Saturday, February 20, 2010

My Word for the Day: Fnord

That's Fnord, courtesy of BoingBoing, with a link to a pretty good Wiki. There are eight definitions in the Urban Dictionary, including with two interesting lists of putative Fnords. I particularly like:
Fnord is place where those socks vanish off to in the laundry.
Fnord is the bucket where they keep the unused serifs for Helvetica.
Fnord is the color only blind people can see.
Fnord is the the four-leaf clover with a missing leaf.
But I wonder: are they really all Fnords? I wonder also whether I could qualify "Wagner is the Puccini of music." I hear tell they ran a philosophy seminar at Harvard on the question whether and under what circumstances that one made any sense.

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