James Governor's Monkchips

On The Origins of “Sporadic”

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I dropped a hint in my post about going on holiday last week when I said access to email would be “sporadic”. We went to a beautiful island called Allonisos – which nestles like a rough piece of malachite set in the crystal Aegean waters of the Sporades islands.

Electricity was down for half the day. You couldn’t flush paper down the toilets. And I didn’t look at twitter for a week.

Downtime was uptime.

According to dictionary.com

spo·rad·ic
   /spəˈrædɪk/ Show Spelled[spuh-rad-ik] Show IPA
–adjective
1. (of similar things or occurrences) appearing or happening at irregular intervals in time; occasional: sporadic renewals of enthusiasm.
2. appearing in scattered or isolated instances, as a disease.
3. isolated, as a single instance of something; being or occurring apart from others.

So the islands are probably named based on their scattered nature, rather than the other way around. But its still a lovely thing.

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