I did not grow up in a tradition that studied St. Augustine (or, for that matter, Jesus Christ, Moses, or Mohammed).

What was he referring to with "continentiam"? In context, I doubt he was talking about the ability to voluntarily control urination.

"Continent" means pretty much "able to control oneself". The meaning has narrowed.

Well, it's control, and it's control of the same organ...it's basically a synonym for chastity. It's a tautology.

Is this politics-free? Because our not-president says we have "BOARDER" problem, which means that the Third Amendment is needed, perhaps for the first time ever.

From Adam-Troy Castro's FB. "Spotted in the ARC of a really outstanding upcoming novel: 'The glasses on the bridge of his knows.'"

OtterB@5: not the best song Kansas recorded.

Can I get a citation for that Seneca quote? I cannot find it.

And I think it is vanishingly likely that he would use the word "diabolicum", which gets into Latin as a transliteration of New Testament Greek.

So maybe he said something like "errare humanum est" somewhere, but I strongly suspect that second half comes much later than Seneca.

I feel bad for being so pedantic. But then again, the "dreadful phrases" threads are natural display-cases for pedantry, so maybe it is less out of place here?

Oldster, I cannot find a citation for it, but it is universally attributed to Seneca.

Diabolicum is not a common Latin word, but the Greek word διαβολικός means "slanderous" or "lying". (It's also not common; I can see no references to it before the common era in Perseus.

I'll amend the entry to say it's attributed to Seneca.

I'm afraid that between us we are illustrating the saying of St. Ambrosius, "to err is human, but to make a big deal pointing out other people's errors is, like, being a jerk."

I'm pretty sure it was St. Ambrosius?

I could be wrong. As Martin Luther said to the Pope in his 95 theses, "yeah? well, you know, that's just like, your opinion, man."

Oldster, you are correct; it is Ambrosius who wrote errare humanum est, sed volgo errores aliorum indicare equidem crudelis est.

It's in De Officiis Ministrorum, Book IV, De Mediis Sociabilibus.

ah, yes: the de Mediis Sociabilibus. Part of his projected summa, left incomplete at his death, de Tela Totius Terrae, vel de origine mali humani.

An amazing visionary, Ambrosius! He it was who first laid down that golden precept, troglodytae non pascendae sunt.

I saw "a cry and shame" yesterday.

just seen:
the pompous circumstance and ceremony

I'd just like to say that the conversation between oldster and abi, #7-11, is exactly what I love about reading things here. I learn so much, so much!!

Crazy(and very grateful to everyone here)Soph

Oldster wins, well, an internet for Tela Totius Terrae.

absolutely no credit deserved for TTT, because that is simply its official name in Vatican Latin:

https://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tela_totius_terrae

One of their many articles about the Interrete:

https://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrete

I want to thank abi for our exchange of bad Latin, but so far as "learning" anything goes, Soph, I would take it all cum Drano salis.

(e.g., I made a beginner's mistake by writing "pascendae" instead of "pascendi"; "troglodytae" looks like a feminine ending, but it's a masculine noun. First-year Latin fail.)

16
nauta is Latin for "sailor" - but it's a feminine-form noun. Languages are weird.

In Othello, when Roderigo says, "I will incontinently drown myself," he's not indicating any particular body part but general lack of self-control.

P J Evans @17
Nauta (sailor), poeta (poet (surprise!)), and agricola (farmer) are all masculine, but they are first declension, which means they are very old words indeed.

Russell @18 --

oddly enough, "incontinently" here has a different etymology from the more familiar word "incontinent", where the "in-" means "not".

"incontinently" as an adverb of time is from the phrase "in continenti tempore," i.e. in continuous time, without any interval, where the "in-" represents the preposition "in" instead of the negative prefix.

So English gets two adverbs "incontinently," one being the negation of "continently," and the other meaning "right away."

But PJ Evans put it more concisely at #17

Total derail here but: I had a wonderful Latin teacher, who was the one that got me hooked on "Useless Information". Decades after high school, when I started working at my current job, I discovered that she had worked there also, some years earlier. Had made enough of an impression that, when she passed away, they named a meeting room after her. (Which was weird the first time I encountered it: "What, was that—? Surely not! Oh yeah, it is. Huh." Also was the one who made them (and I can fully visualize her twisting appropriate arms (figuratively speaking, of course)) name our local Craigslist-equivalent, "Agora."

She wasn't just a Latin teacher, she was a Latin geek.

Jacque @21 --

She sounds like a wonderful person.

And I am sure she did not twist any arms at all.

As a good Latinist, she simply promoted the alignment of brachial incentives.

Apologies for being OT...

15+ year follower, 2nd time poster, but given HW's passing, I find myself struggling to contextualize the awfulness of the Bush clan, and looking for the "Aristocrats" post on this site. It was great and has stuck with me for over a decade, but I can't find the link. Any help appreciated. Thanks!

MC Alcock: Maybe yes, maybe no, but the search phrase:

bush aristocrat nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/

produces results that are worth revisiting in their own right....

The winner of Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction award has been announced for this year. If you ever had any doubts about James Frey's writing ability, they've been well and truly rewarded. The Guardian has excerpts from this year's all-male list of nominees.

P J Evans @ #17: There are several others, but they're not in first-year Latin books because they're naughty. Look up "mentula" (a name Catullus gives to an enemy in a famous scabrous poem).

26
I have, actually, a bilingual edition of Catullus.

I thought diabolical meant havign two bollocks

The indispensable Notes & Queries is on the case.

It looks as though two different authentic quotes got conflated:
In the 1st century BC, Cicero said “Any human can make a mistake; it takes a fool to persist in his mistake”;
(Cuiusvis hominis est errare; nullius nisi insipientis in errore perseverare. Philippics xii.2.5)

In the 5th century AD, St. Jerome said, “To sin is human, but to lay traps is diabolical.”
(Peccare enim hominis est, insidias tendere diaboli. Adv. Ruf. iii.33)
(Cf. “lead us not into temptation etc….”)

But neither one said “to persist in error is diabolical.”

And thank heavens for that! Many of us persist in error without supernatural aid of either kind.
(To keep up with my perseverated errors would exhaust a troop of devils.)

So it is deeply unclear when this formulation arose, sc. errare human est, sed perseverare diabolicum.

I see it listed in the Italian Wikiquotes,
And German Wikiquotes.

But neither has any citation for that formula — they give no source or provenance.

We can get a good hint of its date from the fact that no one seems to have said even the first half — even just the “errare humanum est” part — until 1745.
(See the citations in N&Q: things like it, true, but not that phrase.)

I suspect the conflated version is much less than 300 years old.
For all that these records show, it may have been coined in the last few years; a trap laid for the unwary by someone who thought himself devilish clever.
I myself don't think the conflation *is* devilish clever. But I do think it would be foolish to persist in spreading it further.

Oh! And note also that the indefatigable Sonnenschein who contributed the note in N&Q betrays no awareness of the "to persist is diabolical" formulation.

That's more good reason to think that it is quite recent, i.e. post 1904.

Wait, la.wikipedia.org? Really? Though I suppose I probably use Google Translate as much to cheat at Latin as I do for more current languages.

Also, that Ambrosius did make a fine salad.

rm@4 The "boarders" missspelling reminds me of the Grateful Dead album's working title about "Ugly Roomers from the Mars Hotel".

both also vied into conspiracy theories

Oy. I don't know if that one is autocorrupt or user error.

A somewhat different kind of error, from a Newsday article about building bulkheads along a shoreline that was hard-hit in Sandy:

"...to protect and ensure the city's very inhabitability and the continuity of life on the barrier island."

me (34): No, wait, I'm getting my negations confused. The 'in' in 'inhabitability' is not a negation; that would be uninhabitability'. So that statement I quoted is fine.

Nevermind. /Litella

Mary Aileen (35) I read that several times and couldn't see what was wrong with it but figured it was just me. :-) Sort of like the "inflammable" problem.

OtterB (36): Yep! Flammable/inflammable, habitable/inhabitable. Same-same. Sorry for the confusion.

Trying to sew maximum confusion

@38, now that would be an interesting cosplay...

"You don't want to tip your hat too early...."

Somebody referred to "getting soak and wet" from the rains we're finally having more of here. That's what happens when you tip your hat too early, I guess.

Cassy B @39, cosplay would be easier if you were dealing with major confusion or general confusion rather than maximum confusion.

OtterB #42

Private confusion being subordinate to the others?

Abi #3

“Chastity” can also mean “loyalty and faithfulness within a relationship”. This isn’t quite the same as continence.

"I heard you had built a report with Biru."

Someone posted a scan of a want-ad page from Oklahoma - the ad they did it for is for dealing with a green dragon. But the one above it is for help wanted to clear right-aways....

I think they wanted to clear the cleaners immediately, hence "right-away clearing" -- rather than wanting to clear rights of way.

Having had green dragon problems of my own years ago, I can understand what the ad-placer wants there; but how did he reach an agreement with the red dragon? They're usually fiercer.

From the captions on a BBC video about a mother cat who adopted some ducklings along with her newborn kittens: "mothering hormones were coarsing through her blood."

True but redundant: "errant nonsense".

KeithS (49): Not necessarily; there is such a thing as deliberate nonsense*. However, the phrase does appear to be self-referential.

*the works of Lewis Carroll spring to mind

oldster (and abi): I just looked into this for a copy-editing job, and the quotation is complicated. errare humanum est appears in Seneca, I believe, and was certainly current in his day: the Cicero variant is only one example of what seems to have been a common phrase.

sed perseverare diabolicum does not appear in Seneca's surviving works, which does not of course mean he didn't write it. But the most likely source is Ambrose's contemporary St Augustine,Sermons 164.10.14: Humanum fuit errare, diabolicum est per animositatem in errore manere: it is human to err, but devilish to cling on to your error out of contrariness. His target was the Donatists, whom he figured knew they were wrong but didn't want to admit it.

And Fragano is right: castitas and continentia in Augustine's day were terms with different technical meanings: chastity did not rule out sex but meant having sex only within a legitimate marriage; continentia is really just self-control, but applied to sex in general. Neither implied virginitas, which Jerome was pressing for at the time.

candle @51--

Thanks! That is super interesting and helpful.

