By the way(side)

Notes from the word face

 (an irregular report on  work towards WVGTbk2)

Just a quickie: in my ongoing (but  increasingly sporadic...

<digression>
Good word, that – sporadic. I imagine it's got something to do with ...

<meta_digression>
Yup. Etymonline  shows how it started life as a Greek metaphor, then found its way into various Romance languages (via Latin)

sporadic (adj.)

1680s, from Medieval Latin sporadicus "scattered," from Greek sporadikos "scattered," from sporas (genitive sporados) "scattered, dispersed," from spora "a sowing" (see spore).....
</meta_digression>

 ...spore.
 </digression>

..._) trawl through words spelt with the letters *IR*, I took some time off to make an .mp3 file of my choir's next offering – Mozart's Requiem. Rather than use one of the YouTube2mp3 sites I took the old-fashioned path of recording  it through my own sound card (patching the speaker into the record socket) into some audio manipulation software I use – no doubt sacrificing some sound quality on the altar of DIY.

I've mentioned before, somewhere in this blog, the dictionary software I use, which pronounces each word as you select it. While my audio file was still doing its thing, Proceeding with my trawl I came upon a word and clicked on the little loudspeaker doofer to check that the transcription matched the audio sample (pointlessly, of course, as my patch was routing the soundcard back into  itself, but thinking isn't something I do much of when I'm in data-collection mode).

I realized what I had done when I was lstening back to the recording:

Rex tremen-STIRRUP-dae majestatis

Fortunately I learnt not to continue with this fruitless clicking, so the mp3 file does not have disembodied *IR* words scattered (sporadically – appropriate or what?) throughout .

b