June 8, 2005
BooYa!
Stanford students are big on word compression - reducing words to their first syllable. So Memorial Church becomes MemChu, Memorial Auditorium becomes MemAud, and Hoover Tower becomes HooTow. I think we can use this to predict politics. For instance, George Bush would become GeBu but John Kerry would become JoKe. Hillary Clinton would become HillClin, but Howard Dean would become HowDe (with Doody invariably added). Okay, maybe the analysis is not up to the standards of a MicBar, but fun for me anyway.
Speaking of John Kerry, did you notice that although his grades were ever so slightly lower than Bush's, it's always reported that they were similar or nearly identical. Would the headline have been the same if they had been ever so slightly higher? Anyway, JoKe has a good explanation of why.
Speaking of Howard Dean, maybe HowDe should just go back to the all purpose "yeaghhhh!!!" instead of saying anything else.
Posted by Kevin Murphy at June 8, 2005 1:23 PM | National PoliticsAs I recall from my Stanford University days, any single-word designation was transformed into the proper format by adding the prefix "Mem" to the name. In this way "The Claw" fountain in White Memorial Plaza became "Mem Claw". That big red hoop fountain in front of the Cecil H. Green East library became "Mem Hoop" (or less politely, "Mem I.U.D.").
Tanner Fountain in front of HooTow was the exception.
http://www.riehle.org/ageekstour/wiki.cgi?TannerFountain
For some reason the name "Tanner" never caught on during my student days, so that one was simply called "Mem Fountain" (Mem Fou?). In 1980 there was a little anometer mounted on one of the kiosks nearby (just to the left of that picture), and it was a little-known fact that the anometer was used to turn down Mem Fountain when the winds got too great and blew the water all over the street. This arrangement was probably some mechanical engineer's Master's thesis. Every now and then I would reach up and whack the little innocent-looking anometer with a stick, and marvel as the fountain suddenly died down with no visible cause. When I got back from Cliveden in 1981 I found that some killjoy had mounted a little cage around the anometer to keep bozos like me from messing with it.
Speaking of fountains, Stanford University has a great collection of them, and during Spring Quarter they provide some wonderful recreation for hard-working students. Many a game of frisbee golf has had one or more "goals" designated as some fountain a couple hundred yards away. Gotta drop the frisbee in the water to win the hole.
Sometime during the summer of 1980 John Traugott and I went for an All-Fountain Run on the Stanford campus, the goal being to swim or at least dunk ourselves in every campus fountain over the course of our jog. We imagined that this run would become an annual event for the student body, but it never caught on. There was only one fountain we couldn't get to - that little pool in the interior courtyard of the Hoover Institute. The most forbidding one was the fountain in the courtyard of Old Union.
http://www.stanford.edu/home/welcome/campus/oldunion.html
We were afraid that Dean of Admissions Fred Hargadon himself would come running out of the building and holler at us to get the heck out of the water! We bagged that one and cleared out of there pretty quickly. The rest were quite enjoyable, especially the Terman Engineering pond.
Aaah, those carefree glory days . . .
