Accent quiz

eeek, I'm doing a meme! eeek!
( accent meme, cut to protect friends pages from wonkiness )

Short answer: I'm a midlander, I guess, whatever that means...

Small role for actor types

I'm posting this for a coworker.

I'll post what I was told, and if you're interested, I'll pass you a phone number.

It's a small role for a church theatre doing a show about the life of Paul. They need an actor to play the judge. Rehearsals are Mondays, Wednesdays (evenings) and Saturdays. The actor would not need to be at all rehearsals. The show will be weekends, ongoing "for as long as they can."

Political "robocalls" -- a warning!

According to this article at WTOPnews.com, many of the automated phone calls you are getting are not from the candidate they mention.

A call may start with, "I want to talk to you about [Candidate X]" and then say many negative things about the candidate, and finally identify the call's source as the candidate's opponent. The problem here is that if you are immediately annoyed by the call, you hang up after hearing the name of Candidate X, and choose not to vote for them.

So when you get these calls, be aware that you don't know who's sending them! Politicians know that they are annoying, and are playing accordingly.

pen-

I was listening to an audiotape this morning that made a comment about the word "insulate" -- noting that it means, literally, to make an island. The Latin, insula, means island. This led me to think about the word insular, and then peninsula (pen = almost, insula = island), which led me to think about the prefix, pen-, meaning "almost." I love the word penultimate, because for the longest time I thought it meant "even more ultimate, beyond the best" but of course, that's wrong, it means "almost the ultimate" or "second best" or "next to last."

Other than peninsula and penultimate, can you think of any other words with the prefix "pen-"?

Trivia question: what animal is called a "pen"?

and yes, it's cheating to use a dictionary!