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The thing is, is that some of the most dreadful are not so much phrases as syntactical constructions.
My wife once saw a sign in a store that had both "everyday" and "every day", and both were used correctly. She was surprised and very pleased.
Thanks, abi! This is one of the amusements that never palls.
I didn't see this one on the previous list:
He put her on a peddle stool
A did see "Don't want someone who will put me on a pedal stool" in a dating profile once. Pretty sure she was in no danger of that from me.
I've seen "towing the party line". "Towing the company line" appears in the previous thread, but for some reason, I think "towing the party line" is different and funnier.
Are we allowed poor-quality translingual puns?
<Mrs. Wombat, (pointing at two whole fresh eggs in a bowl)>Can you fry me an egg for breakfast?
<Me (pointing at the bowl with two whole fresh eggs)>But that's not un oeuf! You'll be hungry!
Rando on Twitter: Jesus just waves his hand and your toast.
Me: Why would Jesus want to wave my toast?
Nancy Lebovitz @6: Towing the party line is how you pull the party barge, presumably.
A piece I was editing the other week had a police officer “upholstering his gun”. I guess it makes the handgrip nice and comfy on cold nights?
I am now reminded of what I think is a David Langford line, about reading the novel title The Tower of the King's Daughter and picturing a burly official hauling with some difficulty on a silken rope.
Kitten kaboodle
A friend just discovered this isn't the phrase, and she is broken.
I've always loved butt naked, which actually makes more sense than buck naked.
#9 ::: James E
Thanks for the link. The Silver Jews do good silly stuff.
The publishing company I used to work with like to tell their customers they would treat them with "kit gloves". And get pissed when I would be given something to review and correct it.
Then again, I had to explain that 'flushing out' in the way they were talking about it was actually 'fleshing out' something.
Supposedly people who worked with language too.
Whoops, advertising executives. Never mind.
I'll try not to spam this thread, but I found this one today as well:
people are acting as though this is his first radio
I have actually seen, "toad away," applied to cars.
rea @16:
I have actually seen, "toad away," applied to cars.
I'm afraid I've been reading too much Ursula Vernon. I am now picturing a truly massive toad (yellow-green with lots of bumps) hopping up to a badly-parked car, ensnaring it with a twenty-foot sticky tongue that wraps all the way around it, pulling it into its mouth and hopping off to the impound lot.
rea @16, I guess that's accurate, if you're in The Wind in the Willows.
We have a bumper sticker that says, "Do not tailgate the Wizard - violators will be Toad", but that's deliberate.
abi @17 I have a comic clipped out of the paper long ago. There is a placid amphibian the size of the car sitting on the back of a little hatchback. One character is saying to another, "Looks like you need one of those rear window defroggers."
That accessory has been a defrogger in our household ever since.
abi@17: I'm afraid I've been reading too much Ursula Vernon.
Can you explain this concept, please?
OtterB (20): It may become a 'defrogger' in my household as well. Thanks for that.
I once worked with someone who always said "physical year" for "fiscal year" and it exasperated me no end. He would spell it correctly in emails. He just could never say it.
Steve C., #23: Reminds me of a former cow-orker who (1) was a sloppy speaker and (2) spelled things the way she pronounced them (e.g. she pronounced the word "skeleton" like the last name of the comedian and spelled it the same way).* This became a problem when she was writing text that would appear in the material we sent out to clients! At least the text for the actual product went by me and I could proofread it, but I shudder to think about the cover letters she sent.
* I should mention here that when I was in elementary school, I thought for years that his name was Red Skeleton. But by the time I was out of high school I knew better!
My current bugaboo is a subject being "cut and dry".
I just want to point out that, when this comment thread started, I had not yet finished my first year in grad school at Iowa, had no idea I was moving to L.A., and had four-and-a-half full productions of full-length plays, two web series, and 5+ drafts of a novel to come...and no idea of the mistakes I'd make therein.
Do better, past me! Get smarter! Enjoy the fun! Have more fun!
I cannot stand 'to no end' being used for 'no end'.
dotless ı @21: Ursula Vernon (who sometimes writes as T. Kingfisher) writes amazing screwball magical realism, often comic, and likely to involve wildlife. Also she had a long-running webcomic for a while, and draws amazing things.
Elliott Mason (29): I thought dotless ı was making a joke about about the impossibility of there ever being too much Ursula Vernon.
Stirring the ambers of the fire.
James E #9: I can imagine a slightly different universe in which a gun secured in a holster is “holstered up”.
Kevin @ 32-
Ahh--so that explains the old Mae West line, "is that a separable prefix or are you just glad to see me?"
Me 8: A friend on FB responded "Because he has a rye sense of humor."
Just seen: 'guilding the lily'
Well, if it needs that kind of help....
Kevin Reid @32: hah! Yes. It's definitely not this universe, though, because having upholstered his gun he proceeded to file several shots with it. Quick on the drawer, clearly.
Abi @17: I think Ursula would be at least as likely to show the car being hauled away by a large flock of small birds, i.e., pigeon towed.
And in a related vein, my brain has lately been trying to interpret "nematode" as "NEMA toad" -- an amphibian that is in compliance with electrical wiring standards.
This is not a true dreadful, but *I* dread it:
"But he also wanted to give himself every chance at success. He may have killed 206 people but he gained no benefit of experience from that."
(Quote is from _Zero World_ by Jason M. Hough because that's where I happened to notice it recently and remember the location.)
To my ear, the word "may" there is wrong wrong wrong. It needs to be "might". Clearly this is not the accepted English rule, because lots of people use "may" this way. I can't even articulate what rule I think it's breaking. But I am sure it's wrong. Every time I run into this, it grates.
It has the feel of a tense mismatch. "Might have" implies that the narrator did not know at that point in the story. "May have" implies that the *author* does not know *now*. Really I want to use the past tense of "may", but that doesn't even make sense, of course.
Does anybody else have this problem/
38
I've seen library drop boxes painted as toads. There has to be something for them.
39
You pick up that one also!
Yes, it should be 'might' - it's tense, and sometimes also mood.
Can't resist linking to Toad Words.
It's apropos.
OtterB @20
Is that akin to a vindshield viper?
Mary Aileen@30: Yes, thanks, that's what I meant. Elliott Mason@29, sorry I was unclear. I agree entirely with "amazing".
Incidentally, "toad" is the correct jargon for a small vehicle towed behind an RV.
AP @39--
I share your instincts about "may" in this sentence. But I think "might" would have other problems, just as severe.
"He might have killed 206 people..." sounds as though it should be completed by, e.g. "if he had pressed the wrong button." It sounds like the consequent of a contrary-to-fact conditional.
"Might" does both of these jobs, as PJE notes. You'd like it to be a pure tense-marker in this context, but it does not stop sounding like a mood-marker. People are going to hear both, and be bothered by the mismatch with one or the other.
I would probably revise to shift the tense-marker to a different verb, e.g. "He thought to himself, "I may have killed 206 people, but I gained...."
With the tense-marking done by "thought", "may" is clearly the right verb, not "might."
I've just come from the comments section of . . . another blog, with a certain overlap in commenters with this one, where a front-pager's characterization of the NFL Commissioner as a "slavering authoritarian" gets denounced in comments: "Comparing a four game suspension of Tom Brady to 'slavery' is . . . asinine." Oh, well . . .
Andrew Plotkin (39): I think 'may' is right in that instance, although I can't articulate a rule. Take what I wrote about my very annoying upstairs neighbors last year:
"My neighbors may be annoying, but they have their uses."
That's not saying that they might (or might not) be annoying, it's conceding that they are* and contrasting that with their having other uses. 'Might' would definitely have been the wrong word to express my meaning. As I said, I can't articulate why; call it native speaker intuition.
*or were; they've since moved out
I'm fond of "Oldtimer's" (for "Alzheimer's").
abi @ 17:
What is this "too much Ursula Vernon" you speak of?
P J Evans @ 35
Just seen: 'guilding the lily'
To what guild does the lily belong, and is there an initiation ritual? I once saw the phase "guilting the lily," which does have some amusement value, but I don't think the poster meant it that way.
Jewish friends have also used the phrase "Hanukkah Guilt" rather than "Hanukkah Gelt," but I think that was deliberate.
Alex @51--
I'm pretty sure that if you rips its stamen out, then you are gelding the lily.
(Which explains the old Mae West line, "is that a pistil in your pocket, or are you just gladioli?")
(Of course, "guilting refined gold" would be a hair less wrong, but just barely.)
I think "may" is a special case of a subjunctive modal form in the forms you're considering. These are tricky forms.
Normally one thinks of hypotheticals as counter-factual; however, in these cases what's being proposed is a *factual* hypothetical case and I have a gut sense that in this case "may" is more correct than "might".
Compare the following constructions:
"I may have a good job, but it is still important that I manage my money carefully."
vs.
"I might have a billion dollars, but it would still be important that I manage my money carefully."
Both assert that the second clause is true *even* if the first clauses is true, but the former implies that I do have a good job (without specifically affirming it) while the second implies that I do not have a billion dollars (again, without absolutely disclaiming it.)
Clifton @54:
For me, the force of the "would be" in the second of your examples strongly suggests that the speaker does not have a billion dollars.
"I might have a good job, but it is still important that I manage my money carefully."
"I may have a good job, but it is still important that I manage my money carefully."
Neither one of those screams "wrong" to me, and they both suggest the speaker does have a good job. It may be that one of these forms is in fact formally incorrect, but it's not "wrong enough" to nag at me.
I appreciate the continued discussion on may/might! It's one of those things I picked up without being formally taught. Which means, as I noted, that I could have picked up a usage that is uncommon or wrong.
lorax's examples:
"I might have a good job, but it is still important that I manage my money carefully."
"I may have a good job, but it is still important that I manage my money carefully."
...have different implications to me. The second definitely has a good job; it's an idiom questioning causality. The first is a counterfactual, but perhaps the speaker has a good job anyway and is excluding it from the domain of discourse for the sake of argument!
(Yes, that latter is a lot of complexity to lay on one verb!)
But in third-person-past-tense it's all different again:
"He might have a good job, but it was still important that he managed his money carefully."
"He may have a good job, but it was still important that he managed his money carefully."
The last case is the one that bothers me. I agree that the problem is that one degree of freedom (may/might) is trying to do two jobs, so there's probably no solution that will work for every reader.
(Side note: in my original quoted example, the protagonist is an assassin who has his memory wiped after every job. So he *really is* unsure how many people he's killed. But I run into this grammar thing in many other books.)
lorax (55): To me "I might have a good job, but..." expresses doubt about whether or not the job is actually good, whereas "I may have a good job, but..." does not. Neither is clearly right or wrong, but they mean subtly different things.
I think Clifton's explanation in #54 is correct.
Andrew Plotkin (56): Thank you for clarifying your complaint. I think you are correct that your second example ("He may have a good job, but it was still important that he managed his money carefully.") is wrong. I would change the verb tense: "He may have had* a good job..."
Does that work for you?
*emphasis to show my addition
I think when the dependent clause is past tense, the contrafactual sounds wrong if it isn't also in the past, for both 'may' and 'might'.
So
...may have had ...
...might have had ...
at least for this dependent clause. (Though, oddly, I'm not sure 'might' works with a past tense dependent regardless of its own tense. Possibly a dialectal thing? Or a spoken vs. written thing.)
emgrasso (59): You're right that both of those examples should be 'have had'.
'Might' works perfectly well with a past tense, though. "I might have gone to the same college as my brother, but I didn't."
Seen today:
"When a small submarine is trapped in a deep sea cravat..."
rea #47: Oy. I'm reminded of a flap a few years back when somebody got in trouble over "niggardly"... IIRC, they were addressing an audience of college students, too.
oldster @ 52
I'm pretty sure that if you rips its stamen out, then you are gelding the lily.
That's doubtless true, but one should also note that female flowers like a male with lots of stamena.
On a yard sign promoting a local church:
"Join Us Sunday's at 10:30"
Sunday's what?
...female flowers like a male with lots of stamena.
She hates it when I fire my pistil too soon!
Re: the may/might distinction, I think it's being used in sense 8 of the Oxford English Dictionary's definition "may"):
8. Used in one of a pair of coordinate clauses with concessive force (may be or do..but = ‘although..is’ or ‘does’).
...
1903 D. McLean Stud. Apostles iv. 58 You may force fruit, but you cannot force flavour.
1984 A. Smith Mind iii. xi. 180 The eye may be the visual organ, but it is the brain that sees.
But there's a paragraph in the entry for sense 7 addressing the may/might distinction as well (I'll leave the references to senses 7a, 18b, 26 etc. because that's a lot of ellipses otherwise; if anyone really wants to know what those entries say I can post them):
From the late Middle English period senses 7a and 7b contrasted with the use of might expressing both the past subjective possibility of a situation (sense 18a; originally in indirect statements) and the present subjective possibility of a past situation (sense 18b; this function was taken over by sense 7c). Subsequently there arose a use of might in virtually indistinguishable contexts, but having the possibility of greater tentativeness (sense 26).
P J Evans@35: 'guilding the lily'
There is a notion of a guild in ecology, and lilies could presumably be assigned to one or more, but I don't know enough about them to know what would make sense. (I first encountered that meaning of "guild" only a few months ago after looking up the wonderfully SF-sounding word "forb".)
I see "rational" frequently used, when what is actually meant is "rationale". Augghhh.
And I just saw "split of the moment idea here..." I'm not even sure what that's supposed to be.
David Harmon @69: Probably meant to be "spur of the moment".
Chris #70: Oh yeah. Thanks, that "split" just sent my associations off into the weeds.
There is at least one U.S. state that has a "Statement of One in the Same" form for establishing that two names refer to the same person. I wince whenever I have to mention it because, of course, that actually is the name of the form and it's hard to avoid calling it that.
The phrase itself isn't that bad, compared to the rest of this thread and its predecessor, but making it part of the title of an official document seems like a new low.
67
In the full context, it was clear they had gilt lilies.
('Forb' I'd met. guilds of lilies - that would, as a WAG, be Asiatic, oriental, species...?)
Somebody I read earlier today was referring to "sewing the seeds" of discord or whatever. Not sure what they were sewing them to.
74
the guilded lilies, maybe. Or the toad lines.
Curious that the word "forb" should arise here. It's used several times in Graydon's book A Succession of Bad Days, and it took me by surprise that there should be a short, simple word that in 47 years of ridely pretty widely I had never encountered.
(It may of course be that dotless ı came across the word in the same place I did.)
Not a phonetic near miss, but it still says something that the writer did not intend:
"I have worms and Swedish pimples!"
(seen on a sign outside a shop that sells fishing tackle).
Dude, TMI. Just talk to your doctor about it.
I ran across "He shuttered" in the wild. In a published book.
David Harmon @69/71 - possibly "split second" sneaking in around the back to turn the phrase into gibberish, there?
I'm just speculating. Off the cuff of my head, sort of thing.
Steve Wright @79 Off the cuff of my head (snort).
The French royal flag has gilded lilies.
P J Evans (75): toad lines
This morning I started wondering if a witch who turns people who don't tell her the truth into amphibians could be said to toad the lyin'.
David Goldfarb, #76:
"Ridely" is a short, simple word that, in 47 years of forbing pretty widely, I have never encountered.
David Goldfarb@76: I came across the word "forb" while researching a small child's question, "What do sheep eat?" The first answer I found was "grass, clover, and forbs", which led to the next question.
Quick browsing suggests that daylilies are classed as forbs; so I suppose that someone has already guilded the daylily.
I know "forb", though I don't know where I first encountered it; I almost always see it in the phrase "grasses and forbs"; AIUI it's a catchall term for non-woody plants other than grasses. So "clover and forbs" seems a little like saying "apples and fruits"; the implication is that the first is most common or most important, but there really should be an "other" in there.
In any case, "gilding the lily" is a misquotation to begin with. From Shakespeare's King John:
SALISBURY:
Therefore, to be possess'd with double pomp,
To guard a title that was rich before,
To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet,
To smooth the ice, or add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.
Seen more than once in a traditionally published book (the first in a series, the second of which is overdue): 'mental anagram'. (Which sounds painful.)
And in a different book, traditionally published by a different company: 'crumbled' instead of 'crumpled'. Paper is crumbled, people crumble to the ground, etc. (This sounds even more painful.)
I was discussing editorial mis-steps with a friend and he told me in all seriousness that bad spelling could be due to anorexia.
Oooo-kay, then.
sherwood Smith @12
I've been told somewhere that butt naked is preferable to buck naked, as one possible etymology for the latter is that it's in reference to the supposed "primitive state" of young Native American males or male African slaves, both of whom were referred to as "bucks".
Renee #87: What's wrong with doing anagrams in your head?
David Harmon #89: I like doing anagrams in my head (it's a fun game for a long drive -- Licence Plate Bingo!) But having a mental anagram done when an engram was intended ... not so much.
Renee #90: I see... indeed that sounds like it would scramble your memories.
Found this in, I swear to God, the official company style guide where I work:
"Calls to action are provided in standalone fashion beneath body copy followed by a carrot...
Learn More >"
Nice of them to show an example, wasn't it?
I thought calls to action were supposed to be *preceded* by a carrot and followed by a stick. Following something with a carrot just encourages it to turn around and bite the hand that feeds it.
Jordin: Well, it called ME to action, but I resisted in the name of, you know, keeping my job. It's good for a laugh, anyhow, and still not quite as bad as their current let's-go-troops slogan, "Journey to Great." (And again -- I'm not making this up; who could?)
That's not even a caret; it's a right-hand angle bracket.
Helen S. @95--Indeed: as a caret, it lacks.
It is too a caret, it's just sleeping. Or perhaps has had to much to drink.
I think it's pining for the fjords.
It's not pinin', it's passed on! IT IS AN EX-CARET!
>
^^^^^^ ^: Wow, he sure seems heavier dead.
Do I caret all about this? No. I'm just posting because I want to get bracket the rest of you.
And you know what Pope Gregory said about carets: they point toward heaven, so non angli sed angeli.
A speaker in a training session:
'Don't just brush it under the elephant that's always in the room.'
What??