Because you give a citation for the Augustine sermon, it is possible for anyone to go to a standard edition of Augustine and verify what it says, and also understand its context.

You'll find sermon 164 listed along the left column here.

That's how one attributes a quotation to an historical figure.

And when someone can give me a citation in a standard edition of Seneca's works which contains " errare humanum est," then I'll be happy to attribute that to him, too.

But I have checked the standard editions of Seneca, and I cannot find it. I cannot find anything like it. If he said something like it, he used different words.

Looking for a quotation is not a mysterious process: the writings of Seneca are now just a text-file (or several text-files) like any other file, and can be searched mechanically.

Maybe I searched badly, or unimaginatively, and something like this quotation remains to be found in Seneca. That's fine! In that case, someone will find it, and give us a standard citation, and we'll all know where it is, and have evidence that Seneca said it.

But until then, we have no reason to attribute it to Seneca.

We have no other access to "what Seneca said" than this. We have no grounds for saying "Seneca said X" other than what we find in the writings of Seneca.

(Well, his writings, augmented by early reports from reliable witnesses. Luckily, such early reports are now generally included in an author's published corpus as "fragmenta" or "testimonia" and the like, and are equally amenable to searching and citation.)

So: can someone show some evidence, before continuing to say "Seneca said this"?

Related point: proper citation not only gives us solid evidence for attribution, it also gives us *context*.

And context in this case allows us to observe two things about the "in errore manere" line in Augustine:

1) it is not *all* persistence in error that is labeled diabolical here, but rather persistence when animated by animosity;
2) it is also possible, given the context, that Augustine is not speaking about any persistence other than the persistence of the Donatists. That is, the sense here may be "to err is human, but *the Donatists'* persistence in error is clearly motivated by animosity, spurred on by Satan." Heretics are the limbs of the devil, after all.

So: given what Augstine says here, it is likely that he thinks that there is a lot of non-diabolical persistence in error -- for instance, any persistence not motivated by animosity. It is also possible that he thought there was even persistence based on animosity that was not diabolical, so long as it was not the persistence of heretics like the Dponatists.

That said, this is a terrific find, which thoroughly explodes my contention in #29 that quotations that link persisting in error with diabolical causes are the result of a conflation in the last few centuries. For that I'm very grateful.

Hmmm...not a great link.

Try this one.

Sigh. I'm not good at embedding links, so here it is unembedded:

https://www.augustinus.it/latino/discorsi/tavola_discorsi.htm

This fits in with some of my brother's kvetching about The Big Bang Theory. Sheldon has a theory, and then finds out that a previous guy, a Russian, had the same thought, and then said it was obviously wrong. Hilarity ensues, as they say.

It's all over very quickly, and that's not science. You persist in error, until you resolve the discrepancy. If you have different results from an experiment, you want to know why the difference happens.

It started with my brother complaining about people (he was less polite) contracting out the task of finding citations, on the grounds that If you can't find your own citations you don't understand what you're working on. I can see that, synonyms come into it for any search.

And, yeah, what you are using the error for has to matter.

Incidentally, he keeps posting pictures to Twitter, mostly landscapes. Including infra red, which does all sorts of strange things: black skies, no haze, white grass, it's odd. He bought a modded camera, but some smartphones can detect IR. Try yours, look for a light on your TV remote.

Infra-red picture here

"she heard cries of help"

Really? We're having trouble with prepositions now?

Oh dear. I spoke too soon:
"155 miles-per-hour winds ravished the home"

Did it at least offer a smoke after...?

Jacque (56): Maybe it's not preposition trouble but punctuation trouble: She heard cries of "Help!".

In the “funding provided by” section of several Season 11 episodes of Cook’s Country:

“Wine and recipes have one thing in common: they’re made with love and meant to be shared.”

I think this one needs a little re-writing:
As she so longed to do, she is now free to run barefoot jubilantly through the gardens of Heaven with her redeemer and adoring husband.

"My parents, Ayn Rand and God"

Yes, but which is which?

Someone I know just printed up lyrics (copied from an online source without editing) for "Silent Night,", which included the line "Round you Virgin, Mother and Child" -- does that imply that Joseph was the Virgin, instead of Mary? Makes for a much less interesting Nativity, sort of a Dog Bites Man headline.

"cultural moors that were no longer normal"

Or pining thereon, I imagine.

I don't think the headline is saying exactly what they meant:
Newspaper plant virus halts Los Angeles Times deliveries

Carrie S.: or, to prove that an Oxford comma is not the solution:

"To my mother, Ayn Rand, and God"

candle (66): Yay, a sample sentence in which the Oxford comma is wrong! I had come across one once, but could never find it again.

My tenth grade English teacher taught us always to use the Oxford comma*, on the pragmatic grounds that sometimes it was necessary and was never wrong, so if we got in the habit of using it, we wouldn't have to stop and think about whether this particular sentence needed it. A few years later, I did find a counterexample, but I kept using the Oxford comma anyway.

*although she didn't call it that. She might have used the term 'serial comma', but I think she (we) didn't have an actual name for it.

66 & 67: Uh...I don't get it...? Candle's example tells me there are three people being addressed:
1. Mom
2. Ayn Rand
3. God

What am I missing?

67
"Mom" can be misunderstood as "Ayn Rand".

Jacque, consider: "And to my mother, Connie, I leave the following..." Even in the list form what's between the commas can be construed as a clarification, not an additional entry in the list.

@69 & 70: Hm. Okay. I guess? I mean, that's not how I parse it at all. Which says that, to me, the Oxford comma very much is the correct construction here?

How would you edit it so it would be clearer that it's a list?

Jacque (71): It's the wrong construction because it *can* be misread, not because it inevitably will be.

Rephrasings:

"God, my mother, and Ayn Rand" would work. So would putting "my mother" at the end.

"My mother, God, and Ayn Rand" is a bit more dubious but should still be okay.

Or just leave out the Oxford comma in this case. That works, too.

It's not the Oxford comma that's the problem there. There are two issues:

1. The order of the list introduces ambiguity, and
2. The author has the execrable taste to dedicate someone to that icon of selfishness, hypocrisy, and horrible hack prose, Ayn Rand.

Xopher:

1. Thank you. I couldn't quite articulate it, but that's exactly my issue, and
2. *snrk!*

Honestly, in that case, I'd dedicate it, "To my mother, and Ayn Rand, and God."

Well, actually I'd personally never dedicate ANYTHING to Ayn Rand other than, possibly, a bowel movement, but I believed that's the least ambiguous solution to the problem.

or
"To my mother, to Ayn Rand, and to God". Which also fixes it, but, yeah, I'm not dedicating anything useful to Ayn Rand.

Pretty sure this one is an auto-miscorrect: “They have not yet reached full burnout, but they are encroaching it,” she said.

Spotted on Twitter: “up ship creak without a paddle”

Yes, my point (as Mary Aileen says) was only that the Oxford comma does not inevitably clear up any and all ambiguity. There are plenty of ways of fixing the sentence, but that is also true of other ambiguous sentences which do not use the Oxford comma.

I do agree with Xopher and others that the far more significant problem here is anyone dedicating anything to Ayn Rand, but I believe that is the trad. illustration of the case.

Ayn Rand is in the traditional illustration because she didn't want to share credit for anything with anybody, certainly not with God.

This one's not the usual sort of eggcorn, but it seemed on-topic. I'm on the mailing list for the local jeweler from whom we commissioned our wedding rings. Their latest one, advertising the resale of a pearl ring, made me go, "How's that again?":

There's a story behind every gem. What was once someone's treasure, now withholds the opportunity for a new journey.

David: "You might want it, but you can never have it! Mwa-hah-hah!"

Yeah, one suspects they meant "holds." Unusually creative autocarrot?

It looks to me like an antonymization of "presents". Someone hit an on-line thesaurus and clicked one too many times?

("Mrifk!")

This section will brevily look into state handling

"Brevily" is a delightful coinage!

"...it is a flex duck 3" in diameter." Whereupon I immediately pictured a rubber ducky.

Yes, that would be where you use your duck tape.

About an hour ago, our TV started screaming about an Amber Alert. (Except, bizarrely, it said "Presidential Alert", which is particularly odd given that we're in Canada.) The alert was about a child abduction that had apparently occurred about 5 hours drive from here.

Which, okay, isn't completely silly given that the father and child were last seen about 9 hours ago. But the alert was read by an automated system that totally mangled not only the names of the father and child, but the type of the car. "Honda Sivitch". This is... counterproductive.

88
The L.A. MTA (bus/light rail system) has text messages with computer-read audio. It needs training: it reads the slashes as "slash". (It also spells out some of the abbreviations.) This doesn't make it easy to understand.

I'm reminded of one of my favorite abbreviation-expansion bloopers. Several years ago - so probably wouldn't happen now - I was looking online for a map to an address that included the road FM 1960 in Houston. The FM road names are common in Texas - it stands for Farm to Market - and that particular one is a major road in its part of town. FM 1960 is the name of the road; it doesn't have any other name.

The map program kept translating FM as "Federated States of Micronesia," which did not produce useful mapping results.

90
I wonder what it would have done with the Texas RM roads. (My parents' house in west Texas was on FM 179 - the address while they lived there was a box on a mail route, but now it has an actual house number.)

I have seen -- and perpetrated -- some address expansion bloopers in my time. But fortunately placing the Federated States of Micronesia in Texas was not one of them. We would expand FM 1960 to FM Road 1960 and make sure it is slotted into the same bucket as County Road, State Highway, and so on.

For RM the easiest mistake would be to expand it to ROOM and then decide that the following number is a suite or apartment number.

OtterB: I've encountered that one! It happens that I live just south of a Farm to Market road (albeit one that does have another name, to wit, Westheimer). When I first moved to Houston, I was driving and using a Garmin GPS device. And when it instructed me as to which freeway exit to take – well, there was the FM right in the name of the exit. (Why it had to expand the abbreviation instead of saying "FM", I confess I don't know.)

The GPS thing that gets me is numbers. My Garmin always expands them to their full value.

Example: 1779
The standard way to say that in an address is either
one seven seven nine
or
seventeen seventy-nine
My Garmin pronounces it one thousand seven hundred seventy-nine

Argh!

