Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

In after Baud. Damn.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about it’s history.”

No one could have predicted…

Days Since JD Vance Insulted Women Across America: Zero

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

“That’s what the insurrection act is for!”

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

Consistently wrong since 2002

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

I wonder if trump will be tried as an adult.

Russia bombs Ukraine’s maternity hospitals; Republicans in the House can’t sort out supporting Ukraine.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Monday Morning Open Thread: Buckle Up for Another Week

Monday Morning Open Thread: Buckle Up for Another Week

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  6. 6.

    Betty Cracker

    According to CNN, the dance hall shooter showed up at a second crowded dance hall and was disarmed by a man who was working the ticket booth there before the killer had a chance to start spraying a crowd with bullets a second time. The man who wrested the gun away from the killer pointed it at him and told him to “get the hell out.” Thank goodness for that man’s bravery! And shame on this deeply stupid country for requiring ordinary people to confront heavily armed psychopaths with such nauseating regularity.

  10. 10.

    Princess

    Americans, or at least their press, are always obsessed with motive after these killings, as if understanding motive is going to give some clue that will stop them. It won’t. Motive is irrelevant. It’s the guns.

    that’s not to say that there aren’t hate crimes or that hate it irrelevant. But whether this particular crime was hate or terrorism or a sad ex or a crazy guy or whatever is irrelevant and a distraction.

  11. 11.

    Spanky

    Attention, Illinois jackals! Will someone please slap the shit out of your Republican-lite Senator?

    Thank you for your attention to this matter

     

    ETA I’m going to backtrack here a bit since it seems the reporting on what he said about Biden’s classified docs does not match what he actually said.

    Fooled again.

  14. 14.

    SFAW

    From skimming TPM this AM, it seems that it would be a good idea for Chris Coons to have a chat with Dick Durbin before Durbin opens his idiot yap again re: Biden docs. Until then, Durbin might need to STFU.ETA: Shakes fist ineffectually at Spanky.
    ETA2: Spanky, don’t be too hard on yourself​

  15. 15.

    NotMax

    Remember this from 2021?

    Following overwhelming support from both chambers of Congress, President Biden signed legislation Thursday that addresses hate crimes throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, with particular emphasis on the increase in violence against Asian Americans.
    [snip]
    The legislation, introduced by Rep. Grace Meng, D-N.Y., and Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, aims to make the reporting of hate crimes more accessible at the local and state levels by boosting public outreach and ensuring reporting resources are available online in multiple languages.
    [snip]
    The signing comes two days after the House of Representatives passed the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act by a vote of 364-62; all 62 votes against the bill were from Republicans. The Senate approved the legislation last month, with near-unanimous support; Missouri Republican Josh Hawley was the sole senator to vote against the bill. Source

  18. 18.

    Spanky

    @SFAW: IMO Durbin always needs to stfu, but see my addenda above. Reading actual quotes makes it look fairly benign, but I did not see the cnn segment.

  20. 20.

    Baud

    @Spanky:

    the reporting on what he said about Biden’s classified docs does not match what he actually said.

     

    Expect more misleading reporting. The media will milk this.

    The silver lining of all this is that it gives is a chance to redeem ourselves after we failed to back Hillary on EMAILZ!

  28. 28.

    NotMax

    @catclub

    Not to mention QANTAS. Okay, okay, it’s an acronym but even so often appears as Qantas.

    More on point is wild animals being sedated by a tranq gun.

  29. 29.

    lowtechcyclist

    @NotMax:

    And it’s perq.

    According to my 1982 American Heritage dictionary, if there was a battle, it had already been lost by that time.  It has an entry for ‘perk’ as a word of its own, synonymous with ‘perquisite.’  And it includes an example of its use in Newsweek

    ETA: Its entry for ‘perquisite’ doesn’t list ‘perq’ as an alternative form or abbreviation.

  31. 31.

