now that's a work perk pic.twitter.com/xJ8nTB0QcB
— cats being weird little guys (@weirdlilguys) January 21, 2023
Well, what a relief https://t.co/x5xamAZ56X
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) January 23, 2023
As I said last week to @SRuhle on her show, you’re not going to have a good faith discussion of the difference between the Biden and Trump cases with Republicans who are engaged in a determined bad-faith effort to erase any distinctions between those cases.
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) January 22, 2023
Coons: "There is one important document that distinguishes former President Trump from President Biden. That's a warrant." pic.twitter.com/cyXFi69pMG
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 22, 2023
Applying the facts of what we know of both Biden and Trump's document sagas – including yesterday's consent search of Biden's residence – to DOJ's past practice yields two clear conclusions:
– Trump should be prosecuted
– Biden should not— Pete Strzok (@petestrzok) January 22, 2023
Authorities searched for a motive for the gunman who killed 10 people at a Los Angeles-area ballroom dance club during Lunar New Year celebrations. The suspect was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a van in which authorities say he fled. https://t.co/r7c56rgW3L
— The Associated Press (@AP) January 23, 2023
Biden orders US flags flown at half staff at the White House and all public buildings and grounds throughout the country until sunset on Thursday as a mark of respect for the Monterey Park shooting victims, White House proclamation says.
— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) January 23, 2023
Passage to the Year of the Rabbit pic.twitter.com/UuTantj2BC
— gregorio catarino (@gregcatarino1) January 22, 2023
On The Road – Albatrossity – Tarangire National Park – 4
OzarkHillbilly
Blech.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone😊😊😊
Low Key Swagger
@OzarkHillbilly: Is that a blanket blech, or aimed at a particular story in the post?
mrmoshpotato
Ahoy ahoy on this 22-degree morning.
mrmoshpotato
True. Silly cats.
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.
WereBear
@rikyrah: Good morning 😁
lowtechcyclist
@mrmoshpotato: Ahoy, matey!
NotMax
@mrmoshpotato
And it’s perq.
(But I’m afraid that’s a battle which has been lost.)
/pedant
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.
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.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
SFAW
@NotMax:
You, SubaruDianne, and I may be the only jackals who care. But that’s OK.
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
NotMax
Remember this from 2021?
sab
@SFAW: I care, and I admit I didn’t know that perk=perq. Now it makes sense.
Baud
@NotMax:
@SFAW:
Q without u. What the fresh hell?
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.
Steeplejack
@rikyrah:
Good morning! 🙏
Baud
@Spanky:
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!
eclare
@mrmoshpotato: That kitty’s tail! I hope his or her hooman has a laser pointer toy. One of my cats loves it.
Spanky
@Baud: It’s short for perkwisits, of course.
catclub
Iraq and Qatar. President Zia ul Haq
SFAW
@Baud:
Iraq?
I assume you know/knew “perq” is a truncation of “perquisite.”
eclare
@NotMax: You’re right! I had forgotten that, perquisite.
Baud
@catclub:
That’s coming from a non English language.
Spanky
@SFAW: Well, Notmax is right that that battle has been well and truly lost.
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.
lowtechcyclist
@NotMax:
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.
sab
@Baud: Kind of like Qing Dynasty, which is sort of pronounced ching.
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.
Spanky
@NotMax: Hmmmm. I’ve heard it often, but I’m not sure I’ve actually seen the trunqated version in print.
Baud
I’m so old I remember when people wanted Durbin to be Majority Leader rather than Schumer.
sab
@Baud: Isn’t perquisite from Latin?
SFAW
@lowtechcyclist:
And far-too-many people use “bemused” when they mean “amused,” but that don’t make it right.
Baud
@sab:
Aren’t a lot of English words from Latin?
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!)
eclare
@NotMax: That’s an acronym?! I need an interrobang key.
Chris T.
@SFAW: I am bemused by such misuse.
OzarkHillbilly
@Low Key Swagger: Blanket blech.
NotMax
@SFAW
Take you’re not gruntled by that.
:)
NotMax
@NotMax
Clickus prematuris.
#41: Take = Take it
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.
Chris T.
@eclare: Yes, from Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Ltd. (But it went from acronym to word long ago…)
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.]
NotMax
@eclare
Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@lowtechcyclist: I working on a last round of copy edits and just rejected a change from “give” to “gift” as the verb. I will go to my grave before I allow that.
SFAW
@lowtechcyclist:
You need to get out more, Intertubezically speaking. I see it all the time, drives me shithouse.
