Hey there! You’re just in time for this week’s Wacky Word Wednesday, a weekly celebration of the wackiest and most interesting words from around the world.

As the autumn chill approaches, it’s getting more and more difficult to stagger out of bed. There’s nothing like bare feet on a cold floor to make you want to snuggle in bed for just one more minute. (The sun’s not even up yet, so why should we be, right?)

So hopefully reading through today’s entry can help your mornings roll out a little bit more smoothly. For your health and wellbeing, this week’s wacky word is: pandiculation.

Without further ado, the definition from TermWiki.com:

pan·dic·u·la·tion [pan-dik-yuh-ley-shun] -noun the act of stretching oneself and yawning

The etymology of this word is Latin-based: pandiculari means to stretch one’s body, and pandere means to spread out. Interestingly enough, there’s an entire school of thought that’s related to this word.

Have you ever heard of Somatic Studies? In a nutshell, the belief behind this practice is that people should try to achieve self-competence and self-reliance through self-awareness in the most literal sense: becoming aware of your sensory self, or body. (Yikes, that’s a lot of selves.) To this end, the late founder of Somatic Studies, Thomas Hanna, systemized various pandiculations into what are now collectively known as Somatic Exercises.

Hey there, everyone! It’s Monday again, which means it’s time for another Monday Morning Quote, courtesy of your friends and fellow hooligans here at CSOFT. This week’s quote is by world-renowned basketball wizard extraordinaire, His Airness, Michael Jordan. In spite of once being called “God disguised as Michael Jordan” by his fellow dribbler, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan was actually too short to make the varsity basketball team in his sophomore year of high school. Oops.

I have missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot… and missed. And I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why… I succeed. - Michael Jordan

At first glance, this quote is nice and inspirational. But what does it mean, really? Is failure intrinsic to success? How can you use failure as a mechanism to succeed?

Just something to think about as you shuffle around in your bunny slippers, with a coffee mug in your fist, curlers in your hair, and a nice long day in the office looming menacingly before you. Happy Monday morning, everyone!

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Welcome back for Issue Eight of Your Own Terms, the biweekly comic about Sir Terminus: Crusader of Logic, Manly Valor, and Multilingual Terminology Management.

Click here for previous issues.

About today’s comic:

Removing my marketing hat for the moment, I’d actually like to talk about the inspiration behind today’s comic. A while back, Renato Beninatto made a reference to “All your base are belong to us” on Twitter. Naturally, being a gaming geek, I was thoroughly impressed, especially because members of his (there’s no nice way of saying this, really, so at the risk of sounding ageist:) “age bracket” don’t tend to keep up with nerdy memes as much as say, Generation Xers who grew up with this stuff. That’s not always the case, obviously, but my brothers and I tend to get blanks stares from our parents whenever we refer to lame stuff on the internet. But that just goes to show that Renato’s a pretty cool guy.

Anyway, his Tweet reacquainted me with this outdated yet still hilarious internet meme, and because it’s a direct result of translation problems, I was instantly set on including it in the comic one day.

Fast forward to a few days ago when I was writing the script for this week’s comic. I went to our Head Italian Linguist for a translation of “Oh my God, it’s a full on double rainbow!”, the infamous phrase that made Double Rainbow Guy go viral on Youtube back in July of this year. To give her a bit of context, I showed her the video and, after watching it, she said, “You know, only Americans come up with crazy things like this.”

The thing is, that’s not true. I’m sure there are tons of Double Rainbow Guy-equivalents from different countries all over the web, but because native English speakers (particularly Americans and the British) are, for the most part, notably uninterested in the goings on of the rest of the world (aside from various surface-scratchings on the Discovery Channel), a lot of potentially hilarious stuff is overlooked. (For example, did you know that in China a large portion of young internet users say “Oh My Lady Gaga!” instead of OMG? Not comedic gold, necessarily—but still, it’s pretty interesting.)

In order to fix this, I went in and added a category for internet memes on TermWiki.com. I think it’s a pretty good platform for defining these memes, and doing so in a multilingual context. Because the data is interconnected so well, now my Chinese friends can understand why geeky Americans laugh when someone makes an “All your base are belong to us” reference. And my Egyptian friends can enjoy the more recently popular and delightfully ridiculous contraptions in the Troll Physics trend. From there, they can also share with everyone else some of the hilarious stuff that goes on in their respective countries and languages.

I’ll admit that, on the one hand, explaining these things runs the age-old risk of ruining the joke by trying to break down why it’s funny. On the other hand, it always feels good to be let in on an inside joke. And that’s all internet memes are, really: big, viral inside jokes.

So yeah. That’s the story behind this week’s comic. If you’ve got any funny internet memes to add, feel free to sign up for a free account on TermWiki.com and add away! As always, translations into other languages are definitely appreciated.

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Happy International Project Management Day! According to internationalpmday.org, the purpose of International Project Management Day is to encourage project-based organizations to demonstrate appreciation for—and recognize the achievements of—project managers and their teams. In celebration of this annual event, we want to highlight the achievements of one of our very own, very motivated project managers, Jo Zhang.

In this featured interview, Jo (shown on the left) talks with Melissa Taing (right) about the challenges of managing localization projects, how to overcome them, and then makes some suggestions on how we can all better express appreciation to the PMs that we work with every day in our industry.

Born and raised in Beijing, Jo Zhang has lived in the capital of China most of her life. After graduating from university in Qingdao, where she majored in English, Jo worked in client and account management for Apple before joining CSOFT as a project manager, where she has provided exemplary service for the past three years.

When not playing e-mail tag with translators, Jo enjoys hiking and traveling. She also loves trying out new cuisine, but will always return to an unwavering love for spicy food. Her positive energy and optimistic outlook on life is nothing short of infectious. Enjoy!

Welcome back, everyone! We hope your November has started off on the right foot. For those of you who celebrated Halloween with costumes and festivities, we’ve decided to continue in the same imaginative vein with this week’s Wacky Word Wednesday.

For your reading pleasure, today’s wacky word is: batrachomyomachy.

(Don’t freak out at the amount of syllables—this is a good one.)

The definition from TermWiki.com:

Bat·ra·cho·my·om·a·chy [bæ-trê-kê-mI-'om-ê-ki] -noun A fight over nothing; a storm in a teacup.

We know we’re betting against fleeting attention spans here with this monster of a word, but the etymology is pretty interesting if you choose to stick around. Batrachos comes from the Greek word for “frog,” whereas myo in Greek originates from the Latin word mus, which means “mouse.” And then there’s “machia,” the Greek word for power or fighting. Hence, the not-so-epic epic poem from which this word derives, Batrachomyomachy, is translated into English as “The Battle of Frogs and Mice”. This poem is actually an ancient satirical take on how the Trojan War began from a molehill that turned into a ten-year-long mountain. (But hey, we kinda get it. We’d be spittin’ mad too if someone kidnapped our world-renowned babe-o-rama!)