Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

My co-worker and I were composing an email today. He was writing and I was watching over. When I pointed out to him that he wanted to write “vacation” instead of “vocation”, he argued that if the word was wrong, the spellchecker would have underlined it in red. Since I was 99.9% sure that I was right, I aked him to double check.

It turned out that both “vacation” and “vocation” are legitimate words. But what surprised me was that their meanings were almost opposite.

“Vacation” has to do with resting and spending the time nicely. “Vocation” has to do with hard work. If you don’t believe me, check the definitions in the dictionary. Here are the words in Dictionary.com : vacation and vocation.

P.S.: And I was right.

I almost forgot how much fun it can be to have different versions of compiler/interpreter between production and development servers. Even more fun is forgetting which of the two machines is running an older version.

Until now I’ve been using http://www.rambler.ru/dict for all my translation needs. I realize that it might not at all be the best out there, but it is was good enough. I wanted something fast and simple. No need for phrases, just quick word translations from Russian to English, and back.

I think I’ll be switching to http://lingvo.yandex.ru now. It is also a good enough alternative. And fast enough. It also takes care of the greatest annoyance I have with the Rambler dictionary - language switching. When asking for the translation, I think, it is pretty obvious which language the original word is in. So, if I type ‘muse’ and ask for the English/Russian translation, it is obvious that I have typed an English word and I want thus a Russian translsation. For some strange reason, with Rambler, I had to specify. But I would have minded it aswell, if not the ugly interface. Check it out. What is the problem? Well, the language switch is after the submit button. That’s inconvenient.

I’ve been coping with this for far too long. Enough!

P.S.: Yandex dictionary has another nice feature - it shows the meaning of the word in other languages too. Educational.

If you ever were, are, or will be thinking about learning Japanese language, you should read this small essey on the subject. Even if you are not going to think about learning Japanese, you should still read this essay, because, I am telling you, it is one of the funniest things I’ve read in recent years.

The only Japanese that I “know” is “Kuma yo oyabun?” which supposedly means “Who is your boss?”. It was translated by some unknown guy into Russian from English subtitles of some American action movie of the 80s. That is one reliable source.