Perfectly Cromulent Word: Difference between revisions

** The word "ass-tastic" is apparently common in their magazine.

* ''[[Look Around You]]'': Spoofs the wealth of jargon found in the world of science by making up a host of new words, including fictitious chemicals ("bumcivilian", "segnomin"), laboratory equipment ("Besselheim plate", "gribbin"), units of measurement ("billigram", "quorums per second") and many more.

** George Martin coined the same word as a humorous way of describing a recording technique to [[The Beatles]]. The technique in question is that of dubbing a track with a version of itself delayed a few milliseconds, so that different frequencies either cancel or reinforce themselves. This also plays with the brain's mechanism for locating the source of sounds, giving it an interesting psychedelic flavour that the Beatles liked. The effect is still known as "flange".

*** The effect was in use before The Beatles (though can't say for sure it wasn't Martin who named it). In those days was to set up two identical recordings on two different machines and play them in perfect sync. One then touched the outside edge of one of the tape reels to set one of the machines ever so slightly out of synch. As a flange is an older word used to mean the outer edge of something, it is thus an entirely legitimate use of the term. Presumably it was used as rimming sounded too rude even then.