Joshua: “Mom, do you mind if I link my cell phone to your laptop for a sec?”
My Mom: “Why would I care?”
J: “Sorry. Just thought I should ask first.”
MM: “No, seriously. Why would I care? Is it going to cost me money? Slow down my computer? Break something?”
J: “Oh. No.”
MM: “Go ahead.”
(Note to self: take laptop with you everywhere.)
Q: “… The border can be either of the same color or shaded.”
I’m doing this post without Web searches to help my point, namely, that when one gets 95%+ of one’s news from NPR, not only does one get a skewed selection of stories (I saw a checkstand tabloid and asked my mother “Is Patrick Swayze really dying?”), one never knows how to spell anything. If I had ever read a story about the man, I might have a vague clue of how to spell the Iranian president’s name. I think I could utter (the American pronunciation of) the syllables, and I bet it starts with an ‘A’, but even that is a guess.
Sometimes, though, the misconceptions can be more fundamental. Consider the proposed environmental regulation that I kept hearing as cap in trade. This made no sense to me, if for no other reason than that politicians are rarely so forthright about the negative consequences of policies. Toying briefly with Cap’n Trade — presumably a lovable mercantile sailor with a cool hat — I saw on a blog today cap-and-trade. Oh. So, that’s like, “An upper limit on allowable discharge of pollutants by corporations, a market in which unused allowances can be auctioned, and a catchy three-short-word moniker”? That would make sense. I suppose a quick Wikipedia search would clear that up, but, again: that’s my point.
Do there exist words for the following?
Real words only, please. I’m not looking to play e-Sniglets 
Highly recommended: The Have a Word For It by Howard Rheingold (not in print?) and:
Unread (if someone wants to buy me the Kindle edition, LMK; I’ve sent the sample to Cabin Small):
OK, fine, since people are going to post smartass answers anyway, I might as well pretend I courted them
Worst. Definition. Ever.
assignation, sense 2, The New Oxford American Dictionary: the allocation or attribution of someone or something as belonging to something.
I believe that I have been reading too much dialogue between kittehs: when I saw the URL for the (sublime) doihaveswineflu.org, I pictured a photo of a hung-over-looking tabby asking “Do I haves wine flu?”
“Supreme Court Ruling a Crock of Shit”.
via The Center for Inquiry’s Twitter feed, found when they started following me. What the hell? I know I’m cool and all, but how did I get the CFI to care about my tweets?
… is small enough that one may safely round it to zero –Bob Mike
I’ll just come out and say it: I really like Spider Robinson. Misogynist, yes, but wonderful. As in what? Well, dedicating a book about a brothel to Heinlein and wishing that all prostitutes — “artists” — had a place as wonderful to practice their art as his fictional parlor.
But as embarrassed as I am to mention the book, and mortified that it will seem I’m recommending it, I have to quote a couple of lines:
[I]f there is any way that you can arrange your affairs so as to avoid dropping into whorehouse garbage from a great height, naked in February, then that is almost certainly the course your life should take.
and
A command is really just a request you don’t bother to phrase politely.
Dam furners. Lettem in and soon theyll be corupting our spellling ‘n uzing punctwation marks insted of wurds:
“The immigration issue has touched every corner of society over the past two decades in some way, and this particular segment features experts’ commentary about immigration’s affect on critical issue facing the country … With our economy struggling, border violence reaching a tipping point & our natural resources beginning to dwindle the immigration issue is too important to our society to be ignored!” — The Federation for American Immigration Reform
During the campaign, BBC anchors were pronouncing candidate Obama’s name as “barrack OH-bahmah”. Fun. They’ve fixed this. They now pronounce his name as “Buh-RACK a bomber”. Yes, not “RAHCK”, “RACK”. In RP, foreign words, presumably to sound more foreign, have a phonemes pronounced with North American short a — as in Rack. In educated NA pronunciation, presumably to sound more foreign, foreign words are pronounced with ahs — as in Rock. Listen to the BBC and NPR and compare the pronunciations of Iraq.
Of course, in RP, “Obama” does not sound like “a bomber”. That would be silly. To say “Obama”, you end it with an “r” sound. To say “a bomber”, you end it with an “a” sound. Of course. It is only we silly North Americans (and only in something like “NA RP”) who pronounce present rs and don’t pronounce absent rs. Of course.
