This and That

WICKED

I'm working the Sunday Jumble and one of the words, after it's been unscrambled, is WICKED. Now WICKED is a perfectly cromulant word. You might notice that the first four letters of WICKED is WICK. WICKED looks like a past tense of the verb WICK, but I don't think WICK is a verb unless you are referring to someone's violent actions, like 'he went all John WICK on the bad guys'. But WICK, as far as I know, is a noun, not a verb, so you can't have a world like WICKED unless you are making it out of some other kind of WICK. Maybe we should look up WICKED and see what we find:

wicked - evil or morally wrong.

Origin Middle English: probably from Old English wicca ‘witch’ + -ed1.

But there's something funny about tacking ED onto the end of WICK. If you tack ED onto the end of some verb like CALL you get CALLED, but you do not pronounce the ED like you do in WICKED, It's more like CALL'D, whereas with WICKED you get a distinctive ED sound at the end. Or maybe that's just me.

I looked around for some code to embed some audio clips, but I got nowhere. Probably wasn't holding my mouth right.

SUBTITLES

We're watching the Portland Trail Blazers basketball game this evening and I notice that the subtitles have gotten turned on. They don't seem to bother my wife and she's the devoted fan, but they bug me. They cover the top, I dunno, 20% maybe, of the screen and they don't really interfere with watching the game, being as they are usually giving us long shots so we can see the whole of the action. The court occupies the middle half of the screen, so the top and bottom quarters of the screen are just noise, you can fill them with whatever you want and it won't interfere with the game. Vital information goes in the bottom quarter and the top quarter is just the audience, so the subtitles can go up there. But they bug me, so I turned them off.

After the game we switched to True Detective on HOMAX or whatever it's called, and now I gotta turn the subtitles back on again.

So what's the diff? When we're watching the game, the announcer fills the sound track and it's like a pleasant hum of background noise. Nothing he says is of any import, but we've been listening to him for years and whenever the Blazers play in some foreign city we sometimes get foreign announcers, and those guys just grate on me.

When we are watching shows off the internet, be it Netflix, Prime or HOBOAX, we like to listen to the dialog, but sometimes we can't quite hear what they're saying, either because they talk so quietly, or background noise, or an accent, or, what's probably the worst, is when they make a quick out-of-character quip and you have nothing to grasp onto that will help your mind make sense of what they said. So we turn on the subtitles,

Yesterday I said that I don't listen to people unless they are right in front of me. That's not exactly true, I listen to TV dramatic shows, and I watch YouTube videos. I think the difference might be that they are like basketball games, I'm watching the action and the audio track is just warm background noise. I suspect that I keep going back to the same ones because I like the sound of their voice, or at least not repelled, which some voices do.