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…”
eclare
@Dorothy A. Winsor: A friend of mine who used to be a consultant used the word boutique as a verb. Shiver.
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.’
SFAW
@NotMax:
Abbreviation, not acronym, hoss. But I “lost” that argument a long time ago. [Where “lost” == “lots more people (incorrectly) call it an acronym”]
Baud
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Spanish is nice. They have a specific word for to gift. Regalar.
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.
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…)
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.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@NotMax: I. Don’t. Care.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@eclare: Jesus Christ
eclare
@Chris T.: Hahaha! And let’s have PowerPoint on that.
Spanky
@eclare:
There’s your problem right there.
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.
SFAW
@Chris T.:
Except “Peking” is not a Wade-Giles transcription; it’s just a poor “translation” of “Beijing.”
eclare
@NorthLeft: Wasn’t the Las Vegas shooter late 50’s?
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.
NotMax
@SFAW
Yet it remains Peking duck on the menu.
Ain’t language wacky?
eclare
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I reviewed her resume once. I removed about ten gerunds.
eclare
@Matt McIrvin: Thanks for the data.
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.
NotMax
Talk about algorithmic dissonance. Prime video recommendations listing Apocalypse Now alongside Henry V.
:)
lowtechcyclist
@Delk:
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.”
Ken
Experience the freedom of not following the 7th-century BCE practices of the Etruscans regarding the alphabetic symbols representing velar stops.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
It worked!
Gin & Tonic
@NotMax: Same now with “Chicken Kiev” vs Kyiv the capital of Ukraine.
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
NotMax
@eclare
“Gerund or gerundive?”
— Mr. Chips
;)
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?)
NotMax
@https://balloon-juice.com/2023/01/23/monday-morning-open-thread-buckle-up-for-another-week/#comment-8743049
Except in Russia (and, I guess, Belarus), where it’s now Chicken Royale.
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…
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.
NotMax
Fix. 3:40 in the morning fumble fingers.
@Gin & Tonic
Except in Russia (and, I guess, Belarus), where it’s now Chicken Royale.
SFAW
@lowtechcyclist:
That sounds like Dick Tuck-like trolling.
eclare
@Michael Bersin: Abort the court- love it!
Gin & Tonic
@NotMax: Also, incidentally, a dish I have never encountered in actual Kyiv.
NotMax
@SFAW
I am so not going to Google Dick Tuck.
:)
Spanky
@NotMax: Sounds like a tummy tuck gone rogue.
Timill
@NotMax: https://jollycontrarian.com/index.php?title=Gerundive
Delk
@NotMax: another George Santos alias?
Anyway
@Baud:
Yes, and proper nouns. Different r00ls.
prostratedragon
@Uncle Cosmo: Ever suspect Dante had diverticulosis?
SFAW
@NotMax:
Dick Tuck was a famous — or perhaps infamous — political prankster. I only semi-recall one specific prank (too boring to repeat here, but was amusing at the time), but his stuff was generally amusing/funny. He was a Dem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Tuck
lowtechcyclist
@NotMax:
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:
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.
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.
Chris T.
@lowtechcyclist:
As Calvin (of & Hobbes) said, “Verbing weirds language.”
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.
WaterGirl
@Spanky: What did you think Durbin said? And what did he actually say?
lowtechcyclist
@WaterGirl:
And of course, Steve Scalise isn’t any less pro-gun since his getting shot.
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?
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.
WaterGirl
@lowtechcyclist: Shaking my head.
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.)
James E Powell
@Chief Oshkosh:
This is a Democratic disease. I mean, say what you want about tenets of
National Socialismthe Republicans, Dude, at least they’ve got message discipline.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”.
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.
Ken
The polls came in.
(And that is not snark.)
James E Powell
@SFAW:
Look what they’ve done to nonplussed!
SFAW
@Chief Oshkosh:
Management should have incentivized her to repurpose her core competencies to a vertically-integrated something something
James E Powell
@Baud:
Most of the latinate words in English came via French.
SFAW
@James E Powell:
I just say “minussed,” saves a syllable. [OK, it doesn’t really.]
Matt McIrvin
@Ken:
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.
SFAW
@James E Powell:
Good thing they aren’t from Latin America, then the GQP would stop those words at the border before they got here.
SFAW
@Matt McIrvin:
I had no idea re: American Heritage Dictionary. Thanks!