I hope my trans-Atlantic colleagues will forgive me when I note that anglophilia will get you so far, then it will get you killed
Somehow, when I wasn’t looking, it looks like we’ve lost some irregular conjugations of “to thrive”. Whereas I would say “The economy throve on foo, and has thriven on bar ever since”, educated people, including plenty of analysts on NPR, are saying “The economy thrived on foo, and has thrived on bar ever since.”
Linguists are well past being prescriptive, and are now descriptive, grammarians, bestselling books be damned. And many of my word choices are affectations, or at least began as such — using constructions such as these are they more or less self-consciously. But this isn’t one of those. It’s not even a wincer, like “heighth” is. It is simply as natively jarring to my ear as “He goed to the store one day, and has goed every day since.” OK, so, fine, do away with irregular verbs — it makes English far easier for learners, and who gives a whit about Old Norse — but, real question, when did we lose the past conjugation and past participle of to thrive, if indeed we have?
Paging Jordon.
Too precious not to quote:
don’t give your info to scam/phishing sites. these are generally easy to spot if you’re not cognitively impaired, like many American’s
(I was going to begin this post “O quantumcipher! Although you are not here with us today, …” but I didn’t think that was funny enough.)
United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 … was passed in November 1967, after Israel had occupied Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Sinai and Golan, and it emphasizes “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” and calls for “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict”.
Readers who know the problem here will be joined by those who will immediately pick it up. The Israelis say that they are not required to withdraw from all the territories — because the word “all” is missing and since the definite article “the” is missing before the word “territories”, its up to Israel to decide which bits of the occupied territories it gives up and which bits it keeps.
In related news, I was just given a parking ticket! Can you believe it? Yes, there was a sign that said “No parking”, but I told the cop that I didn’t park there on Wednesdays or Thursdays! Just Saturday! When I was not parking on Wednesdays, I was indeed not parking!
Egads.
A perennial favorite on mcgees.org, almost as long as there has been a mcgees.org, is the mangling of Christmas carols and poetry by taking them through translation paths in Babelfish. In this stretch of time, automatic translation technology has progressed to the point at which it’s not really funny any longer. Here is the traditional Narcotic Period path for “Twas the Night Before Christmas”, this time using the fantastic Google Translate:
“That was on Christmas Eve, when the entire house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;Stockings were hung by the chimney with care
In the hope that Saint - Nicholas soon would be there;The children were all located in drag their beds,
While visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads;
Mother and her kerchief and I in my cap
Recently installed for a long winter nap,
If the lawn, as a tire noise,
I jumped out of bed to see what is wrong.
Through the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw the chassis.
The moon within the snow
He gave the brightness of midday to objects below,
If my eyes should appear,But a miniature sleigh and eight reindeer,
With some “old driver so lively and quick,
I knew that at one time must Saint - Nick.
More than eagles his courses came Jenny,
He whistles and shouted and called them by name;
“Now, Nob! Now, dancer! Now Prance and Vixen!
On, Comet! on Cupid! And Blitzer!
For the upper balcony! at the top of the wall!
Well, the difference Dash! Dash away! Dash away all! ”
As dry leaves before the wild hurricane fly,
If it is an obstacle, mount to the sky,
So, for that high-flying home courses,
With the sleigh full of toys, and Saint - Nicholas too.And then in a twinkling I heard on the roof
Pawing rampant and in every small town.
Since I drew my hand and became,
The chimney Saint Nicholas came with a bound.
He was dressed all in fur from head to toe in
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A pile of toys he referred,
And he seemed a lot peddle its opening.
His eyes - as Valentine! Dimple, as his merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His beautiful mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard of its development is so white with snow;
The strain of a pipe held tightly in its teeth;
The smoke encircled his head like a crown;
He had a broad face and a little round the stomach,
What shocked when traveling as a bowl of jelly.
He was plump and plump, a right merry old elf,
And I laugh when I saw in spite of myself;
A wink of an eye and a twist of the head,
Soon gave me to know that he had nothing to fear;
He does not speak a word, but it was straight to his work,
Meets in the Netherlands and then with a jolt,
And with the finger aside of his nose,
NOD and the chimney rises;
I jumped on his sled, his team has a whistle,
And much all flew like a camp.But I heard him exclaim, led the first sight
“Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.”
