The Devil’s In The Duo…

Sunrise looking north this morning.

…Lingo, that is. I got my annual stats from Duolingo. I was very happy to see that I learned a beastly 666 new words. While on words, I thought I would share my latest weekly stats from Grammarly, also. Besides, it bugs the heck out of me that they are tracking all my writing, besides correcting my manifold mistakes, but that’s what you have to do to be checked out, I do find the stats interesting.

I have given three papers at conferences about how natives of north-central New Mexico have a very unique vocabulary and word usage. I am a native of north-central New Mexico, and my weekly Grammarly stats always report that one-third or more of the words that Grammarly checks in my musings it consider them to be “unique words”. They must count many of the same words as unique each week because I know I can’t be coming up with 1,800 to 2,000 new and unique words each week. Last week, I seemed to have gone all out as Grammarly reported I used 3,387 unique words out of 9,656 of my words it checked. With my numb fingertips, I make a lot of mistakes, the reason I have Grammarly to watch over my words and probably another reason so many end up as unique.

Given my consistency in the number of unique words used each week, it supports my thesis that natives of north-central New Mexico have a unique vocabulary. However, I would need to have a large sample of word usage stats from many different north-central New Mexicans to really show that my thesis could hold any water from the Rio Grande.

A collage of my Duolingo and Grammarly stats with comments by Silver, Spunk and Gwendolyn.

While on words, there’s always the issue of Acronymphomania!

So Wired!

Mustang Hazel

A new horse in Sara’s corral next door called me over to meet her at the fence last night while I was out photographing the moon under Venus. She is a sweet horse, and really adorable with her bangs and banded main. Sara said her name is Hazel and that Hazel is a mustang rescued from a horse auction as a foal. Hazel seems forever grateful to be saved from the auction block, and she was being a good neighbor greeting me.

Jake & The Bass

I ordered an Ibanez multi-scale 5-string bass in the middle of August. I just got it last week. I was thinking the fanned frets on the fingerboard would help my poor arthritic fingers. Why not get a fretless bass, you might ask? I did consider that, but I like having frets. I’ve been practicing with it and I finally got time to record two new songs this weekend. The one I recorded today I’m calling “The Bass” and I put it together with video of Jake chasing a stick and rolling in the dirt. It’s a jazzy piece. The other song I named “Black Widow” is very hard and dark. I don’t have a video for it unless I do a visualization. I’ll post it at another time after I figure out if I’ll at video or go with the audio.

The multi-scale fingerboard is a lot easier for me to play and my fingers and hands are not hurting or swollen beyond normal after hours of playing and recording. I played the Ibanez multi-scale 7-string guitar on the recording.