14 September 2006

I won! I won! I won!

I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won! I won!

Join me in a little dance!!

I can't believe it, but I really won Cookie's wordy post contest!!!

Go see the full results here.

I thought Laura from Magniferous would win, though I did have some hope of winning second prize for most pretentious post (7 years in academia will do that to even the nicest person, really!). But I won first! And it seems to be due in large part to my use of the word "hosieric," which, I confess, I made up. I did not, however, make up the word "frigorific." It's totally real and I plan to use it regularly from now on. While I'm confessing I might as well also admit that until coming across them in a list of "SAT words," I'd never heard of "noesis" or "fusiform." The rest, though, I mostly came up with by figuring out what I wanted to say in plain in English and then staring at the ceiling and thinking, "now, how would my most ambitious Freshman writing student say this?" until I came up with something. How much fun to throw nominalizations around like confetti, when I spend so much of my time hunting them down and eradicating them!

And I love that Laura (of Magniferous, above) and I both used the word "antidisestablishmentarianism" (or a form thereof), which apparently we'd both long been saving up for a good purpose. I learned it when I was working on my 4th grade newspaper, "The Harrington Grindstone," and my friend and I were in charge of polling people all over the school as to what they thought the word meant, and then we published all their answers along with the real definition, which we put into our own words in a way I still remember exactly: "it means the people who are against the people who are against the government." A little shady as far as definitions go, but better than what our poll victims came up with.

So, see, you never know when what you learned in 4th grade is going to come in extremely handy!

Because, folks, I WON FREE YARN!!!!!!

This is the prize I picked:



See Cookie's original post for the other prizes, the contest details, and links to the other entries.

It was really hard to choose between the universally fabulous prizes Cookie was offering. I mean, another one was...RED. And the third had NORO in it, which I've never ever tried, plus several other really interesting skeins that would have been great fun to experiment with. But in the end I decided the sock yarn was the most likely to get knit up soon. I've got a huge list of backlogged sock patterns I've been wanting to try (I'm working on perfecting the Priscilla Gibson-Roberts short row method now, but I want to try them all!), and sock yarn is the one area in which my stash is really inadequate, as sock knitting doesn't have nearly the same following in Russia, where I bought most of my yarn, that it does here. And it was just serendipitous that I've been eyeing the Fall VK but hadn't bought it yet.

What a frabjous, frabjous day indeed!!

6 comments:

Dame Wendy said...

Yay for you!!! Congrats!

aija said...

Congrats!! I can see how hard it would be to choose, too :)

Anonymous said...

You seriously deserved it! That post was great! Boy does Cookie ever give wonderful prizes. I should've gotten out my Thesaurus for that contest. Once I read yours though, I knew I couldn't compete.

Anonymous said...

I realize this is a bit late but congratulations! Your post was a hoot.

Hannah said...

Congrats! What a great idea for a contest!

Anonymous said...

Congrats! I thought that frigorific was made up, but that it was a fabulous made-up word. Hosieric was pure genius. Genius!