    SFAW

    @Spanky: ​ Reading the actual quotes does soften the blow slightly, but Durbin — since he’s the Whip — should not be doing anything but ignoring the question and saying something like “TFG lied about the docs, the FBI needed to get a search warrant after NN months of stonewalling by TFG and it’s minions, and he’s STILL screwing around with the truth, and you’re trying to equate the two? GTFO until you stop carrying water for TFG and the GQP!”If I want a Dem senator to bad-mouth President Biden, I’ll talk to Manchin (and he has obliged them, of course) or perhaps Senator Sparkle Plenty.​

  37. 37.

    Chris T.

    @sab: Well, yes, but Chinese transliteration into English is its own thing. “Qing” = Ching, “Xing” = “Shing”, etc.

    (Which always makes me pronounce the street signs funny… Ped Shing!)

  43. 43.

    lowtechcyclist

    @SFAW:

    Gotta admit, I’ve never seen that particular misuse.  Just like I’ve never seen ‘perq’ in print, to the best of my recollection.  And AFAIK, I was today days old the first time I saw it as a word on a screen.

    Pedants who think they’re right insisting on a usage that’s never used doesn’t make it right either.

    ETA: Not to mention, the quarrel of the pedants is with a highly-regarded dictionary.  I’d regard the dictionary as more authoritative, but to each their own.

  45. 45.

    SFAW

    @sab: ​
     
    I still don’t understand why they switched from Wade-Giles to Pinyin. Wade-Giles’s spellings made sense, in that it uses the same phonetics with which English speakers are familiar, but Pinyin uses different letters/phonetics because why??
    [For example: “Qing” is “Ch’ing” in Wade Giles.]
    I guess the semi-official reason is that Pinyin uses only one letter and no apostrophes, but that seems like a rationalization, rather than a rational reason. [For English-speakers, of course.]

  48. 48.

    SFAW

    @lowtechcyclist: ​
     

    Gotta admit, I’ve never seen that particular misuse.

    You need to get out more, Intertubezically speaking. I see it all the time, drives me shithouse.

  49. 49.

    Chris T.

    @SFAW: Well, Peking vs Beijing, and all that. “Istanbul was Constantinople / Now it’s Istanbul not Constantinople / If you’ve got a gal in Constantinople / She’ll be waiting in Istanbul…”

  51. 51.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:

    I’m totally with you on holding the line at ‘give’ being the verb and ‘gift’ being the noun.  In general, I’m not keen on verbing nouns.  Here at the virtual office, I grit my teeth when I see ‘onboarding.’

  52. 52.

    SFAW

    @NotMax: ​
     

    Okay, okay, it’s an acronym but even so often appears as Qantas.

    Abbreviation, not acronym, hoss. But I “lost” that argument a long time ago. [Where “lost” == “lots more people (incorrectly) call it an acronym”]

  54. 54.

    NotMax

    @Dorothy A. Winsor

    Not gonna look it up again but in the past have provided several citations form the 19th century using gift as a verb. IIRC one from Queen Vicky herself.

    Would rate it as rare but correct.

  55. 55.

    Chris T.

    @eclare: Let’s impact the boutiquing by managerializing some actionable potentializationals!

    (I escaped the office a few years ago, but the scars linger…)

  56. 56.

    Delk

    The first year that Durbin ran for senator he marched in Chicago’s gay pride parade. The chants of “We love Dick” could be heard along the entire route. :-)

    in other news: some asshole sideswiped our car.

  61. 61.

    NorthLeft

    I have not seen a lot of discussion about this, but this shooter was described as a seventy-two year old, and I thought a recent mass shooter was also in his seventies.
    This seems to me to be a significant change. Seem to recall that almost all other mass shooters were much younger, say twenties to early fifties at the oldest.

  62. 62.

    SFAW

    @Chris T.: ​
     

    Well, Peking vs Beijing,

    Except “Peking” is not a Wade-Giles transcription; it’s just a poor “translation” of “Beijing.”