I have not been impressed by Garmin GPS devices. Last month when I was in the area of Victoria, BC, I had a rental car with a Garmin. I was trying to get from a hospital to the house I was staying in, which was rather secluded in the hills. When the GPS told me to follow a different route than the one I expected, quite late one night, I did a mental shrug: perhaps it knew a back route that was shorter and/or faster than the somewhat roundabout highway route. But the roads got rougher, and narrower, and darker... then into the forest, and the road turned into a one-lane bumpy path. And then the GPS told me to drive into a tree.

Working hypotheses: (1) the GPS was hacked by a serial killer; (2) the GPS was possessed by the malevolent spirit of my late mother-in-law.

I was told later that the route I was directed to was shorter in terms of distance, though longer by time (the device was supposed to optimize for the latter). And technically passable in daylight if one was not concerned about one's suspension.

It took me some creative route-planning to trick it into directing me via a reasonable path. It made several other poor choices. And another Garmin unit that I borrowed for a while last year made some similar mistakes. Though I find it very useful -- in some cases I would say necessary -- to have a navigator when I don't know my route well, I wouldn't choose a Garmin.

There's a half-block stretch of a street I commonly walk to and from work that Google Maps will not plot a path for. It insists on routing you around that stretch of road (by preference, over two blocks so you can helpfully stop by the transit center—that you have no need to go to if you're trying to walk from point A to point B), even when the route adds anywhere from a quarter to a half mile over the direct straight shot down the road. There is absolutely nothing remarkable about that stretch of street to warrant this diversion.

I have more than once considered stopping in to the Google campus a block away from the "problem" stretch of road and pointing this out to them.

Various #88-96: It may in fact help to file error reports, though I'd bet it helps more for Google than for Garmin. Which says nothing about the ethics of a company crowdsourcing their error-correction to their user base.

I've written previously about the time I tried to use Apple Maps to walk (that is, explicitly selecting "walking directions" from my house to downtown.

First it directed me along a highway most of which didn't even have sidewalks. Eventually, it directed me to turn right off the highway and cut across to another street. Turning and looking off the shoulder of the highway, I beheld: Old barbed-wire fencing, a 15' deep gully, a 10' chain-link fence, and a few hundred feet of forest, beyond which was visible the back of a small shopping center's parking lot.

Admittedly, that was a few years ago, but it made me quite wary of their walking directions since.

Seen on the side of a local business' SUV, advertising the services they offer:

Custom vinyl grapics

When I was a child, my hometown library was extensively renovated and the parking lot redone. The new sign in the lot read "Libarry Parking." (Needless to say, that sign was replaced within a few days...)

A couple of years into my grad work at Queen's U in Kingston, I noticed that when the student newspaper ran the ads for the candidates for Student Council President, every one of them had serious errors in basic grammar and/or spelling. I wrote a letter to the editor, pointing this out, and noting that the ads were sent in as camera-ready copy. The newspaper wasn't responsible for the errors; it was all on the candidates themselves. It was disappointing that the people who wanted to be representing the university had such universally poor literacy. (Queen's students have a rather overblown sense of pride.)

The newspaper ran my letter. With a bunch of typos added. So I wrote another letter to the editor about the typos they'd put in my previous letter complaining about typos.

They ran that one, too, with still more typos. So I wrote another letter complaining about the typos they'd put in my previous letter complaining about the typos in the first letter about the candidates' typos.

And so on. I don't recall how many iterations we went through. Four or five, I think.

Joel Polowin #100: I don't recall how many iterations we went through. Four or five, I think.

Before you realized they were taking the piss? ;-)

Dave Harmon @101 -- It's possible, though they continued to print my rather dry comments about how it reflected on their competence and/or literacy. I did my first couple of degrees at Carleton University, and didn't care for the Queen's students' snotty attitude regarding Carleton -- wholly unjustified, so far as I could see, having been a TA at both.

Dave 97: Years ago, I tried to use Google Maps mass transit/walking directions to find a location in Brooklyn. GM at the time assumed that subway stations were point locations on a map and had only one exit, which wouldn't have been so bad if they told you WHICH exit they decided was the real one, or where you'd be when you came out. No, they just said "exit the subway and go north on Blahblah street." It turned out, after a good deal of wandering around, that by coming out the largest entrance of the station I had put myself a good block from Blahblah street, on the other side of a huge building with no through access.

An online stress-management class I just took included the line "...look for ways to tone it back...".

I think they mean either 'tone it down' or 'dial it back'.

Re. error reports, I did once contact AA Routefinder here in the UK to inform them that they were recommending an illegal right hand turn close to where I live. They both responded by email AND corrected the error.

My stepmother's satnav once directed her to drive her horsebox (that's a fairly large vehicle (not a trailer), designed in this case to carry two horses, with an area for people to sit, and with storage space for tack, hay nets, water and so on)up an old packhorse trail that would have been tough going to RIDE a horse up!

Seen Elseweb: "a thermite infested apartment in Sicily"

eric @106: I would expect that to be a notably short-lived apartment!

eru, #106: Gives a whole new meaning to the word "exterminators".

eric, #106: Something worse than fire ants!

also from elseweb:

"Sewing means lots of scraps and I hate to waist them"

"Trump's behavior...is becoming more bazaar..."

Well, the marketplace of ideas, right?

Fragano Ledgister @ 43 (very belatedly): there's a line in the recorded At the Drop of a Hat about a bus sitting outside the theater with a sign in a window saying "Private" -- "I remember when it used to be a general."

Joel Polowin @ 95: I inherited a Garmin and added the traffic-report pickup; it has guided me out of some traffic jams, and into others. However, I don't know whether it's confused about when transit construction will close bridges in northern Somerville (MA), or just confused -- going south on the relevant road I was told to go straight on, but if I head north it wants me to zigzag (NE then NW) twice, for no obvious reason. I'll report this one if I'm every motivated to download the screenshots I took.

Jacque @ 96: Google was particularly confusticated a year or so ago, when a dangerous part of a major highway intersection was replaced with a safer elongated version; somehow (possibly user report that wasn't checked) they got that the old connection was gone but not that the new connection was open, so transfers that would have used it were taken several miles out of the way.

Dave Harmon @ 97: I wonder who gave Google that? Around here it won't even tell pedestrians to cut through parking lots.

All this said, I have to give Google props for mixed-mode transport; it found me the Boston-Plattsburgh best route, which included a ferry (also decent for Boston-Montreal).

Just saw "the solo survivor of the attack."

Xopher (113): Presumably the attack also had duet and trio survivors.

Solo survivor, ha! He shot first.

TomB: You win!

CHip #112: Back then, I don't think they were using Google. I suspect they were using a map where that interstitial space was marked as the equivalent of a blank green space -- that is, no known obstacles (note that none of the barriers would have shown on most maps), so the algorithm just told me to cut across wherever that minimized the total distance. Modern Google Maps does do better in general, but as others have noted, it still has a GIGO problem, and I suspect its algorithms are doomed to have at least some instability in them.

This is a major design floor.

118
It's a huge mosaic?

I know spam is so rife with these that it hardly counts, but I just got one asking for an "unguent respond." I laughed.

Mary Aileen @120, ha. Self-defining as a little slimy?

OtterB (121): That's what it looks like!

slime-mold marketing!

TFW the autocarrot is coming from inside your head:

"found a loan representative of [category]"

::HEAVY sigh::

Jacque (124): What's that supposed to be? I'm not seeing it.

Mary Aileen @125:

Are you borrowing money from [category], or do you see only one of that [category]?

Buddha Buck: Option B.

Mary Aileen: Yes! Denotational ambiguity! Yes, let's go with that. XD

Buddha Buck (126)/Jacque (127): Aha! I only thought of Option A. Thank you for clarifying that.

Denotational Ambiguity might be the name of my next band.

"he was diluted into thinking..."

Rainflame (130): Well, that's one solution.

#130-131: Well, that's one solution.

Given the apparent intent, it's presumably the "solution which is simple, obvious, and wrong".

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.

Perhaps "diluted into thinking" would provide a cure for homeopathy, if the thinking could just be diluted enough.

"He told a raptured audience"

Piles of clothes atop empty shoes...?

Not far from where I work, there's a gallery store for French furniture called RocheBobois. I walked by there today and in all their windows they had this copy advertising an upcoming sale:

10 DAYS OF TEMPTATIONS
May 9 to 19
alluring offers on all new collections

Okay, not a "dreadful phrase" as such, but thematically related.

136
well, it is eleven days, not ten....

somebody on the social media just called someone a "cooperate flunky" when they meant "corporate flunky"

Autocorrect or ignorance?

That depends -- was the person a Trump supporter?

Seen on a webpage from a very large provider of computing resources (and online bookstore), while enumerating the organizing principles of one of their services, they started the 2nd paragraph: "Of course, in keeping with our first tenant, ..."

Funnier if they'd said Tennant!

I remember "it is a major tenant of our religion..."

One of the people who said that was actually renting a room to a co-religionist, so he got out of that one!

I just saw, in a published novel, one character asking another how he's been doing, and get the answer "Fair to Midland."

This author really thinks that's what the phrase is. That's not a typo. That's not a simple error. He capitalized it! He's just never thought it through.

Any chance that that can be attributed to an error on the part of the character? I remember the stir that went through my grade-10 English class when the teacher told us that he wouldn't take marks off for poor grammar, foul language, etc. in dialogue, if it was appropriate for the characters to speak that way.

Even the New York Times is doing it: an article on state legislation that would have the effect of making Trump's state tax returns available to Congress was described as leading into "unchartered" territory. (The spellchecker on this website says that's not even a word.) This was reprinted in the Boston Globe, so in old days I'd have blamed a retypist; these days I'd assume the error is in the original, which would have been e-copied.

I wouldn't be terribly surprised to hear that Trump used unchartered accountants. Pillaging on the wide accountancy, etc.

The word appears in various dictionaries: lacking a charter, used to describe a person or object in areas where having a charter is usual.

Ah, the death of a maritime metaphor....

Joel Polowin: The Crimson Permanent Assurance?

I'm quite enjoying a shirt being described as "Undaunted in the back for a Better fit."

xeger #149 More of my clothing needs to be undaunted.

Is that supposed to be undarted?