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Now I need to look up “woke” in Webster’s.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: “Permissiveness” was the horror buzzword they were terrified of this time around.
mrmoshpotato
@NotMax: Blame the cat who wrote the tweet.
mrmoshpotato
@Spanky: You wanna give us some details here?
Central Planning
@Chris T.: Ped Shing, the patron saint of crosswalks.
Geminid
My pet gripe is people substituting “morph” for “change.” That usage may be declining though.
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.)
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!”
mrmoshpotato
@lowtechcyclist:
LOL!
And people who “speak to” ideas are on some strong hallucinagenics.
Steeplejack
@lowtechcyclist:
“I’m not keen on verbing nouns.”
You just did it!
Steeplejack
@SFAW:
How is “Qantas” not an acronym?
mrmoshpotato
@eclare: What? How? Oh fuck it. I don’t want to know.
WaterGirl
@James E Powell: What about nonplussed? I rarely hear anyone use that at all, let alone use it wrong.
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.
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.
prostratedragon
@Steeplejack: I think that’s called a batting practice pitch.
different-church-lady
@lowtechcyclist: Verbing weirds language. (Waterson)
Chris T.
@James E Powell:
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…)
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.
different-church-lady
@WaterGirl: I am unnonplussed by it.
Chris T.
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
Did Angleton go “tsk”?
MisterDancer
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.
Burnspbesq
@eclare:
I’m guessing that once upon a time, it stood for Queensland and Northern Territory Air Service.
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.
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!
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.
Ken
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.
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.
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.]
schrodingers_cat
While we are at it can we also get rid of coronate?
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)?
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.)
Steeplejack
@prostratedragon:
Point taken. 😹
Ken
Because the obvious pronunciation is obscene?
different-church-lady
@schrodingers_cat: I am in favor of removing all words and replacing them with ice cream.
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.
mrmoshpotato
@different-church-lady: 🍨🍦🍧🍨🍦🍧😋
ETA – Actually, come to think if it, Snoopy and Harpo had it right.
Steeplejack
@SFAW:
“Pronounced the way an existing word is pronounced.”
I have never seen that stipulation. Do you have a source for that?
Steeplejack
@schrodingers_cat:
Coronate is an abomination. Just crown somebody!
Tarragon
Unfortunately, most fonts have a terrible interrobang. WHY‽
schrodingers_cat
@Steeplejack: I have seen it used in newspapers too. **Shudder
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”
mali muso
@marklar: LOL. No, I just got used to weird looks and then started editing myself.
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.
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.))
lowtechcyclist
@JAFD: Twenty-three skiddoo!!!
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Chris T.
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.
J R in WV
@James E Powell:
Didn’t they actually come from the Norman, after the battle of Hastings in 1066?
Also:
nonplussed = minussed? ;~)
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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!
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.
zhena gogolia
How about referring to an actor as being “decorated”? I thought that was for military heroes.
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.
Steeplejack
@SFAW:
Well, all righty, then. That clinches it! 🙄
Brachiator
@Matt McIrvin:
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.
SFAW
@Steeplejack:
As the kids say: “whatever” and “you do you.”
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.
Another Scott
@Brachiator: Similarly, the great Russian novel, War and Peace, opens with a bunch of aristocrats conversing in French…
Cheers,
Scott .
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.
Frank Wilhoit
@NotMax: A usage may have historical credentials but today be an indicator of illiteracy.
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.)
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.
different-church-lady
@TooManyJens: This is why I now say, “literally literally.”
Brachiator
@Origuy:
I associate Guernsey and Jersey more with cows than with islands and languages.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
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”).
eddie blake
@Matt McIrvin:
“the jutes will not replace us!”
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!
Geminid
@TooManyJens: One problem is that people tend to over use modifiers when the noun or verb is by itself sufficient to express their thought clearly.
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!
different-church-lady
The “could care less” problem is nothing a cattle prod couldn’t solve.
different-church-lady
“E-mail” is its own plural. Thank you for listening.
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.
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!)
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.
LiminalOwl
@Chris T.: And as someone relied, it’s not the verbing that weirds language; it’s the renounification.
LiminalOwl
@lowtechcyclist: Or, as I was told it, “Dick Nixon before he dicks you.”
(Honorable mention: “vote Frank Zappa in ‘76: three Mothers in a row.”)
LiminalOwl
@eclare: An otherwise good book used incest as a transitive verb.
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)!
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….
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!”.
Steeplejack
@eddie blake:
Good one! 😹
Another Scott
@TooManyJens: Yet another example of:
;-)
Cheers,
Scott.