When a shipyard is done fixing a boat they want to try out the systems, usually the first few days at sea. I see all too often sea trails to describe that period.
Last month we moved to a different building, and from offices to open plan. Along with a floor map, there is now in circulation a directory of "cubical numbers."
Cath #104: So, the offices run 1, 8, 27, 64...? ;-)
Cath @ 104: Please tell me that they're numbered 1, 8, 27, 64....
Someone just answered a two-sentence, eight-word comment of mine on Facebook with "not sure what you mean by that little codex."
They meant coda, I am pretty sure. Or possibly codicil?
That depends: did you hand-write the sentences, and post a picture of them?
Tom: no, I did not. Nor did I bind them in a volume.
Someone in a fic I'm reading just got stabbed with a hyperbolic needle, which presumably hurt worse than anything has ever hurt before.
David Harmon @105, john @106
Great minds! And alas, no.
Really, the homophone thing makes this too easy. Maybe they stand out more because autocorrect fixes the typos?
The latest, regarding offshoring call centre support: the owners want to "eek out a few more dollars here or there." I would be going "eek!" too, if my job were about to vanish.
Overheard on the bus home:
"...he was very nervous during the interview and kept covering his hands with his mouth."
Seen at Daily Kos, in today's midday roundup:
Hundreds of structures burned in three towns, with no end in site
Argh: context to #116: #100 HelenS.
@ 116: All excep Peason who hav a face like a baboon.
From a spam email about designing a website, and communicating to people:
"Did you know that 70% of website visitors leave a website because they do not find the website useful or relevant? i.e., despite reaching a company’s business presence on internet, they barely convert to customers."
Shouldn't that be "rarely" rather than "barely"? If you don't know the difference, why should I use your communication service?
I am, this week, plunged back into my regular task of grading student papers (a fact that constantly reminds me that in Iberian Spanish the word for 'duties' -- deberes -- also means 'chores'). A student wrote:
Although humans are all the same, we are very different.
Recently observed in email: "It's become too big for its breaches"
Frangano,
There's a series of TV ads running on MSNBC (for GE, I think) where they show two initially identical animated sketches of some object or scene (a windmill, a row of streetlights, the view out an airplane windshield) and then one sketch changes while the announcer explains that even though these two things look similar, the one on the right uses GE Intelligent Technology (tm, no doubt) so it works better (windmill spins, streetlights blink on and off to conserve energy, view through windshield shows plane flying).
The tag line at the end of the ad is always "Never have two things that are exactly the same been so very different."
And in other news, although it's not actually an error, the following unfortunately-phrased headline appeared on a cnn.com article today:
Kicked Syrian migrant offered football role in Madrid
(This is a sentence fragment in the original): "Plain, white baseball hat, planted vicariously on his head and tilted to the side."
Just found rereading an old Electrolite thread: "I would have saved myself a lot of vein gesturing throughout this thread..."
M. Fragonard comes to mind.
During the Singapore Grand Prix:
Engineer to Lewis Hamilton (currently fourth): "Okay, Lewis, we are going to have to look after this tyre set - try to eek it out as long as we can."
Clearly there are mice involved in this.
As I wrap up marking papers for the weekend, this sentence stuck out:
The violence and rage of the people enticed riots, killed nobles and overall began a revolution in hope of an outcome favoring the majority.
I grant that the problem here is a simple spoonerism, but the image is, shall we say, alluring.
Fragano Ledgister @128, surely you mean it's enticing....? <grin>
Cadbury Moose: Was that a real-time subtitling? Because I cut them a lot of slack for simple homophones.
Terry Karney@130, alas variants on the phrase "eek out" show up often enough in what passes for print on the internet, sometimes including in electronic versions of actual newspapers, that I think it has to be ascribed to ignorance rather than just accident.
(That's not counting the times that pattern matchers find it as a part of "geek out", of course, but eek, it's enough to freek me out.)
Terry @ #130
No, it seemed to be a text running commentary on the race.
Could be a spell chequer error rather than a braino or typo.
Just seen:
ad homonym attacks
PJ @134:
I've been known to refer to "argumentum ad nominem", to refer to the use of names (like "Billary", "John McShame", etc) as a way of sounding like you are making an argument without actually, you know, presenting any evidence related to the situation. Perhaps "ad homonym attacks" refers to some related fallacy?
Buddha Buck, #135: Context would probably provide a few clues. I remember using "the McCampaign" myself in 2008, but that was deliberately invoking the sense of words like "McJob" or "McMansion". I avoided "McPalin" on the grounds that it sounded like a fanfic ship descriptor!
I was enticed to something, but it was definitely an incite joke.
Fragano, although paper-grading is a trying time for you, I confess looking forward to the awful things you post.
P J Evans #134: A nicely self-referential error!
My apologies for agreeing with Carol Kimball@138.
And I saw somebody on the web today use the word "back-peddle". It was not a totally inaccurate word to use for the behaviour it was describing, even though it wasn't the one the writer meant.
From a neighborhood watch website, locally:
"We have been telling neighbors to get the U-shaped bike lock an key to better detour theives."
Maybe they should take a different route?
From my most recent batch of student papers, I have discovered that the Punic Wars led the Roman Empire begin its rise to empirical conquest, which makes me badly want a recording of the Empirical March. However, the Romans were a laughing-stalk on the sea.
empirical conquest
"Can we conquer them?"
(big fight)
"Yep."
I am now reminded of a very badly OCR-ed book I tried to read about Hannibal, who was (apparently) a man of great diatinotion at the time of the Pfnic Wab.
Clearly a Pfnic Wab is one in which the loser gets pwned.
Very badly OCR-ed, indeed.
140: Back-peddle.
I have also seen "soft-pedaling"
Someone on Twitter just described Joe Biden as the one they wanted to see being a "loose canon" on the Sunday talk shows in 2017. Even if he started seminary now, I doubt he could rise that quickly through the ranks, even in the Episcopal Church.
Erik Nelson @ 146
What is wrong with that one - it is even in the dictionary? :)
146
Soft-pedaling is actually okay - think of the pedals on a piano.
"The restaurant was later helmed by [X] before the reigns were passed on to [Y]"
I am seeing a transfer of orb, sceptre, and maybe an archbishop or two ...
Seen this morning in two different places:
"Do to computer problems..."
"...but it was eluded to..."
Carrie S. @151: I am so very tempted to complete those sentences:
"...as they would do unto you." and
"...the consternation of the police at the roadblock."
(I need to practice temptation-resistance. Tae kwon don't.)
If bad bilingual puns are allowed…
They never understand my accent at that French Vietnamese restaurant. I asked for beef soup and they gave me an armchair.
(Phở tái vs fauteuil)
I almost struck myself down with a dreadful phrase just now. "Vested" in "vested interest", is as in "fully vested", not as in card tricks [and I'm not actually sure vesting a card has to do with card tricks... slow day indeed.]
Seen in the wild: Our email had an outage:
Due to the service laps, we many need to...Luckily we didn't have to go around and around to get it restored.
I just finished Last First Snow and felt compelled to re-read Two Serpents Rise. Early on, I ran across this one, which I didn't remember encountering before:
Sixty years after Dresediel Lex cast off the gods' yolk, its masters still demanded blood.(Apologies to our hosts if this is tactless.)
Kevin Marks @153, on bad bilingual puns - this from my sister, recently:
"I asked my German friend what he'd done at the weekend and he said he'd been rearranging the furniture - apparently he's put the table in the bath - bad-um-tisch!"
Wow, a pun that's it's own rimshot, that's impressive!
Reported seen in the wild: "No margarine for error."
I guess if they just barely squeezed by...
Headline at SFGate:
Man saves dog from mountain lion in his underwear
(There were at least two comments with the response you would expect.)
I just saw a flier for a "Fall Craft Bizarre".
Chris (162): How bazaar.
Pittsfield, Massachusetts, has a "Bizarre Bazaar" every October.
“We got out of the shoot extremely strong; very strong in the first few days.” — Tim Cook interview in The Telegraph.
TomB (164): I take it that the interview is not about shooting a movie? 'The shoot' would make sense in that context. (It took me a couple of tries to read it differently, and thus to figure out what was wrong with the sentence).
Just seen: "They don't have a lead singer per say."
I should say not!
Just seen: "They way as little as 150 grams."
One for Fragano's collection: 'it is a natural part of human nature to be weary of what is new'.
Colleague when told about a problem: "I'll have to put my thinking tap on."
Which, makes good sense for initiating the flow of solutions.
Not quite the usual, but an example of usage that clearly indicates the speaker didn't understand: heard a newsreader pronounce 'biopic' to rhyme with "my topic." BIO(graphical )PIC(ture), fool.
The more usual kind: an article about a SECOND armed militia showing up in Oregon, claiming they wanted to "diffuse the situation."
The situation is potentially explosive, not hyperconcentrated.
Fortunately, even the snackless white-ring terrorists knew the presence of an armed perimeter would not be helpful.
From an article on a new show: "The two actors are attached to toppling the pilot and series, if it scores a full pickup."
Why Autocorrect hasn't yet been indicted in the Hague for Crimes Against Humanity I cannot imagine.
Xopher (172): I can't figure out what that's trying to say. Any clues?
They meant "topping" as in "getting top billing." The two lead actors are on board for the pilot, and if it's picked up for a full season, they're in for that, too.
Came across a good one today: an "honor role student."
Thanks, Xopher (174). I could tell that 'toppling' was the problem, but I wasn't familiar with that use of 'topping' so I couldn't fill in the blank.
Just saw a new one (to me) on a restaurant's website: "Prefix 5 Course Menu"
It took a while for it to dawn on me that they meant "prix fixé", and then I burst out laughing.
From a Marin newspaper website:
"Sausalito anchor-out Peter Romansky had his own explanation for the theater’s troubles.
“I’ve been kicked out of the theater and banned,” Romansky said. “I’ve put a curse on the theater and will not lift that curse until I get an apology.”"
anchor-out = anchorite?
178
As he's from Sausalito, he might live on a boat.
I saw one this week: 'rain in' someone or something.
A kid describing himself as a secret "sex attic".
Oh, that could be - I forgot Sausalito has this whole houseboat community. It may be a local or a nautical term.
The Guardian said the authorities were "extolling" the public to stay off the roads.
"Praise to you, o Great Public! ...please stay off the roads."
I would guess that "anchor-out" refers to someone living on a boat that is anchored out away from the shore, as opposed to being tied up to a dock in a marina, or possibly tied to a permanent mooring buoy in a harbor. Living on a boat is sometimes cheaper than living on land, but tying up to a dock in a marina pretty much always costs money, and moorings in many harbors cost money. In most places anchoring your boat is free, though some places have regulations limiting where or for how long you can anchor.
Broken parallelism has become so common that it probably doesn't qualify as a Dreadful Phrase any more, but I still am irritated by, e.g., "When he awoke from his dream he was sated, dizzy, and red sauce stained his shirt." (As I was taught ~50 years ago, either the first comma should be replaced by " and" or the entire sentence should be rebuilt.) Has this become so common that people's minds just fix it while processing?
wrt "anchor-out": I can see that applying to someone who can't afford a slip (e.g., F-18) and has to anchor out in the water instead. Can anyone from that area suggest whether such a person has a tiny boat to get to the shore and back or pays for a dock slot as semi-suburban landlubbers such as myself pay for parking when we go into the city?
CHip:
1) Syllepsis! Also known as zeugma! When it's used intentionally for humorous effect, it can be wonderful, as in Flanders and Swann's 'Have Some Madeira, M'Dear' - "She lifted the glass, her courage, her eyes, and his hopes." When unintentional, it can still be pretty funny but less wonderful.
I haven't seen enough of it to think it's become that much more common, though bad writing abounds.
Clifton, #185: My favorite bit is, "When he said, 'What in Heaven?', she made no reply, up her mind, and a dash for the door!"
A few weeks ago, I used 'cohering' as the verb form of 'coherent'. My mother didn't even blink.
I would use "cohere" in a physics context without blinking.
Mary Aileen #187: I think that's entirely correct.
David Harmon (189): "I wasn't cohering very well" to mean "I wasn't very coherent"? It doesn't sound correct to me.
Mary Aileen, #190: Maybe not strictly correct, but I would accept it as a fannish back-formation without hesitation.
Mary Aileen @ 190 ...
David Harmon (189): "I wasn't cohering very well" to mean "I wasn't very coherent"? It doesn't sound correct to me.
... which seems entirely apropos to me ;D
Mary Aileen #190: Hmm. ISTM The main problem with "I wasn't cohering very well" would be a lack of context, as to in what manner you failed to cohere. However, presumably you weren't spontanously disassembling, or badly attempting to align your wavelengths, so the conversational context does tend to imply itself. ;-)
(Note to self: No matter how cold it was outside, don't order a pot of tea with dinner. That leads to insomnia and 3AM postings.)
We no longer use coherers in our wireless apparatus, but a long time ago they were, as the kids say these days, A Thing.
I am corrected.
Lee (191), "fannish backformation" is about right. As I said, my mother didn't even blink at it.
Oh, and xeger (192) has the right of it: I was still no more than 3/4 awake when I came up with that.
A license plate rather than a phrase, but today I saw "ROUT 66". The owner had clearly had the plate for a long time, too.
Clifton: NOT syllepsis, and certainly not zeugma as I learned it (and Wikipedia defines it). These have a parallel structure (as shown in other comments), with sometimes a small mismatch ("he works his work, I mine"), so that phrases could be exchanged with minor disagreement in non-zeugma syllepses; compare the result to "he was red sauce stained his shirt and dizzy".
Found while down an Internet rabbithole: '... but maybe that’s just pegging the question here.'
Just seen:
"Beauty is truly in the high of the beholder."
No, not meant humorously or punnishly or ironically. *Sigh*
"waived goodbye"
no, that's okay, you don't have to bid me farewell
Just seen on twitter:
"Your knockers are overly twisted"
GlendP, #202: Sadly, I can mentally reconstruct the format of the discussion in which that occurred, and make several guesses about the possible topic.
Lee #204: The topic was innocuous enough, but yes, the format of the discussion was all too familiar.
Sighted in a discussion on feminism: if you don't oppress women it will lead them "to pants wearing and the wonton urge to vote."
Someone will be in the soup over that one.
Cadbury Moose @207
The jokes just write themselves, don't they? Myself, I look forward to the day when dumpling emancipation is no longer controversial.
"[Her condition] was then exasperated by..."
Carrie S. (209): I don't know, I'm frequently in a condition of being exasperated by things. ;)
Heard a newsreader say that a killer was also wanted for the "disembodiment" of a young woman.
[Some effort] has been for not.
So did I. (I was wondering whether the Lee I've been seeing there was you.)
"She let him too it." (left him to it)
Seen in an otherwise high quality fanfic, so I have to attribute it to authorial lack of sleep or the like.
"[He] lived in one of the refugee buildings – thrown up after the rest of Brooklyn was raised to the ground by the War."
:twitches:
Seen quoted by someone elseNet, in a similarly-themed sub-thread:
"You should never pleasurize someone else’s work."
Lee (219): That sounds like it means that the writer doesn't approve of slash.
Just seen onweb: "flee market".
I mean, I don't like them, but I'm not that melodramatic. Or fast.
The other day, one of the usual crowd was foaming on about "right ring femisnt."
Even what they MEANT doesn't make sense.
Xopher #222: I've got a left ring and a right ring. One of those might be involved.
I pointed out that before SSM was legal (it still gives me a little thrill to type that) some gay couples used to wear wedding rings on the right hand as a protest. Someone else pointed out that that's wayyy too logical.
Reason given for editing a forum post: 'forgot to inbed link'.
I'm not sure it counts, because the usage is correct and quite clear in context, but it amuses me so I thought I'd share.
I was completing a form about respite care for my daughter with special needs. In a series of questions about medical and technological needs (do they have any assistive technology devices, do they use a CPAP when they sleep...) it asked "Does this person use oxygen?"
Well, yes, but not in the way the question was intended.
#218 throwing up a building gives m an image of a great beast vomiting bricks
Erik, one of my friends in high school German class had, as his catchphrase, 'Iß den Dom!'—which is ungrammatical German for "Eat the cathedral!" as a command.
He drew many a picture of people devouring cathedrals. One of them was a multi-panel cartoon, and in the penultimate panel the Domesser, his head distorted into the shape of the Kölner Dom, announces that he's feeling ill. The last panel shows him bent over a pile of bricks and rubble.
When our summer exchange group visited Köln, we posed with mouths open and teeth bared near the buttresses.
My gods. That was FORTY years ago this summer. I am old.
Found today:
"ALL MATERIALS ARE TO BE PACKAGED IN A MANOR THAT WILL PREVENT OUTSIDE CONTAMINATION FROM COMING IN CONTACT WITH THE MATERIAL, AND PREVENT SURFACE SCRATCHING DURING SHIPMENT OF THE PRODUCT."
Now picturing statuesque and stately homes being shipped around the world, with product safely ensconced within in a comfy chair. The look is slightly marred by every piece of furniture - and every other object within the house - being covered in a high-tech version of those clear vinyl covers you see on couches in the living room of many a house. The fire is, unfortunately, behind a high-tech version of one of those glass fronts. The drink on the sideboard is in a complicated vessel that would look more at home in a zero-gravity space station. Said homes have a cleanroom ventilation system installed, maintaining positive pressure within at all times. Doors and windows are locked, of course, and the very high-tech alarm system is always armed. The butler finds his dignity somewhat affronted by having to wear a cleanroom "bunny suit" as they check on the product and see to its needs throughout the journey. At least they can be satisfied that their white gloves always come away perfectly clean upon touching any surface in this immaculate house.
From an article in the Wall Street Journal:
"Liberals may have been fond of claiming that Republicans were all closet bigots and that tax cuts were a form of racial prejudice, but the accusation rang hollow because the evidence for it was so tendentious."
The word he was looking for was "tenuous".
From this article on lead poisoning, "infant morality".
Five minutes earlier I saw "sacrificing our children on the alter", but that had the dubious excuse of being an op-ed .
Guy on radio: [tells an illustrative story] That's one antidote, but we have studies and statistics that show the same thing.