  64. 64.

    Matt McIrvin

    @NorthLeft: I remember looking into that a while back–actually mass shooters, that is the really big spree killers, trend older than most other types of violent criminals. They’re often middle-aged or older. *School* shooters tend to be young but that’s to be expected, it’s a school.

    The Las Vegas shooter was 64, the guy who tried to shoot up the Holocaust Museum was ancient.

  68. 68.

    Matt McIrvin

    @SFAW: The PRC standardized on Hanyu Pinyin as their official romanization scheme, and that cemented it. I think they were less concerned with readability for foreigners and more with consistency and brevity, but it might have been arbitrary to some degree.

  69. 69.

    NotMax

    Talk about algorithmic dissonance. Prime video recommendations listing Apocalypse Now alongside Henry V.
    :)

  70. 70.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Delk:

    The first year that Durbin ran for senator he marched in Chicago’s gay pride parade. The chants of “We love Dick” could be heard along the entire route. :-)

    I bet they could!

    Reminds me of satirical Nixon slogans in 1972, along the lines of “nobody can lick our Dick” and “don’t change Dicks in the middle of a screw, vote Nixon in ’72.”

  71. 71.

    Ken

    @Baud: Q without u. What the fresh hell?

    Experience the freedom of not following the 7th-century BCE practices of the Etruscans regarding the alphabetic symbols representing velar stops.

  74. 74.

    Michael Bersin

    Yesterday at noon over 50 individuals gathered in Warrensburg, Missouri (population around 19,000 if you squint) for a Women’s March and rally.

    One of the speakers ,Jessica Piper – “Dirt Road Democrat” and former 1st Legislative Democratic Party candidate, drove in from Northwest Missouri.

    The turnout was quite good considering the cold (just above freezing), the wet, and the dreary overcast. Standing at the rally in the cold for an hour or so and then trying to leapfrog the march for photos was a challenge. I’m getting too old for this…

    The younger activists pull no punches with their signage.

    Women’s March – Warrensburg, Missouri – January 22, 2023

  76. 76.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Spanky: Even shorter for the Perkwizits Hadiraq…

    (FTR in an extended session in the WC I once conceived of a long and lugubrious novel set on a world covered to an average depth of 5,76 kilometers in bovine excrement, swarming with the giant tapeworms known as Shayt-HuNu who create the great stores of smellange, and awaiting its messiah in the form of offworlder Billy Rubin who takes the name of the felch-gerbil, Merde’Dweeb, to lead his Schemen hordes to topple Emperor Sharttem Exlax from the Porcelain Throne…

    …but I figured, ehh, what junior editor’s gonna take seriously a twenty-page book proposal for something called Dung?)

  78. 78.

    Gin & Tonic

    @NorthLeft: With modern medicine, people can live longer, so septuagenarians can be just as active and vigorous as those decades younger.

    Wait, maybe I should start over…

  79. 79.

    SFAW

    @Matt McIrvin: ​
     
    Yes, I understand the reality as it currently stands, and I understand the rationalization re: why Pinyin came into existence; I just have an issue with changing a system-that-was-working-OK into something requiring counter-intuitive re-training.

  91. 91.

    lowtechcyclist

    @NotMax:

    Not gonna look it up again but in the past have provided several citations form the 19th century using gift as a verb. IIRC one from Queen Vicky herself.

    Would rate it as rare but correct.

    Since I’ve already pulled the aforementioned dictionary off the shelf, here’s what American Heritage had to say in 1982 about ‘gift’ as a verb:

    Gift has a long history of use in the sense of “to present as a gift, to endow”: He gifted her with a necklace. In current use, however, gift in this sense is sometimes regarded as affected and is unacceptable to a large majority of the Usage Panel.

    That was forty years ago. Obviously, this usage has become a lot more frequent in the past fifteen or twenty years.  And I’ve long been a believer that language is ultimately democratic, and a popular usage that persists will eventually be considered legit or even standard.  But the verbing of nouns still grates on my ears.