Well, hell. Humor 0, International Relations 1. Happy Holidays.
Reading Gould just now, I ran across the word molluscan meaning pertaining to a mollusk.
This is so cool. I haven’t been so excited about an animal adjective since cygneous.
Now I have to quickly learn how to program a TWAIN driver so that I can release a Linux scanning program called MolluScan. It will, of course, need hooks into the Nautilus file browser, but I can skip having to write OCR functionality into it because no mollusk — not even a cephalopod — can, to the best of my knowledge, read.
(Yes, this is a joke.)
I just got a Spam message with the title “dixon mole expectorate interrogatory cheerleader”. I marked it spam, then had second thoughts, and thought, “I’ve got to see this one” (yes, I occasionally think in italics) and clicked “Undo”. Here are the contents:
——————————
dukedom tombstone sisal? bygone, tombstone dixon.
lawmen upperclassmen bygone materiel cheerleader tombstone, barr
dukedom interrogatory cinematic quill built.
footpad man mole
barr academia univariate? circumstance, speck materiel.
montpelier barr built cromwellian litton espousal, barr
footpad allow retiree montpelier sisal.
crater toady man
campsite quill dukedom? sisal, bygone vertebrate.
lawmen cinematic.
——————————
That’s it. No link, no misspelled drug name, no implication that I should be worried about the size of any of my body parts, no comma-plus-an-exclamation-point to render it in the imperative. Just that aphasic string. For what? Channel testing? List pruning? Anarchy? Better ideas?
I’m looking for someone who can do some simple, short translations from English into Scottish Gaelic. Fluent speakers, please, preferably Scottish (rather than Canadian). I can pay you or, preferably, if you have a freelance translation service, I can give you a free ad on this site — one year for every 15 minutes of translation time on your part.
Can anyone help?
There’s an eBay lot that I really, really want. The auction closes in less than one hour (4:40 a.m. PDT is probably some sensible time in Johannesburg, where the seller resides), and the bidding is at 14% of my high bid. I would love to get this lot for 14% of my high bid.
I can’t sleep, as you can probably tell, so I’ve been fiddling (they call it a “one tweak loop” in computerese) with the sidebar. Let me know what you think — if you can tell the difference.
Firefox did not complain about the word “computerese”. Wow.
The PowerSquid, one of the most clever products in history, is now available with a <1 nanosecond response-time, 540 joule surge suppressor. List price is $34.95; the store Affordable Home Electronics has* it for $9.44 and low shipping.
* Happy, Dave? I arranged the sentence so that I could use a singular verb.
Do you think we could ask Gmail to put a really unlikely names filter into their program? I just don’t get legitimate email from anybody named Redler Sanbrough, Pinn Copping, Metter Vittetoe, or Britschgi Buren — not to mention Rainwaters Risby (if you’re writing a TV pilot, feel free to steal that one). It’s obvious to me that the software is just picking a random first name and a random last name. Why can’t it be obvious to Gmail?
(Because that essentially racist NLP, one of the relatively few things that you both can’t and shouldn’t do. Dumbass.)
Reminds me of the hilarious joke (so many levels to the humor): If Muhammad is the most common first name in the world, and Chen is the most common family name, why do you meet so few people named Muhammad Chen?
Poor ain’t. I’ve never said it but in jest. Though it is thoroughly dialect-related, accepting dialects (with the possible exception of rock lyrics that need one syllable contractions) are dismissed as the rantings of the uneducated and poor.
We have spots for most negating contractions in our language. Except the first person continuous of to be. There, we would logically have amn’t. But that’s really tough to say. Ain’t could save the day[, as it was originally meant to] .
But ain’t doesn’t stop there. It creeps into second person and third person formations, replacing the usable aren’t and isn’t. Now, to be is a miserably irregular verb, and maybe it’s in some need of polishing. And since in English, second person and third person are modified by names or pronouns (Joshua, you, he, she, it), there is no confusion. “I ain’t who you think I am.” “You ain’t who I thought you were.” “He ain’t who he claims he is.” No ambiguity. Useful word.