May have been a momentary lapse. He was otherwise quite cogent.
Gah.
You "hone" an edge. You "home in on" a target.
If you "hone in on" an answer, you make my teeth hurt.
Seen in the wild today: "he cagouled her until she gave in".
Lightweight raincoats are very persuasive.
On a Maintenance door card: "I would like to set a time to inseminate. Please call me at [number]."
The person who showed it to me opined that it was the opening of a porn scenario, but I think the person just meant "exterminate."
Come to think of it, the porn version of the Daleks would be saying "INSEMINATE! INSEMINATE!"
Consensually, of course.
In #233 Jacque doesn't mention the text that was bugging her, but perhaps it was page 19 of the Feb. 29-March 13 issue of Aviation Week and Space Technology. In an article about a counter-drone hijacking experiment during the Rose Bowl game, Graham Warwick quotes Randy Villahermosa of the Aerospace Corporation:"There were 100,000 people, 100,000 cellphones, Wi-Fi, satellite and terrestrial communications active during game time [...] We were still able to hone in, detect the drone, and exert control."
From an answer on Quora: "... you spend a lot of time cowtailing to everyone around you--your supervisors as well as your client, your tenants, and the general public."
Found in a help forum about adding watermarks to images on a website, whether to add to image or:
...adding watermark "in the fly".
>> ... you spend a lot of time cowtailing to everyone around you ...
This one took me a few seconds, because in east Africa (and probably other places) there is such a thing as a fly whisk made of the hair of a cow or bull's tail, so I imagined cowtailing as a metaphor for some helpful act in service of keeping pests away from one's superiors and senior colleagues.
(I brought a bull tail whisk back from my trip, but found that I strongly prefer the western fly swatter.)
'Cow tailing' actually makes a certain amount of sense. Or at least I can see how they got to it. What we have here is someone who has heard the phrase 'kowtowing to' but is not familiar with the word itself and has never seen it spelled. So they turned it into something familiar.
My partner and I call that an Inverse Gazebo Error. A regular Gazebo Error is when you don't know how to pronounce a word because you've only seen it written.
I remember having that very thing happen when I first encountered the word "kowtow"; for a while I assumed it was pronounced "co-toe".
I just heard someone say 'pneumonic device' (talking about how to remember thing).
#241 Mary Ailenn: It's a common enough phenomenon that linguists have coined a name for it: "eggcorn". ("Eggcorn" for "acorn" is the prototypical example.) Take a look at The Eggcorn Database for more examples. (I'm rather proud of having brought the phrase "beyond approach" to the attention of the compilers of the database.)
Aargh. I was being so careful to get the "A" in "Aileen", and wound up with a double-"n". Sorry about that!
Jim Parish (246): Don't worry about it. You got both parts of my name in there, that's the important thing.
I worked at a place where the design documents and code comments were required to define all the mnemonics they contained. In practice it was almost always misspelled as 'pneumonics'. It was scary. All it took was one person to misspell it and everyone else would copy it. It was like a plague.
TomB #248: <low-hanging-fruit> The pneumonic plague? </low-hanging-fruit>
Lee@242 - I am so adopting 'Gazebo Error'. Much more concise than 'I-often-see-it-written-I-never-hear-it-spoken Error'. And when one spends much of one's time among geeks, one has a use for a concise way to say that!
Lee #242, SunflowerP #250: Hmm. "Gazebo Error" makes me think of a very different sort of error:
Early in the history of D&D, one of the sample adventures¹ started in a house with a gazebo behind it. A significant number of 10 and 12-year old players² were told by their similarly-aged DMs "behind the building, you see a gazebo", assumed it was some kind of monster, and responded with "I attack the gazebo!", leaving the DM snickering and/or frantically trying to figure out what AC and hit points a gazebo had.
¹ I forget whether it was in the Basic set or the first AD&D adventure booklet.
² Including me, IIRC. ;-)
One of those was written up as Eric and the Dread Gazebo.
#251/252: Yes, that's where it came from. It seems pretty obvious that the player in question had never heard anyone say "gazebo" and thought it was pronounced GAZE-bo, and that's why the repeated explanations of "It's a gazebo!" weren't penetrating.
Lee #253: I simply didn't know what a gazebo was, because I was 10 years old, and lived in a levittown where nobody had space for gazebos. (My DM did pronounce it properly.)
Your gazebo is no match for my friend's pergola.
I coined the term "to be /maizld/" (which is spelled 'misled') for the Gazebo Effect. :) This is because I saw it written much more than I heard it spoken, and was, well, misled as to the pronunciation. (I am not the only person I've met who invented this specific term for it, either.)
The Boyfriend uses /'maizld/ to describe malicious misinformation. /mis'led/ can be by accident or through ignorance.
When I was a kid, Watergate was in the news a lot. It was quite a while before I discovered that the word "indict" that I saw in the newspaper, and the word that I heard pronounced as "indite" on the news, which had similar meanings, were actually the same word.
Huh. Here's a variant of the Grocer's apostrophe I haven't encountered before:
We carry GAGS' & GIFTS'
My embarrassing couldn't pronounce word was archaeology. I mangled it horribly when standing in front of a university professor saying I wanted to study it. No excuse of being a child there :s
I mispronounce far too many words. My sister is the only one who corrects me, and as she's on the other side of the country, I don't get the corrections enough to have an effect.
Seen in the wild: "if you ever lose site of humanity, go watch a marathon".
(Or is that the Grocers' apostrophe?)
My always-mispronounced word (and it drives my husband batty) is "mosaic". I consistently say "mo-ZY-ic", rather than "mo-ZAY-ic". I have no idea why, and I can't seem to train myself out of it. All I end up doing is stuttering on the word...
Seen in an article on political rallies
yelling and causing a raucous
From the National Weather Service:
MANY ROADS ARE CLOSURED ACROSS NORTHEAST COLORADO.
I wish I could believe this was written by a robot.
Found on a menu, probably found on many menus these days
Chinese Chicken Chop Salad
It stands out because the rest of the menu is done very well. Complete sentences and everything.
"Chop salad" is a common term for a chopped salad -- Google it and you'll find many examples. It may be a dreadful phrase in some ways, but it's a very well known usage.
Making the rounds on the Canadian internet at the moment, a woman in Alberta wants to launch a "kudatah" against the provincial NDP government.
From the same place as the Chop Salad comes the online menu choices of
Choose up to 1 option.
I guess 0 is a choice.
Tom @267
It still makes me cringe. And it stood out in an otherwise well done print menu.
Talking about menu abominations always makes me think of "with au jus sauce", which shows up in places upscale enough that they really ought to know better.
271
or even just 'with au jus'. Aaarrrggghhh!
I once saw, "with au jus, in a sauce of its own natural juices."
Department of redundancy department on line one for you....
Lin Daniel #269: Well yes, you could skip the free side dish, or some other category. If that's showing for entree options, you might have a problem, depending how the system is setup.
Saw another restaurant offering a "pre-fix" Easter dinner. It was on the way home from lunch, so I went home and had a suffix.
On restaurant menus, the somewhat bizarre Chinese translations can be entertaining ("Fresh Cobster") or a trap for the unwary ("Chicken in black bean sauce. Not very hot." - they'd omitted the 'e'on the end of 'Note', to our considerable surprise).
www.engrish.com usually has some "interesting" translations, like the fire extinguisher, or the worrying No Smoking sign.
Eek!
Just got a notcie from a Meetup group that the group is having a Meetup at the "Cheery blossom kite festival."
I've just read that rabbits of the same gender will fight "for mating rites and nesting sites."
dcb (279): Do rabbit mating rites involve giving each other brightly colored eggs?
Mary Aileen @280: Not so I've noticed... :-)
Someone I know just called someone else a "died in the wool conservative" on Facebook.
I suppose if you're going to die, there are worse places than in the wool.
Cadbury Moose@277: Victor Mair's posts on Language Log often try to tease apart particularly odd translations into English, like "spicy fried broccoli is better to die" on a menu, or "China Transfinite Governance". Sometimes there's a really obvious explanation; other times it takes some exploration, conjecture, and a trip through a bad dictionary. The "lost in translation" tag on the blog makes for fun browsing.
"maniacle laughter"
My first glance skipped over the I and I was left wondering why manacles would laugh.
Trying to shake loose a server error.
Seen in a comment section: "someone ... cutting me up in traffic."
In an otherwise wonderful article about a wonderful institution, an online magazine said the institution "strives to affect positive change." In the HEADLINE.
"Civil rights icon paying #amish to another civil rights icon"
If you've ever seen the picture of a dog getting sprayed with a hose with the caption "WHAARGARBL" on it? That is my face right now.
From Wikipedia:
Elephants loom large in the life of people of the Lugenda River Valley.
Someone on Twitter today said she'd be "hard broken" if her partner (did something untrusting).
Bruce H. @289: isn't that just the intransitive verb "to loom", meaning to appear large, often over or above something (e.g. storm clouds or mountains are often described as "looming" over the scenery)? Or is it a mis-spelling of some other phrase that I'm overlooking?
Two things struck me about this:
1. Of course elephants loom large. That's what elephants do. It's not clear to me what this choice of words adds to the article. (See Orwell on cliches.)
2. It sounds like it was written by a 10 year old who had just learned about alliteration.
I just saw a job listing for a position at the Day School of the Scared Heart.
From Talking Points Memo today:
"We are in all new unchartered grounds," said Holland Redfield, a delegate from the U.S. Virgin Islands who has attended the convention as a delegate multiple times beginning in the 1980s.
Unchartered grounds, indeed.
From a smartphone review:
The power button has a seriously tactical design engraved into it.I think they meant "tactile".
It would depend on the context of the review; in some circles, "tactical" has come to mean something like "martial" (but more manly). Things like clothing, footwear, backpacks, shoulder bags, flashlights, even food can all now be marketed as "tactical", meaning they're available in one or more militaristic shades or camouflage patterns, and may have the right patterns of straps and buckles, or be implied to be more durable (without necessarily living up to that claim, of course).
I could imagine a deeply knurled black button, that resembled something on a firearm, being described as "tactical" by someone engaging in that sort of marketing.
I have a computer case that was marketed as "tactical" and "stealth". This despite having pretty light-up LEDs inside it.
That's funny. In the context of the review, the engraving made it easier to distinguish the power button by touch, so I think "tactile" would make the most sense. But it could be they really meant "tactical". It would be easy for me to miss that because I am really not into "tactical" styling.
From a free Kindle book (worth every penny)
Salesmen hocking mattresses (I wonder if the boss knows about that)
He decided to try a new tact
In the end it was all for not
When I found out it was in Mozambique, I hoped the Lugenda River would be close to the other famous source of alliteration, the great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees
Sadly, they're at opposite ends of the country. I suppose the elephant-looming is still probably about the same size.
From a web page I happened to have stumbled across: "most of the grudge work can be done automatically using a small utility I've created". While I have done some projects out of spite, I don't think that's what they meant.
Not necessarily a Dreadful Phrase, but can anyone tell me why the page linked to about medieval illuminated manuscripts over in the open thread (this one) says "The fact that these texts were bound with animal skins makes them pretty metal" as one of the two sentences in its description? Do you think they meant "meta" rather than "metal"? The metal portion of the binding doesn't quite fit another interpretation, at least in my head....
I feel pretty sure that "metal" is meant. I'm a bit fuzzy on just what "metal" means, but it's something along the lines of "good/cool in a way that is in accordance with the behavior of heavy metal musicians". (Which definition is itself not in the least metal.)
I would have said metal meant 'in accordance with the aesthetics of heavy-metal music' rather than related to the behaviour of the musicians.
Back in the middle ages it wouldn't have been either meta or metal to bind books made of animal guts with animal skins. If you did it today you could make a case for either. Though not both; I think they're mutually exclusive.
Okay, reasonable correction. I'd say, of course, that there's a certain natural overlap between the aesthetics of the music and the behavior of the musicians.
You could make a book cover that was both meta and metal if you then added a dust-jacket with spikes on it, I think.
From the History Things web site: "Scroll through the gallery and bare witness to some of history’s greatest images."
So is this like Heinlein's Fair Witnesses but without the white robe?
Additional annoyance, the post promises 30 great images, but the navigation bar shows 52 pages.
Hey, a little over half the images are great ones -- that's a pretty good average!
Only if you weight the images equally; experience of online galleries of "great images" suggests to me that the remaining 22 images will be ads, and therefore lack greatness disproportionately to their mere number.
From an article in the online Smithsonian Magazine (from whom I expect better): '... Oculus headsets that jettison us through time and space....'
Spotted in the wild: someone said that the right wing assumes that their "freedom" includes the right to "impose their fews on others."
And now, at quite a different location elseweb, someone else said that he'd been told something "a view times."
I'll be back in a bit. I just have to smash this desk to splinters with my head.
Damn you, autocorrect? V and F are right next to each other and the thing might have decided he forgot the I.
Mayyyybe, but the words are also very similar in sound. Still, one can hope.
Read a story today in which someone ordered lomaine noodles for lunch.
With a side salad of ro mein lettuce.
Speak my peace
My sorted past
A riff in the relationship
Maybe I should stop downloading free books for my Kindle
Went past an advertisement today for an apartment which has a photon.
Em@318
One would hope it has plenty of photons.
Otherwise the interior would be very difficult to see...
I'm guessing it bounces around a lot. Mirrors everywhere.
From an essay in the online Washington Post: "I would intend to write after tucking [the children] in at night; instead I would end up tidying the living room while my husband clambered for time with me."
Pretty sure her husband was clamoring, not clambering.
In the inbox today (regrettably not caught by the spam filter) the title of an e-mail was "Gaooool!!". Thought by me: "Why are they seeming really excited about jail?" followed by looking over to the actual e-mail in the preview pane and seeing it was about European style football, and the iconic yell of the commentators when a goal is scored.
Hmm. Now I'm thinking about commentators for fast-paced courtroom events...
cajunfj40 @323 -- The best example of this recently (or perhaps, just of a partisan commentator completely losing it over a goal) was from the recent Iceland match. (thinking about it, it's probably what you got)
Iceland, a small nation, without much in the way of footballers managed to finish second in their group with a goal in the last 30 seconds of their match to win, when they'd been on their heels defending for the last half hour, and a mistake doing that would have sent them home. I'm not a major soccer fan, but it was the soccer equivalent of a mic drop.
(And by small, something over 2% of the country was _in_ the stadium in France watching the game. )
Reading an interview with the producer of an upcoming TV series; the interviewer invites him to "wet the appetite" of the audience.
In the comments of an article about the latest episode of Game of Thrones:
why don’t the Umber’s rule all of Westeros? They seem to be about the only people in the land with the combination of shields, armor and spears. If they don’t get hit in the rear by cavalry, they could concur all.I suppose if you've beaten everyone into submission, they then have to agree with you.
"Our dresses give you the instant hourly glass figure."
"...people would rather watch the tennis with their dog as apposed to their partner."
From an SFGate story on Juno:
After reaching a max speed of 165,000 mph — fast enough to fly around Earth in nine minutes — Juno will slam on the breaks by firing its engines. This is where things get tricky.
I don't know it is automiscorrect or someone who's using speech-to-text an not checking it.
P J Evans@331 - Them's the brakes.
"After the events of the movie, Our Hero goes on the lamb..."
I, um, don't think I've ever seen it called that before...
Carrie S@334
Said the narrator sheepishly?
:-)
"After reading through this, I don’t want anyone pronouncing Ralph Lauren’s last name in the same alliteration as Sophia Lauren [sic]."
On tipping in restaurants: "Its a potential mind-field."
So, a guy I know was perusing the a.s.s.m archives (purely for scholarly purposes you understand) and came across a story where "phonemes" was used where "pheromones" was intended. The story was old enough that I don't think this was a Cupertino (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/myl/languagelog/archives/002911.html).
In a medical device testing job, I encountered another substitution that was a Cupertino. Many of the test scripts required a recirculating tube set, and endless loop of tubing filled with water to exercise the pump on the device. The problem was that in some of the the scripts, "recirculating" had been changed to "recalculating". I wondered about this, and fixed it when I found it, but never investigated. Several years later I found out that if MS Word doesn't recognize "recirculating", "recalculating" is its first suggested correction.
@341: Well, some religions believe man was made from mud, so I guess it could be right...
In connection with other events this week:
nomination by acclimation
And another:
NOW comes the coup de gras
And another:
NOW comes the coup de gras
PJ Evans @344: In my experience (UK) LARPers and tabletop roleplayers produce that one all the time - usually spoken, though; they'll spell it correctly, but say "coo de grah".
I think it's a hypercorrection: people know it's a French phrase, correctly remember that French often doesn't pronounce final consonants, and then incorrectly assume that applies here.
The -p in coup is not pronounced (it is not one of C, F, L, R), so that part's right.
re 3344 et seq: I'm pretty sure they're imitating some cartoon character but I couldn't tell you whose catchphrase it is.
"But can we all take a minute and marinate on the fact that he looks like Ash?"
"Eleanor was FDR’s eyes and ears in the country, she traveled endlessly, and she campaigned for human rights issues ignored by our society in those daze"
The days when the country was in a daze?
Sadly, a classic mistake:
"Pence will be elevated by this, especially if he takes the "clean up the mess" roll."
Craft (Alchemy) @347: I didn't realize how common an error this was. A quick search tells me it's used twice in Kill Bill, for instance. "Coo de grah" is the correct pronunciation of coup de gras; the error is in the "gras" part, which means grease or fat (as in foie gras, fat liver). The expression should be written coup de grâce and pronounced "coo de grass".
So if I whack someone with a bag of lard (my stomach, for example) that's a proper coup de gras?
354
AAAAAAGGGGHHHHH!
(also, nice work!)
Really, I should stop reading the comments elsewhere:
"There are plenty of people in this country that believe in the occult of the Donald."
In terms of French hypercorrection, I heard one quite often when I was a tournament chess player in California. There's a phrase "en prise" that means a piece is threatened with capture; just about everybody said "on pre" when it should be "on preez".
"You've never suck out medical advice?"
(That has to be a generalization from "sneak --> snuck", right?)