  92. 92.

    WaterGirl

    @Betty Cracker: Wow on the ticket booth guy.  That’s amazing.

    Apparently the only way Republicans in congress will support gun control is if they or their families are held hostage in a shooting event.

    Oh, wait, House Republicans went through the violence of Jan 6 and then after a couple of days, suddenly had no problem with it at all.

  94. 94.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @SFAW: Nice guy, but Durbin is the classic “please may I have another, sir!” Democrat. Total sad-sack. Can’t wait until he and his ilk finally shuffle off the stage and let younger Dems take the wheel.

    ETA: Agreed with others that Durbin’s ENTIRE statement is OK, but that just highlights his inability to keep the response tight and on point, without all the blather that he MUST know will get quoted.

  97. 97.

    SFAW

    Yesterday at LGM, there was a discussion re: the proper/improper use of “literally.” Someone was complaining about a tweeterer’s “incorrect” use of “literally.” Unfortunately for the commenter, the use of “literally” in the tweet’s context was probably correct. I was tempted to have Steve in the ATL weigh in, but I don’t think he comments over there.

    Yes, I’m now in trolling-mode — why do you ask?

  98. 98.

    NotMax

    @Anyway

    One word crudely appropriated into English from the foreign is a term for a type of cloth.

    In the original Persian (roughly) pronounced as the lilting shee-ahr-soo-kah. In English, seersucker.

  100. 100.

    Spanky

    @WaterGirl: Just google “durbin biden documents” and scroll through the headlines to see how “Top Democrats” have “slammed” Biden. (Manchin being another one to hit the Sunday snoozefests.)

  101. 101.

    James E Powell

    @Chief Oshkosh:

    that just highlights his inability to keep the response tight and on point, without all the blather that he MUST know will get quoted.

    This is a Democratic disease. I mean, say what you want about tenets of National Socialism the Republicans, Dude, at least they’ve got message discipline.

  102. 102.

    Ken

    @lowtechcyclist: however, gift in this sense is sometimes regarded as affected and is unacceptable to a large majority of the Usage Panel.

    A panel that votes on the acceptability of English word usage? Sounds like the National Review will need to step up their game, if they want to reclaim the right to brag about “standing athwart history yelling stop”.

  103. 103.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @Chris T.: It’s funny but can create real problems. I had a semi-boss that actually spoke, and worse, wrote like that. She just about killed our niche of the organization because she filled official documents with that claptrap, especially progress reports to leadership, even after we corrected her many, many times. Leadership damned near shut us down because they couldn’t figure out WTF she was trying to communicate to them. Thankfully and miraculously, another organization actually hired her away. Two years later we’re still cleaning up her mess.

  104. 104.

    Ken

    @WaterGirl: House Republicans went through the violence of Jan 6 and then after a couple of days, suddenly had no problem with it at all.

    The polls came in.

    (And that is not snark.)

  105. 105.

    James E Powell

    @SFAW:

    And far-too-many people use “bemused” when they mean “amused,” but that don’t make it right.

    Look what they’ve done to nonplussed!

  109. 109.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Ken:

    A panel that votes on the acceptability of English word usage? Sounds like the National Review will need to step up their game, if they want to reclaim the right to brag about “standing athwart history yelling stop”.

    You’ve correctly sniffed what is going on here. This is the American Heritage Dictionary, created as the conservative and prescriptionist response to the wicked, radical Webster’s Third New International, one of the big culture-war bombs of the 1960s.

  110. 110.

    SFAW

    @James E Powell: ​
     

    Most of the latinate words in English came via French.

    Good thing they aren’t from Latin America, then the GQP would stop those words at the border before they got here.

  112. 112.

    Baud

    @Matt McIrvin:

    the wicked, radical Webster’s Third New International, one of the big culture-war bombs of the 1960s.