OtterB @ 150:
Is that supposed to be undarted?

I'd normally expect it to be 'darted', rather than 'undarted' for better fit -- but apparently mileage is highly variable.

Found in a rather poorly-edited companion volume to a well-known Brit TV castle saga, this one sentence hits a trifecta:

"Although it can be tempting to laden plates with cakes, make it gentile and elegant, not coma inducing!"

Or, why copy editors are *really* a good idea.

Makes me worry about the goodness of the recipes. Guess I'll need to test and report back?

@joann, beware lest the cakes you taste-test induce a coma...

Someone else who needs a copy-editor:
"Memorial Day is America's Most Sacred Holiday" - OK, so where is the Commander and Chief?

OH GOD. Was having a lot of trouble with my joints a few months ago when strong recs for this went across Twitter, so I got it.

I don't recall issues with the English, particularly, but whoever published this had the idea that they were competent to format it themselves.

First three lines of a paragraph are ragged right. Rest of the paragraph is justified. Last line on the page (in the middle of a sentence) is a single or a couple orphan word(s). Lather, rinse, repeat. Text references exercises, refers you to an appendix. Which refers you to another chapter. Which refers you to yet aother chapter—I never did figure out the referencing system.

I think her content might be good...? But the book itself is nearly indecipherable.

Joel 144: Well, it was in dialogue. And the character isn't otherwise characterized as a malaprop. I think the mistake is the author's.

Heard in a meeting, "...run it up the totem pole..."

joann 152: am I missing something? I only see 2 errors, "laden" as an infinitive, and "gentile/genteel". What's the 3rd?

Jeremy Leader @158: "It", singular, seems to refer back to "plates", plural -- though it may refer to a statement in another sentence, which makes its usage problematic rather than necessarily wrong.

"It can be tempting" strikes me as a perfectly normal English.

The second "it", not the first one -- "make it gentile and elegant" -- is the "it" I was referring to. My bad for not disambiguating.

Tom Whitmore (161): Oh! I didn't even see that one. Yeah, that is problematic. I don't think it's referring to 'plates', but it's very hard to tell.

Jeremy Leader #158:

I was also including "coma inducing" instead of "coma-inducing". At least, when I leave off hyphens in places like that, every spell-checker on the planet goes ape.

Joel Polowin @ 146: I was thinking it might be a word, albeit old enough that simpleminded dictionaries wouldn't have it. My first thought on seeing it was a reference to the Charterless Zarathustra Corporation, but "unchartered" to me sounds like an initial failure rather than a loss.

" trump syncopates like him don't listen to reason, logic, or actual facts"

Wow. Someone who knows enough to use "sycophants" but doesn't know enough to watch the spellchecker!

Aaauggh. That gives syncopation a bad name.

Ya gotta wonder what their conversations are like that that's what their auto-carrot comes up with.

Seen on local neighborhood forum:

"Panda party supplies outside [address redacted]! There are 13 gift bags, 3 uninflected balloons."

So ... the balloons got bad grammar, or what?

The balloons were pre-owned and used at a "measles party", but have since been sterilized. But a spall-chucker didn't like "uninfected".

The other day I saw a box truck with the business name "Tire's Unlimited". (I'm not sure what kind of tire they actually sell.)

"Tire's Unlimited"

Little do you know that Seymour Tire sells backpacks, houseplants and fresh-baked pies! ;-)

featured at my office cafeteria: a sandwich served "w/ side of au jus"

173
Somewhere along the line, people seem to have decided that "au jus" is the name of a kind of gravy/sauce.

I saw a singer-songwriter in concert today and I think I heard one of the lines of his song had someone trying to "bonify" something, i e make it bona fide.

Erik: Heh. That's a construction I'd endorse. :)

I have a coworker who is the (entirely unconscious) absolute master of the malapropism. His latest:

"They hear 'audit' and they have negative condemtations."

Erik Nelson #175

A newspaper in Belize 30 years ago came up with the phrase "bonified customers." I was appalled for a moment before I got it.

Is a "bonified" customer bone-in, deboned, or bones put back in? Compare with "flammable" vs. "inflammable".

Joel Polowin #179:

In keeping with Ian Macdonald's "mellified man" (see _The Dervish House_) I'd say it meant wrapped in bones.

Joel Polowin #179:

Bones added, I'd say.

"He didn't give any collaborating evidence."

::facepalm::

::bites tongue::

Not saying anything. Nothing at all.

wry whiskey

183
whiskey with a wedge of lemon?

or with an attitude, cf a button I've seen: "H. H. Munro was a wry swine."

185
Well-known British Fan Brian Ameringen habitually wears (or wore, if it's now worn out) a T-shirt with this slogan.

just won’t pass the mustard

We seem to have wandered into the Mad Hatter's tea party.

The shirt may have succeeded the button (it's been 14 years since I've seen either Brian or Caroline), or my memory may have been jumbled, but Brian is definitely who I saw wearing the text.

Fret level
(though that may have been a deliberate malapropism)

Seen on Tumblr: "smith and western pistol"

Spotted on CNN: "At issue: Giuliani's wild-eyed promotion of wildly debunked conspiracy theories about Biden and his son Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company."

(I think a hyphen between "wildly" and "debunked" would be more correct.)

Actually, according to most sources, phrasal adjectives beginning with an adverb in -ly are correctly left unhyphenated. I first encountered that in Mary Norris's memoir-cum-style guide, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen and I have to confess it surprised me a bit. But everywhere else I've seen that addresses the topic agrees.

Makes sense, if you think about it: "wildly" must modify "debunked" rather than theories, because "wildly conspiracy theories" is gibberish. So the hyphen isn't necessary.

Am I missing something? I think the issue is not the hyphen, but that the conspiracy theories are widely, not wildly, debunked.

Well, yes, of course that's what led Bill to post it here. But I thought that his closing parenthetical merited comment.

OtterB in #194: You are correct. I threw in the parenthetical remark about hyphenation as a distraction.

My 1949 copy of the Chicago A Manual of Style agrees with David in #192. Guess I'm still learning to write English.

Sorry for the pedantic digression. It wasn't intentional.

I would have thought to hyphenate it as Bill Higgins suggests and find it interesting that unhyphenated is correct. I suppose one hyphenates in a case where the meaning is ambiguous without the hyphen. I know I've seen them but I can't think of one at the moment.

The "still-vexed Bermoothes" I take to be vexed by stills, rather than still and vexed. I assume Shakespeare's talking about the Sargasso Sea.

So. last week I turned up a slim volume by Ambrose Bierce, titled "Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults". This is basically Mr. Bierce's list of pet peeves, circa 1909.

In his own preface, he does admit that the work is fundamentally a reflection of his own taste; my edition also has a newer introduction, which points out that Bierce had a serious distaste for American usage. (Indeed, in one entry he says flat out "this may be good American, but it is not good English").

Even given this, it's amusing to see how some of his entries had to have been quixotic pedantry even in his own time, while others represent fights that have since been won or lost. Throughout, his wry humor is entertaining.

An amusing juxtaposition demonstrates this -- in adjacent entries, he condemns:
1. "Sideburns" for "Burnsides" (noting that they are named for the Civil War general). Nowadays it's the canonical term.
2. "Side-hill" for "hillside", which I've never even seen used. Unless it remains as a Britishism or regionalism, I'd guess that one has indeed fallen out of use.
3. "Sideways" for "sidewise". He refers the entry to "endways" (for "endwise"), which in his time apparently was going the same way (the same wise? ;-) ). Curiously, nowadays (IMHO) "sidewise" looks archaic at best, but "endwise" still looks natural. Language development is weird.

Dave Harmon @199 - Well, there's the infamous Sidehill Gouger.

One of the characters in Sometimes A Great Notion filled his freezer with "side-hill salmon", meaning deer taken out of season.

Joel Polowin #200, Rainflame #201: I note those are both regional references, which tends to make my point.

I was driving by my local movie theater and saw their marquee advertise the new film of "Downtown Abbey".

And the furniture store Roche Bobois near where I work is at it again: you may remember them having "Ten Days of Temptations" from May 9-19. Now they're having "Eight Exceptional Days" from October 12-20. (And no, I checked: their showroom is open seven days a week.)

David Goldfarb (203): That's nothing. The local Restaurant Week* lasts for more than two weeks: starts on a Friday, ends on the Sunday 2+ weeks later. I could forgive them for including two weekends in the "week", since that's when most people eat out, but a week that lasts more than a fortnight is a bit much.

*special deals at participating restaurants

This guy wrote that he and his childhood friends had "free reign of the neighborhood." Two mistakes in one WORD.

Ingenious People's Day

Erik #206:

Isn't that Hacker's Day? (old usage)

David Goldfarb #203: "Downtown Abbey"

They did a film about the Cloisters? ;-)

"They know they have a stronghold on the market in our area"

streamer trunk

210
The storage container for party supplies?

Maybe it is a trunk you can access anywhere, but you don't own it.

TomB #209: Okay, I just realized I can't tell: Was that a reply to mine, or a separate Dreadful Phrase? ;-)

#209 is unrelated. They probably meant "stranglehold".

A few years ago I composited a fanzine article that had some photos of the Cloisters. They were beautiful. If there is a film about the Cloisters, I would watch it.

TomB@214 They probably meant "stranglehold".

Either that or someone built a castle inside the local supermarket...

The interesting thing about #209 is that if they'd written 'strong hold', with the space, it would make sense; I agree that they probably meant 'stranglehold', however.

@203 -- doesn't everybody make fencepost errors now and then? (I wonder how many people would think it was a reverse error if the count were correct.)

@204: that probably expanded under the name; the ones I know of (Boston, Providence) used to be just a week, but were so successful that they ~doubled the length. (Just doubled IIRC -- they don't do Saturdays at all, so it's Sunday to next-but-one Friday.) IIARC, the name finally got changed to "Dine Out Xxx" after enough grammarians complained; maybe you should start a movement?

CHip @217: A restaurant anti-"math-acree" movement?

Probably some of the bad word-choices are people being careless with spellcheck: not that they didn't know the correct word, but they just accepted all of their software's suggestions without double-checking the accuracy.

