The Lighter Side

I was meandering through technorati, checking what people out there in the world have to say about us (at least those who have the courage to link back) and saw WAH(Web)Mommy expose her weirdness to the world. A little off kilter, I had almost relegated her to the OCD kookie bin, where she would be pleasantly surprised to find about half the women I have ever loved including my wife, when dear god, she called me out to lift my skirts too. Never one to back down to any kind of challenge, I bring you seven more pathetic quirks to add to this ever growing rash of personal exposure making its way across the web.
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I am in Spain on business and launched Google to quickly look up some conference details. Staring back at me was ‘La Web‘. So there you have it, folks. That willey, brilliant collaboration we call the web is in fact a woman. Considering the fact that anything so complicated could function that well, the choice is no surprise. Which makes me wonder, when a new word appears in a language that assigns gender to everything, how does it get selected and who makes the final call?

When trying to figure this out, Wikipedia was my savior.

Internet causes speakers to hesitate between making it masculine like other loanwords from English, or making it feminine to agree with “red”, the Spanish word for “net”.

So it looks like Google just took a stand. How does Spanish deal with gender when incorporating foreign words? According to Wikipedia:

• Take the gender they have in that language, with neuter taken to be the same as masculine (so English nouns are made masculine)
• Take the gender it seems to be (e.g. la Coca-Cola because it ends in -a)
• Take the gender of the closest-related Spanish word (e.g. la Guinness because of la cerveza)

This is off the business topic, but it certainly is a major issue for all of us who work from home, especially Macbook Pro users. You see, I love my new laptop but it has a few particularities. It runs 3x hotter than my PC - so hot, in fact, that I have a hard time working with it on my lap. Normally, it would not be that big a deal. That is until Julie & I decided to start trying to have children (I’m told this is definitely the best part).

On the drive to San Francisco today, Peter & I began to wonder if the radiation or heat from my laptop could roast my nads cause me to have three headed children fertility troubles. A little research online and it appears that, yes, this might just be an issue. So all you guys who work like we do and who want to have kids some day, pay attention.
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