This ones for everyone!

since you've now been turned into a pumpkin, aRe yoU going to become friends with the yard gnomes ?

Querida Special K

Muchas gracias para los discos de musica latina. Los recibimos el semana pasada. Desafortunadamente, !ninguno de los dos funciona! Trate de tocarlos en la computadora y tambien en el CD player (?como se dice? ?tocador de discos?) y nada. !Que lastima!

Rumors of my demise...

...have been chilling in their accuracy. I am in fact dead, killed off by three things, nay, four: 1) Teaching 2) The student newspaper 3) my classes (oh, yeah, I have to read these books!) and 4) traveling to see family on the weekends. As I fritter away precious minutes on this post, I am getting deader and deader. Got to admit I'm getting deader, getting deader all the time .

Does the Chaka still live?

vote now !

Pronounciation train

Chaka, without looking this up, how would you pronounce the word "provolone." As in the cheese?

Barbaric Folk Entymologies

So, Boromir has a question for Chaka, and anyone else for that matter, but he cannot post, so I'll post in his stead (that sentence should be re-worded to remove a comma or two, but I'm feeling lazy):

What is the origin of the word "Barbarian"? Boromir was intruiged because he had heard two different origins, and I had heard a third origin.

Boromir heard:
1) Barbar means "outsider" in some language.
2) Barbar is like the name of a tribe of a particularly savage peoples in asia.

I heard:
When the Greeks or Romans or some other tribe of people came upon Northern Europeans who were speaking Germanic languages, they thought that the Germanic peoples' gibberish sounded like "bar bar bar bar bar bar." So any peoples who spoke a Germanic language were called "barbarions."

Has anyone else heard a different origin for the word "barbarian"? Do you have your own guess, Chaka?
At the end we can then check O.E.D. and find the actual origin.