Pendrift @353: The weird thing is that I'd bet that most of the people I hear saying "coo de grah" have learned it by reading ("coup de grace" is a reasonably common term to find in RPG or wargaming sourcebooks; the language of LARP is heavily influenced by the language of tabletop), but have somehow got from the correct spelling to the wrong pronunciation. I think this is where the hypercorrection comes in.
Xopher @354: *applause*
David Goldfarb @358: That's really interesting. I wonder what other instances of this kind of error are out there?
I've just heard the phrase "early adapters" about six times from different people on one radio interview. The context is people who immediately run out to get the latest-and-greatest thing, not people who are particularly protean...
Pfusand #357: Well, a lot of folks think he's the devil, but most don't mean it literally!
And lots of us would be in favor of his occultation.
Craft (Alchemy)@360: I wonder what other instances of this kind of error are out there?
The word "verdigris" might count, in either or both of English and French. In English I've heard the final "s" dropped as if in French; and I believe French now uses "vert-de-gris", which does drop the final "s". But, if I'm reading the etymology correctly, the common origin of the two is "verte de Grece" ("green of Greece"), which would have a final consonant even in modern French, and the term came into English with a final consonant.
Someone on Twitter was saying wacky things, and repeatedly proclaiming "Just my onion."
I commented that he really needs to pay attention to the text his autocomplete produces.
Xopher (365): I am amusingly reminded of my family's oft-repeated pronouncement "That's an opinion. Opinions are subject to controversy."
Wacky-twitter-dude's autocomplete would turn that into "Onions are subject to controversy." Why, yes. Yes they are.
*hopes someone here got his pun*
Xopher (367): I do now. But not until you mentioned that there was one.
Mary Aileen 368: That'll do!
Craft (Alchemy) @ various: do your gamers also refer to gods as "die-teez", or a magically-enforced onus as a "geese"? I've heard these are common in the US, but don't know directly as I haven't RPG'd for a long time; the closest I've come was providing some bureaucratic disentanglement for what may have been the first public LARP (Boskone, February 1982).
I think the SCA tourneys of the late 60s count as public LARPs, CHip (the Baycon Tourney was at least as public as something at Boskone); and possibly some of the Coventry games before that in LA.
CHip @370: I've never heard "die-teez" (I assume that first syllable is pronounced like the verb related to death, and the last the same as "tease"), and I've only rarely heard "geese".
I've always pronounced the latter as "GEE-as", with a hard "g". It's only recently (since I basically stopped using the word) that I've learned it's supposed to be pronounced "gesh".
I say "DEE-a-tees" for "deities," and "GHEE-ahs" (hard g) for "geas". I know that the latter is wrong, but it's a habit I can't seem to break; it's one of those words I learned from a page rather than by ear.
Pronunciation of "deities": all the RPers I know use what I would consider the correct UK pronunciation, "DAY-e-tees".
Pronunciation of "geas": we say it two syllables, "GEE-us". I'd never come across the "gesh" pronunciation before this thread. Huh.
I saw someone on Facebook say today that Trump has an "IV League education." I wonder if that means he had to be nursed through it.
Well, geas is Gaelic, at least Irish and possibly others. In Irish it's pronounced /gyas/, that is, palatalized /g/, /a/ as in 'father' (or a little darker, halfway to /o/ as in 'ought'), s as in 'seven sensational Saracens'. The plural is geasa, pronounced /'gyas-ə/.
Back in D&D days, we said /'ji-əs/.
A geas, in Celtic mythology and story, is not a spell. It is a personal behavior restriction that comes from the Otherworld, and often amounts to a prophecy about what you'll do just before you die.
For example, Cu Chulainn had the geasa that he was not allowed to eat the flesh of a dog (because he was the Hound ('Cu') of Culann), and that he was not permitted to refuse hospitality. His enemies found these things out, and invited Cu Chulainn to join them for a meal of dog's flesh. I can't recall what he did, but he broke one of his geasa and therefore died shortly afterward.
I don't know how the word is pronounced in any other Gaelic, or for that matter in any Irish dialect other than the one I studied. And I think gamers should borrow it completely and say it however seems right to them, and not fuss about others' pronunciation.
"The end is neigh."
(from one of those clickbait articles you get links to on Facebook)
The four horsemen of the apocalypse?
A friend sent me some job postings and suggested that some of them might be in my "wheel helm."
Nein, ich sagte, Wilhelm ist mein Bruder.
Xopher, good to know the big vote of confidence didn't turn your head.
It would have been rudder of me to say so than to remain quiet.
Xopher@378: To be answered with a Wilhelm scream?
"every once and a while" caught my eye in a promotional booklet from a technical publishing company who are usually very meticulous in their editing.
I've been noticing a new oddity among some of the network reporters, pundits, and assorted talking heads: they use "milestone" where presumably they mean "hallmark."
As in, "Such crude epithets are the milestones of the Trump campaign."
Bob Webber @#383: I've been noticing a new oddity among some of the network reporters, pundits, and assorted talking heads: they use "milestone" where presumably they mean "hallmark."
As in, "Such crude epithets are the milestones of the Trump campaign."
Maybe it's a different error, and they meant "millstone(s)"...
Xopher @ 376: A geas, in Celtic mythology and story, is not a spell. It is a personal behavior restriction that comes from the Otherworld... So Golias "put[ting] a geas on everyone in this hall" in the middle of Silverlock is improper usage? I've never seen it restricted as you describe, but meanings expand the way my waistline did when I got careless.
I think so, CHip. At least by what I was taught.
James Branch Cabell had people laying geasa on one another as early as the 1920's.
As for 'milestones', might it mean that the progress of the Trump campaign can be measured by its movement from one crude epithet to another?
"Since leaving the White House in 2001, the Clintons have irradiated their debt and made millions of dollars through speaking engagements. "
from yet another Facebook clickbait article
I guess that's one way to keep creditors away, with radioactive debt.
A review on BoardGameGeek of the Battlestar Galactica board game says that "the Cylons widdle away at the resource dials". I think if I was on the human team in that situation, I'd be pissed.
The modern Irish singular is actually geis, according to the dictionary, and that would be pronounced more or less as "gesh". Details at
http://www.teanglann.ie/en/fgb/geis, including plenty of examples. Scottish Gaelic has geas, according to Scannell's Gàidhlig-Gaeilge dictionary.
Discussing why dragon-taming, despite being cool, perhaps does not make the most practical sense: "[Dragons are] darn right dangerous..." I think they meant "downright"?
From an article on the CBC: "unchartered waters".
Em@393: "sailing on the wide accountancy"?
On Twitter, accompanying saaaaad pictures, "I'm balling my eyes out."
I commented that that's usually a rather more pleasant process, but had it pointed out to me by several people that it's not if it's done with a melon baller. Discussions about Œdipus getting one as a wedding present ensued.
From the I-shit-you-not NEW YORK FUCKING TIMES:
Mr. Roche, who was also in a relationship, sat back and took it all in. “Everyone was aware that this gorgeous woman had entered the room,” he said. But soon he and Ms. O’Brien were cutting up backstage over missed queues and fumbled lines and whatever else captured their fancy.
Missed queues. They forgot to wait in line? The NYT relying on spell checkers instead of employing copyeditors as custom, decency and all gods demand is surely a sign of the End Times.
Here's the link. In case they try to deny it when on trial for their lives later, I've also saved a screenshot.
Not as egregious, and not the NYT, but:
(((Susan Crites))) @neonnurse (via twitter) Just read a Denver Post article where someone says "We don't want to kick a gift horse in the mouth." Um...no, no, you don't. 0.o
Xopher -- I'm not convinced that was a spell checker; as Teresa noted in her previous book, copy editors can also have off days (or off books...). However, I see that it still isn't fixed.
"I would like to do that, but since I have to deal with her in person at least once a week I reframed."
Heard on a Globetrekker: "were under empirical rule".
Evidence-based government--now there's a concept. Those wily Hapsburgs!
joann, #401: Evidence-based government--now there's a concept.
No shit. It's one I wish we had.
*wondering if there's a T-shirt or bumper sticker to be got out of this*
This moose would happily settle for competent government, rather than the newspaper-driven shower of canine excreta currently in charge of the UK.
Gah!
Someone is posting a story on the pagan forum I help run. It has a 'prolong'.
Given that it's an attempt at surrealism that consists of poorly-spelled, poorly-punctuated walls-o'-text, this strikes me as a singularly apt eggcorn.
TomB @405: "Draw some symbols on the floor, light some candles, read some lation. This pretty much summons it up."
On things to knit for winter comfort:
"a gator for the neck"
Carol Kimball (407): Like these?
(That does seem to be a common error; when I googled for alligator neck warmer, most of the results were for gaiters with the 'gator' spelling. Using scarf instead of neck warmer brought up what I wanted.)
I have to confess one I did myself. I wrote that we try to "insure that every child has a holiday gift." Fortunately I corrected it.
You can't actually buy "holiday gift guarantee" policies as far as I know.
My stoning will take place tomorrow at noon outside the city gates. All are welcome to observe; active participants should be without sin.
re: dyeing in a big pot and gradually adding more tint "to get an hombre effect".
You can't actually buy "holiday gift guarantee" policies as far as I know.
That's brilliant!
Someone in a blog comment was worried that Muslim immigrants might try to impose Sahara Law.
Em, that's great. I've also seen "Shania Law."
Xopher@413
"Snania Law"
All radio stations must play at least one Shania Twain song each hour?
Xopher@413, Michael@414:
I was thinking of the new album by Sharia Twain.
I've seen "Muslin extremists" a few times lately.
Gotta watch out for that unbleached cotton...
To invoke Article 50 without involving Parliament, the Government needs "the Royal Pejorative".
Michael 414: All radio stations must play at least one Shania Twain song each hour?
Raise your hand if you just flashed on Shania singing the Call to Prayer. *raises hand*
You know, I get that homophones are a thing, and it's especially tricky when going across languages. I try to cut people slack.
However, I feel that I must draw the line at referring to Adolf Hitler as "the Füror".
It's the fact that they umlauted the U but couldn't be arsed to take the 10 seconds (assuming they didn't already have a Google tab open) necessary to google the word that really gets to me.
Note to self: add "buco bucks", courtesy of Janice Gelb.
(good to see you posting, t!)
Teresa! Welcome back to feeling well enough to post!
Amazon review of Burn, Witch, Burn: "This movie should burn at the steak."
This question may belong in the open thread, but I'll ask it here for the context. Are there other English word pairs with the brake/break, stake/steak pattern?
Brake/brake in particular seems to trip a lot of people.
Bruce H. (425): Different final consonent, but there's great/grate.
Bruce H. @425, for a similar mechanism with (near-)homophones, I'd say affect/effect, but unlike the other pairs, a lot of people don't have a clear grasp of the difference. Bear/bare as well.
Lose/Loose seems to be the worst. I think it's because if you look at "lose" on the page, it looks wrong. You would expect it to be pronounced more like "Lowe's" instead of "Lew's". If only folks misspelled it "loos"; it would be a close match phonetically, and the English already look at us funny for so many other things, what's one more?
Bruce H. @ 425: I'm having trouble thinking of any other words where "eak" is pronounced like "ake". Are there others? There's "sheik" but I don't think I see that getting mixed up with "shake".
For a slightly different vowel pair, I believe I do see leek/leak confused from time to time. There's also reek/wreak, but I've never seen them confused; maybe anybody who knows how to use "wreak" in a sentence is likely to be past spelling problems.
From an accident report, I offer the news that a minor cut was "oozying".
429
I've seen "reek" and "wreak" confused. I don't know if it's someone who doesn't know the difference, or if it's automiscorrect.
I found "burned at the steak" particularly amusing because the writer was trying for a pun.
Bruce H.@425: I don't know if it's the full set of words, but my memory is that only a handful of words with "ea" came out of the Great Vowel Shift with that sound: "great", "steak", "break", "yea", "swear", and "bear" are commonly mentioned.
So then "bare/bear" would fit the pattern, despite ending in R instead of K.
So would "pear/pair/pare" I suppose. And "wear/ware".
Although that might depend on dialect; certainly they all sound the same in my dialect, but then, so does "merry/Mary/marry". But pen and pin sound completely different...
I've seen the phrase "reek havoc", and always took it to be an inverse gazebo error -- not knowing how the word is spelled because you've only heard it pronounced.
"Pear/pair/pare" all sound the same in my dialect as well, as do "wear/ware" (and "where").
But "merry/Mary/marry" are definitely three different sounds to me, and pen and pin sound completely different as well...
For further reference, I hear pear and wear rhyming with each other, and pair/pare sounding the same and rhyming with pare.
I also hear merry/Mary/marry as two sounds - merry and Mary/marry.
Given that I have relatives who were raised with the same dialect that don't make the same distinction, I wonder how much can be attributed to choral training?
Also, pin and pen are completely different sounds to me, but growing up I had classmates for whom they were the same.
"Where" doesn't QUITE sound like "ware" or "wear"; it's slightly breathier. So is "which" as opposed to "witch". Oddly, I make no distinction between "when" and "wen".
Del 436: Indeed, tier/tear/tare, the ends being distinct and homophonic with the two words in the center homograph.
In an obituary for the great historian and California State Librarian, Kevin Starr: "Dr. Starr attended St. Ignacious High School"
I think it's time for an airing of this poem:
The Chaos - by the Dutch writer G. Nolst Trenité, written in 1922.
Also know as English Pronunciation
Definitely British English pronunciation, and for a native speaker hard to read aloud due to fits of laughter!
This afternoon my coworker was looking at a website that also collected these. (I think they were real, not made up on the spot.) The two that stuck in my mind:
someone who spoke porch and geese
playing rush and roulette
That first one took me a minute to parse correctly.
dcb @ 443 - Much of it works in American English too, but there are occasional "say what?" points.
@443, mostly it works for me, but there are a few failures in my dialect. For example, "branch" rhymes perfectly with "ranch" to me. (Same "a" as in "and"). If there's another way to pronounce either word, I don't know it. And I never knew "Pall Mall" was pronounced differently than "pall mall" (pawl mawl). Probably because I've never heard it spoken. How IS "Pall Mall" pronounced...?)
446
I was taught that it's pronounced "Pell Mell" - it's an old game resembling croquet, and the place in London with the name was where it was played at the time.
PJ Evans, ok, now, that's fascinating. I've heard of doing things "pell-mell" (rapidly and recklessly) but had no idea that it came from a game called "pall mall" nor that "Pall Mall" was a gaming ground where it was played. (I'm assuming the etymology, here, but it seems logical.)
It's from the Italian palla e maglio, "pale (or stake) and mallet", in other words the game that evolved into croquet. The hoops are now a convenient way of putting the spikes in the ground at the regulation separation, but originally they were two separate spikes you had to measure carefully. You used the same mallet to knock them in as to play the balls with. When you hit the balls with the mallet, they rolled "pell-mell" across the grass.
It's from the Italian palla e maglio, "pale (or stake) and mallet", in other words the game that evolved into croquet. The hoops are now a convenient way of putting the spikes in the ground at the regulation separation, but originally they were two separate spikes you had to measure carefully. You used the same mallet to knock them in as to play the balls with. When you hit the balls with the mallet, they rolled "pell-mell" across the grass.
"Pall Mall" - the road in London - is pronounced with a short 'a' as in "and" (and as in "pal" meaning friend) in both words: listen at https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/pall-mall
'pall' as in the sheet over a coffin, or a dark cloud of smoke, or even the verb (the quiet life began to pall" is pronounced more like 'pawl' or "Paul" (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/pall).
The distinctions in three versions of "mall" I wouldn't have thought about, but I can hear the difference in the examples provided at the bottom of the page https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/mall
However, "branch" and "ranch" rhyme for me as well (and on that website).
From a list of causes of intermittent groin pain:
- Cute appendicitis
I assume it started as "Acute appendicitis" but I'm not sure how it lost the initial 'A' - probably from poor copy editing.
dcb @452: it amuses me when international travelers refer to the strip of green space and monuments in DC to rhyme with pal.
My husband (English father) does it on purpose and as a disambiguation technique from shopping plazas, because that sort of mess disturbs him. And also because it's funny. :->
I always thought Pall Mall was where you went to shop for coffins and stuff...
Only if you've been smoking them.
"New seats with Lumber support".
Quote from a visitor's review of a movie theater, not a lumberyard. And, no, that theater doesn't show films about hard wood.
KeithS... Not a movie spiritually inspired by Ed Wood movie and starring James Wood and Joan Woodward, based on designs by Carl Barks?
"Lumber support" sounds like gay porn to me.
I'd swear that lumber support would describe the average church pew ...
Pit props and shuttering?
Cartel (TINLC) member #1317 as far as this moose can remember.
Courtesy of a local paper: "chronic obstruction of her airwaves."
dcb, #462: I can't even begin to figure out what that was supposed to have been.
462/463
I think they meant "airways".
dcb @462: I saw the same substitution in a newspaper classified ad many years ago. On a milling machine, the work table moves back and forth and left and right on ways. On high end machines, the ways are chromed to reduce wear and keep the movements accurate. This ad offered a machine with "chrome waves". The one thing the ways are not, is wavy; they are made as straight as humanly achievable. I had to read the ad out loud to figure out what it was trying to say.
On the Edinburgh tram project:
The chamber was subsequently used in the second world war as an air raid shelter and there are still artefacts from that time, such as signage, which are still well persevered.
Lee @463: Definitely supposed to be 'airways' as P J Evans says @464.
In response to one of those "X profession should stay out of politics" comments:
"It honestly begs to differ which people are 'allowed' to be in politics anymore doesn't it?"
"Express service is cancelled on 53 Steeles East route due to incremental weather."
It just kept getting worse, little by little.
(Colin Hinz posted that on FB. A couple of commenters beat me to the remark.)
Just spotted on the wilds of Facebook: "aiding and a bedding criminals".
Offered on my local Buy Nothing group: "Neckless. Brand new." It took me a minute of staring at the picture (which included a couple of other objects) to realize they were giving away a necklace.
"Neckless. Brand New" makes me think of a guy you haven't seen for a year, who started doing steroids 11 months ago.