This occurred to me yesterday when I realized that Chrome* doesn't recognize either 'fibromyalgia' or 'rheumatologist'. It suggested 'fibrillation' and 'hematologist', respectively.

*Firefox just recognized 'rheumatologist' but made the same error with 'fibromyalgia'.

219
"Auto-corrupt" isn't as useful as some people think.

I've been gnomed! I can offer an orange Life Saver if that will help.

"the national guard was called in to prevent luters"

Are there any RPG players who find that the idea of a plucky band of luters resonates with them?
(I wouldn't want to string you along to approving of viol-ence, I'll guitarta here.)

(Sorry)

"point black assertion"

Is this a negative assertion?

“There are more smoking guns in this sorted tale than in an NRA Firing Range.”

Um, well, it hasn't been fully sorted yet.

Reminds me of that horrid joke title:

"Sordid & Stoned: The Seamy Side of Camelot"

Semitruck. A truck divided into two cargo sections is a semi truck. A semitruck is half a truck.

"No, Xopher, that's a hemitruck. A semitruck is half a quarter note."

"No, that's a semiquaver. A semitruck is..."

"Your exclusive discount code is weighting"

In recent posts by FB friends:
ice-cycle (for icicle)
it's self (for itself)

"it feels like you're lost in the maize"

The corn maze?

"Looks like snow is whining down."

Hey, if wind can whistle...

Just saw "the bookshop is in dire straights."

Given that it's a gay romance, maybe. But I think it's just a mistake.

Dire straights are the guys who go around looking for gays to beat up?

Gary K. Wolfe edited American Science Fiction: Eight Classic Novels of the 1960s now out from the prestigious Library of America. In reviewing this collection, Paul Di Filippo turns to Poul Anderson's The Last Crusade:

While it checks off many of Campbell’s crochets—the unique superiority of humans; contrarian political stances such as the advantages of feudalism—it does so in a rather perfunctory, non-dogmatic manner.

Could be a mere typo, I suppose. Mr. Di Filippo's vocabulary outruns mine (I had to look up "detournements" and "psychopomp" just to get through this review).

234
In this sense, it's usually spelled "crotchet", so I'll go with typo. (Or someone who thought that "crotchet" wasn't correct and "fixed" it.)

'...he does not want to cast dispersion on someone with a drug problem'.

P J Evans @ 235: Wolfe should have been able to overrule whatever contract copyeditor came up with such a "fix" -- but I don't know enough about today's publishing to guess whether he was given enough time to review the edit, or whether it was even clearly marked up. (Or whether he fixed the "correction", which then got unfixed in a version-control mess, as NESFA once managed to do -- to TNH's distress.) TNH laid out very clear rules for marks in the blue-pencil era; can anyone here tell us how markup is shown when most text is electrons rather than marks on paper?

CHip @ 237: I frequently give take-home tests in my classes, and I allow electronic submissions, in .pdf or Word formats. In the former case, I use the commenting feature - electronic post-its, as it were. This isn't quite copy editing, but perhaps it is similar enough, I suppose.

I was writing to someone about some other people showing off their erudition, and my dictation program made it "air addition". Sometimes these changes are more apt than expected.

Jim Parish @ 238: I know markup tools exist; I was subjected to one form of them while trying to persuade some nitpickers in the Sasquan executive to work with the decorator spec that had been used in the past. But I don't know whether copyeditors use such tools, or just make the changes. There are also tools for comparing files (to find changes that haven't been annotated), but I don't know whether there's anything user-friendly enough to be usable. (I'd brute-force the question with an assortment of UNIX tools, but I worked with UNIX for a few decades and like simple tools that I can apply one-at-a-time so I can know what the results mean.)

238
Word has a feature like that, also. It's under "review".

CHip #240:

When spouse and I were doing a book for Large Well-Known Computer Book Publisher, we traded marked-up PDFs with the copyeditor, using change tracking within Acrobat.

Describing a near miss on the highway: "I had the right away."

Allan #243: No doubt this is a phobia about tardiness.

CHip, in #237, when you write:

Wolfe should have been able to overrule whatever contract copyeditor came up with such a "fix..."

I presume instead of "Wolfe" you mean the author of the review I was quoting, Paul Di Filippo; Gary K. Wolfe is the editor of the books PDiF is reviewing, and is not responsible.

#39
air addition - putting on airs?

I meant #239 - (comment by Angiportus "erudition" -sorry

Allah cart. As in "He ordered Allah cart."

Presumably, it's the cart with the halal food.

"He ticks all the buckets."

HelenS (249): Better than kicking all the buckets, I suppose.

Bill Higgins @ 245: this is me failing reading comprehension -- and I used to be so good with those little booklets....

I still whether an editor made the error or just left it in.

"I have a rash over the top part of my diagram."

Allan Beatty #252: They must have run out of paper!

From the Secret Service's "Know Your Money" guide, right up front:

U.S. currency paper consists of 25% linen and 75% cotton and contains small randomly disbursed red and blue security fibers embedded throughout the paper.

I suspect a semantic collision, as "disbursed" does at least apply to money. It should of course be "dispersed".

Dave: The ATM out front has instructions for how to get a deposit envelope "disbursed." By which of course they mean "dispensed."

I don't think it's exactly a dreadful phrase, but someone needs to do some research:
"knight Lady Hotspur finds herself torn between love and her beliefs as the fate of her kingdom hangs in the balance" (book blurb, seen online, and no, I'm not interested)

Just saw "I understand and emphasize." I suspect arty carrot.

"In lieu of recent events—"

Pro author, too. Otto Carrot, we hope?

"swine vehicular disease" - which pre-dated the invention of the auto-carrot since it was in a local newspaper still using the Linotype machine for composing. (A recent search by moose for this typo turned it up in an EU document from 1994 that appears to have been autocarroted back to 'vesicular' when pdf'd (or maybe vice versa and the pdf OCR process caused the error.) Still amusing though, a specific disease that only pig lorries can contract?

Nope. It's car sickness in pigs.

My brain was trying to relate it to swine flu. But that would be porcine aviation disorder.

259
I suspect that OCR did it - I worked for a while checking and correcting OCR'd docs, and some of the errors were amusing (turning "legal obligation" into "lethal obligation", as an example).

P J Evans @ 262

Sometimes, both are correct.

Seen on Twitter: "we've all but irradiated these diseases because of vaccines"

OCR is the mortal enemy of anyone whose last name is Fuchs.

A common OCR error IME is interpreting 'd' as 'cl' or vice versa, turning 'dip' into 'clip' and similar things that will pass the spell checker.

This moose has just realised that it's entirely possible that 'You can hear the sound of the chickens ducking." under certain circumstances.

Thanks to Pfusand and Mary Aileen for the travel related variations of SVD, too.

Ah, Cadbury Moose. You remind me of the time, in dim light, I caught the OCR error of "hips" rather than "lips," in "she licked her hips." She was an alien, but not in that alien a shape.

At the same OCR-checking job, I saw "District" scrambled into "Omelet". ("Lethal obligation" was in a section about DC bonds.)

I was reading an OCR'd collection of Chinese folk tales. The OCR usually (but not always) transcribed "R" as "E". As a mathematician, I was delighted by the repeated references to "the Euler of Heaven".

I was reading an OCR'd collection of Chinese folk tales. The OCR usually (but not always) transcribed "R" as "E". As a mathematician, I was delighted by the repeated references to "the Euler of Heaven".

Sorry for the double; I was too impatient to wait out the posting.

I'm sure this was autocorrect, but it's too good not to share: "A technical companion to this paper contains the complete mythological details."

Allan Beatty @272, too good not to share indeed. Unintended truth in publication, perhaps?

Jim Parish @ 269: I remember being delighted to find Euler on Swiss currency when I went to Confiction; it was nice not only as a change from heroes and politicos, but also as a tie-in as I'd just finished a course on discrete math that covered graph theory from the Königsberg bridges forward. As a former chemist, I was also pleased to find myself in Berzelius Square when I went to pick mail in Stockholm a couple of weeks later.

"Shutter Island is a beautiful and eerie creation that encapsulated audiences in 2010 and then seemingly dropped off of the map."

Xopher @275. So, the audiences haven't been heard from since 2010?

OtterB (276): And the island is no longer showing on maps, either.

Fortunately, the audiences were protected in a safety capsule when they fell off the map.

#266
click here
flickering lights

Well, yeah, if the audiences were encapsulated, and word got out, it's clear why people stopped going to see the movie. When people settle down for a nice movie watch, they don't want their cheeks pierc to be squashed into a capsule!

"The queen was born April, 21 1926. At the age of 25 she became queen, and was coronated on June 2, 1953, only 16 years after her father’s coronation."

Good gods. CROWNED, dammit. Coronated sounds like it means "endow with a corona."

And if you want to invocate some archaic rule to justificate this back-formation, crucifict me now.

"Coronated" sounds like having indulged in a particular kind of beer-binge. As in, "Let's go down to the bar and Coronated. Hope they don't run out of limes!"

I ran across "coronated" in a fantasy I otherwise liked a lot. Don't remember which one. I noticed because I stubbed my mental toe on it.

281
I think they're doing a back-formation from "coronation", but dammit, they should be able to use a dictionary. It also isn't like they've never heard of people being crowned.

also, since I keep using the wrong email address, imma gonna change it.

also, since I keep using the wrong email address, imma gonna change it.
(intentional duplicate)

@284: like "use" vs "utilize." The latter sounds fancier.

I remember Edward James Olmos once talking about people being "poorly nutritioned," when what he meant was "poorly nourished." I'll grant the possibility that he wanted to put a little extra emphasis on the concept, but ::flinch::

"corn colonels" :)

estelendur (288): That took me a minute to parse!

Especially since I first read it as "corn colonials".

Jacque (290): I tried to read it as a mistake for 'colonials' before I got to the pronunciation confusion. And that was after I tried to figure out what kind of colonels there were that might get mistaken for/mistyped as 'corn'.

The story lines were unaspiring [from a clickbait article about a TV show]

Xopher @ 281 (and following): I have a vague memory of "crown(vt)" meaning "strike someone on the head", but dictionary.com doesn't support this, and where the intransitive form (wrt birth) is intended should be clear from context, so I also don't see how it can be right. ISTM that the insertion/backformation of a surplus "at" is becoming common, if not outright accepted; cf "orientating" (which I've seen even on the BBC!), but "coronating" is unusually ugly even if it looks like regularizing an odd bit of English.

