hapax legomenon

Where is Burke when you need him? Which Burke? James Burke of course.

Here is a man who puts Johnny Cochran's logical progressions to shame. If Burke said angry, purple, lesbian, chinchillas were the origin of the Space Shuttle program, then you had best believe him. In fact, I believe he did say that's how it happened.

If Burke said the Internet didn't exist and I read that on his website, then it would be that much more factual.

So what is it I need Mr. Burke to do? I need Burke to keep track of what the hell I was doing a few minutes ago. Burke is likely the only one who could research my dysfunctional thought process that started with a topic for today's blog entry and ended up with the phrase: "hapax legomenon".

So in a Connections-esque blog entry for the day we start with the Democratic Republic of Congo. A nice enough place, but in fact home to the deadliest conflict since World War II. While one may surprised to learn this, especially with it's neighbors of Sudan and Rwanda and their mastery of genocide, Congo has been passed around by Dictators, Superpowers, and Colonialists - leading it to it's present station.

In a short modern history, Congo was a Belgian Colony until 1960. They repackaged themselves in 1971 as Zaire. They went through much turmoil and turnover until a series of wars beginning in 1996 until July of 2006 (now referring to themselves as Congo Classic) when they held their first free elections since Belgian Independence.

Every good new administration needs a cabinet. You need a minister for this that and the other thing. The other thing just happened to be Trade.

Enter Andre Kasongo Ilunga. This guy is the bomb. He's 34 and excellently qualified. Nothing hidden in his background. No previous positions on issues to raise a stink. No illegitimate children. No major financial interest in Enron, Haliburton, or Disney. He's never smoked a cigar so we don't have to worry about Monica.

In fact, he is the perfect man for the job. He will never do anything along the Gaff-line, because.. well because he doesn't exist. That could be a problem for some. I think he's perfect though. He won't ever lie to anyone about what happened.

You see, Ilunga was the creation of Honorius Kisimba Ngoyof. He wanted the job. But the rules required the party provide two candidates. So Kisimba creates Ilunga as the second option. Surely they wouldn't pick Ilunga over him.

You can make the argument that this is "gaming the game". Within a framework of rules and norms there may be undefined conduct. This conduct is neither legal and allowed or illegal and disallowed. In fact gaming the game, generally is a means to end where the action adheres to the rules but was an abortion of a mechanism intended to inhibit some other action.

Next, gaming the game lead me to Google Bombing. The practice of doctoring a web page so it ranks higher in search results. Its quite a sport. Imagine searching for Chevrolet where the top 25 results were Ford pages.

Not far removed from the Google Bomb is Googlewhack or Googlewhacking. You enter a query into the search engine of 2 words. Both words must be in the search engines repertoire. A successful Googlewhack returns only one result. ( http://www.googlewhack.com/rules.htm )

This brings us to the hapax legomenon. A googlewhack is the miserable progression of such a thing.

From Ancient Greek ‘(something) said only once’. Noun. A word occurring only once in a given corpus. There is a lovely technical term for a word that appears once in a body of text: a hapax legomenon (plural: hapax legomena), Greek for “once said.” The term comes from philology, the study of old texts. — Steven Pinker, Words and Rules page 172.

It's Shakespeare's fault. Ask Costard about Honorificabilitudinitatibus. Better yet, ask Burke. It's something to do with the aforementioned chinchillas.