Chiropractor may have exasperated my problem
So the pagan forum I help run has lately picked up a member who apparently cannot communicate in anything other than dreadful phrases. When someone finally asked him whether English was his first language, he came out with this gem: 'This is absolutive my native tongue.'
your round of the mill
well, I guess if you run around the mill....
Manager is quoted as "This is a nice little feather in his camp." Mistranscription or figure of speech? It's baseball, so hard to tell.
'This is absolutive my native tongue.'
Well, that can't be right, since English is nom/acc.
...I'll see myself out.
headline quote in the local newspaper: "recipe for ranker"
the quote in the article correctly said "rancor"
And on a running site, discussing wet weather and the state of the trails: "I found ducks swimming on my favourite bridal path recently."
- I'm choosing to believe that's an auto-miscorrect!
dcb #480: The confusion there (involving a groom as it does), means that someone is being taken for a ride.
dcb #480: The confusion there (involving a groom as it does), means that someone is being taken for a ride.
Within spitting difference of. I think this comes from an association with "splitting the difference"?
They probably mean within spitting distance of - no farther away than you can spit
A subtle one from this article, which is interesting for other reasons:
An Oklahoma state senator charged with child prostitution turned himself into authorities Thursday, a week after police found him a motel room with a 17-year-old boy.While I'm sure he would like to have turned himself into authorities (PAF! "I drop the charges against myself, and deny your appeal!") what he really did was turn himself in to authorities.
Xopher @486 I missed the one you spotted on my first pass through. What I saw (and I checked, and it's in the original, not a transcription error on your part) is a week after police found him a motel room with a 17-year-old boy
in a motel room, surely?
LOL I hadn't noticed that one! Hmm...given the likelihood that this was a setup, maybe they DID find him a motel room...
From someone's list of World's Dumbest Tweets:
Why y'all acting like the world just now gettin messed up? What about slavery? The hall of cost? Pick up a bookI think the "Hall of Cost" must be the mall corridor with the expensive stores...
Also, "hollow cost" in the same list. Jesusmaria.
Xopher #489: The "Hall of Cost" is where the spirits of the dead are valued.
Fragano, #491: Presided over by Anubis, I take it?
No, Anubis' brother Bill (that Gates family, it's everywhere).
I wish this was intentional because it's absolutely magnificent (from the Energy Gang podcast): "The headwinds for coal are strong and they're coming from every direction."
From There Is No Military Option Against North Korea:
Either this administration has to accept that and talk to Kim Jong-un, or continue down a tic-for-tac road where Pyongyang responds to instigation with a missile test that further destabilizes the region—or puts our allies in the region at risk.
Which branch of game theory involves trading tiny candies on a cross-hatch playing board, again?
~oOo~
(And have I mentioned recently how nuts it makes me when people "hone in" on something?)
"European born, American Bread."
Can I smother him with white dough? Please?
“It’s a stick with which you wack people. Or other things. At your digression.”
Seen in the wild: "...back in the midsts of time."
My teeth hurt.
Xopher #496: Just throw a loaf of Wonder Bread at them, probably wouldn't even count as assault.
No, Dave. But if I threw the raw dough at them, it might be battery.
Add some seasoning and it'd be a salt and battery.
g,d&rvvvf
Jacque @ #495
There's that now obsolete tool for sharpening certain kinds of fish: the carp hone. (We still have carphone warehouses in England, but I don't think they actually keep them in stock.)
Would the warehouses be the repositories of mass carp hone? Sounds cheesy to me...
Cadbury Moose@503: There's that now obsolete tool for sharpening certain kinds of fish: the carp hone. (We still have carphone warehouses in England, but I don't think they actually keep them in stock.
Better to keep them in stock if you want the stock to get all the flavor.
A guy wakes up to find himself covered in bedbug bites:
I come to find out that three units in my building are aware that the woman directly above me has her apt invested.
"The dye is cast."
Poor kid; I didn't have the heart to correct him. He was tweeting about Trump-Russia with great sincerity. I mean, Holi smokes, how mean can you be?
I can think of situations - even involving Trump-Russia - in which "the dye is cast" would be perfectly correct. Such situations would probably end in arrests, though.
You know what Holi is, Jim?
Obviously, I didn't; but I do now.
I stand by my previous comment, however.
Reported previously, but just saw it again: "He thinks he's getting away with impeding the investigation but he's got another thing coming."
This may turn out to be a blessing in the skies.
"A test of his own medicine."
This moose has seen 'the stocking trade' somewhere.
Cadbury Moose (517): I've seen stores that only sell socks; surely they're in the stocking trade? ;)
So the idea of brushing my teeth with dirt didn’t phase me at all.
"When it comes to historical or periodical films..."
OK, The Devil Wears Prada is a periodical film. But that's not what they meant.
522
Would films about newspapers and magazines count as periodical?
Would Serial Mom be a periodical film?
The Devil Wears Prada was a film about the editor of a magazine. That's what I meant.
"I collect millinery radios"
Presumably these are the helmet-mounted variety?
Or perhaps a periodical film is the sort that they only show every so often?
Em at #110: Hyperbolic needle:
You should not use a hyperbolic needle unless you are asymptomatic.
Erik @528 : That is glorious.
Even a parabolic needle strikes me as a risky proposition.
@528, @530: Is the discussion now getting metabolic?
Clifton @ #532
As long as it doesn't get hypergolic we should be OK.
(Do not cross this thread with O.T.217 or there will be "boom today".)
They also released their self-entitled debut album that year.
Perhaps a small gazebo that spontaneously combusts would be a hypergola.
Erik @ 535: Bravissimo! (And fortissimo when the flames reach the fireworks.)
"You see a well-groomed garden. In the middle, on a small hill, you see a gazebo."
Someone I knew back in college just messaged me on Facebook, reminiscing about how I used to wear "purple overhauls."
OK, now we're going to make EVERYONE royalty!
"case and point", when talking about the latest changes to some of the games with Marvel character.
In a description of equipment that might be useful to a private investigator: "a jeweler's loop".
It's a small-press book, so presumably it had at least some pretense of editing. And the correct word is specialty jargon -- but all the more reason for making sure that you get it right if you know enough to use it.
In talking about what version of a device to use for testing: "... needs to have all the latest belts as weasels ...".
Genuine LOL at that one.
Previously seen on Making Light: Large flattened weasels make very poor books. Not sure what kind of belts they make.
Oh, wait, other way around. Never mind.
This was the headline in an online HLN magazine I follow:
Hoboken Police Arrest Man With Warrants Found In Hudson Street BuildingI read the article and was disappointed to discover that it doesn't explain how the warrants got into the building, who found them, or why they were still valid.
English needs parentheses. Either that or German-style compounding. "Police Arrest Warrant-Having Man Found In Hudson Street Building" would be clearer, but it's at best deeply awkward in English.
544
They'd have been fine if they'd dropped "with warrants". (I wish they'd get someone else to read the headlines and provide feedback.)
I think they were trying to make it clear that they didn't arrest him just because he was in the Hudson Street building. But I agree with you that that information didn't need to be in the headline.
I might hyphenate Man-with-Warrants if I were trying to get all that into the headline. It's not right, but it's not as awkward English as your example of Warrant-Having Man.
How about "Police arrest wanted man..." I'm fairly sure having warrants out on you is one of the primary definitions of 'wanted' in the legal context.
Mary Aileen 542: True. I was (foolishly, perhaps) trying to parallel the German construction, which would be something like 'Optionsscheinehabender Mann'.
Carrie S. (548): I'm not sure. To me 'wanted' sounds more serious than 'have warrants out on'. 'Wanted' would be for a major crime; 'has warrants' could be something minor, like missing a court date.
That could just be me, though.
Man with Warrants Arrested; Found in Hudson Street Building.
"Police" is unnecessary unless citizens' arrests are common in the region.
551
or
Man Arrested on Warrants; Found in Hudson Street Building
Email from somebody who said he wanted us to do something for him at our "earliest possible conveyance"
#553
Or
Man Found in Hudson Street Building Arrested on Outstanding Warrants
Erik @#554
Call him a taxi.
<Omnes>"You're a taxi!"
Received in my work email today:
"He was not stratified with the quality."
Fortunately, the work in question wasn't mine. I like to think my work is more layered.
Received in my work email today:
"He was not stratified with the quality."
Fortunately, the work in question wasn't mine. I like to think my work is more layered.
Talking about a training schedule: "which throws it out of sink a little."
see at Daily Kos:
when it was au current to say
P J Evans@560
Obviously a highly charged situation. Possibly with an impending volt-face.
Posted on a neighborhood mailing list in which I participate:
FOUND -- blue pibble puppy
Illustrated with a photo of a young pit bull. It took me several days to figure that one out.
"Pibble" is fairly common slang for the breed among those who own and/or breed them; I think it may be an attempt to cut down on the Scary Dog image by giving them a cutesy nickname.
Unless it's a reference to Peter Dickinson's series detective James Pibble!
"...teleporting to a different dementia".
Carrie, #593: Interesting -- I didn't know that. This mailing list gets a fair number of postings about found pit bulls needing a foster home; many of them have scarring around the face, which indicates that they were probably dumped for not showing fighting ability. I've met a lot of pit bulls, and they are amazingly sweet-tempered and friendly dogs by nature. I can't imagine the kind of abuse it would take to turn one vicious.
I think "pibble" is like "doxie" in being a breed nickname that's pretty common in some places but not immediately clear if you haven't run into it before.
Last week on Craigslist I encountered "dotson" for dachshund.
Bruce H. (569): Spoken not written, but I have a friend who insists on pronouncing that 'dash-hound'. I finally gave up correcting her.
Lee @567: I can't imagine the kind of abuse it would take to turn one vicious.
I've heard that the thing that makes pit bulls dangerous is not their temperament, so much as that they've been bred to just not let go once they've bitten down on something.
Jacque, that was previously used to describe Rottweilers, German Shepherds, Doberman Pinschers, and all the previous breeds known to be "Scary Dogs". None of that is correct.
"Tempura paint for art class." That uniform golden-brown is so BORING.
I'm really not sure it's worth pointing out the use of "Here, here!" as an expression of agreement anymore. I cannot actually remember the last time I saw someone use the right word.
Carrie 574: Here's the last time I used it on ML.
Xopher: By which, of course, you mean "Here! Here!"
Xopher: By which, of course, you mean "Here! Here!"
Poss dup; ISE
THANK you, Internal Server Error, for blowing my punchline. ::sulk::
There, there...
g,d&rvvvf (before the ISE fairy catches up with this moose).
There's an exchange in Barbara Hambly's Star Trek novel Ishmael* that goes
"Hear, hear!"
"There, there."
"Where, where?"
"Now, now."
The Vulcan in the room (not Spock, who is missing) is Not Amused.
*a lot more fun than it has any right to be
Lee @ #562: That reminds me of a James Herriot story where's covering for a vet in another town and keeps getting messages passed along by the landlady from "Mr. Pimoroff" (who turns out to be a Mr. Pimm, in a nearby village called Roth), or "Smiling Harry Syphilis," which turns out to be a farmer whose pigs have swine erysipelas.
Fade Manley @ #568: I've seen some people call Siamese cats "meezers."
In an email sent to me regarding cancelling a subscription & also cancelling the direct debit from the bank: "for your piece of mind."
Sarah E @581: I've heard Siamese cats called "measles", myself.
I sometimes write 'Hear here!', which I believe is a quotation from The Phantom Tollbooth.
"He's a little higher up the management food change."
>> Do autocarrots count?
Yes. If they survive the editing(?) process(??), they're just as dreadful.
Autocarrots would presumably useful to anyone with a pet rabbit...
Michael I@588: I would associate autocarrots more with a pet rabbi.
From the Materials category at Craigslist: rustic waynes coating.
Seen on a wiring diagram:
"Half function electronic spark control"
(Which does seem to explain a lot about that wiring harness...)
From a BBC News item about Bland, Dull and Boring (.au, .uk & ,us, respectively):
"It's a bit like visiting a sight that you see on the telly."
#593 is a new poster and not on topic. Generic praise-spam?
Looks to be someone who studied English in university and is working as a translator. Welcome, Azzeddine! If you have some dreadful phrases to share, this is the place. The more general conversation is over on the Open Thread. Do you perhaps write poetry?
"...what is probably needed is a route and branches review (of the categories)" -- Clearly a call for network analysis!
I have just regretfully put aside a real estate listing for a nice looking house that is really outside my price range - no doubt due to it being, as the listing proudly proclaims, in a "sort after" location.
Is it just me, or is the current political covfefe completely unprecedented?
@598, one can only wish that it was unPresidented.
It's not exactly a dreadful phrase, but there's a land sale that's been "advertised" (public notice) in my local weekly for several weeks: Parcel One: All that certain tract or parcel of land situate in Albemarle County, Virginia, containing 14.9519 acres, more or less, and being on the residue of a 16.94 acre parcel...
First Thought: Six digits of precision... "more or less". ;-) Highlighted by both the 4-digit original parcel, and the trailing 9 in the value. Second thought: Looks like 0.0001 acre is about 4 square feet. Given how hilly things are around here, I'd bet the landscape itself voids at least two of those digits of precision.
600
Reminds me of seeing a parcel on an assessor's map that was 0.01 feet wide (an eighth of an inch!) and a hundred or so feet long. I looked at that one and said, "dude, that's survey error!"
Ask a Manager is having a thread on coworkers who use words wrong. Lots of good ones, some NSFW.
Someone on a neighborhood mailing list is looking for a "mirrowed dresser". Repeated twice, in the header and the text, so not just a typo.
Benjamin Moore's Color of the Year, Shadow 2117-30, is allusive and enigmatic — a master of ambiance.
Heh. That mailing list is the gift that keeps on giving. Today it's "3 peace living room table set for sale".
Just seen elseweb, in a comment about White House infighting:
mono-a-mono
Erik Nelson #604: I quite missed the allusion.
Lee #605: Talk about giving peace a chance.
P J Evans #606: "Mono", inter alia, is the Spanish both for "cute" and "monkey". I forbear to say what image that phrase brought to mind, save that it involved people named Bannon and Miller.
On BBC Radio 4, an item about work that's just starting on London's Houses of Parliament tower that has the clock and the Big Ben bell, which is controversially being silenced for the safety of the workers: someone says, surely they could wear ear offenders.
Odalchini #608: That would bring them under the Offenses Against The Person Act.
Just saw 'tongue and cheek' again.
"In my point of you..."
(To be fair, the writer may not be a native English-speaker)
"Her boss knew the Daredevil well enough to chassis him."
This latch can only be opened with disposable thumbs.
Em, I wish I'd applied this crazy-glue with disposable thumbs. <grumble-grumble-scraping-at-artificial-callouses-grumble>
Just saw an article calling Joel Osteen "a bold-faced liar."
Sigh.
Just heard a commenter on TV saying he hoped a classic building would "stand the testament of time."
"gave me a rest bit before a busy week"
P J Evans 601, maybe you could build a fence on that parcel of land?
618
I think there was a fence on it. All of it, and then some. *g*
a halter top with bare mid drift
Most of the time, they stay put, don't they?
"Society, school, experience and our immediate environment usually teach us to be careful and weary of dangers."
I'm weary of writers who don't know the difference between 'weary' and 'wary'.
'weary' and 'wary'
As a lector at a Catholic mass, one Sunday I was reading aloud the Prayers of the Faithful, which are typed out for us, and are often specific to the season or the day's readings or current events. This one was supposed to echo one of the day's readings from St. Paul and ask for the grace to pray without growing weary. My typed sheet asked for the grace to pray without growing wary, and I read it aloud before I realized the typo. And came very close to a bad case of the giggles at the front of church. I've been religious (heh) ever since about reading over all the prayers before the service, not just the ones where I might need to check the pronunciation of someone's name.
Be careful what you pray for...
I have a couple of friends who even pronounce "wary" as "weary" and I am rather weary of it! Admittedly, they are dyslexic, so I am wary of correcting them unless I'm genuinely confused; it strikes me as unkind, since they haven't asked.
OtterB @622:
That reminds me of the classic Vicar of Dibley episode where Alice is trying very hard read "Ye are the ſalt of the earth and ſainted. God shall ſeal your endeavours until ye ſit on His right hand. Therefore fight the good fight for His ſake and He shall be your ſuccour."
She had practiced the reading from a modern printing that didn't use the long s, but was using a historic bible during the service.
"[bad movie] deserved the drumming it took from critics."
Celluloid makes terrible drum heads.
OtterB #622:
A major, and I do mean major, text published a few years ago, which filled a great need for students of Caribbean history, political and social thought, and culture, mentioned something called the "colonial yolk" in the introduction. A snarky reviewer, named Ledgister, inquired "sunny side up, perhaps?"
I might not have done it had it not recalled to me the time in school, when the hymn one morning was Kipling's "Children's Song" from Puck of Pook's Hill. The cyclostyled sheet handed out to us had us requesting the divine power "Teach us to bear the yolk in youth." One can only conclude that British imperial rule was eggscruciating.
Reminds me of when the Messiah rehearsals got around to "His Yoke Is Easy." Boy were there puns and filks.
Xopher@627
With you there to egg them on?
The difference between drumming and drubbing needs to be explained with practical examples, Xopher.
Today I read in the local paper about rival organizations meeting in "mutual territory".
Paul A. (630): They both own that piece of territory? ;)
Mary Aileen (631): Alas for a beautiful explanation, the article was explicit that the value of the meeting place was that it was owned by neither side.
Someone got "soak and wet" today.
My workplace recently did a major revamp of their website. In the section on Security, the subsection about physical security showed a screen with computer code, and the one about application security showed a corridor full of spikes. I suggested to our marketing director that each of these pictures might do better on the other section. She emailed me today to tell me she had "swamped them".
(Admittedly, that one may have been an autocarrot.)
Saw "stock & trade" again.
... from a post on FB, from someone on vacation: "Lots of site seeing tomorrow"
@636, well, if one went on a historical-places tour, or were visiting several possible locations for a proposed building, I suppose site seeing would be an appropriate phrase. (If one went to a that Trump-tweet exhibit put on by the Daily Show, would one be cite seeing...?)