Have recently seen a mention of a "badmitten racket." Some sort of scam involving inferior hand coverings?

That's a good one.

Stairstep (literally) addition to my previous: "preventative". I was going to flame about this, but the mid-century OED I inherited says it's almost as old as "preventive" (1654 vs ?1629?); I don't recall hearing it when I was younger and the OED and other dead-tree dictionaries (and dictionary.com) refer seekers to "preventive", but it seems to be becoming common. I wonder whether there's some sort of meme that the more complicated word must be more correct.

A sheriff's department just issued an emergency alert on Twitter saying "A large boulder the size of a small boulder" was blocking a highway

293
I've met that one - it was certainly around when I was a kid! (If you crowned someone in that sense, you had hit them in or on the head.)
It's in my American Heritage College Dictionary, as the last entry for the verb, marked as "informal".

CHip @ 297: I have a distinct memory of a '60s cartoon in which Snagglepuss (or was it Snaggletooth? Can't tell them apart), confronted with a caged lion - the cage had a sign saying "King of the Beasts" - said "King, eh? Well," (he pulled a hammer out of hammerspace) "I'm crownin' ya!" (thwack, stars and birdies, improbably large lump).

CHip @295: Huh, I've actually never encountered "preventive" before. *is young'un*

CHip 293: I've definitely seen 'crown' used to mean "strike on [the top of] the head," but not in several decades, now that you mention it. 'Orientated' appears to be standard British usage at this point, as far as I can tell.

Orientated: Sometime in the last couple of years, I've heard (possibly here?) that "orientated" has a particular meaning, in that it's specifically, "oriented wrt North," where as "oriented" is just your general, non-specific orientation in whatever the relevant contextual refrerence frame is. Can't speak to any actual veracity of this claim.

Since I'm from the west, I'm more likely to occidentate than orientate.

But only occidentally, of course.

CHip @295, estelendur @ 299:

When I say the two words to myself, what comes to mind is that "preventive" is an adjective, as in "He took preventive measures", while "preventative" has more of a nouny flavor. I feel I might say "She was worried about 2019-nCor, so she took an antiviral and wore a facemask as a preventative.". Even both as adjectives, there are some places where one feels more right than the other.

"Orient" goes back to when the primary direction on maps was east, toward Jerusalem. It got verbed from that.
I don't know when "orientate" became a verb, but AFAICT it's another back-formation, from "orientation".
(And "orient" goes back to Latin "orior", to rise - as in rising sun.)

P J Evans: omg of course. That makes total sense.

I'll admit to having to look up the Latin source - I was expecting an -are verb, truthfully.

P J Evans (307): Pity it wasn't 'orientare', as in We Three Kings.

Jacque @ 301: I think I've seen "orientated" used in the more general sense (e.g., followed by "toward"); now I'll have to watch for uses.

Buddha Buck @ 304: that seems plausible -- but I'm pretty sure I've seen "preventative" used as an adjective (e.g., attached to "medicine" or "measures").

Several of you don't owe me a new laptop, but only because I don't drink near mine.

And today's irritation (from NPR, which ought to know better): Mexico's president is gearing up for a national raffle. The prize? The presidential plane. It's like Mexico's Air Force One, but the president refuses to step foot in it. I've seen hand dancing ("jiving" in Grease, and not named in The Cocoanuts, but what other than a foot can you step with?

CHip @ 309: what other than a foot can you step with?

A paw? A peg leg? Perhaps even flippers count, for pinnipeds.

309
I've seen "hand jive" used to describe some newer signs in ASL.

Hand Jive is also the name of a drum rhythm that you've heard and would recognize.

"to step foot in" is a common phrase that I've heard my whole life; it may be redundant, but it's entrenched in the language.

Cassy B. (313): I would have said that 'set foot in' is more common, but 'step foot in' doesn't sound terribly wrong to me.

@309, @313, @314,

According to Google nGram, the prevalence of "step foot in" jumped by a factor of 10 between 1980 and 2005, but that just meant that "set foot in" went from 200 times as prevalent to just 25 times as prevalent. nGram charts

That matches my gut feeling, that "step foot in" didn't sound wrong, but "set foot in" sounds much more right.

Buddha Buck #315:

Of course there are some instances in which "step *your* foot in" make a lot more sense than "set". Closely related to how many lazy dog-walkers there have been recently on a sidewalk near you.

I think some of what's going on here has to do with whether the foot got there by accident or on purpose.

I never heard "step foot in" until the 90s, possibly later. It was always "set foot in," with the meaning "minimally visit." "The Romans never set foot in Ireland" means they didn't so much as send a little excursion, much less establish a base.*

*Please, it's only a sample sentence.

"remodelized"

::facepalm::

Sadly, not out of character for the speaker.

Xopher Halftongue @ 317: I don't remember ever hearing/reading "step foot in" in the sense you describe (and the story intended); now I'll have to attend more closely to see whether I run into it again.

"The only full proof way..."

Not a drive by, honest, although I haven't posted in yonks...

I don't have a specific quote, but I seem to be seeing this all over the place lately: "weary" in place of either "leery" or "wary". I guess it makes a kind of sense; stick the two together and that's what you end up with. Only, how is it getting past the copy editors/proofreaders? Because I'm seeing it in published books, not just blog posts, etc.

Example: "I'm weary of walking through the alley at night".

Saw a post about somebody's workplace not charging them PTO for coronavirus-quarantine-related work absence due to the "extortionary circumstances." :)

Cheryl @321. I am sometimes a lector at my Catholic church, which means I read some of the scriptures of the day and read a typed set of "Prayers of the Faithful." My usual practice was to skim over the Prayers of the Faithful before mass to make sure I knew how to pronounce the name of anyone we were praying for, but not bother to pre-read the other prayers since they were normally straightforward. Until the day I read aloud the typo that asked for the grace to pray always without growing wary. It should, of course, have been weary. I made the mental correction too late and barely avoided a fit of the giggles in the middle of the service in front of several hundred people. Ever since then, I have carefully preread all the prayers.

From NPR's Doctors Push Back As Congress Takes Aim At Surprise Medical Bills

The ads prompted a bipartisan probe from Walden and committee Chairman Frank Pallone, D-N.J., into how the companies have influenced surprise billing practices.
"I'm not trying to hurtle a rock at them, but they've been throwing a few my way," he said.

Re: surprise medical bills --

This exact thing happened to my family, a few years ago. My husband had his gall bladder out. The hospital was an in-group hospital, the doctor was an in-group doctor. We got a bill from an assistant surgeon that my husband had never met, hadn't authorized, and didn't even know was involved, who was NOT in-group, and our insurance wouldn't pay him. It was a major hassle to get that resolved. If my husband wasn't very, very good at arguing, and very persistent, it would have cost us a great deal of money.

Health care in the US is broken.

Why are so few people pointing out that a single-payer system eliminates these surprise medical bills, which are a feature of the current health insurance marketplace?

it probably hasn't happened to them - yet - or possibly they don't think it will happen to them.

I think "hurtle" -- cause to move at great speed -- might work. Not as well as "hurl", and better than the correction I thought of, "hurdle".

This is more like usage drift than a single dreadful phrase, but it's still a sore point: when did "$<number> dollars" become common? (I don't read any other languages well enough to know whether this is used for other currencies; I don't think the BBC uses it for pounds but I wouldn't swear they don't.) Is there any pattern to this tautology?

This fit of cane-stomping and foot-waving brought to you by an NPR story that uses both this form and $<number> without the added "dollars"

Argh, that reminds me of when I was a kid and we made our own play money (on the backs of computer punch cards) and one of my friends kept writing 5$.

From someone whose heart was in the right place, but maybe not educated to phd level. (Explaining what to do when someone, a woman in this case, rides their horse at you aggressively while you are interfering with their perceived right to hunt, torture and kill wildlife, specicifically vulpes vulpes.)

"Told you guys before , grab a hold of the horses bit and with the other hand pull the buckle on the rain, doit good enough an itll come loose.. she wont be so iron mighty then !!"

I like "iron mighty." It suits the person shown in the photograph (which I won't show to protect the innocent parties involved).

I never would have thought of trying to detach the rein to curb a rider's aggression. Next time someone's trying to ride me down I may try it.

This will probably not happen in this lifetime, however. No tradition of fox hunting here.

(Story idea: former employees of Fox news hunted for sport by the oligarchs they benefited.)

Xopher at 332: The Most Dangerous Game?

Eric 333: Yeah, but with more "Why are you doing this? I've always done your bidding" and "Do you think you matter to me as much as an insect? Run, boy, run!"

I have to admit that the idea of snatching at the face of one innocent animal and wrenching something from their mouth in order to protect another seems a touch... off.

I trust the intent wasn't to harm or even alarm the horse, but I can see a LOT of ways for that to go wrong.

There's a more basic issue with the "snatch at the rein" thing: You've got a very large animal miving toward you at speed, and your response is supposed to be grabbing something off its face/out of its mouth? Never mind that even with its mouth full of bit, the horse can kick, or just trample you!

I'm sorry, if somebody's riding a horse at me, my natural response is going to be "get the f*ck out of the way!"

What I understand is, you grab the bridle from the side and pull the horses' head down.

Still not something I'd want to do, even if the horse is just trotting.

Devin 335: I thought the idea was to grab both the bit and the rein, and try to unfasten the one from the other. Seems like you couldn't do it easily on the fly, but at least the purpose is not to jerk the bit from the mouth, but to unhook the rein so the rider no longer has that form of control.

A Jason Bourne move for sure, though, now that I think of it.

BUT: I would try it if the rider was trying to trample me, and I didn't have something sharp to stick in the rider's thigh.

Only after trying to run away sideways, I hasten to add. If forced to fight with a person on horseback, try to undo the rider's control of the horse, then try to injure the rider.

Oh, sure, if your life is on the line then going for the bridle is absolutely a smart play. But my reading of this situation was not so much "fox hunter attempts vehicular-ish homicide" but more "fox hunter plays chicken with protester."

If getting actually ridden down was a basic hazard of fox-hunt protests, I would expect the concern to be less with the iron-mighty attitudes of hunters and more things like "where can we get some pikes?"