     
    Now I need to look up “woke” in Webster’s.

  117. 117.

    Geminid

    My pet gripe is people substituting “morph” for “change.” That usage may be declining though.

  118. 118.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    @Chris T.: I think in some parallel dimension, Bob Howard of The Laundry just had a seizure.

    (Also, zombification via PowerPoint is a thing that happens in Charlie Stross’s Laundry Files novels.)

  119. 119.

    WaterGirl

    @Ken: Apparently Republican statesmen have gone extinct.

    Back when the Republican party was awful but not insane and authoritarian, someone saying you were putting party before country would have been an accusation to defend against.

    Now the response would be “damn straight!”

  120. 120.

    mrmoshpotato

    @lowtechcyclist:

    Here at the virtual office, I grit my teeth when I see ‘onboarding.’ 

    LOL!

    And people who “speak to” ideas are on some strong hallucinagenics.

  125. 125.

    Soprano2

    @NorthLeft: I have to wonder if he had a specific grievance against a specific group of people, or dance clubs. I agree, it seems strange for a 72-year-old to do something like this.

  126. 126.

    different-church-lady

    Whatever the fuck Durbin is in charge of, give it to Coons. Because it’s pretty freakin obvious Durbin couldn’t keep a pencil from rolling off a table.

  129. 129.

    Chris T.

    @James E Powell:

    Most of the latinate words in English came via French.

    Yeah, the kick-ass verbs are all Saxon. Then those high-falutin Normans came in and encumbered us with polysyllabic verbiage….

    (Though technically my own ancestry is Irish and German with Slavic roots so I suppose I should be saying Sláinte! and Auf Wiedersehen now…)

  130. 130.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Geminid: I think that Mighty Morphin Power Rangers had a lot to do with that. Morphing, the digital visual effects technique, was a very fashionable and hot thing in the early 1990s because it had just become widely feasible and had appeared in big movies like Terminator 2. The “Morphin” in the Power Rangers title was riding on that, but the funny thing was, they didn’t even use morphing for the transformation effects on the show. But I think it helped popularize it as a word for any kind of transformation.

    Zoologists had used “morph” for a long time as a noun for different-looking forms of the same species.

  133. 133.

    MisterDancer

    @Chief Oshkosh: Durbin is the classic “please may I have another, sir!” Democrat. Total sad-sack. Can’t wait until he and his ilk finally shuffle off the stage and let younger Dems take the wheel.

    Given that Durbin very directly moved Obama to run for POTUS when he did, I find this comment hilarious. (And from what I understand this video understates the work Durbin put in to get Barack’s ass in gear…)

    Durbin has his flaws, but he’s generally been on the side of good ideas and governance — and handing off to the next generation.

  134. 134.

    Burnspbesq

    @eclare:

    That’s an acronym?!

    I’m guessing that once upon a time, it stood for Queensland and Northern Territory Air Service.

  135. 135.

    different-church-lady

    Fine let’s do this: you don’t focus in on something. You either focus on it, or you zoom in on it.

  136. 136.

    mali muso

    @Chris T.: One of the easy shortcuts I absorbed when learning French was that you could almost always take any English word that ends in -ment or -tion, say it with a French accent and have it be understood.  Education, gouvernement, sanitation, etc.  Of course, the reverse is not always the case.  I remember getting very comfortable using the French word “ammeliorate” and then getting weird looks when I used it in my English conversation.  Technically, it’s a word in our lexicon but certainly not used everyday!

  137. 137.

    Geminid

    @Soprano2: The shooter may have been looking to gun down his ex-wife. Local ABC7 TV news interviewed a Mr. Chong, the head of the local Asian Chamber of Commerce yesterday and he said that he thought jealousy may have been a motivation. Chong also said that these dances are invitation only, and those not invited often hold a grudge over that.

  138. 138.

    Ken

    @Matt McIrvin: The “Morphin” in the Power Rangers title was riding on that, but the funny thing was, they didn’t even use morphing for the transformation effects on the show.

