Apostrophe means that the previous consonant should be softened when pronounced.

Avos'ka used to be a very popular item in a household. It didn't take much space, so you could always stick it into your purse or pocket. "Avos'ka" is a derivative of the word "Avos'", and it would mean "just in case", were it considered translatable. It was not. Too much national pride was invested into this ingeniously designed bag, to admit that the semantics could be easily shared with the rest of the mankind. Another possible translation is "let's hope we'll be lucky".

The primary destination of "avos'ka" was to embrace whatever treasures a Soviet citizen could meet on his path to the bright future. The idea behind communism was to replace chaotic and uncontrollable forces that drive capitalist economies with rational, scientifically and precisely calculated ones. Well, either precision wasn't precise enough, or data entry girls kept on to mistype data, but there always was something that just wasn’t here. It could be forks, for example. The stories were full of teapots, spoons, plates, but there were no forks whatsoever. Or there could be pillows, blankets of all possible kinds, sizes and colors, but no single bed sheet in the whole country. Or soap. Or underwear.

It’s not that communism exterminated all these things. There were always rumors that forks were recently seen in that store on the other site of the town. Or you could mindlessly walk into your neighbor store and see -- nothing else but... but... bed sheets!

That's when "avos'ka" becomes indispensable. You don't want to spend rest of your life searching for yet another set of bed sheets, so you put in your "avos'ka" a set large enough to accommodate a garrison. You buy supplies of underwear that would dress a decent whorehouse. You buy soap enough to keep an adult elephant clean for the rest of his life.

And unless you were a totally anti-social freak, you would share this precious information with your coworkers. This means the whole department would abandon the workplace and run to the store. This was considered a perfectly valid reason to abandon the workplace. And this was the source of the ultimate intimacy that made coworkers closer to each other than the closest friends, closer than relatives. If you worked in the same place long enough, you could be sure that your buddies slept on the same bed sheets you slept, wear the same underwear, and washed their faces with the same soap you did.

From wikipedia article:

The rhetorical question mark first appeared in the 1580s and was used at the end of a rhetorical question, however it died out of use in the 1600s. It was the reverse of an ordinary question mark, so that instead of the main opening pointing back into the sentence, it opened away from it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_mark

Now its job is delegated to emoticon, in addition to 's other functions, such as to designate sarcasm. There is a problem with our current set of visual markup elements, though, and this problem is a lack of symmetry. We have means to distinguish a rhetorical question from an honest, genuine one; but there is none to mark a question as an honest and genuine, if you feel it's likely to be mistaken for rhetorical.

Turned out that the root "blog" is extremely productive. This means that lots of new words are produced based on it. (Note: I saw the term "productive" applied to auxiliary morphemes: suffixes and prefixes; not sure how correct it is to apply it to the word roots. If it isn't correct, then let's say that I use the term metaphorically.) Part of productivity stems from the fact that the last three letters of "blog" make the beginning of "logo" morpheme, providing for many interesting possibilities.

Here is my collection of neoblogisms, organized according to the elaborate classification of my own making.

Space terms
     Blogosphere
     Blogospace
     Blogiverse

     Geographical terms
           Blogaria (URL)
           Blogovia (URL)
           Blogostan

Time terms
     blogaversary (URL)
     variant: bloggiversary (URL)

The rest
     Blogalization (URL)

     Blogeny (URL)

     Blogulae
           "I've picked up the "identity" topic a dozen times today, turned it slightly, and started blogulae about identity and pseudonymity" (URL)

     Blogar "nexus of Blogar" (URL)

     Bliction
           "new fiction written in blog form "bliction" pseudonymity" (URL) via Language Log
     Blog-buster
     Blognovel (URL)

     Neoblogism

     Blogarithmical law

     Blog-spotted — this, I believe was coined by Simon Brown

     Blogo — this is my invention, unless I read it somewhere and forgot

     Blogotomy — not sure about this

     Bloglossary
           There was an attempt to collect neoblogisms but it didn't go too far and seems abandoned now. I found an interesting word there, though:
     Blogasm
           "Simultaneous blogasm: Discovering that a favorite blogger has posted something similar to your own thoughts, at almost the same time." (URL)

I just learnt that Leibniz had a spectacular idea on how to solve "legal, religious and political disagreements":

By working on a universal language Leibniz was following up on a particularly baroque idea that had also been pursued by a number of other 17th century luminaries (most notably Athanasius Kircher with his polygraphy and the a priori philosophical language of John Wilkins. Leibniz however was uninterested in the main attraction that universal languages had for other researchers, the ability to facilitate missionary activity or international trade. Instead, his main focus was upon making a mathematical language with which to perform calculations that would automatically lead to the formulation of true propositions.

If we accept the traditional definition of man as a 'rational animal', we might consider man as a concept composed of 'rational' and 'animal'. We may assign numbers to these prime terms: animal = 2, and rational = 3. The composite concept of man can be represented as the expression 2 * 3, or 6.

For a proposition to be true, if we express fractionally the subject-predicate (S/P) relationship, the number which corresponds to the subject must be exactly divisible by the number which corresponds to the predicate. Given the proposition 'all men are animals', the number for the subject (men), is 6; the number for the animals is 2; the resulting fraction is 6 / 2 = 3. Three being an integer, consequently, the proposition is true. If the number for monkey were 10, we could demonstrate the falsity of either the proposition 'all men are monkeys' or 'all monkeys are men': 'the idea of the monkey does not contain the idea of man, nor, vice versa, does the idea of the latter contain the former, because neither can 6 be exactly divided by 10, nor 10 by 6'
--- The Search for the Perfect language, Umberto Eco
via Laputan Logic

Mark Liberman called it "a really stupid idea" though.

This page has a "growing collection of book in-jokes. Little jokes that most readers won't notice, hidden in otherwise serious books". As the author explains, "The in-jokes normally hide in a book's appendices, in the index, in the "solutions" sections of textbooks, and so forth."

I picked up three items of his collection, but the whole page is worth reading!

The Java Programming Language
by Ken Arnold, James Goslingand Davlid Holmes (3rd edition, Addison-Wesley, 2000)

In the index, we find (p. 579):

IndexOutOfBoundsException: 30, 196, 210, 596

The book is only 595 pages long.

Common LISP: The Language
by Guy L. Steele (Second Edition, Digital Press, 1990)

The index also includes an entry for kludges, pointing to pages 1-971 -- namely, the whole book.

The Java Language Specification
by James Gosling, Bill Joy and Guy Steele (Addison-Wesley, 1996)

The large index of this book (pages 767 to 821) includes numerous bogus, obscure, self-referential and silly entries. In fact, there are so many of them around that a special entry indexes them! It reads (on page 788):

index entries
     bogus
            Fibonacci numbers, 783
            prime numbers, 801

Fibonacci numbers, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610

Worse still is the "prime numbers" entry, which lists every prime number from 1 to 826 (the number of pages in the book) -- 142 values, which require twenty lines.