Tag: Pigeons

The Devil’s In The Duo…

Timothy Price68 Comments
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!

Persistence of Pigeons Parking

Timothy Price48 Comments

Every morning during the week I park my car in the same spot as I am usually first to arrive in the parking lot. Recently, when I get out of the car, pigeons fly in and gather around me. Last week three or four would gather, but this morning 14 pigeons flew in and stood in front of me. I assume they are expecting a handout like most people I encounter early in the morning downtown. Since I had nothing to offer them other than a few words of encouragement, like Saint Frances of Assisi, I gave them a short sermon. Then I gathered my things out of the trunk of my car and headed to the office.

Fourteen pigeons hoping for a handout got a short sermon instead.

Possessive Pigeon

Timothy Price9 Comments

DSCF9861

This pigeon laid claim to the bench outside of Patrician Design and wasn’t going to give it up for anyone or anything. After I got this photograph, we had a brief standoff, which ended with me picking the pigeon up off the bench so Amanda could move the bench inside for the night. The pigeon did not fly away, but rather perched on the window ledge and flapped at the window like it was trying to get inside to the bench that it could see through the window.