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Monday, May 01, 2006

Technical Stuff and cung

I don't know how observant my three readers are, but I do have some idea of how often they check my blog.

If you go down to the bottom of this page, you will find a banner for "Site Meter". Click on it, and it will take you to a web page with statistics on how many times my site has been viewed. I thought it might be interesting to see. I'm averaging 9 per day, so I think that means that Uncle Bob, my Mom and Earl are each looking at it three times per day.

Guys, I'm not a professional, but I don't think that I would be too far off base if I used the word "obsessive" to describe this kind of viewing.

Anyway, I thought you'd like a little glimpse into the guts of this thing.

Back to cung. I thought I would Google "cung" and see what popped up. These are the results I found:

Cung is a common English spelling for a Vietnamese name. Google spat up the famous Vietnamese martial artist Cung Le. I must confess, I am not so much worried that Cung Le will stumble on my Roblog as that he will kick the crap out of it. I sincerely hope that he will think back on how he was bullied as a child, and decide to cut this particular nerd some slack. I also got the composer, Cung Tien, and a scientist, Ven-Dat Cung. Ven-Dat Cung's thesis was on "Parallel Space Searches in Artificial Intelligence and Operations Research". I believe this means that he wants to create giant robots to dominate the world. I still couldn't tell you for sure whether it's a given or family name. It may be either. It also turns out to be a chunk of the title "Silent Night" translated into Vietnamese. At any rate, I don't believe that there are many Vietnamese people named Cung who will read my blog and get upset about it, as long as none of you tell Cung Le what I'm up to. And if I'm lucky, "Cung" means silent in Vietnamese, so they won't say anything to me about it.

Yes. Sit back and enjoy the twisted logic.

Cung is also a language of Cameroon. One of 279 living languages. If I'm reading the report right, it's spoken by about 2000 people. It seems pretty unlikely that any of them will stumble across my blog and bug me about stealing their language name, so I think I'm OK on the Cameroonian front.

In other words, "cung" is not taken in English.

I had lunch today with Earl and Indra, another coworker, and I had occasion to say that something was very cung. So I did. I said it. Just like that. Figuring that it rhymes with "tongue", only it's easier to spell. Indra immediately asked what the hell we were talking about, expressing his jealousy over not knowing a word that both Earl and I were conversant with.

We explained, and he nodded with the satisfied smile of a tyrant who knows that the peasant who just back-talked him will soon be shopping for a new head.

So I've been working on word forms. Please let me know if you have any preferences, or if you think something doesn't work:

cung (adj): Unsurprising, yet unpredictable. ex: When John came to work wearing purple pants, it was cung. It was very cung.

cung (vb): To give an impression (to someone) that something unsurprising, yet unpredictable has happened or will happen. ex(vt): His excuse cunged me. I was cunged by his excuse. I'm sure your performance will cung me. (vi) Grisham's latest novel about an an existentialist hooker trying to get revenge for copyright infringement cunged.

cung (noun): The state of being cung, an action that is cung. ex: Her essay was rife with cung. That was a cung.

I don't see an adverb here. Cungly? I can't come up with a proper use for it. You either cung or you don't. You do something with cung or without. An action is cung or it isn't, a little or a lot. But you don't do something cungly.

Actually I'm not certain about the noun or verb forms. Other than the continuous (cunging) and past/past participle (cunged), I don't see any inflections happening either. This might be better off as just an adjective.

The point: I would like to field test this word. I'm sure that everyone who reads this will find occasion to use the word cung, now that you know it exists. So please do. And don't forget to nod sagely as the people around you ask what it means. Tell them, but don't mention where you got it. Not specifically, anyway. Just say, "I got it from the internet. It's a kind of global university, you know."

And be sure to let me know when you have used it. The more detail the better.

Thanks in advance for your assistance and support. Mom.

Peace,

Rob

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Rob you are soooo nice. Obsessive is one of the best things I've ever been called.
Uncle Bob

Anonymous said...

There are more than three. I check all the time. I thought I signed up to receive notices of updates, but I guess I didn't since you never include me as one of your obsessive readers.

Aunt Becky

Anonymous said...

Adverb: cungingly. Two possible usages:

"And then my boss cungingly told me that I would not be paid until I assembled nine small model wildebeests out of toothpicks and peanut shells for display on the dashboard of his car."

OR

"And then my boss told me that I would not be paid until I assembled nine small model wildebeests out of toothpicks and peanut shells for display on the dashboard of his car," Joe said cungingly.

I think the first makes the most sense, but the second is plausible.

Drawback: most people will think you're saying "cunningly," which is almost exactly wrong.

Anonymous said...

For a guy with no time for his friends, you sure seem to spend a lot of time on cung. BTW, in helping prepare my students for their group final, I have found many new terms to apply to phenomena yet to have sufficient lexical representation.

Anonymous said...

Oh, that last comment was from me, er . . . Earl. I forgot to put my name. So cung, but not really cung.

Aubrey said...

Just to let you know, I've been using "cung" whenever I can. My poor kids that I teach will be so disillusioned when they confuse native English speakers by using the adjective (the particular form in which I'm teaching it) "cung." You're on my blog, too. Nice-uh.

Anonymous said...

"dung-cunging linguist" - a person who habitually invents new dung-oriented phrases that, while unsurprising, are impossible to predict

Ex.

[hypothetical scene from the show Trailer Park Boys -- Mr. Lahey and his toady assistant Randy are grilling burgers outside their trailer as an angry ex-Mrs. Lahey approaches with 2 of her friends]

Mr. Lahey: "Uh-oh, better batten down the s%#t hatch, Randy, we're starin' down the triple barrel of a s#!t hurricane."

Randy: "Wow Mr. Lahey, what a dung-cunging linguist you are."

A Brief Introduction

Roblog is my writing lab. It is my goal to not let seven days pass without a new post. I welcome your criticism, as I cannot improve on my own.

Here is a link to my cung post, which remains the only word which I have ever invented, and which has not, as far as I know, caught on. Yet.