David Goldfarb @634 - A former workplace of mine was trying to advertise that they did computer security stuff in addition to the Y2K stuff that was their main focus. They produced a glossy brochure that showed a trio in tactical gear, with a burble about how they were willing to "repel" down buildings.
My manager showed me a copy of the brochure and proudly asked me what I thought of it. I skimmed it, trying to keep a positive expression on my face (vs. appalled, which was how I felt), until I tripped over "repel". I pointed it out to him and asked if they were using antigrav boots or something. I had to explain: using gear to go down a cliff or whatever was spelled "rappel". He got a bit upset; copies of the brochure had just been distributed to lots of potential clients. "Let's hope they don't notice that..." (I hoped that they wouldn't see any of it. I told him that the entire thing looked kind of, well, goofy. IIRC, he told me that I didn't understand advertising, which is perhaps true.)
"...makes me want to ask her name, age, and cereal number."
I guess Kellogg's Corn Flakes would have a cereal number of one...
I saw someone saying that they are "on beckon call to" their customers.
I suppose "beck" doesn't much appear outside that phrase. Somebody explained in the comments and they graciously took the correction.
A rather lovely "not the word you're meaning" from a paper I graded a couple of days ago: "a story that transposes time".
It was not a time-travel story, nor one told in non-sequential order, alas.
https://twitter.com/brian_bilston/status/922940807132442624
A tweeted poem by Brian Bilston apropos of all this.
We cannot rewrite literature for reflecting the morays of their time.
Erik 644: Or as Spider Robinson put it, "When you swim in the sea and an eel bites your knee, that's a moray!"
Erik 644: Or as Spider Robinson put it, "When you swim in the sea and an eel bites your knee, that's a moray!"
Xopher &c #639:
I'd assign cereal #1 to spelt, for obvious reasons.
Which of course makes me want to ask, "How's it spelt?"
Marking a paper, and a student accidentally came up with a really good summary of the plot of "The Yellow Wallpaper":
"A dichotomy which can be found in the story is that of 'wife versus patience'."
(They meant "patient", but you've gotta admit they're onto something.)
Xopher @ 645: whereas,
"A big burly guy with tattoos 'neath his eye, that's a Maori!"
Seen on as a title on a job posting on LinkedIn:
“Senior Programmar”
I'm officially a senior (in many situations), and I'm pro-grammar!
I saw "making due" in Robert Reed's Down the Bright Way. He also uses "minuscule" a lot, and usually, but not always, spells it "miniscule". Shame on Reed's editor.
A laptop with a “chick-lit keyboard”
...could be useful if its owner happened to be a chick-lit author, I suppose.
"He apologized because he saw the wiring on the wall."
From a yarn ad:
"...dark gray flecks that are disbursed throughout the strand ..."
"In his book Treaties with Human Nature, Hume poses the question..."
Abi's recent correct use of "vise" reminded me that I've recently seen somebody use "vice" when "vise" would have better described the pressure they were under.
Bill Stewart @ 665 ...
Given that the UK uses vice where the US uses vise, perhaps they were using it as you describe.
That might explain it. I have the impression that American was their native language, but that may have been some other grammatical miscreant.
Hmm... I note (maybe "again") that many of these would make interesting bases for microSFF.
I remember arguing with a friend in college over whether "vise" should be pronounced with an S or a Z sound (he favored the Z). I had to get out a dictionary to convince him that people did indeed use the S pronunciation, same as "vice." He said, "But Vice-Grips sounds terrible, like another name for love handles." Whereupon we fell about laughing.
HelenS @#669:
The UK version is the Mole Wrench, a handy tool for getting the persistent little b*****s out of your lawn. We also have the monkey wrench, a useful tool for the extraction of various primates from confined spaces.
Vice/vise causes a lot of confusion, because it doesn't get the kind of publicity that that other UK/US differences like pavement/sidewalk do. I've more than once seen people saying 'He wrote "trapped in a vice"!', obviously taking that to be wrong, and assuming everyone else would know it was wrong, without any explanation, and there was I thinking 'Yes, trapped in a vice, what's wrong with that?'. It was a while before I saw someone explaining that 'vice' was the British form of 'vise', and so discovered this mysterious word 'vise', which I had not heard of befor
I just checked the OED and "vice" in this sense is difficult to find. Turned out to be sense 5a under a classification in which sense 1 was "A winding or spiral staircase."
Comments snagged from "Not Always Right":
Clay: There's a minor circle of hell for the people who get que/queue/cue mixed up.
Richard Hanck: Those people who are awaiting a signal to form a line to receive their billiards equipment, but are distracted by slow-cooked beef or pork with a tangy sauce? They're about to miss their cue queue cue there, because of 'que.
Heard just now on the radio, wrt the dramatic trope that catfighting = love: “That’s a comforting thought in the current political context, when there are turgid waters all around us.”
Someone in a Facebook thread just wrote the word wan't instead of want.
Via Twitter: Belgian whistles (for "bells and whistles"). There are some pretty good ones in the response thread, too ...
Belgian whistles are what they blow at the diner to let you know your waffles are ready.
"It used to be that only the deliberate/wonton transgressors violated that covenant" on the NANOG mailing list yesterday ...
How do you transgress against a wonton? Put ketchup on it...?
(No, wait, that's how you transgress against a hot dog in Chicago...)
Sigh. Express.co.uk needs some proof-readers. A recent article on whether the Anglican church should gradually disestablish itself when Prince Charlie takes over as king rather than having him take an oath "committing him to uphold the tenants of the Anglican faith".
I used to live near Tennent NJ, which led to landlords posting signs with all sorts of spelling for "tenant" (but not"tenet".)
I recently saw someone use "incent" as a verb.
Are we going to incent people to cognish that they need to liase?
Careful, you might incense someone.
Now I am scared of transgressive wontons.
>> Are we going to incent people to cognish that they need to liase?
It's like Pope said about vice. First we endure, then pity, then embrace.
Right now, we have a president who has promised to eliminate "redundancy and duplication". I'll wait.
typo, not misuse, but I was amused.
In a Craigslist ad for a shared house: "Huge bedroom with walking closet."
Makes me think of Baba Yaga's house.
"Like most things under this guy it is a fait au compli."
Well, at least it manages to look vaguely French-ish.
Seen on Facebook: someone describing dinner as being "turn-up greens and Hoppin' John". Sadly,this is a person I know.
(Not really back yet, but this was too egregious to ignore.)
Seen on Facebook: someone describing dinner as being "turn-up greens and Hoppin' John". Sadly,this is a person I know.
(Not really back yet, but this was too egregious to ignore.)
Lee, I presume that's supposed to be turnip greens? I'm curious; what's "Hoppin' John" (or is that also a mistake)?
Happy New Year all; may the malapropisms we accidentally commit be hilarious, and not too embarrassing!
Cassy B @690:
Hoppin' John is a traditional New Year's dish made from peas, rice, and bacon. It's supposed to bring good luck and prosperity. Commonly, the tradition includes greens, like turnip greens, to symbolize money.
Growing up, we'd have black-eyed peas and collard greens, which is basically the same idea (without the rice and bacon, of course).
Buddha Buck, thanks! I'm one of today's Lucky 10,000!
If the greens symbolize money, I wouldn’t want to just hope they turn up.
Is it a modern take on the tradition, to eat greens for prosperity in the new year? My people eat glazed carrots to symbolize money. (What do they do in countries with multi-colored currency?)
#686 ::: OtterB
... ad for a shared house: "Huge bedroom with walking closet."
Looks like a spellcheck error.
Heard repeatedly as an ad on the local radio station:
"small batch artesian foods"
Think it must be in the ad, not just a mispronunciation.
Artisan? A very over-used word now.
"Artesian" almost makes sense, given the current popularity of "raw" or "live" water (which being interpreted means John Snow Turning in His Grave, per https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2708175.html).
Anyone else encountering news stories about the recent "inclimate" weather?
No, but I recently saw someone refer to "slight-of-hand"....
"... obviously so dirty he makes Dick Nixon look like a quire boy."
Perhaps someone could take a page from Nixon's....
HelenS: ::woggle:: Oh, that John Snow. Not the other one....
Tracie: No, but it did show up on a "wet floor" sign at my local drug store. At least it makes a sideways sort of sense....
'Quire' actually is a historic spelling of 'choir'. In some places a distinction is maintained between the choir (the people who sing) and the quire (the part of the church where the singing takes place).
"Have you gotten a chance to parouse it yet?"
I...
I've often seen the spelling "quire" used (to mean "choir") in "The Holly and the Ivy." No idea why there. It's of course also a measure of paper (usually 25 sheets).
I think the Game of Thrones guy is Jon Snow, with no H.
No H in the Game of Thrones character: correct.
So unlike the home life of our own dear Queen!
Yes, or my brother-in-law Jon Schwarz for that matter. In our world, "Jon" is short for Jonathan, which has no H in the first syllable. (In Game of Thrones many names and titles are a bit altered, such as "Joffrey", "Petyr", and "Eddard" so it's entirely possible that they just spell "John" with no H in it.)
Spelling seen in a meme today: you'r
Impressively, that's wrong in any context.
Here's a multi-layered gem from an article in Fashionbeans.
"The boutique approach, intended to reign in younger customers..."
First there's the common misuse of "reign" instead of "rein". But far worse, the phrase itself is wrong; what the author wanted was "reel in".
Oops.
I can't remember the exact source, but the other day I read of the "ware and tare" on consumable parts.
"And then the very successful robot runs a muck"
At The Guardian, right now:
SpaceX mission originally planned to end in orbit around red plant
You obviously don’t get it. Why don’t you go to the Space X website and have a look around before you case dispersions.
Encountered in the wild (emphasis added):
"A Spell for Chameleon" is the story of Bink, a young man who is about to be exiled from the magical land of Xanth because he has no talent -- all humans must demonstrate magic ability by the age of 25. In hope of avoiding deportment, he travels through the perilous wilderness (populated by harpies, dragons and a wide variety of dangerous magical plants) to ask Humphrey, the Magician of Information, whether or not he has any undiscovered ability.Can't refer to a person facing unjust deportation if you're a reader of noted racist Piers Anthony. Better to use the wrong word entirely, yes sirree Bob.
Seen today, the perfectly lovely "one of the cravats of the profession," referring to how the profession in question might put people who weren't used to it in a situation they found uncomfortable.
Wearing ties, presumably.
In-tacked (instead of intact)
"It means your point is mute."
If only....
I don't know if it was an auto correct thing, but I saw a Facebook post which referred to something as "arrow dynamic".
not a dreadful phrase, but worth noticing, IMO:
multiplies faster than a tribble at an all-you-can-eat buffet
Two in one 'sentence', part of a discussion about making friends with the support staff because they are the ones who Know Everything: "I dido all the remarks about the exec. C-suite assistants they are the best allies to have, if employed judicially."
Carrie 722: I aeneas your comment, but I try not to judge.
"Actress took to Instagram with never-before-scene moments from the award-winning television series" (clickbait headline)
seen once too often for my patience:
coup de gras
Which, in the context where I last saw it, is appropriate though still incorrect.
Just saw "It's a rap for the day." And they didn't mean "Here's a chantable poem about the period from dawn to sunset," either.
Better than the original: "fix the problem prompto"
Electronics teacher, comparing wires to nerves: "The thing to remember about nerves is, they are all fingers off a main arterial!"
Elsewhere, a restaurant had a chalkboard menu spotlighting duck livers. It was written hastily and it looked like it said "dock livers".
Angiportus: To quote the inimitable Susan Crites, "What, scrambled metaphors for breakfast again?"
One of the interminable listicles you find on Facebook had the sentence
"The Marvel Cinematic Universe currently has 18 titles in its’ past, and for some reasons, the most powerful people on the planet continuously have to blend in with regular people."
This was actually written correctly, but the reader during Prayers of the People the other day said "by the power of Your incarceration."
That wasn't all she did wrong, either. Pretty sure she's being crossed off the list.
"When [Star Trek TOS] was being prepared for its HD debut in 2006, Paramount upgraded all of the flying sequences and space background shots. While some fans thought it was paramount to sacrilege..."
"Armed without a compass or a map, Knight followed the sun, still scorching hot in the summer sky, and headed southward." (from a Facebook clickbait article)
From the same article:
"Sugary snacks were popular with the hermit. "
Is it possible for something to be "popular with" just one person?
Well, the Sun is always south* in the northern hemisphere. Harder to notice in the summer, but you can find south if you know what time of day it is, or watch the sun move for a while. The passage isn't ridiculous, just very awkwardly written.
*that is, it's always south of a line running from due east to due west. At high noon in deep winter, walking toward the sun will easily guide you due south.
Also, I think High Noon in Deep Winter is a GREAT book title.
Oops, I got something wrong up there. The Sun is NOT always south in the northern hemisphere; it's always south if you're north of the Tropic of Cancer.
I thought the problem with #733 was Armed without a compass or a map.
Armed with, sure. Armed without? Ummm.
I bet that was an editor (human or virtual). If the author wrote "Armed with neither compass nor map," the clickbaitifier.py script goes "nope, can't use 'neither-nor', too difficult" and changes it to "without-or," resulting in the travesty shown.
But if you're right, Mary Aileen, and you may be, I'm not sure why Eric included the rest of the sentence.
So: Hey Eric, what were you positing as the Dreadful Phrase here?
"Armed without" is what caught my eye there.
“Well actually”, the sun can be due north in the summer in the northern hemisphere, and it’s already rising well north of east at my latitude.
The knight would be running in circles all day above the arctic circle.
Eric @741, something like that was a plot point in a novel I read some thirty years ago; I believe it was named "Parsifal"; it was a thick trade paperback with a buff-colored cover, and I don't recall the author's name. The titular (Arthurian legend) character, who is entirely naive and uneducated, is sent out into the world by his mother whose last advise to him is to "follow the sun". Which he does, stopping every noon and night because it's too hard to tell what direction to walk.... At some point along this drunkard's walk, he comes across the Holy Grail but (if memory serves) he cannot find it again once he is no longer naive, because of the zig-zag haphazard path he took. Presumably he trended, on average, south, because of the latitude of England. That's one of the few things I retain about the book. The only other one is that (while still naive and foolish) he defeats a knight in armor and is told he gets the armor of the fallen knight; he triumphantly undoes the codpiece of the knight because that's the only bit of armor he can figure out how to remove...
Odd what sticks in one's memory.
That's Parsival by Richard Monaco, Cassy.
@Tom Whitmore, thanks! It was bothering me that I couldn't remember the author. I tried an Amazon search (I was pretty sure I'd remember the cover if I saw it) but my misspelling of Parsival defeated me.
I was pretty sure it was the Monaco, and ran a search on ABE with your title. Turns out that in the Italian translation, that was the title! I back-checked to see what the right spelling was. And there were sequels, which you can find by searching on the author's name (THE GRAIL WAR and I think one other).
Eric 741: That's why I corrected to "north of the Tropic of Cancer." In that portion of the world the Sun is never directly overhead, much less in the North.
Xopher - the sun is always to the south north of the Tropic of Cancer at noon. At sunrise and sunset between the vernal equinox and autumnal equinox, it's north of east and west by varying amounts, depending on date and location. Furthest north around the summer solstice, whatever the location.
from this morning's Boston Globe: "...subsequently caused undo delay to the traveling public." (The former operator of the area's commuter rail service, talking about one of the rail goofs of an engineer who had so many car-driving violations he should never have been authorized to drive a locomotive.) I don't think the train actually had to wait to back up -- but I'd love to know whether that was the newspaper's error or the operator's.
From a review of a TV show: "characters who are, with a few notable exceptions, dull as ditchwater".
I'm not sure if this really counts as a dreadful phrase, because there's nothing inaccurate about it. It's just that I've always seen/heard that idiom as "dull as dishwater", so the slight difference caught my eye.
Lee @ 749:
I've seen and heard both, and the OED says and has examples of both.
Quick research suggests that the original phrase is the ditchwater variant (17 or 1800s), with dishwater coming along later (18 or early 1900s). One website said that the ditchwater variant is preferred in England, but the OED lists the dishwater variant first, so I have no idea.
I wonder if increasing urbanization played a role in the change of the phrase.
I'm unsurprised "ditchwater" came first -- it would be more widely visible since it stays around instead of being tossed. I'd love to know whether this was parallel evolution or a typo that took on its own life.
Meanwhile, a genre slip: http://www.crimsonromance.com/featured/what-is-paranormal-romance/ tells us "Most people hear the words ‘Paranormal Romance’ and visions of sparkly vamps and bare-chested wares seeking virginal human mates spring like crack-addicted leprechauns from the recesses of their minds."
"Dull as ditchwater" is a proverbial English phrase I've heard from childhood on. Just not in the US of A.
Just saw 'beaucoup' spelled 'bookoo' earlier today. Blocked him.
(No, not for that! He called me a "Nazi-Communist" because I told him his tirade on the people killed by communism was an inappropriate response to a post about Holocaust Remembrance Day.)
753
He could at least have misspelled it correctly: "bokoo".
from http://www.crimsonromance.com/featured/what-is-paranormal-romance/:
Most people hear the words ‘Paranormal Romance’ and visions of sparkly vamps and bare-chested wares seeking virginal human mates spring like crack-addicted leprechauns from the recesses of their minds.
A lovely sentence but brings up Mandingo-esque images I don't think the writer intended.
Just in case this thread isn't dead, a minor-but-irritating infelicity in Gladstone's latest (Ruin of Angels): "knocking" an arrow (without even trying it). I wonder whether that was introduced; I've gotten the impression spelling is one of his many skills.
TomB @757:
That would be appropriate if picking up a hoopy frood who is in danger of being eaten by a ravenous bugbladder beast of Traal.
PRIVATE PROPERTY
Intended for sole
use by tennents,
guests and invitees,
right to pass
revocable at any
time.
There's a town in central NJ called Tennent, which just encourages badly spelled signs in apartment buildings all over the state.
"... none of Trump’s attorneys have even a wit of ethical integrity left..."
The jokes just write themselves.
Tautology in talking about a film: "about a canine police dog".
Now, if it had been a feline police dog it might have been interesting...