But ain’t doesn’t stop there. It, bizarrely, replaces hasn’t and haven’t? No? How about “He ain’t been here in three weeks?” Right? But try as I might, I have not been able to construct a sentence in which ain’t is ambiguous, even in this hugely expanded sense. Ain’t in this case is always (as far as I can see) followed by a past participle, while the others are not. I’d like to be proven wrong here.
But ain’t doesn’t stop there, either. More to the point, ain’t don’t stop there neither. It is almost always accompanied by a munged form of doesn’t (poor, sweet doesn’t, who never hurt anyone!) and a double-negative, which we all know don’t make no sense.
But is ain’t, properly used, salvageable? Be my guest. I cannot help, at this point, because it is unsalvageable while one is on the job market. And that, socioeconomically, just about says it all.
Other uses of ain’t? Other thoughts?
Chain Link 2. You are reading this bottom-up, right?
This, too, was going to be one sentence in the following post, but it also grew out of hand.
It’s reasonable, I think, for people to be able to choose the words applied to them.
I grew up a gaijin. That’s a Japanese derogatory racial epithet for foreigners. What would I have preferred? Well, I don’t really like American, as I don’t think one nation should get to claim the name of two continents containing 22 countries. Westerner would have been OK. Something descriptive, like he’s a U.S. Citizen would probably be best.
I weigh close to three bills. That’s 21 stones if you’re British, 133 kilos if you’re from anywhere else, and two million grains if I’m fated to encounter an ungloved Midas. Obese is unpleasant. Morbidly obese especially so. “Big Guy” is not a charming nickname (Bob Mike, do people call you “Slim”? Do you like it?) I prefer large.
I’m an atheist. Calling me agnostic is likely to get you sneered at. Calling me a Bright is liable to get you bitch-slapped. Naturalist is comfortable. Rationalist and Freethinker feel nice, but I imagine are offensive to many people, because they imply that if you rationally and freely thought about things you’d completely agree with me. So I stick with atheist.
Now I’m venturing into unknown territory. If I had very dark skin, I think I would still hate African-American. It’s clunky. It wrongfully suggests that all dark-skinned people are from Africa, which has to annoy Australians, yes? And aren’t all Americans really, originally, African? I think I’d like black, or even Negroe, with an e and capitalized.
I’m heterosexual. That’s a fine term as far as I’m concerned. I loathe straight (what’s the opposite of that?) But if I were homosexual, I think I’d prefer gay (whether a man or woman.) I know several practicing bisexuals, at least one of which self-describes as queer. I think that’s mostly affect, but egads. You’ve got to help me, people. It this one of those rescued epithets, like nigger, that the “in” crowd is allowed to flaunt and outsiders can be murdered over?
But most sincerely — and this is my ultimate point — if I were significantly shorter in stature than the average person, I strongly believe I would like almost anything more than little person. That sounds so bloody condescending to me. Maybe not midget, but what — what? — is wrong with dwarf?
This will be relevant in Chain Link 3.
Um, wow? Did Gmail just double its disk quota overnight? It’s showing a 6341 MB, and I would have sworn it was about 2800 MB a few days ago. I’m back down to 26% utilization, and hoping against hope that the quotas continue to grow faster than my email volume (I’ve already turned off every mailing list that’s being archived on a website, as that was quickly creeping up on the quota.)
Also, I’m very surprised that quotas is the plural of quota, and not quotae or something.
Encountered online. It mostly sounds like English:
Reason for READ NFO is, during the feed there was a minor blimp. IT is not a encoding glitch. There is no reason for a proper over this, even tho we expect KYR or aAF will find a lame reason to proper 12 hrs from our pre time.
“Its translucent color so alluring and taste and aroma so gentle and mellow offer admiring feelings of a graceful lady. Enjoy soft and juicy Kasugai Muscat Gummy.”
From a Snapfish email:
Add fun mystery text and a photo to a puzzle for you’re a loved one (will you marry me? and photo of a ring)
This does actually mean something. At least if you insert a comma after ‘puzzle’. And some quotation marks. And maybe a colon. Just nothing like what they intended.
It Figures, from In Praise of Argument. Jay Heinrichs reveals rhetorical tricks and pitfalls in the news. I guarantee you’ll love it. (Quick: What technique is that?)
(This edit is to see whether Dave’s host does trackback verification on his posts.)