    As I recall, MMPR used the venerable technique of the “jump cut”. Uncostumed actors say “morphing time”, costumed ones are suddenly jumping around.  That was probably because in the English-language version, the uncostumed and costumed actors were on different continents and possibly in different decades.

    Buffy the Vampire Slayer and later Angel made heavy use of morphing.

  139. 139.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Chris T.: The odd thing is that there’s so little remnant of what preceded Anglo-Saxon Britain–there are not many words of English from the Celtic Brythonic language, which was more like Welsh or Gaelic, and not many traces of Latin dating from the earlier Roman occupation. But what we’ve got is mostly Germanic Saxon with a massive vocabulary overlay of 11th-century Anglo-Norman French. And then a lot of later borrowings on top of that.

  140. 140.

    SFAW

    @Steeplejack:

    “Qantas” is not a pre-existing word. An acronym is an abbreviation which can also be pronounced the way an existing word is pronounced. [I imagine this works in French, German, etc., but I don’t know.]

    For example, “SCORE” (Service Corps Of Retired Executives) is an acronym, because “score” is an English word. “JCAHO” (Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations) is pronounced by those who deal with it as “JAYCO,” but “jayco” is not an English word, so it’s just an abbreviation that people pronounce. [I don’t quite get how “JCAHO” gets pronounced “JAYCO,” but given Americans’ wish for stuff like that (i.e., abbreviations that you can pronounce), it is what it is.]

  142. 142.

    marklar

    @mali muso: Did you do anything to ameliorate the reac-tions (which may have reflected astonish-ment with the sophistica-tion of your lexicon)?

  143. 143.

    Ken

    @schrodingers_cat: Making an exception for the adjective as used by zoologists, I would hope.

    (Or zoölogists, since we’re talking about words and spellings going in and out of fashion.)

  147. 147.

    tobie

    I suspect this thread has ended but for those complaining about Durbin, I’d add that what really pissed me off with him is when he changed the rules two years ago so he could be both caucus whip and chair of the judiciary committee. This happened after Feinstein agreed to step aside. Durbin’s neither a sharp questioner nor a vocal advocate. The chairmanship would have gone to Sheldon Whitehouse or Amy Klobuchar if Durbin hadn’t changed the rules for his own benefit.

  149. 149.

    Steeplejack

    @SFAW:

    “Pronounced the way an existing word is pronounced.”

    I have never seen that stipulation. Do you have a source for that?

  153. 153.

    JAFD

    @SFAW: An agency of the US Navy held a contest, back in the late ’40’s, for useful new acronyms.

    The winner was “Seek Cover Rapidly – Atomic Missle”

  155. 155.

    JAFD

    To kill this thread, a reminder that today be the 23rd day of the 23rd year of this millennium.

    I am certain the Discordians amongst the jackaltariat will be suitably celebrating.

  156. 156.

    JAFD

    @schrodingers_cat: Methinks that verbing arose among Kingmaker players, back in the ’70’s.  Rules required you to assemble the ‘lucky’ heir, an archbishop or two bishops in a place with a cathedral, to “hold a coronation”, and, since that usually happened several times a game …

    (BTW, am awaiting my copy of the Kickstarter reprint edition of Kingmaker soon.))

  158. 158.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    @Chris T.

    Did Angleton go “tsk”?

    Probably, alongside some commentary about how words have power, and should not be treated in the cavalier manner of some uncouth American waving around a toy gun.

  159. 159.

    J R in WV

    @James E Powell:

    Most of the latinate words in English came via French.

    Didn’t they actually come from the Norman, after the battle of Hastings in 1066?​

    Also:

    Look what they’ve done to nonplussed!

    nonplussed = minussed? ;~)

  160. 160.