Right now, st SFGate, a headline starting with this:
Fairytale Tudor chateau
I don't even want to think about how you can have a "Tudor chateau".
(A pic of this creature: https://blog.sfgate.com/ontheblock/wp-content/blogs.dir/2283/files/640-brewer-dr-in-hillsborough/ML81705317_55_0.jpg)
P J Evans #764: Looking at the definitions in Wikipedia of "Tudor architecture" and "Château", I see little problem beyond the Channel-crossing mismatch of languages.
I don't know if the building in your picture would actually qualify as Tudor style, but it seems the French word is fairly broad; you could certainly have a "palace", "manor" or "country-house" (terms from the latter article) in the Tudor style despite the style's English origin.
P J Evans, that building is Tudor as the term is used in real estate listings in the United States--it has an irregular roof line and exposed beams--but I'm not sure why someone who is not trying to sell it would call it a chateau.
It's Norman Tudor with a bunch of other French stuff, it's large, it's got a couple of rooms that almost qualify as State Rooms, it's got grounds, it's gated, and it's got a round tower. What else does a chateau need? My main quibble is that they should be using the word "storybook" rather than "fairytale".
AKICIML:
I collect triplets of word that matching this specification:
(Yes, I know that several of these have metaphorical and/or specialized uses. Those aren't the uses I'm talking about here.)
DAMMIT. WRONG THREAD. Apologies, folks.
Xopher Halftongue #769: Strangely enough, your first example is entirely relevant to the prior discussion of "Château" (which seems to be French for "castle", but with an even wider range of referents).
Dave 770: Thank you for your kind words. :-)
We may have had this one before?:
"a bit hidden miss"
In the convention app for ComicPalooza, there were two options for looking at a subset of the vendors: "Artists" and "Chotchkeys". Oy.
Probably had this one before, too: A neighborhood group on the book of face, on treatments for fire ants, as discussed by "a Texas A&M etymologist".
I would have thought the origins of that term were fairly simple and well-known.
Joann, #774: Not really. Even I didn't learn either etymology or entomology until after I was out of college -- and I was interested enough in science and language to pick up a lot of "how to decode Greek and Latin roots" early on. But I wouldn't call either of those terms commonly used.
Lee @ #775:
I understood joann to be suggesting that it shouldn't require an etymologist to determine the origins of the term "fire ant".
Joke from a coworker:
Q: "What's the difference between an etymologist and an entomologist?"
A: "An etymologist knows the difference."
Jacque (778) Hee! I'll have to remember that one.
Joann, #777: Ah, sorry. It's chemo week and my brain is full of fuzz.
780
Ah, the joy of chemo. My brain got fuzzy only toward the end, and I'm still recovering from that part physically. (Chemo-induced neuropathy is unpleasant. It's improving - slowly. The chemo-induced Brazilian is going away much faster, I have enough head-hair now to look human. The rest is a bit slower - but it was slower leaving, also.)
My next Big Event is surgery, currently scheduled for Friday. I am *not* looking forward to it.
More good wishes to both Lee and P J Evans.
May you both continue commenting here for many decades to come!
782
It's supposed to take a hour, maybe an hour and a half, so going in earlyish in the morning (fasting!) and out maybe mid-afternoon, very hungry. (I'm taking fruit and nut snacks for after.)
They do *not* believe in informing me about what's going to happen. I'm having to use search engines (*cough* and Wikipedia *cough*) to find out even minimal information that they should effing well be telling me, or have a handout for.
P J Evans (783): How infuriating! I was fortunate enough to have informative chemo nurses, armed with handouts and willing to answer all kinds of questions. (I also looked a lot of things up on my own, because I'm a librarian and research is an instinct.)
Best of luck with your surgery. I found that a lot easier to cope with than the chemo, but Mileage Varies.
Returning to the thread theme, I just got one which came with its own comeback:
"Sorry for being semantic, but..."
My response: "You mean 'pedantic', not 'semantic'."
(Double self-reference, as the original error was (IIUC) a semantic error.)
784
In this case, it's a different set of office staff - the surgeon's people at least told me a little, but the chemo people don't do the surgical stuff (never mind that they're right next door and the offices connect physically).
(The surgeon doesn't do electronic records, and his staff is annoyed about that.)
Seen from time to time in various places, referring to a knife-care tool: wet stone.
What made me need to post it here today was a one-star review of a knife sharpener in which the disgruntled reviewer said (without saying the cited eggcorn, but other reviewers had included the phrase), 'I even tried putting water on it....'
There actually are knife-sharpening stones that work better when wet, with oil or water. And there are specific "dry stone" sharpeners. So I think there may be a place for "wet stone" in the canon, rather than in the rejected canon. Jon Singer would know more about this than I do. Or check out this website for a discussion on wet vs dry sharpening.
Over heard when the kids were playing — “That would be cannonballism!”
A whetstone may be wet, but there are many wet stones that are not whetstones.
Whetting a knife makes it sharper. Wetting a knife, not so much.
Self, exasperated, to someone parroting misinformation--"Don't believe that, it's just a stuporstition!"
Self, exasperated, to someone parroting misinformation--"Don't believe that, it's just a stuporstition!"
Lee & P J, my sympathies! It's been 2 years since my chemo & I'm still recovering brain & energy. (I am extremely fortunate in my medical team, & living in California which has a really robust Medicaid expansion program. Sutter Health has an exercise class for cancer patients that really helps, too)
Not long ago I wrote at the rate of 40K raw words in a month: now I'm doing well to do that in a year.
I've always thought of whetting as more like honing than sharpening, using the distinction in the video I linked to. But that may be just my interpretation.
Tom Whitmore @788 - I've used a whetstone and oil myself, years ago; I wasn't thinking of oil as 'wet'. That still seems like a stretch to me, or at any rate likely to be misunderstood unless 'oil' is explicitly stated. But waterstones, discussed on the page you linked, were new to me (except as the proper name of the UK bookseller, of course). I'm part of today's Lucky Ten Thousand; thank you!
Sorry I hit the button twice the other day. This computer was acting funny and I might need to sharpen it.
"I make good money, have benefits, and am able to provide for my family without issue."
So, just you and your spouse, then?
This seems to belong here:
"The games get pretty crazy at English teachers' parties." –Dave Blazek.
Secondhand, from a friend elseNet who said it showed up on an event announcement in her feed:
"Representatives from the financial, yoga, medicinal cannabis, sensory deprivation and other industries will be available to provide information".
Really?
Seen in comments on The Space Review:
Mueller said yes, he wasn't kidding, they could not afford delays or cost increases. If they could not be done with Gemini by the end of 1966, he would just assume cancel it.
From a discussion of cake recipes:
desecrated coconut
Carol Kimball (801): I'm not parsing what that's supposed to be.
Mary Aileen 802: Dessicated.
Thanks, Xopher. That was one of my guesses, but I'm not enough of a cook to know if it was a plausible reading.
Xopher 803: Correcting to be polite: Desiccated.
@805 re @803: *snrk!* How...meta.
Meanwhile, I really want to know how one would go about desecrating coconut. And what sorts of recipes would one use that in? (I'm reading Harry Potter, so there's one obvious context.)
Desecrating coconuts feels like it should involve Pele in some way... probably not a good one.
I always read "Pele", above all, as Edson Arantes do Nascimento the god of the beautiful game. Not the goddess of Hawaiian volcanoes.
Found in neighborhood forum: "legislative rigamarrow".
OH GOD Pele's hair! I just learned about that over the weekend. That is SO COOL. (Though it's not something I'd want to get anywhere close to, having encountered fiberglass in various forms. Eeee! Makes me itch just thinking about it.)
The Tumblr staff blog describes the Texas Civil Rights Project with, 'Lawyers in Texas have banned together....'
Just saw someone use "play homage." And it wasn't a typo, she said it twice.
In a published gay YA novel: "At least I'm not cruising the parking lot, pedaling my virginity again."
Virginity is a bicycle you ride to the cruising area, apparently.
This is what comes of eliminating the in-house copyeditor.
Thanks for the laugh, Xopher.
They say you never forget how to ride a bicycle, but I have no idea how I could pedal my virginity again.
Could have been "petaling." He loves me ... he loves me not ... he loves me ...
The Virgin Bicycles, a novel of youth, exploration, and horniness on the Tour de France.
Or maybe it's my Bangles tribute band, can't decide which.
BTW Overall I quite liked the book. Just like I loved the pair of books written by a member of this parish even though they consistently referred to the main city of a country as "the capitol." One notices these things, winces, and moves on.
I wondered if perhaps they had been thinking of the virginal, an early keyboard instrument... but unlike later, more elaborate instruments such as the harpsichord and pianoforte, the virginal has no pedals.
Ha! Our best proofreader, the [late,] great George Flynn, caught a reference to the hero "peddling" on a stolen bicycle. (This was for a reprint; the previous publisher had not spotted it.)
@819
Once you've sung madrigals, you can no longer play virginals?
Allan 821: Social Intercourse, by Greg Howard. Bullied out-of-the-closet gay boy Beckett and closeted bi football star Jaxon, both high school seniors, team up to prevent Beckett's divorced dad from getting together with one of Jaxon's two recently-separated moms; meanwhile, the small South Carolina town where they live is about to have its first LGBTQ prom. Wackiness ensues, as do drama, misunderstanding, and romance.
A mix of cleverness and dreadfulness here: A guy on Twitter said "I don't give a fryer tuck."
I'm going to use "don't give a Friar Tuck" myself. But a fryer tuck is an event where people pig out on fried chicken.
Xopher (824): I am reminded of a joke my brother told me in the early '70s*:
Brother: What word begins with F and ends with U-C-K?
Me: *boggles*
Brother: Firetruck!
*when good little children--as we both were--did not use† words like that
†We did know the word, or the joke would not have worked, but it wasn't one casually heard in our environment from adults either.
825
I met that one in my first year of college, in marching band, in 1968...the school administration Did Not Appreciate It.
Found in neighborhood forum, under "why is there a water leak in my ceiling?":
"Check that the drain pan, under the HVAC unit in the attic, isn’t overflown."
I know that some of us have a pigeon problem, but really ...
Explaining much about the Russians and the 2016 US election:
how widespread, how deeply entranced and just how sleazy and pervasive
@825:
Q: What starts with an F, ends with a K, and if it doesn't work, you use your fingers?
A: "Fork."
817: Petalling Virginity sounds like the title of a book or documentary about Georgia O'Keeffe.
Typos from the possibly-computer-generated subtitles from a documentary about the pres's past financial dealings I am watching right now on youtube:
unfine ansible
oleg arcs
more from the same:
financed ears
Just had a lengthy disagreement with someone over his use of 'preaching to the quire'. It's an archaic spelling for 'choir', but IMO "preaching to the quire" sounds like lecturing to 25 sheets of paper. I told him so, adding:
Then I will make no further inquiries, nor attempt to require modern spelling of you. I wish you'd acquire a more modern dictionary, but I won't try to squire you to the preferred spellings.
Erik Nelson @ 832/833:
Reminds me of the subtitles on a documentary we were watching in one of the classes I took years ago. The presenter was talking about such-and-such butte.
The subtitle said "such-and-such tail".
KeithS 835: Sounds like the clbuttic error to mee.
My choir's volunteer webpage updater stepped down this spring. I can only assume that the new video uploads were labelled by the new person, as suddenly we've got a whole bunch of experts from performances.
Seen on a utility pole:
We Buy Cars
Runing or Not
Somebody on Twitter, making decorative close pins. Presumably for pinning close to a close-line.
Seen in the wild: "a ride of passage"
This is why I'm against spelling reform to make words be "spelled the way they're pronounced". To those whose native accent is not "clipped", "ride" would now be the correct spelling of "rite", and "rite" an archaic holdover, but it would also be the correct spelling of "ride", turning the two words into another confusing pair of homonyms.
Meanwhile, to those whose native accent is clipped, "rite" is still the correct spelling, because that's how we pronounce it. And anyway "courtship rite" is never "courtship ride", even among people with accents that are not clipped. A rigorous phonetic spelling reform might take us down the rabbit hole of mutation, like Welsh.
Maybe what we need is pronunciation reform, making words be pronounced the way they're spelled, thus bringing back "rite", "richt", and "wwwwrite".
Del Cotter: making words be pronounced the way they're spelled
...like Canadians do. =:o)
(But then, what do you do with words like "right"?)
Spelling reform would necessarily privilege one set of dialects over another. Current spelling does already, of course, but spelling things "as they sound" would require picking a sound for each word.
Do we drop all the rs after vowels, to spell like non-rhotic dialects, or leave them in like rhotic dialects (actually the non-rhotic dialects lengthen the vowel...so what do we use for a long mark?)?
Do we respell 'secretary' to be pronounced with four syllables, as in most American dialects, or with three as in some British dialects? Does 'extraordinary' begin with a vowel or not?
Spelling reform for English, at least of that kind, is a really terrible idea.
@840: ...and now I actually see the last line of @841. Ahem.
Xopher: No, we just privelege all dialects and use the IPA. #RollyourownBabel #Chaucerwasright <g,d&r>
Jacque 843: Yeah, and by the time everyone learns IPA, we will have ascended (with the help of Oma Desalla) and no longer need language at all. Problem solved!
A basic problem with IPA for text, of course, is that it accurately reproduces the spoken word: but it loses all the useful features of regular orthography. Having read through some documents from before orthography was regularized, I would prefer not to have to do so again. (Tongue continuing in cheek, just so everyone knows.)
The big splits like rhoticity are actually the easy case: you can handle that the same way we do element 13. Non-rhotic dialects spell it with a long vowel, rhotic with an r. There will be some collision problems, but nothing too much thornier than British vs. American english as it stands (particularly when you get into Canadian and Australian usage).
The tough ones are going to be minority pronunciations, and position-dependent ones. (For instance, many non-rhotic dialects do pronounce at least some terminal Rs if the next word starts with a vowel. Or I can't be the only person who normally pronounces "extraordinary" without the initial vowel but as "extra" plus "ordinary" when it is explicitly contrasted with something else that is ordinary.)
Xopher: See?? Right???
Devin: Use it for beer cans? Wuut?
And then there are the voiced-but-not-written consonants, like the R Brits instert between a word ending in a vowel and the next word starting with one.
Jacque, if you can turn rhoticity into beer cans, I have a WHOLE LOT of abstract concepts that would be more useful as beverage containers than in their current applications.
Devin 846: The question is more basic than that: Do we write juncture consonants?
In English no word-boundary can be vowel-vowel. There's either a sandhi including a glide (so in SAE "the pachyderm" has "the" pronounced /ðə/ but "the elephant" has /ðiy/)* or an imposed juncture consonant. In a non-rhotic dialect the juncture consonant can be r, since phonemic /r/ would otherwise not appear in that position; in rhotic ones it's generally a glottal stop (which appears realizing t various other places† depending on the dialect).
I prefer the simple expedient of not writing juncture consonants at all, given the complexity of transcribing them.
*Yet another reason why the glide after a formerly-long vowel should not be treated as predictable.
†See the pronunciation of "bottle" in some British dialects; also, my own last name, "Hatton," is said /hæt&ən/ only in exaggerated pronunciation; ordinarily it's /hæɂn/.
Sorry, somehow got and extra "&" in /hætən/.
Heh. Of course there's more to it than the ice I could see, and of course that particular knowledge ICIML. Thanks!
(Though it seems like the choice of juncture consonant is neither random nor consistent per-speaker. I do recall something about non-rhotic speakers sometimes using r as a juncture consonant on words that aren't spelled with a terminal r... but it didn't seem to be a consistent phenomenon at all, while its use as a juncture for r-spelled words was. If that's the case, then the choice of juncture consonant is at least slightly significant (though probably Shannon-redundant and not necessarily worth transcribing into a medium with different error-handling needs)).
It's controlled by the previous vowel: mid and low vowels use [r], high-front use [j] and high-back use [w].
[this maps fairly closely to the orthography because of the history of it; final vowels have to be long [or schwa] because they're in an open syllable, and centuries earlier the great english vowel shift meant that all the long vowels became falling diphthongs with second element u or i. High vowels; the only final low or mid vowels are recent borrowings or those generated by the loss of r.]
This is just an off-the-cuff analysis, mind. I'm also ignoring short-final i, because australian doesn't do that.
Going back and looking at your View All By, Louis Patterson: I just want to say that I'm struck by how much you add here when you do post. Thank you.
Louis 852: It's controlled by the previous vowel: mid and low vowels use [r], high-front use [j] and high-back use [w].
Could you give some examples? I'm not sure what sound you're transcribing with "[j]," for example.
final vowels have to be long [or schwa] because they're in an open syllable
Or /a/ or /ɔ/. Blah, claw, dit dit dah, do re mi fa, haha and haw, jaw, law, ma and maw, nah and naw, pa and paw, rah-rah and raw, saw, ta-ta, yaw.
I think I might be misunderstanding you, though. Please explain if so. Or perhaps these ending in non-schwa undiphthongized low back vowels is dialect-specific; I'm describing them as I pronounce them. Examples: the phrase 'yaw and pitch', in my dialect, has a glottal stop (not a /w/ glide) between 'yaw' and 'and'; the song from The Sound of Music made no sense to me until I heard non-rhotic dialects, because 'fa' sounded nothing like 'far', and we sang "Fa, a long long way" beginning with /faɂə/.
At any rate, diachronically the falling diphthongs were generated by the GVS, but synchronically it makes most sense (in my view) to treat the resulting y- and w-glides as consonants (at no cost in simplicity, since we need those glide consonants elsewhere). Then we only have to account separately for the junctures in the "short" vowel cases.
From a newspaper story:
"The sideshow itself didn’t come to fruition," Chang said. "Once cars start getting towed and tickets get issued, people tend to disburse."
First they disperse, then they disburse.
The sign on the ATM outside my office offers to "disburse" envelopes.
Such a versatile malapropism.
Or /a/ or /ɔ/.
Count as "long" for these purposes. "Long" is a bad name, here, because australian english is horrible has phonemic length distinctions that don't map to the difference being drawn. Tense/lax? The RP analysis -- where the length does map -- is clearer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation#Vowels
[j] is IPA j, palatal approximant.
