I missed the part of the broadcast about "Gary never worked here" after jury-rigged, jerry-built, etc. (Was canceling a dental cleaning due to sleet.) I don't know if this sheds any light or enlarges the subject, but Elbridge Gerry of Marblehead MA (as in gerrymander) pronounced his name like Gary. [Wikipedia: Elbridge Thomas Gerry (pronounced /ˈɛlbrɪdʒ ˈɡɛri/) (July 17, 1744 – November 23, 1814)]
Seven letters for "source of relief?" I went off on a geological tangent: "erosion".
I wonder if anyone who actually has a cat hesitated even a moment over four letters for "sound elicited by an electric can opener".
I can't believe Unicode 6 includes Mayan. It's logosyllabic, most signs are logograms, there are hundreds of them, many are undeciphered, and what is more, no one uses it today. All over the world there are maybe one hundred people who can read Mayan glyphs. Why would anyone bother to include it in Unicode?
While it seems a bit of a flight of fancy to include Mayan in Unicode, there have been amazing breakthroughs in the writing system since the 1970s and 80s. The writing system is almost completely understood. There are over 750 000 speakers of Mayan languages living in Mexico today (according to INEGI), and more and more of them are learning the writing system.
Mayan writing
Books on Mayan writing
A fun interactive on Mayan by PBS.
INEGI
On the other hand, today's Maya dialects are in a similar relationship to the Classic Mayan (which used glyphs as the writing system) as contemporary European languages to Latin. They come from the common source, but for the last 1000+ years have developed in many various directions. So I think that the Mayan fad will be rather short-lived and will finish at Christmas 2012 when nothing happens 🙂 Then only fanatics like me will keep on studying Mayan glyphs 🙂