I for one would argue against iron pikes on the grounds that hurting the horses is not the goal, and in fact should be avoided at all costs. Someone who's willing to use a horse to attack a person on foot doesn't care about the horse, but that's no reason I shouldn't.

Pepper-spraying the hunters might be a good move though.

“From a size standpoint, 1,400 feet of vertical is nothing to shake a stick at,” said James Hamilton, co-founder of the marketing firm that has been handling Tenney’s public relations strategy in its latest renaissance. I'm glad to hear a ski mountain was revived, but shouldn't a PR person have a better grasp of idiom -- or know when they don't?

@341: pikes with boxing gloves on the ends! Plant the back end and aim at the rider rather than the horse. You'd need a real pike-length shaft (18'? something suitable for the multiple ranks of a phalanx) rather than just a single-combat-style spear, and maybe some fancy footwork, but think of the YouTube videos!

@343: I think the boxing glove needs to be on a spring.

@344, I think Acme might sell pikes with boxing gloves on springs, if the Coyote hasn't already bought out their stock... <grin>

I think the fox's head should be a fox mask over a boxing glove on a spring.

Note: the reins often attach to the bit by a slit in the rein that goes over a short T-piece and pulls into place - so if you know what you're doing you can pull it out and detatch the rein from the bit quite easily.

"That last one certainly put a hamper on Bloomberg."

The was a deliberate mistake, not seen in the wild, but it's too good not to share: star-craving mad.

I think that would describe a celebrity stalker.

dcb 347: Good to know. Sounds like you could do it without hurting the horse...but that you should practice it if you expect the goddam foxhunting toffs to try to ride you down.

"... it seems ingenious to fake enthusiasm as I'm walking gifts over to the closet." I'd certainly never have thought of it!

(I'm pretty sure they meant "ingenuous.")

Tom Whitmore #351: In fact, I'd hope they meant "disingenuous".

True, Dave.

And online today in an article on the novel coronavirus and CoViD-19, The Wall Street Journal said that "People can protect themselves and their communities by taking steps such as frequent handwashing, avoiding contact with people who are sick and staying home if they develop systems."

Applications programmmers, however, should continue to go to work?

"Star-craving mad" is a good description of me in my teens, when I was trapped in a remote area where neither good astronomy books nor clear skies were common.

"The younger generations out there are ready to take the reigns."

I'm so tired of that one. In both directions.

355
That one, and "towing the line". They may also have to "sew what they reap."

They may also have to rip what they sew. And then resew. And then rerip.

357
Also known as "frogging": Rip it, rip it, rip it...

358
As opposed to tinking - taking it out one stitch at a time, unknitting it in reverse order.

Met a non-native speaker who is apparently unaware that 'gateway' and 'getaway' are different words. Not sure what, if anything, I can do. I can't think of way of explaining it without being rude.

Just saw 'bear minimum' again.

Did we agree that Bear Minimum is Ursa Minor, and Ursa Major is Bear Maximum?

Xopher (361): Sounds right to me.

The “bear minimum” is where the market is heading.

Now I've been earwormed by the old Jungle Book movie with Baloo singing "Look for the bare necessities..."

"death of the birds was caused by the birds striking the tarmac or the nearby bushes, and probably consistent with the birds avoiding either severe weather or a rapture of the area."

... I know what was meant, but it took me a moment!

"they had to make due with what they had"

A lot of these are the result of lost vowel distinctions: do/due, not/naught, Harry/hairy. Once they're gone from your speech, it takes a strong connection to the community of the written word to avoid them disappearing from your spelling too.

dcb @365: Well, if the birds were good birds and their souls were abruptly yanked up to Heaven, that would do it too.

"This level of telecommuting is unchartered territory."

Joel Polowin @367: a very localised rapture!

dcb #369: Modified rapture!

Or, if it were a small-enough group of birds: By sections of threes: rapture!

One can think of the Rapture as a kind of harvest: God consuming those human-cattle who have followed his rules about what is healthy for mind and body, so that they will be most tasty when eaten. Sort of like "To Serve Man" with a religious component....

Seen in too many places: "Corvid-19", which is presumably something like a bird flu. The W'pedia page for "Corvid" redirects to "Corvidae", which now has a "if you're looking for info about the virus, you need to go *here*" redirect-y thing.

Also "carona virus". Teeny vehicles for driving on diseases?

Not especially apropos, but I just saw "pumpkin-sized" from a writer who's usually better than that. (Pumpkins, of course, range from fist-sized varieties to giants weighing over a ton.)

Ah, you're thinking of the Corolla, right?

375
No, that's the Corona. Which, while common, was not viral.

I was thinking "car on a virus", but the Corolla works too.

Tom Whitmore @ 372: What a wonderful metaphor! One could even treat being Born Again as analogous to the way meat animals are shifted from fish meal (highly convertible to meat) to grain, to leach out any residual taste. I vaguely recall a Pohl/Kornbluth novel (Wolfbane?) that had a similar approach to ~mysticism, but that was as close as they dared to confronting popular isms.

"The White Flag has Been Waived... We Surrender...Now Closed!"

Well, they didn't have to present an actual white flag, did they? It must have been waived.

When the lofty Ieu Eun physicists discover that fully half of Anarresti scientists are women, and moreover that the respected physicist Gvarab is a woman, they balk, chock it up to cultural differences, and change the subject. I guess you could say they had mental blocks. Unfortunately, this is from the tor.com reread of Le Guin.

Oxford comma dilemma:

Just started The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers (which, twelve pages in, I think I'm going to actually buy), and the dedication reads:

For my family, hatch and feather

So here's my question: is her family comprised of hatch and feather? Or are they in addition to her family?? ::ambiguity wail!::

@Jacque, from the context of what I remember from the book, I'd say that you should probably read it as "for my family, both hatch and feather."

Birth family and found family.

I guess “down the hatch” could mean something very different to an ornithologist than to a sailor. And then there are those into fly fishing.

"[N]o one is going to go out and be around others in close prolixity ..."

... except for the associates of Trump.

My office is having a major renovation, including creating some "huddle spaces" for small group meetings. One of my coworkers just forwarded a message about the white boards in the new "cuddle" space. Pretty sure you're not supposed to do that at work, even without a pandemic.

Seen at Kobo:
Winner of the 1980 Locus Pole Award for Best Novella

Seen in a book of face posting about whether you have to show symptoms: "Rand Paul was asymptotic". Well, he certainly causes my blood pressure to do that ...

@385, @388: nice shots!

"a gray chili day"

Hm. Yes. Good day for a pot of chilly. : )

Not really a Dreadful Phrase in our usual sense, but when I was texting with Mom she came out with a fearsome auto-co-wreck: "Mother is in the posit cowboy your name supply". I have no idea what she was trying to write.

Just seen in the wild: "will leave [people] clambering for access"

Mary Aileen #392: "will leave [people] clambering for access"

Because someone pulled up the ladder after them-self?

"They only found it by trialling error." ... Fair enough really.

"I tried to reason with you, I tried to peacefully exonerate you from my situation."

Not only does that word not mean what you think it means, I can't even tell what word you were trying for.

"you’ll owe an exuberant bill"
as opposed to your usual dull and lifeless bills

David Goldfarb@395 -- I think that's a thesaurus error, using exonerate as a synonym for excuse, Different form of excusing -- closer to release in the original user's statement, rather than hold innocent.

Seen as someone's pencil (thankfully) mis-correction in a book: 'if that's what he thinks he has another thinkg coming'. Why? Why would someone change 'think' to 'thing' in that and think they were correcting an error?

dcb (398): I've seen a lot of people use 'thing' there. I don't understand it either.

dcb@398: I have also seen that as an error; an embedded or final 'k' is often subtle or outright missing in speech, so someone who learned the idiom purely by ear could have misunderstood it, just as many of the other errors here look like they come from mis-hearing. As to why someone would change it -- at least half the issue with being wrong is not knowing that one is wrong, and being certain that someone who differs is wrong (cf. Will Rogers).

'k' sometimes floats instead of disappearing; I ran across "gingko" in print within the last week. I suppose this is like "nucular", a shuffle that some find easier to pronounce; the unvoiced palatal(?) stop followed by the voiced version is not easy to say clearly.

Until today, I have never noticed "another think coming", and had always thought that it was "thing". It makes sense to me. What do you have another of coming? A thing, unspecified.

Google NGrams says that in 2008 "think" outnumbers "thing" (in that phrase) 3:2, so I should have seen it. It also indicates that it's probably wrong to call "thing" wrong, but that dcb's example probably was a miscorrection.

The problem with "another thing" being what you have coming is that the first "think" now no longer contributes to the phrase. It becomes just as likely that if you do that, you have another thing coming, if you say that, you have another thing coming, or if you believe that, you have another thing coming.

"Fuschia" is another "gingko". The real spelling commemorates the 1500s botanist Leonhart Fuchs.

I notice wandering "h"s: Bhudda, Ghengis, and per the Spelling reference below, Ghandi.

Del Cotter @403:

At least one of those three, and probably more, the wandering "h" is due to transliteration issues. English doesn't have a "dh" sound, so it isn't pronounced in English. It is in the language the word comes from, however. (How do I know? By repeatedly being corrected on how I pronounce my own name, without me asking).

These names and titles (a) don't have an "h" sound in the standard English pronunciation, but got an "h" due to transliteration issues, and (b) people know they have an "h", but don't know where. So they put them somewhere they can think of it going.

I think I've seen "Bhudda", "Buhdda" (not often, as that changes the pronunciation too much), and "Buddah". I don't think I've seen "Budhda". I have definitely watched people write "Budd" and then pause as they try to figure out if the "h" comes next or at the end.

I had always thought it was "another thing" up until probably the last ten years. "Another think" makes sense, but it always brings me up short.

Buddha Buck: It's startling to hear a native speaker use a word that English transliterates with those difficult "h"s, as in Afghanistan. I can often actually hear the "h", and then I'm all, "Oh! Yes, of course!" Given that I don't have the relevant wetware, I can never remember the pronunciation, so it's no help in learning the spelling.

