Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Sewrrandur!

Whilst having lunch with some coworkers today, the topic of apocalyptic wastelands came up. If this seems strange, remember that we’re computer game nerds and lacking sports stories, we talk about zombies, Star Trek and apocalypses.

Anyway, it was pointed out that as life becomes more comfortable, the less we will be able to survive. We get our food from the supermarket, get water and electricity delivered, and generally take for granted comforts that a large percentage of the world does not have.

Basically, in an apocalypse, we’d be screwed. Lacking any survival skills, we’d only hold out as long as we had canned food and Twinkies to sustain us. Once those were gone, we’d be too.

NOTE: We did discuss resorting to cannibalism, but then realized we would have no idea how to prepare a person or even what bits were edible. Plus, we didn’t know what wine went with people or which fork to use.

One of the first things we’d lose, of course, would be proper spelling. None of us can spell without a word processor. I used to be an excellent speller, but Word has made it so easy that I just try to get close and let the computer handle it. All of us had fallen into this particular trap.

So if the end of civilization did come, we’d end up fighting for our lives against marauding bands of leather clad, post-apocalyptic hoodlums who couldn’t spell. It might very well go like this:

The arrow buried itself into the wood with a ‘thunk,’ a thick note tied around its shaft.

A grubby survivor, clad in the remains of a jogging suit and wearing shoulder pads and a hockey mask, pulled it out.

“What’s it say?” asked another, who was clad in a makeshift tunic made from bathmats.

“Umm,” said the first man. “Not sure.” He held up the note.

“Sewrrandur ur tuwankeys,” the other sounded out. “What the hell? Sewrrandur? What’s that mean? And what’s a ‘tuwankey?’

“Turkey?”

“Nah, they know we don’t have any turkeys.”

“Tarantula? Turnip? Turnkey?”

“Oh, give me that!” The bathmat bedecked man snatched the note away and then climbed to the top of the makeshift wall. “Excuse me,” he shouted. “But what’s your note say?”

“Surrender your Twinkies!” someone shouted back.

He looked at the note. “No it doesn’t! It say’s ‘Sewrrandur ur tuwankeys.’

“Oh,” came the voice again. “Sorry. I used Word a lot.”

“Ah, that would explain it.” He glanced back at his comrades. “Then do everyone a favor and go plunder a dictionary. And no, you can’t have our Twinkies.”

Cheers,
-Jason

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

do you have a good recipe for crottled greeps?
"gunner"

TX_Val said...

Well I rambled on a bit, then had a browser crash, so now I just say..

HA.. plunder a dictionary.. .nice.

Word and dictionary.com are my saving grace at work.

MOO

Anonymous said...

Hehe... some will do better than others - like say, some guys working in different fields (including computerindustry!) but having LARP as a hobby, and being partly serious about it - meaning, being able to cook with nothing but a fire and what you find, (bow) shooting your dinner-rabbit and so on. Har.

Other than that:
Printed books have some serious value considering the 'sewrrandur' setting (word+apocalypsis)!

Jason Janicki said...

I don't even know what 'crottled greens' are. 'Clotted greens?'

Yeah, I use dictionary.com all the time. I tend to grab my regular dictionary at home (it's right there), rather than open a browswer though. Don't know why.

You're one up on me, Shaya! I could probably take down a game animal (I happen to be an excellent rifle shot - grew up in the country), but I never learned how to dress one.

They should put a sign up: You must be able to spell 'surreptitious' in order to attack this compound.

Anonymous said...

Dressing game is all about getting the shoes to match with the belt.

Anonymous said...

CROTTLED GREEPS:
A term, implicitly a food, first used by Dean Grennell in his fanzine Filler in 1953:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––-
But if you don’t like crottled greeps, why did you order them?
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––-
The derivations are from (1) “crottles,” the curved lines in cartoons indicating that a character is falling over backwards and (2) “grippe” (influenza) as spelled by the English and pronounced by the French. It is said that crottled greeps are to food what blog is to drink; many fans have presented their ideas of what the true recipe for both must be, even though the Geneva Convention expressly describes the transmission of the true recipes of either by any means as a Crime Against Humanity punishable by a fate at least as bad as death.
(8/22/2005)

"gunner"

Jason Janicki said...

Good one, Anonymous, whomever you are :)

And thank you, gunner. Now I know and knowing is half the battle (the other half is violence)!

Sinai_WinterWolf said...

Hey, if they plundered a copy an Oxford-English Dictionary, they could be considered rich.

Well, at least in a literary sense....

I know, because my History of the English Language teacher was talking about said dictionary in class, and quipped, "Oh, well I'll have to go buy a copy of that...," because I had never seen a "copy" of the OED. My teacher replied, "Well, then I'll be over for dinner at your house often," and I had a dumbfounded look on my face until he further explained that the OED is more akin to an encyclopedia than a dictionary, and only libraries are allowed to own a copy--unless, of course, you're rich.

By Cthulhu, when/if I get rich, I am going to buy a copy of the Oxford-English Dictionary. It will be in my possession before I die. Muahahahahahahahaha!

Jason Janicki said...

I did not know that. I do happen to own a copy of the micro edition. It was left to me by an uncle, who had been a dean of a university (which might explain where he got it from).

It's very cool, but you need a magnifying glass :)

Sinai_WinterWolf said...

.......you have exceeded awesome, Jason, and have gone straight to awesome x 10.

Apparently Awesome is something akin to Kaoken from Dragonball....

But yeah, I looked up the OED on Amazon, and it's $4,701 (apparently you save $1,593 by shopping at Amazon for your copies of the OED). I'm still in shock at the moment--or it's the lack of sleep. Meh.

Jason Janicki said...

Rather than going Saiyan(sp?), I go Nerd. It's kinda disappointing, as you just get a pocket protector. I look forward to achieving Super-Nerd someday :)