NOOOO!!!! It’s MLD-III

Oh, fuck!  It’s another edition of Math Language Dissection, affectionately pronounced here as Mouldyyy. It just sounds worse and worse, doesn’t it?  RUN!  RUN AWAY!!

That’s right, if you can’t be manic, pretend like hell.  Maybe someone will believe it and let you go home from school early.  Or work.  It never actually works for me.  I have to ask, beg, plead, petition, pray, call in favors, and pay for it on the next workday , twice as hard.

I’m not a doctor but I’d play The Doctor on that show in a heartbeat.  Fuck, yeah.  I’d even shave my entire face for the role.  And that’s saying something because I fucking hate to shave.  And I also don’t think I like running much, unless it’s running jokes.  Oh, sidetracks, how I adore and detest you.  Fucking ADD (speaking of a running joke).

On the plus side, I remembered something.  What was it again?   Oh yeah, I was going to do something about a homophone.  On the negative side, this isn’t the homophone I was looking for.  Fucking Jedi mind tricks.  They supposedly only work on the weak minded…  Um…  Nevermind.  Ha, “Never  Mind.”  Well, when you either never had one or you lose yours, it’s a pretty easy thing.

I still can’t remember the two original homophones I wanted to write about, damn it.  It was a long time ago, but I remember I was going to write about these two phones that loved each other.  There was a picture at the top of this amusing and possibly informative article that made me remember homophones, written by Marc Elliott, but … Um…nevermind, no, that’s not what it was.  Ok, for you people who aren’t in grammar school any more (some of you may be in Grandma school), homophones are words that sound the same but possibly have different spellings and definitely (or definition-ally) have different meanings.

ho·mo·phone

ˈhäməˌfōn,ˈhōmə-/

noun

plural noun: homophones

1. each of two or more words having the same pronunciation but different meanings, origins, or spelling, e.g., new and knew.

   • each of a set of symbols denoting the same sound or group of sounds.

Thanks, Google.

And damn it, I’m not forgetting this time, because this time when it popped into my head, I wrote the words down before I started writing the rest of this article: Calculus.

Calculus: from Latin calculus, literally “small pebble used for counting.”  Thanks, Wikipedia.  The same article goes on to describe Calculus the way those old fashioned anti-drug people used to describe marijuana:  it’s a gateway to divergence into far worse kinds of maths.  And, if you like doing maths like some people like to do drugs, Calculus was the little pebble in your brain that started you down the path toward your personal nightmare of addition to maths, and either you’ll love the Wikipedia article, or you contributed material or a reference or two.  You know who you are.  If this describes you, get help somewhere, and if you don’t, the anti-maths people are planning to join together and stage an interval-vention.  Because a mind is a terrible thing to waste.

Don’t start unless you’re prepared to face the inevitable con-sequences:  Calculus is like a rock in your head that acts as a gateway to further rocks in your head.  Damn, my mum was right, I DO have rocks in my head!

Calculus is a homophone for Calculous, an adjective that describes teeth that have tartar, or (another homophone) calculus, (see also, homonym (where two nyms love each other, right?)) built up and tightly attached to them.  Scary, isn’t it?

Didn’t I tell you to fucking run?!

One kind of calculus is when you suffer from a hard, irritating, slow buildup that can occur over time and period-ically requires a doctor to intervene and help you understand how best to handle it.  And the other is a serious dental problem.  Both are problems requiring a solution.

Yeah, probably the best solution is to scrape all that off, no matter which calculus you suffer from.  Oh, shit.  I just realized, they’re kind of the same  thing, aren’t they?

Never mind.