what I learned googling on Bing this week

Hey, gang! What’s up?

I’m in my kitchen making some lentil soup for dinner. And in unrelated news, I decided to write a post about what I searched on the internet this week and subsequently what I learned from my googles on Bing.

saying get my goat Something people say when they are irritated by something or someone. Origins are murky, but may be related to the practice of using goats as a companion animal to help keep race horses calm before the race. If the goat was taken away, the horse would become very agitated.

google webmaster tools not verifying on my wordpress site This is true, and searching both the help forums on wordpress as well as the internet via Bing have done nothing to resolve my problems. In fact, if any situation really got my goat this week, it was this as yet unresolved trouble with google webmaster tools.

origins of the days of the week names My husband said something about them originating with the names of gods, and then I thought I had once seen a calendar where they were explained to be names of goddesses. Turns out we’re both right, they are named after gods and goddesses, which ones differ slightly between languages (some have the same origin in French/Spanish/Italian for instance, but differ in English, but some are the same).

hypertext links I wanted to make sure I had the right terminology for this. (But the explanation was really confusing, I didn’t understand much of it. So I’m back to just assuming that what I think is a hypertext link is in fact a hypertext link.) Hypertext links are pretty easy to make, yet most people are lazy and don’t use html so they go around posting links as the full web address, especially in the comments section of blogs, instead of making a nice neat hypertext link. Another thing that really gets my goat.

skinner box did he put his child in it Again, my husband said something about the researcher B.F. Skinner and how he had put his own child in his “Skinner Box”. It is a common belief that he experimented with the “Skinner box” (also called the operant conditioning chamber) by putting his own daughter in it and that she was psychologically damaged by the experience (some versions of the story even have her committing suicide), but this is all untrue. In fact she is alive today and describes her childhood as happy. He did create another invention which he called the “Air Crib” which he did use with his daughter. The misconceptions about her sprung out of an article that was written about the Air Crib, misconceptions which have unfortunately lasted to this day, 25 years after Skinner’s death. (Whoops, sorry bud, I guess you aren’t a crazy child abusing scientist-inventor after all.)

I also had to look up the definitions for these words this week.

claggy sticky, clinging mud

nexus connection/link or core/center

SMS short message service

love apple tomato (I hadn’t heard that one before)

venial (as in venial sin) one that may easily be forgiven

And I had to look up how to spell epitome, alleviate, and connoisseur.

So that’s what I learned this week! They say you learn something new every day and I sure did. What did you learn today? this week?