Casual Fridays 1/18

#hashtag

At the end of every year, the American Dialect Society has a Word of the Year contest, where it crowns a word or phrase with the notable title. The contest is done in fun and is not meant to introduce a new word to the language; rather, it is meant to acknowledge words or phrases that have become extremely culturally relevant within the past year. The 2012 Word of the Year was hashtag, which won out over YOLO, Gangnam Style and fiscal cliff. As self-appointed guardians of proper and correct language, we of the news industry are horrified and offended to see such abhorrent degradations of language acknowledged by academics. Alternatively, we suggest another option for Word of the Year: disgust, as in, “The belief in YOLO as a word disgusts us.”

50 shades of pasta

A dish from the Cheesecake Factory ranked at the top of The Center for Science in the Public Interest’s annual “food porn” list, which compiles the restaurant dishes with the highest amount of calories, fat, sugar and sodium. This year, Cheesecake Factory’s Bistro Shrimp Pasta made the top of the list, with more than 3,000 calories and 80 grams of saturated fat per serving. Finally, an explanation for the serious Post-Cheesecake Factory-Driving Syndrome, in which drivers are forced to awkwardly adjust their seats in order to accommodate newly acquired bloating.

Alive! It’s alive!

Most of us know the plague as that gross disease we tell professors we had when we actually missed class because of a hangover or sleepiness. But the bubonic plague is a very real disease, and is unfortunately not relegated to history books and Monty Python movies or the way that most of us learn history. According to an article in NPR, research done in Algeria, Libya and India shows that the plague virus has reactivated for unknown reasons, and it has been circulated by rats and squirrels. Luckily for us, we don’t have any squirrels — and hopefully peregrine falcons don’t harbor the plague.

Miss Understood

A former teacher at a Cincinnati public high school is accusing the school district of discriminating against her because of her phobia of young children. Maria Walther-Willard had been teaching French and Spanish at Mariemont High School until the school transitioned the French program to an online format. After that, the district transferred her to teach at a middle school. Walther-Willard, who claims to have a rare phobia of young children, retired because her blood pressure levels were allegedly out of control because of her exposure to young children. If we develop rare and serious phobias of professors and authority figures, can we drop out of college?

Faux-bama

Pennsylvania detectives are trying to determine how a voter from Butler County, Pa., which is north of Pittsburgh, managed to register to vote as Barack H. Obama. Apparently lying on voter registration forms could be considered a felony. Finally, the only possible compelling evidence for a voter ID law. Touche, Gov. Tom Corbett.