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In a little update to the hurds, I want to introduce the concept of the Cultural Lisp. Basically, at its core, this is an urban legend, but with a twist in that beyond just being a story that people start to repeat over and over and take as fact, they start to try and convince others that this is the case as well and make them believe that what they're saying really is the truth. It's a downward spiral of societal stupidity. If you're looking for it on a smaller scale, think of the game, telephone.       The origin of the hurd name comes from an article I did last year about how people always say, Barthelona instead of Barcelona as those who live there say the name of the city. Everyone outside of Spain keeps saying that this affectation is because of a king who had this lisp and blah dee blah dee blah blah... God, I'm tired of repeating that incredibly inaccurate story. I can only start to know how all the Spaniards I know (especially those from Barcelona) must feel in getting history lessons from foreigners.       But this is the textbook example of the Cultural Lisp. People around the world became convinced that they knew the origin for this "lisp" (which for god sakes, isn't a damned lisp!) and they felt the need to spread it throughout their culture and in to others. Thusly the irony in all of this is not that Castilian Spanish speakers talk with a lisp, but that everyone else has created this lisp in their culture. It's an artificial construct that is made all the more virulent through today's connected technologies.       We don't have to do this though. We can be informed and not take what people say at face value. Despite how much my mom hates it for proving her wrong quite often, Wikipedia is a great friend to one and all. Be vigilant. Stop the Cultural Lisp.

I'm no trend setter. All attempts at trying to be on the cutting edge of fashion in my hometown resulted in further isolation from those who were "cool" and would of course be wearing what my parents had clothed me in (which was all the rage in SF and LA when I was wearing it) the next year. From this I learned that there is no point in trying to be too far out in front of the current popular culture wave. I also learned that you might as well just start up your own thing and not care what all others think. So, it's only know that I realize I have an annoying ability to come up with new words. Some of them good, some just evil and thusly requiring bloggery.       In recent office adventures, I've unwittingly coined a number of terms that for some reason have stuck. In this one design iteration, the search area of a website looked a helluva lot like a hamburger, thus the term "search burger" was invented. In trying to slim it down a bit, we only ended up with a "search dog" that was then ultimately replaced because it really looked like crap. Whenever anyone wants to toss of an interstitial (those annoying things that take over a web page, I started calling it the, "shotgun in the meadow" or just "shotgun meadow" and for some reason this actually stuck. If that doesn't make sense, think of yourself strolling through a nice meadow (a website) and then kablam! a shotgun goes off (the interstitial). Another one that's caught on even with Those Who Have O In Their Title is the "eyebrow", which is a reference to an extended title. I can't take credit for this though as that's a very old print term that apparently nobody in the net world knew about.       Then of course for those who read this site with any degree of alarming regularity, you'll know of praving, crippies, fatcarts, and of course, kockalocks. To this list, I now add, hurds, which are basically "hudin words". You can see a diagram below if you're unclear.       Will these words change the world? Quite possibly and you can always say that you knew about them first if you're hip enough to read the Hudin.

Some might say that it's an incredibly derogatory word for someone who is crippled or handicapped. Oh, but no, no, no. In my book a 'crippie' is a slightly less than incredibly derogatory word for a 'crap hippie'. You know the type. Those with prayer flags at their house, or dreadlocks, or incense always burning, or Marley posters up on the walls, or any variety of things that point to their taking on the trappings of what the hippies were in the sixties without actually taking on the doings of the hippies in the sixties. Crippie meccas include places such as San Francisco [The Mission], Humboldt [all...], Nevada City (which I will be covering shortly), and of course the true nexus, Barcelona [El Raval or any random building with squatters]. Oddly enough, I seem to be surrounded by these folks in all my most favorite spots. Perhaps I'm a crippie myself? Not hardly. I'm much more in to doing things that make this world a better place and not feeling like I need to grow out dreads to show it. That and incense gives me the worst headaches in the world.       We probably all have a crippie in our lives and so now, I give you a name for these folks. Use it if you want. Some of my previous words are better circulated than others, but I'm always out to make the world a place bent around a vocabulary that I've created. Obviously the rest of the world doesn't always think that I'm the bestest sometimes and thusly, praving, kockalocks, and fatcarts are still just part of my own personal vernacular. Someday though, you will hear someone call someone else a crippie and you'll know the source--sarcastic ole me.

For years, I grew up with the impression that my father was sloppy at repairs around the house or on the car. You always knew when he had "fixed" something because it worked, but did so in a rather funky way. For instance, the choke on our old van's carburetor stopped working. Solution? Run a piece of fishing line up by the steering column that you pulled on until the vehicle got to operating temperature. Another one was that power outlets and light switches would be flipped upside down at irregular intervals. While living at home, you would get used to this and remember that the light for the kitchen was backwards to the the one from the living room. When you visited, it was amazing how quickly you'd forget these idiosyncrasies.       It was my first trip to Croatia in 2004, that I discovered that it was not my father's fault he couldn't repair things properly; it was a Croatian genetic predisposition that caused this. In the first apartment I stayed in, there were ten light switches at the door. Only six turned anything on and of those, two were wired in upside down. I felt like I was at home and over the course of subsequent stays, I've noticed more and more of these. I think the most famous one is having the hot and cold faucets switched on sinks and showers. I'm sure this has caught more than one tourist off guard.       So, it's with this, that I'd like to introduce the term, "praving". This is taking from the Croatian (and as far as I know, Montenegrin, Bosnian, and Serbian) word for "to fix" or "to repair" which is "popraviti". That "ing" ending is something I picked up in Spain where they take a Spanish word and toss that on the end for ease of speech. For instance the airline Vueling picks up on this as a mashup of "vuelo" for a flight or "footing" which Spaniards say for "jogging".       I invite any and all submissions on this topic and I suspect that it is not something limited to Croats or the Balkans, but might be common amongst all Slavs. I don't know, but I'll be happy to see if it does and post any pictures of truly great "fixes" that people do. I will leave you with the first in a long line of these examples below, which I feel is the most classic. Note that the faucet is full left. In standard installations, that is hot. In this case, it is cold. Go, go, Hrvatska!

They've pushed me too far finally and I've had to come up with a proper word. That's right, from now on, any idiot white person with those damned caucasian dreadlocks now has "kockalocks".       Yes, it's a foul word, but this is a foul thing. I've mentioned it before, say, here, here, and here. Needless to say, I don't like dreads and I don't like the people who where them. It's a choice that one decides upon and it's a ridiculous one at that. And when you toss in the fact that with a little bit of history they are in fact often a shown of resistance against the white man slave overlord or what have you, the fact that white morons have this mangy crap makes it even dumber.       Just to add more fuel to my "radical" theory about white folks with dreadlocks (in that any white person with dreads is the lamest idiot you can meet) I ran in to a guy in Berkeley with quite a mange. He was walking up from Bart on Center Street and playing with his mange while talking incredibly loudly on his cellphone. Like most of these idiots he was talking about all this worldly crap and instead of just using the English word he kept dropping in Spanish like he was cooler than cooler, despite being a rat-faced white guy. I thankfully managed to turn off another path to Dwinelle Hall and despite getting further and further away, I could still hear his idiot conversation despite there being 40 feet and a lot of trees between us. Such an idiot. Such a set of dreads.       I'll put forth my challenge (again) that if anyone is to find someone the least bit okay who is white and has dreadlocks, let me know. Otherwise my theory seems to quickly be entering the world of fact.