Blog didn't die after 3 weeks. Whee!

As usual, I wouldn't blog about the most obvious things to blog about. I shall blog about a person with an interesting name. Katherine(or Catherine) Wicker. This name isn't particularly interesting. What's interesting is her pet name "Kitty". It's not really a pet name, since everyone calls her Kitty, and if a stranger (unless it be a policeman) asks for her name she'll introduce herself as "Kitty". You meet her for the first time and you go "Hello Kitty!"

It may still be fine right now, since she's 21. But I'll be interested to know the cut-off age after which calling a woman "Kitty" would sound plain weird. This is especially so in Western Culture where they are fine with calling their parents by name. Having your son call you Kitty is seriously... strange. What could be stranger than calling your mom "Kitty"? Calling your girlfriend's mom Kitty.

Kitty the person is quite interesting too. She studies linguistics in university. LIEK O.M.G. COOL. Among other things, she learns conversation analysis(study what the pauses in a conversation mean), voice analysis (find out if two audio recordings are from the same person), and phonology (classify, learn and produce sounds that form words in any language).

Phonology is quite cool! They have a system of classification of sounds by how it is produced, and each sound contains information about the mouth position and the air flow and throat vibration, and words are combinations of sounds. Tonal changes, clicks and inhalations are reflected too. *gasp!*

According to Kitty, this system of classification allows people to state specifically how one accent sounds like, thus helping them mimic and create accents if they want to.

They use big words. "Voiceless Uvular Fricative". Sexy. "Bilabial Implosive". Even sexier. The use of big and sexy words just to describe sounds- something so crucial to a conversation- allows you to kill a conversation with ease.

"What's the difference between 'whee' and 'wee'?"
"Well, 'w' is a voiceless bilabial fricative."

*silence*

Of course, one wouldn't need to use that ability too often. It's just cool to know that you can do it. (A parallel here is that there are people who learn to kill people with bare hands. It's not like they'll be using it, but it's just cool to know that they could if they want to.)

Speaking of sounds, here are a few tongue twisters for Singaporeans! Apparently they are not difficult for the British.

The Dentist's crisps fell into the wasps' nests.

Three thousand two hundred and thirty three twee thistle trees.

Red Loli Yellow Lorry (repeat)
_______

I've been wanting to blog about this for a long time, but I've never gotten down to it.

Some songs are made of long strings of nouns and adjectives. In my opinion, songs like these are demanding to be parodied. Examples include "Once upon a December" and "My favourite things"(in The Sound of Music).

I didn't blog about this before because I haven't thought of how to parody them yet. I would need some help.