    Matt McIrvin

    @SFAW: Our main home dictionary when I was a kid was a three-volume library-bound edition of the Webster’s Third that my mother had gotten when she was working as a librarian in St. Louis. I knew it as a huge and somewhat forbiddingly technical dictionary, but I had no idea it was so widely regarded as the death-knell of civilization until much, much later.

    But, yeah. They explicitly announced they were taking a descriptivist approach to American English and would be including “ain’t” and curse words, etc. There was a huge horrified reaction to this and the American Heritage was one of the responses. There was and is a large faction who regarded the function of a dictionary as to tell you what is and is not correct English.

  161. 161.

    SFAW

    @Steeplejack: ​
     
    No, I don’t have an effing source, other than that’s been the meaning for the last 50 or 60 years, at least. In America, that is. Not sure what they do in your part of the world.

  162. 162.

    Another Scott

    @Steeplejack: Same here.

    My understanding is that laser and radar and such are acronyms (which eventually became words on their own), while FBI and KGB and the like are initialisms (since they are not pronounced as words).

    Of course, “morphing” is verbifying a noun (morphology), also too.

    At least we have moved on from “ain’t”!!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  163. 163.

    Matt McIrvin

    @J R in WV: Right. Anglo-Norman was basically a dialect of French–French has changed less in the time since than English has, so it’s much more recognizable as French than any language of the era would be as English.

    For some time after the English kings and nobility were all French-speaking, ruling over a Saxon-speaking population, so we’ve retained this idea that the French-derived words with Latin roots are usually the “fancy” ones while the Anglo-Saxon words are earthy and common. And a lot of medieval French words and phrases still appear in law: “tort”, “estoppel”, “voir dire”, “jury” (from juré, sworn) and the distinction of “grand jury” and “petit jury”.

  164. 164.

    J R in WV

    Actually, you can tell when a thread is about dead when I comment late in the thread… no, I’m not proud of that.

  165. 165.

    Geminid

    @J R in WV: I always figured you commented at the of threads because you didn’t want to get caught up in all the pointless squabbling and nitpicking the rest of us like so much!

  166. 166.

    Another Scott

    @Matt McIrvin: Similarly, I vaguely recall a story about how new fangled motorized personal transport vehicles in the US are called “automobiles” not “horseless carriages”.  Carburetor.  Etc.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  167. 167.

    zhena gogolia

    How about referring to an actor as being “decorated”? I thought that was for military heroes.

  168. 168.

    cain

    There has been a lot of tech lay offs – a lot of people with mental health issues. I hope that this shooting isn’t related to that.

  170. 170.

    Brachiator

    @Matt McIrvin:

    @J R in WV: Right. Anglo-Norman was basically a dialect of French–French has changed less in the time since than English has, so it’s much more recognizable as French than any language of the era would be as English.

    I stumbled across a few fun YouTube shorts about the history of the English language.

    There were some differences between Anglo-Norman and medieval French. And English aristocrats knew French before the Norman invasion.

    So, in some cases, two versions of similar words entered English. Ward and guardian are Norman and French derived words, for example, with similar meanings.

  172. 172.

    Geminid

    @cain: There is probably alot of reporting out now on the killer and his background now, if you want to find out. It sounds like he was retired though.

  174. 174.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Brachiator: Modern standard French comes from the dialect they spoke in Île-de-France, the area around Paris.

    The biggest split in those days was between the Northern and Southern dialects, with lots of vocabulary differences, distinguished by their word for “yes”–there was the “langue d’oïl” (north) and the “langue d’òc” (south). Modern standard French evolved from an “oïl” dialect, as you could probably guess, and the southern form survives precariously as Occitan in south coastal France, parts of Italy and Catalonia. It is apparently somewhat similar to Catalan.

  176. 176.

    TooManyJens

    @SFAW: I try not to be overly prescriptionist, but I’m pretty mad that we’ve finally given up on “literally.” Sometimes the listener can tell from context whether “literally” is being used for its actual meaning or just as an intensifier, but when they can’t, how the hell do you express that you actually do mean exactly what you’re saying? Now we need to find a different word for a concept we already had a perfectly good word for.