Yaw and pitch has an r, because /ɔ/ is a mid-vowel.
but synchronically it makes most sense (in my view) to treat the resulting y- and w-glides as consonants (at no cost in simplicity, since we need those glide consonants elsewhere).
Indeed! And amusingly, if you adopt that approach in a non-rhotic accent you merge schwa-offglide and ... r.
Three gods arrive:
-Athena rarrives
-Loki yarrives
-Apollo warrives
If English was like Welsh, those pronunciations would be actually written, making it hard to look "arrive" up in a dictionary under "a" unless you knew you were seeing a rule in action. I think English made the better call.
@Del Cotter,
I have Athena [glottal stop] arrives, but Loki yarrives and Apollo warrives just as in your example. Probably a minor dialectical difference; I'm in suburban Chicago.
858/859: I normally have a small, subtle glottal stop in all three. But if I slur my speech, Apollo warrives and Loki yarrives.
(Grew up in Atlanta with not-Southern parents (it's really complicated...), now living on Long Island.)
"The Dodgers pushed the petal to the metal, while the Rockies were content to chase a pennant on their Schwinn."
Clearly the writer meant bicycle petals.
Aha! The floral part of a bicycle is the bloomers!
Almost typed into an email: "Rhesus peanut butter cup."
Jacque (864): Would that be one shaped like a monkey, or one with a blood type?
Mary Aileen: Given that the latter refers to the former, that would have to be a "yes." ;-)
When driving, I wear tap shoes so I can put the metal to the pedal.
And when there surface has a dip in the center and there's the someone or something incontinent about, you get the piddle in the middle.
And when the car made the tire tracks in Escher's print, there was a muddle in the Puddle.
Coworker: "Please step into the foray."
Jacque (871) Just don't step into the furore.
"is not commiserate with" (when someone meant "is not commensurate with")
Pretty sure everyone's heard about this one by now:
Hilariously, Calk’s list was titled “Perspective Rolls in the Trump administration in rank order” — a misspelling that caused giddy laughter in the host.
From a Yelp review about a bar: "I got a Jin tonic."
Lee, could be a djinn tonic. Good for the health of all of your eldritch spirits....
Xopher @ 834 - And in eastern Iowa, the Quire is an LGBT vocal group to which my sister Cate belongs.
Seen elsenet today: "The more the marrier."
Carrie S. #879: Well, if they want to discuss polyamory....
Actually, most of Europe sits right between 2 superpowers with nuclear weapons, as a puffer zone.
Meals certainly were hardy on the Ponderosa.
(from a clickbait article on Facebook about defunct restaurant chains)
WSJ keeps saying that a trade deal is eminent
(in a comment at dKos about Himself's trade war with China)
Well, it might be eminent, but I don't think one is imminent.
Plus as a tea-totaler, my wife got to try twice as many samples.
(A comment at Not Always Right).
In a cake-decorating tutorial:
Soften the sponge by dipping it in water and ringing it out well.
Lee 885: Let the sponges ring out!
The sponges, sponges, sponges, sponges, sponges, the squishing and the whishing of the sponges!
Yes, let us sing the carol of the sponges!
Hark how the sponge
Blue squishy sponge
Now seems to say
Wipe spills away
Heard about, not seen: a girl who insisted it was the "16 Chapel."
That's the one where Molly Ringwald plays Michelangelo.
From a comment on Paul Krugman's thoughts about a trade war, this one starts off with a routine error but then leaps into Dreadful territory.
Your forgetting a big chunk of their surplus is actually a American surplus capital that is repatrioted back into the US financial system.
This one is new to me:
running ripshod over
Dave Harmon @884: That one took me a minute. Back before I was learnt better, that's how I thought it was spelled.
Jacque #892: And I suspect etymological overlap.
For me it's the very closeness of the semantic mismatch that made it not just a mistake, but a Dreadful Phrase.
Jacque 892 and Dave 893: My dictionary's etymology says the 'tee' is probably a reduplication of the T in Total, and the whole is short for "total abstainer." I'd speculate that the repetition was for emphasis, as we might say "a capital T Total abstainer."
Xopher: Yes, that was what I was given to understand was the case. After they got over laughing hysterically at my error. (Cue long and bitter rant about "spelling correctly.")
Xopher Halftongue #894: Wikipedia says much the same, and indicates that at some early abstinence meetings, people who signed pledge lists marked their signatures with a T.
All parties must give consensus before a new transaction is added to the network
So close. So very close. Also a victim of Donaldson Disease.
I corrected someone at Kos yesterday evening who used "for all intensive purposes" in a comment. That wasn't the first time I'd seen it - but it needed to be fixed.
A picture of Freddie Oversteegen, a Dutch girl who was the unsuspecting killer of dozens of Nazis.
She apparently had no idea she was killing them. They just kind of died all around her.
(No, they didn't. She was an active member of the Dutch Resistance at 14 (as in, helped blow up bridges and stuff), and kept a lookout while her older sister lured them to the woods. She was never caught, so she was unsuspected, but not unsuspecting.)
Yet another mangled common expression:
the lights come on once and awhile
"I’m worried that it’s a viscous cycle"
Carol Kimball@903
"viscous cycle"
Evidently a real sticky situation...
On a blog reminiscing about the Good Old Days: "such an idealic setting"
I wonder how many of these are the result of people hearing phrases but never seeing them in written form (or only in incorrect written form).
P J Evans (906): Probably quite a few of them.
At one point in my childhood, "hors d'oeuvres" and "ordurves" were two separate lexical items.
"Wan't Cold And Clean Water?"
Peak grocer's apostrophe.
Jim 908: I know someone for whom æng-SIGH-uh-tee (which he'd only heard spoken) and ÆNGK-sih-tee (which he'd only seen written, spelled 'anxiety') were separate items.
Jacque 909: Wow, that's the worst one I've ever seen.
At some point in my life I noticed that MAIZ-uld and mis-LED were the same word. It was at that time that I, as others before me, designated MAIZ-uld the term for "mispronouncing, due to its spelling, a word which one has seen written down."
9112
Doesn't nearly every English-speaking kid run into that one and think it's the past tense of "misle?"
P J Evans @911: Yes, probably. :) But I didn't know about anyone else using it specifically for the meaning I set above when I "coined" it, although lots of people have mentioned doing the same in subsequent years.
P J Evans (912): I somehow missed thinking that. I had my own quirks of spelling/pronunciation mismatch, but not that one.
I don't remember what we thought "misle" meant - it's been a long time - but it was something involving mistakes.
There was a song "Miss Lead" in the 70s. Never could make out the words, but I assumed it was about a superhero who could control gravity.
*80s, apparently. My memories of hearing it in high school were obviously implanted by aliens.
estelendur, #911: I never had a problem with that one, although I've encountered other people who did. We call the "mispronounce it because you've only ever seen it written" thing a Gazebo Error, from the story of Eric and the Dread Gazebo. The other way, when you misspell a word because you've only ever heard it said, is an Inverse Gazebo Error.
When I was a kid I enjoyed stories about heroes who went off to seek a ren-dez-vuss with destiny.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that “bedraggled” should be broken down as be-draggled, not bed-raggled. I guess I envisioned someone swathed with worn-out sheets?
920
Ah, that's another one of those "doesn't sound how it looks" words.
I've never forgotten the spelling test in 9th grade where the teacher threw in "badinage", which I'd never seen or heard before. Got it wrong....
I've never forgotten* the sixth grade spelling bee where I got 'docile', a word I knew perfectly well from reading but had literally never heard in my life. Fortunately, the rules of this particular bee allowed one to ask for a definition, and I made the connection in time. I thought, "Oh, dock-isle!" and rattled it off.
*I'm pretty sure I told this story here before.
@Julie L, me, too! I'm glad I wasn't the only one.
Julie L. @920: bed-raggled
Oh, that's sooo much more evocative. Like "hag-ridden" only, you know, not misogynistic.
Carol @ #903: My wife and I used to most deliberately refer to our lovely big dog as the "viscous guard-dog" for reasons of silliness.
This week's atrocity:
written rough-shod
*sigh*
Someone else who seems to have never seen it in print.
PJ Evans at 926; sounds like something a character in a book by H. Writer Haggard would do.
Julie L, Jacques: The other day I mistyped "forgotten" as "fogrotten". I have been too busy trying to visualize how fog could rot, to speculate on whether this would make a good epithet, but I suspect it might.
Angiportus @928: “Fogrotten” sounds like a thoroughly Lovecraftian form of decay, induced in ancestral mansions by dreadful creeping mists of NO EARTHLY COLOR, from which disembodied teeth gleam in the darkness etc.
And another, obviously never seen in print:
fete accompli
Angiportus Librarysaver: Fogrotten
Or it could be the plural of duck liver.
Jacque @931: plural of duck liver
With melted cheese on top, perhaps?
My partner is renowned for her hog-rotten potatoes.
I kind of like fête accompli for referring to a successful party.
Fog-rotten probably does work better in a Lovecraftian context, or a Neil Gaiman London, but it's also how buildings go bad in western San Francisco, aka Fog City.
Fo-grotten refers to dishes served with vegan imitation cheese melted on top.
Probably a typo, but I just stumbled across a catalog record that referred to The Hobbit's dragon as 'Smug'. I laughed.
From the first page of "The Laughing Queen", by E. Barrington:
The young Cleopatra stood in the window of a marble chamber.... Her small figure dilated with pride.
Say what? I don't know what word the author intended there, but that certainly wasn't it.
Dave Harmon (937): 'Expanded', maybe? 'Inflated'? 'Swelled'? 'Dilated' smells of thesaurus abuse.
937
Usually, it's hearts swelling with pride. I guess someone was trying to avoid a cliche, and missed by a lot.
"Try on new shews" —me, a minute ago. My brain? Whyyy???
Mary Aileen #938: Yeah, thesaurus abuse would cover it. But "E. Barrington" was a pretty major author in her day. (Come to think of it, I wonder if she'd become Immune To Editors by that book? it's about 2/3 the way through her career)
"You hate to see that kind of thing at this level of play." ;-)
The book is eighty years old, so there is the possibility that "dilated" had a different range of acceptable meanings at the time than it does now.
A Google Books search on the phrase “dilated with pride” brings up multiple examples from the 18th century, mostly describing a heart, bosom, or figure (which may be intended as synedoche for the preceding pair, considering multitextual context).
Julie L #943: So, I guess it's not actually a dreadful phrase, but just a now-disused one that strikes modern readers quite oddly.
I was just putting away some sheet music at church today and realized that the title of one piece, "O How Amiable," is wrong.
'Oh' is an exclamation.
'O' marks direct or indirect address. "O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion" or "Sleep, o History! Sleep, o Prophecy!" but not *"O How" anything, nor *"O what a tangled web" or anything like that.
Xopher at 945, if you were magically transformed into a bull, you could write a song called Oh How Am I a Bull?
Erik@947: Moderators of the world unite!
Erik @947 See T Kingfisher (aka Ursula Vernon) This Vote is Legally Binding
Robert Sapolsky, Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology.
"Continua" are....
A continuum is....
::slapslapslapslap::
950
also:
criteria are
criterion is
P J: Yeah. What you said.
Likewise:
data
datum
And tangentially:
You hone a skill (or a blade).
You home in on a target.
You don't hone in on a solution ::pant:: ::pant:: ::wheeze:: ::pant:: ::pant::
I've been hearing "horn in" on a solution recently. Which is even odder...
Cassy B.: OMG. Haven't heard that one yet. Bizarrely, that even makes a micron of sense. Sort of. If you squint.
Cassy B. (953): Unless someone else* has come up with a solution, and the speaker intends to take all the credit or otherwise take over.
*or several someone elses
Cassy B@953: So far as I know, horn in is legit and long attested -- it's a cattle-raising idiom,and perfectly cognate with butting in (which is sheep and goats).
That is, if you're using it to mean interrupt. If you mean navigationally converging to the desired target, I got nothin'.
Elliott Mason, I suspect that someone had heard both "horn in" (insert themselves into) and "hone in" (converge on a solution) and ... swapped definitions.
At what point did the word "anniversary" get divorced from the concept of "annual" / "annum" / etc., to mean simply "time-based celebration"? As in "1-year anniversary", "6-month anniversary", and so on? My manager's manager was honestly surprised when I pointed out that the plaque for "15-year anniversary" had a redundancy.
I keep seeing the phrase “deceptively spacious” in real estate listings, which makes ne envision some sort of reverse-TARDIS house.
"Deceptively spacious" = "It *looks* big with no furnishings in it, but the usable space is actually pretty small"?
Was it in "Make Room, Make Room" that the floors near the bases of apartment walls were covtered with pencil marks, as tenants tried to keep track of wall positions because the landlords would shift them to make the tiny apartments momentarily larger for prospective new tenants?
963
I saw that one a couple of weeks ago. I get the feeling a lot of people don't read fiction, or anything else where they'd meet the phrases they're mangling.
Well, to be fair, I didn't get the pun in "Knockturn Alley" until a coworker said it aloud this afternoon.
Jacque @965:
I didn't get "Diagon Alley" until it was pointed out to me myself.It makes me wonder how many other obvious puns I miss.
Jacque (965): I didn't realize there was a pun to get until just now.
The 2001 Worldcon was in Philadelphia; it took me an embarrassingly long time to get the pun in Millennium Philcon. (I could tell that there was some kind of joke there, but not what.)
"I like to be prepared. Don't wanna be blind sighted."
I like "horn in on a solution." I'm still glad my high school Spanish teacher didn't know about that one. For about 3 months, she only used 2 English verbs in class. I know it SEEMS reasonable for a language teacher to encourage students to use only the new language, resorting to their native language in limited ways. But the 2 English verbs were "to waltz" and "to zero." If she had used "to horn..." I shudder to think what a roomful of teenagers would make of that.
Sign in the freezer case of a store:
"Our store has a security system in place. Selected products have alarming labels."
Buddha Buck @966: I didn't get "Diagon Alley" until it was pointed out to me
Oh dear. Um, care to share—oh.
"Say it out loud, dear."
::facepalm::
Erik Nelson @970: I've seen those. "Don't read the ingredients!!"
I'd noticed "Diagon Alley" immediately, but "Knockturn Alley" not until it was pointed out here.
"Pulled deeply down the rabbit hold."
An article about food sanitation issues in an English-language news outlet from Shanghai has an interesting perspective on capitalism: "the kitchen in one of its Beijing outlets was invested with rats"
974 Momentarily mis-read that as Iagomorphic with a capital I. Does that mean shaped like a beast with two backs, etc.?
Jeremy Leader@975
"invested with rats"
The restaurant in Ratatouille opened a branch in Beijing?
Today I heard someone say that at the gym she likes to use the recombinant bicycle.
So that's where all these new mutant powers come from. I did manage not to laugh, though I may have made some choking noises. Fortunately she wasn't looking at me.
You can take that thing apart and put it together several different ways.
I have a bike here with a cracked frame that's going to be recombined when I find a suitable donor frame. (58-60cm steel cyclocross w/cantis)
Seen in the wild: 'a gamete of emotions'.
"Yuu're about as angry as a bull in a red china shop"
from a facebook quiz
"It was one of those old-timey movie theatres with a marquis on main street."
983
And dukes in the back alley?
@983, do they offer volume viscounts?
I assume the Marquis is standing outside yelling at people to come watch the movies. Or something.
Xopher, how does that baron the situation?
Is the theater only open at knight?
Heard in the wild:
"Her nephew tended to her affairs, and now that she is dead he has power of eternity."
My mother is prevaricating between roasting vegetables at my place, roasting vegetables at my sister’s place ...
Vacillating?
Well, if it's cigarettes, it makes a certain amount of sense.
Carol Kimball@990
No, no. Just giving the sequence of events, The mom roasts vegetables at the speaker’ s place, tells a bunch of lies, then roasts vegetables at the speaker’s sister’s place.
:-)
Cake Wrecks is a gold mine of such things, including entries tagged "mithspellings" and/or "Literal LoLs".
"United States Marine Crops" and "Barbarian cream", indeed.
"Currently, the 88 year old spends her time partitioning for animal rights and looking after several animals herself."
From a Facebook clickbait article
Obituaries are such a great source for truly dreadful phrases. The latest:
"entered into public servitude" at the local tax district.
Joel Polowin #994: Ah, Cake Wrecks, aka frosted despair in humanity. ;-) I glanced over there and found:
"Loves: nature, hunting his kids, volunteering."
Just another reminder of the importance of proper comma use, my friends.
I can't seem to link the image, but yeah. "Eats [cake], shoots, and leaves"?
"lightning bulb moment"
I'm actually thinking this one is a keeper.
998
For that moment when you're suddenly enlightened?
Dave Harmon @997: This, from this page. ("God bells Dillon", indeed.) My reaction is that it has to be intentional, and that it's not a "wreck", but a well-executed decoration that happens to be grotesque. Same with the Cookie Monster cake of a few days earlier.
They ran a contribution of mine a couple of years ago, the "beach vomit" cake.
@999: Forcibly so, I would think.
A friend posted a request to tell stories about her in hopes they would "job my memory" about them.
Joel Polowin #1000: Unfortunately, you're probably right. (And there goes a little more of my faith in humanity ;-) )
Narrator in a novel describes his exasperation as "it set my eyes rolling around in the back of my head."
Do these folks even have beta readers?
Also, this. Hire a damn copyeditor!
Unable to be together because of their repressive families, the young couple runs away together, but something incredulous happens during flight. June discovers that she has the ability to shape-shit, but she has no way of controlling her power.Many of us have no ability to control the shapes we shit. It's an incredulous fact.
"Something incredulous happens"?
A lot of us are incredulous when we read lines like these.
This thread is getting too long. Let's move the conversation here.
Spam with some bite @ 1009
https://twentytwowords.com/the-most-insane-and-hilarious-typos-to-ever-exist/?utm_source=twitter-desk-pp&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=pps_Funny%20Typos%20YNew%202306%20V1%20En%20-%20Desktop%20USA%20TW&pps_source=Twitter&pps_medium=WC
collected errors from around the web
Almost but not quite an unintentional candidate for several dreadful phrases all mucked together.