aversaries” of all kinds - anniversaries of particular events, perhaps counted in particular ways, that have been given special names. Here’s some interesting ones I’ve been able to dig up, with links to examples of use or explanations.

1. Meetaversary: an anniversary of a first meeting.
2. Dateaversary: an anniversary of a first date.
3. Kissaversary: an anniversary of a first kiss. A suggested alternative name is annikissary.
4. Electroversary: an anniversary celebrated a year before the event (because electrons have a charge of “-1″). For example, one year before a planned wedding during a long engagement.
5. Postaversary: hitting a significant number (such as 100) of blog posts.
6. Blogaversary: an anniversary of starting a blog.
7. Post-liver-transplant-aversary: exactly what it says. A cause for celebration indeed.
8. Binaversary: an anniversary or birthday celebrated at 0, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, … years.
9. Cataversary: an anniversary of getting a cat.
10. Fooaversary: an anniversary of some random thing.

Last note on this subject - Brownie posted a page explaining the math of binaversaries. He makes a good case for it I think. Basically, counting your age in logarithms makes the passing of the years a lot less stressful. The major drawback I see is that it makes for a lot less cake and presents…

As you get older, birthdays seem to matter less. In fact, their significance seems to fall off at a roughly logarithmic rate. I think it makes sense to celebrate binary birthdays for each year that is a power of two: years 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and (if you are very lucky) 128. That feels about right. And then we could quote our age as 0 byears (1+ years), 1 byear (2+ years), 2 byears (4+ years), 3 byears (8+ years), 4 byears (16+ years), 5 byears (32+ years), or 6 byears (64+ years), and celebrate those binary birthdays or “binaversaries.”

It makes life seem a little more orderly somehow. We are children through age 3 byears, generally settle down during our fourth byear, work to retirement in our fifth byear, then often die at the age of 6 byears. If we’re not so lucky, we have a few byears less, but somehow the variation seems less drastic.

I’m happy to have lived 4 full and joyful byears, and so far byear 5 is pretty nifty too.

Richard Stallman speaking on an MIT mailing list (public archive here), responding to the implicit characterization of GNU/Linux as an alternative to Windows.

Calling GNU/Linux an “alternative” to Windows
is like calling democracy an “alternative” to dictatorship.
It’s not wrong, but it’s a drastic understatement. (*)

This paragraph is nicely phrased. It does not state that GNU/Linux equals democracy and that Windows equals dictatorship (although the rhetorical implications are there). It does suggest that there is probably more to this “alternative” than the choice between, say, different breakfast cereals, or hair products. Democracy is an alternative to dictatorship, but it posits a completely different set of “rules of the game.” Alternative products on the marketplace are not usually different in that sense. Different types of shampoo will not radically change how you live or work. Democracy did, and so does GNU/Linux.

(*) small grammar fix made, see original text.

There’s a few interesting examples of hobo sign at Willa’s Journal. For example, the one on the right apparently means that a “kind-hearted woman lives here.” There’s also sign for man-with-gun lives here, and you-can-sleep-in-hayloft. Interesting to compare the vocabulary with Lapine, the imagined world-view of rabbits. Wikipedia has a little bit more information, and there’s a good “alphabet” at slackaction. Although there are plenty of alternatives.