    (Also, a drabble is 100 words and I will die on this hill.)

  177. 177.

    Origuy

    Norman French survives in the dialects of the Channel Islands, the last portion of the Duchy of Normandy still in English hands. Each island has its own dialect, although the dialect of Alderney, Auregnais, is extinct and the dialect of Sark, Sercquais, is down to a handful of speakers. The dialects of Guernsey and Jersey, Guernéisais and Jèrrais, have a few more speakers.

  179. 179.

    Brachiator

    @Origuy:

    The dialects of Guernsey and Jersey, Guernéisais and Jèrrais, have a few more speakers.

    I associate Guernsey and Jersey more with cows than with islands and languages.

  180. 180.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @Another Scott: while FBI and KGB and the like are initialisms (since they are not pronounced as words).

    I remember a Spanish friend in the 80s being surprised that we said the name of the airline TWA as initials rather than the way they said it, as the word “twah”.

    She was also surprised that their English borrow word “footing” was not in fact an English word. (It meant “jogging”).

  182. 182.

    leeleeFL

    @lowtechcyclist: YES!  A new “word” in my workplace what we do to new employees and new Club Members!  HATE WITH GREAT, HOT, HEAPING HUNKS OF HATE!  h/t to Anne Maera, of blessed memory!

  184. 184.

    leeleeFL

    @Uncle Cosmo: I am screen-shotting? this!  I have been laughing non-stop for several minutes, and really need this available for “those” days when a laugh will prevent my diving off a cliff!  Thank you!

  187. 187.

    Ruckus

    @Betty Cracker:

    The police had a large presence at the event but there were a lot of people there – it was well attended. They had both uniformed and non-uniformed officers there. But it was an open public event. Could they have done more, of course they could have, but at least in theory we don’t live in a police state. And please don’t think that I think this act is in any way good, but in a nation this big and with this much freedom, and with the availability of guns and temps in the 50s, everyone wearing jackets, hiding a pistol is/was easy. It’s why we all go through metal detectors at the airport. Well that and the fact that a lot of humans are completely fucking insane.

  188. 188.

    leeleeFL

    @eddie blake: More chuckling!  What a great thread!  I needed much laughter; you have provided!  Forever grateful, I am!  (Keeping up with my Yoda-ese lessons!)

  189. 189.

    Ruckus

    @WaterGirl:

    Oh, wait, House Republicans went through the violence of Jan 6 and then after a couple of days, suddenly had no problem with it at all.

    It was intended to assist them staying in charge. They want power over all else. And notice that not all rethuglicans were on the side of SFB. Most maybe but not all. I don’t see the “reasonable differences” but at least they might actually exist. But many do not see the differences as reasonable, not in any way, shape or form. Because in most of today’s conservatives they aren’t.

  193. 193.

    greenergood

    Very late to thead but with regard to the kitties and the window-cleaners – I’ve seen a much longer vid of the kittehs and the cleaners – they LOVE each other and always interact each month – the cleaners love playing with the kittehs and vice versa. If I find the link I’ll post, but just thought I’d tone down the vid here today, which makes it look like the kittehs are angry with the window cleaners – couldn’t be further from the truth – Happy Lunar New Year of the Rabbit (China) and the Cat (Vietnam)!

  194. 194.

    LiminalOwl

    @Matt McIrvin: You should see my cluents’ reactions when they use one of Those Words and say “pardon my French,” and I reply that it’s not French, it’s Anglo-Saxon, and they think it’s dirty because it’s Anglo-Saxon and not French….

  195. 195.

    brantl

    @lowtechcyclist:  Read THE WRONG STUFF, by Bill “Spaceman” Lee & Dick Schaap, he hot dimpd off the Red Sox for wearing a t-shirt to rhe ball park that said “Lick Dick in ‘72!”.

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