As usual, I will quote from Michael Quinion’s irreplaceable World Wide Words column, this time from issue 348 (Saturday 5 July 2003):
“English, whatever its other merits, has as many disparaging words
as one would possibly desire. The example that follows is from Sir
Thomas Urquhart’s 1653 translation of Rabelais’ work Gargantua and
Pantagruel, a translation that draws heavily on vocabulary used in
Scotland in his [Urquhart's] time:
“The bun-sellers or cake-makers were in nothing inclinable
to their request; but, which was worse, did injure them
most outrageously, called them prattling gabblers, lickorous
gluttons, freckled bittors, mangy rascals, shite-a-bed
scoundrels, drunken roysters, sly knaves, drowsy loiterers,
slapsauce fellows, slabberdegullion druggels, lubberly louts,
cozening foxes, ruffian rogues, paltry customers, sycophant-varlets, drawlatch hoydens, flouting milksops, jeering
companions, staring clowns, forlorn snakes, ninny lobcocks,
scurvy sneaksbies, fondling fops, base loons, saucy coxcombs,
idle lusks, scoffing braggarts, noddy meacocks, blockish
grutnols, doddipol-joltheads, jobbernol goosecaps, foolish
loggerheads, flutch calf-lollies, grouthead gnat-snappers,
lob-dotterels, gaping changelings, codshead loobies, woodcock
slangams, ninny-hammer flycatchers, noddypeak simpletons,
turdy gut, shitten shepherds, and other suchlike defamatory
epithets; saying further, that it was not for them to eat
of these dainty cakes, but might very well content themselves
with the coarse unranged bread, or to eat of the great brown
household loaf.”
Have fun working all of these into casual sentences, or just tracking down the meanings of all these insults. I’ll get you started: a sychophant-varlet is a servile, flattering servant or rascal. A blockish grutnol is a dull, lazy person.&nbp; A woodcock slangam is a lanky person as dim-witted as a pheasant (Google for slangam and you encounter a fascinating academic paper entitled A cultural-linguistic study of English sound-symbolic pejorative lexemes beginning in sl- and du-. As long as you have your dictionary out already, it’s worth a read: just look for definitions that begin ‘Ling. -‘.) A doddipol-jolthead seems to be a blockhead-blockhead, which suggests that there has been a great deal of linguistic compression of various insults into fewer terms. I have the misfortune of encountering quite a few drunken roysters (revelers), drowsy loiterers, and jeering companions, and I am commonly treated as a paltry customer, although less frequently since the local Wherehouse Music stores have closed. I have been mostly able to avoid staring clowns and forlorn snakes. Just apply some effort: I’m sure you can work shite-a-bed scoundrel into today’s conversations with minimal effort.
The source work for these words, Gargantua and Pantagruel, inspired the English word Gargantuan, which is defined by one source as “Characteristic of Gargantua, a gigantic, wonderful personage; enormous; prodigious; inordinate.” The author, François Rabelais (1494-1553), has also given rise to an English word, Rabelaisian, used to describe wildly obscene humor (take, for instance, Gargantua’s discussion of how best to wipe one’s arse, the final decision being the neck of a live goose, leading me to wonder if a few centuries will turn South Park into fine literature.) If this is intriguing to you, BookFinder lists a range of copies of Gargantua, from a $0.50 Penguin mass market paperback to a charming 1708 octavo edition, containing the translation above, in calfskin with gilt lettering for £1100 (about $1800.) If you beat me to it you can have a $50 limited edition on hand-made paper; I’m checking to see if it contains Urquhart’s translation.
Newspapers have been having fun with the name of the Web site set
up by the British energy firm PowerGen, which is investing in Italy
and has created the wonderful www.powergenitalia.com (it is a real
Web site, I can confirm, though not always easy to access). But you
might prefer instead www.crotch-partnership.co.uk, which isn’t what
you’re thinking it is, unless you know it’s a firm of solicitors in
Norwich. Another odd one is http://www.whorepresents.com, at which
you can find an actor’s representative.- Michael Quinion, World Wide Words, Issue 347 (Saturday 28 June 2003)
Note added 09 July 2003: Michael Quinion has issued a correction to this bulletin, as has a mcgees.org reader. PowerGen has nothing to do with the powergenitalia site, which is rather associated with an Italian firm selling specialized battery products. More information at Snopes.
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