I hope I don’t disappoint you when I tell you that demonyms have nothing to do with demons. (For that I’d recommend The Dictionary of Demons by Belanger.) Rather, the demo is demos, a Greek word for the people and, more significantly for the fillip, the name for a certain type of municipality in Greece. Thus a demonym is a name given to describe a person from a particular place.

Eighty-two point seven percent of the time figuring out what to call someone from somewhere is no big deal. You throw –er or –al or –ian . . . [more]

I’ve recently returned from a trip to the Antipodes — my first. It was thoroughly enjoyable, despite a few minor obstacles, such as surviving a 14-hour flight and a 24-hour travel day, driving on the left, evading roos on the road at twilight, confronting electricity outlets that all looked like miniature cartoons of The Scream, and doing without my smartphone because of the insanely high cost of data roaming.

Oh, and struggling a bit to understand the locals.

That started on the Air New Zealand flight to Auckland, when, with ears that needed to pop, I swore I heard a . . . [more]

The car was the computer of its day:

• A shiny piece of technology that “everyone” had to have,
• an object that divided owners into geeks who delved into the entrails and users who, trained-pigeon-like, merely pushed the provided buttons,
• a people-connector of immense and unprecedented power,
• the reason for the creation of a vast and intricate infrastructure, and
• the principal element in the industrial structure of the west.

I say “was” because I think that the car’s days are numbered, at least as we now know it, the first edge of this change being evident in Google’s self-driving camera cars, . . . [more]

Noise. Some like it, some don’t. I go back and forth myself, donning a pair of noise-cancelling earphones when I have to fly but keeping the radio tuned to a classical station when I’m working. But, unlike a lot of people, I don’t plug into music when I’m wandering out and about, preferring city noise to earbuds.

If you’re one who likes “ambient” sounds when you’re working, relaxing or dropping off to sleep, I’ve got some links for you — and even some research that suggests a mild amount of ambient noise can boost your creativity.

Let’s stop by the . . . [more]

For fun, most of the time — as anyone who lives near a school playground will know. That blast of raw sound, bigger than a shout, less prissy than a sung note, pours energy out of us in a way that demands the world take notice. And it can feel good, as all that pent up breath sweeps out our petty penned up cares and frustrations.

Sheer fun and the release of frustration seem to be what’s behind one particular — communal — screaming fit, known as the Flogsta Scream. Flogsta is a suburb of Uppsala Sweden where a lot . . . [more]

Microsoft has done some good things. Even as an Apple fan boy I can say that. One such Good Thing is Slate magazine, founded in 1996 (and a strong influence in my naming of Slaw, as it happens) under the auspices of Microsoft’s MSN. In 2004 Slate passed into the hands of the Washington Post, under whose umbrella it still shelters today. But even a simple encomium to this news and popular culture magazine would be too . . . earnest, perhaps, for a Friday fillip. So it’s to Slate’s Vault that I want to point you today.

The Vault, . . . [more]

I’m sure I’ve confessed here before to being what others might call a “prescriptivist” where English usage is concerned. (I’m actually all for freedom of choice; it’s just that I would prefer it to be an informed choice.) But I have a healthy respect for the power of practice to normalize things, including the way we speak. Like Canute, the eleventh century king of Denmark, England, Norway, Sweden, etc., I might as well try to hold back the tide as to buck the way things get said.

And King Canute, or Cnut, is a good way to broach what I’m . . . [more]

One hoary definition of a gentleman is: a man who can play the accordion — but doesn’t.

Now, thanks to the magic of a Friday fillip, here’s your chance to lose that straitening status of gentlewoman or gentleman. What’s that you say? You can’t play the accordion? But you can, I assure you. A charming (looking) young Russian, Artem Polikarpov has created a website, Garmoshka, that is an accordion. Sort of. (“‘Garmoshka’, by the way, is a diminutive of гармон (‘garmon’) / гармоника (‘garmonika’); as with the Finnish ‘harmonikka’, the Russian ‘garmonika’ means accordion, not harmonica (an example . . . [more]

One of my favourite quips fell from the misanthropic mouth of Brother Theodore (“philosopher, metaphysician, and podiatrist”): “I have gazed into the abyss, and the abyss has gazed into me . . . and neither of us liked what we saw.”

This turn on Nietzsche’s apothegm 146 — “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” — is, amusingly, a bathetic comment on the Depth, as it caps that awesome void with a plastic lid of “not liking.” But . . . [more]

I couldn’t sell immortality at half price. I just don’t have the skills that are necessary to persuade people to part with their money. Which may explain my fascination with the pitchmen at markets and fairs. Not that I’m a sucker for all things that dice, slice, mince and macerate — though it’s always sensible to have the consumer equivalent of a “sober companion” standing near me as they begin to demonstrate the havoc that the SlashEeze knife might wreak on innocent vegetables or the shine that AmazoGlop could put on my car with only a simple wipe or two . . . [more]

Like most vertebrates, human beings are more or less bilaterally symmetrical. Sure, you’ve got a mole on one shoulder and your liver is very much one-sided. But still, it’s not as though we all had a lone tentacle growing out of a single hip. So how come left and right?

It’s a fairly peculiar thing, when you think about it. Up and down are easy: gravity does the work, and besides the sky is blue. Forward and backward are likewise a piece of cake: we’re iced on one side and not on the other. (We’re bilaterally symmetrical in only one . . . [more]

Paper, that stuff our money used to be made out of, that intermediate medium between vellum and pixels — the afterlife for some 150,000,000 forty-foot trees each year in Canada alone. It’s so clearly doomed in many people’s minds that we’re able to look at it as something apart now, to see it, as it were, where before it was simply always and everywhere. So let’s look.

How Google sees it.

We’re getting close to April 1, so it’s appropriate to take a look at one of Google’s April Fool’s Day jokes: the one from 2007 on Gmail Paper: . . . [more]