As indicated by Del Cotter @402, it's the fact that the whole phrase is 'if you/he/she/they thinks that you/he/she/they has/have another think coming.' So is the confusion because people have lost the connection between the repetition of the word 'think'? My husband suggested it might be related to pronunciation also, with people unfamiliar with the phrase not having heard the the 'k' on the end (more likely with some American accents, perhaps, compared to British accents?). Also maybe confusion with the phrase 'it's just one thing after another' (as I sideline I loved this from Zelazny in one of the Amber books:
“I traveled for perhaps half an hour then, leaving the place far behind me, before I halted and took my breakfast in a hot, bleak valley smelling faintly of sulfur.
As I was finishing, I heard a crashing noise. A horned and tusked purple thing went racing along the ridge to my right pursued by a hairless orange-skinned creature with long claws and a forked tail. Both were wailing in different keys.
I nodded. It was just one damned thing after another.”

Agree that "thing" rather than "think" is probably related to breaking the original phrase in two and using only the second half, which then transmutes to "thing" by the usual sort of Telephone game mechanism.

Thanks for the Zelazny quote. I'm also fond of this, whose original source I don't know "Time is what keeps one damned thing after another from being every damned thing at once." I suppose "every damned think at once" would be a working definition of an anxiety attack.

OtterB I've heard a variant of the second quote attributed to John Lennon. Even if he did use that, he doubless stole it from someone else.

OtterB I've heard a variant of the second quote attributed to John Lennon. Even if he did use that, he doubless stole it from someone else.

OtterB @407: The Flying Karamazov Brothers had a t-whirt that said "Time is what keeps everything from happening at once."

I commented back "It doesn't seem to be working very well these days."

I like Janis Joplin's version: "Tomorrow never comes -- it's all the same damn day, man"

The convo started by dcb @398 was giving me an earworm, which I pursued so as to identify the artist. To my bemusement, and highly relevantly to this convo, it turns out that the Judas Priest song is in fact titled 'You've Got Another Thing Comin''. So that's probably also a contributing factor.

Sunflower@412: Huh.I hadn't known of that song.

I'd always thought it was "If that's what you think, you've got another thing coming" – i.e, if that's what you think is going to happen, the results are going to be different than what you expect.

"You have another think coming" does not seem like a natural phrase to me, although I can imagine people might say it. If that was what I intended, I'd say "If that's what you think — think again."

Rob Rusik @414, I always thought "You've got another think coming" was deliberately ungrammatical for humorous effect, but apparently I was wrong.

Merriam Webster says that think is the older usage, from the mid-nineteenth century, and originates in British English where a phrase like "taking time to have a think" is not unusual. Thing seems to be more common now, with the song Sunflower cited being mentioned.

listed among gear to be brought on a near-polar cruise: "neck gator". Reminds me of a UK packaged sweet's slogan: "One nibble and you're nobbled!", although not quite the way either party had intended. This edges into the how-long-has-this-been-going-on territory of (e.g.) "preventative"; if I Google "neck gator" it does the are-you-sure-here's-the-more-plausible-term thing ("gaiter"), but at least one of the sites listed does spell it "gator".

I think the hardest work is done, with what's left being more pragmatic.

147
Yeah, that's a head-scratcher!

On reflection, I guess they wanted "straightforward". How they got from there to "pragmatic"....

David Goldfarb @417: maybe trying for a single word meaning 'the practicalities' / 'the practical details'?

A "world renounced classic." Like Mein Kampf?

"This may be a mute point."

(Comment on a neighborhood forum, in the context of whether the mayor of Austin can override various open-back-up stupidities on the part of the governor of Texas, specifically to continue a requirement to wear masks in Austin.)

Just seen: "Life begins at contraception."

Chris @423: Well, that's probably true for a lot of (hetero) people who want to have sex without having to worry about having children.

It's a mute point if they're using duct-tape masks , which would improve the contributions many of them are making to the conversation.

Bill Stewart #425:

I wish. Probably in some other thread, though.

"... these people are arrested and arranged..."

Row-order by severity of crime, column-order by intelligence?

Briefing saying that a running course has more uphill than downhill: "cue groans and rye smiles" (probably a Word auto-miscorrect, to be fair)

428
Does it go through grain fields?

Ilka lassie has her laddie
Nane, they say, hae I
Yet a' the lads they smile at me
When comin' thro' the rye.

-- From one of the common variants of Robert Burns's "Comin' Thro' the Rye"

429
or past a distillery?

Joel Polowin @428: a good fit - thank you.

P J Evans @429: that would do it (if it was a good distillery).

A crisis of conference

Erik Nelson (433): An appropriate description for a lot of political and work meetings!

Re "comin' through the rye": I am reminded of Humphrey Bogart offering the bookstore clerk some rye, in a scene that I can't believe made it past the censors.

From a discussion of the reason a commercial jet managed to touch down nosewheel-first: "During the investigation, pilots from a range of operators were asked how they grip the sidestick. There appeared little consensus from their comments, other than that many pilots do not hold the sidestick in the manor intended by the manufacturer."

An enthusiastic response to a FB post: "Here here".

CHip @436:

Any idea why the manufacturer intended the sidestick to be held in a manor, and not in the plane?

Buddha: Thank you. That's the kind of misuse that my brain happily just slides right past.

Buddha Buck @ 438: the fault lies with the report writer rather than the manufacturer -- although the details in the report (via Fear of Landing) suggest that Airbus's grasp of ergonomics is ... insufficient. (A tip of the hat to TNH, who IIRC pointed us at FoL some years ago -- it has been fascinating reading even to a long-ago short-time pilot like me.)

Jacque @ 439: I have no idea why I caught that and miss other typos; possibly some early drilling in what-I-was-taught-to-call-homonyms stuck. (Sorry, ?Xopher?, I've misplaced the proper term(s) for them now -- is "homophones" applicable here?) I've missed other language fluffs. I suspect it's something about specific forms that do or don't catch the eye; I've found that I can make exactly the same error that killed me when I rerun a Minesweeper game, which is annoying. (Usually it's not seeing a diagonal.)

CHip 440: Homophones are the soundalikes; homographs are the lookalikes.

I may have said here before that 4th graders should not have to learn Greek to spell English. I'm advocating calling them soundalikes and lookalikes, and not ever teaching a name for both together. They can learn about homophony and homography when they study Linguistics.

butbutbut...that would be too sensible....

I am in favor of not teaching easily confused words together, as I may have remarked in this space before. Teaching "it's" next to "its" is a recipe for confusion. Teach "it's" next to "he's" and "she's" and "they're." Teach "its" next to "his" and "hers" and "theirs."

"I hope people get the gravity of what's coming down the hatch" says advocate for local police changes.

I don't think he meant having it forced down anyone's throat--except maybe the police.

from a judge:
“All things considered, in-person voting at polling-places is wrought with uncertainty,"

I didn't realize that in-person voting came out of a metal shop.

Did they mean fraught with uncertainty?

446
That's what I think they meant.

Or possible (w)racked with uncertainty.

Yeah, I never know what order to put the billiard balls in to start the game either. Seems like sometimes it matters how you rack them, and sometimes it doesn't.

From our local (really good) Indian/Nepalese restaurant's take-away menu: "...using cooking techniques that reflect our ethnically and conically diverse country."

Suggestions for what word ended up as 'conically'?

@450, dcb, I'd guess "culturally".

I should probably give up on hoping the local paper's headline writer will ever be able to figure out what's wrong with "contract tracing". At least in an epidemiological sense.

Conic peppers!

Cassy B. @451: yes, probably 'culturally', but having problems working out how that became 'conically'.

TomB @453: I like it!

Someone at my work had to do contract tracing. Although that had to do with the provenance of various data items and what we are allowed to do with them.

If not 'culturally', then possibly 'economically'. Either way, I suspect autocarrot.

Carrots are also conical and I'm loving the diversity now we're not just limited to orange.

Allen Beatty #455:

I was sort of thinking of forensic accounting, myself.

"Pool closed due to the carnivorous."

*SFX: theme from Jaws*

I'd think "Jurassic Park" would be more appropriate.

Xopher Halftongue @459: I love it!

Spotted today: "more bangs for your book"

dcb (461): Hmm. Would that be an action-adventure (with explosions) or a romance (with sex scenes)?

@dcb #461: That would make a great writing panel title.

462
A romance with explosions?

I'm thinking a tonsorial novel, but that's probably just me.

Tom Whitmore @ 460: sharks are quite adequately carnivorous; around here, when one is seen dangerously close to swimmers(commonly near the elbow of Cape Cod) it's because the local population of seals has boomed. And ISTM that most water-wading dinosaurs were herbivores (cf brontosaurus) -- or was that something Jurassic Park got wrong? (Or did it add a plesiosaur to the mix?)

In an article about Theophilus Painter, in a section titles "Academic Freedom", I found the following sentence:

"The censorship by the American Association of University Professors lasted nine years, until the organization was convinced that the regents changed their policies."

The AAUP had censured the UT Board of regents for, among other things, censoring professors and books.

467
I'd suggest that that writer learn to read a dictionary.

Tom Whitmore #465: I'm thinking a tonsorial novel, but that's probably just me.

Hmm. Would Sweeney Todd qualify?

Dave Harmon: Hugh Wheeler's part of it, indeed!

Speaking of bang for your book, I've been reading a lot of M/M romance lately. I now recall that at LonCon I worked Access with a delightful person who said they wrote M/M romance, and gave me their authorial name, which I've forgotten.

If that was you could you email me and tell me that name again? My email is the concatenation of my first name above with the singular of what Tolkien's halflings call themselves, at Google's email service.

Just saw this on Twitter: "Jeremy Corbin is a terrorist synthesizer."

It was mocked by a picture of someone in balaclava and dark glasses, holding a portable keyboard like a rifle.

Just now saw in a job req: "Financial or Black chain knowledge preferred." Like that, with the capital B.

I'm picturing the brave activists, arm in arm, marching across that bridge in Selma.

I keep seeing "you may fair better."

I'm not sure if this is a Dreadful Phrase per se, but it's definitely dreadful phrasing: this tweet from Jared Holt of Right Wing Watch expresses bemusement at an unidentified person's reference to him, 'According to right-wing commentator Jared Holt....'

It's not grammatically wrong; there are many instances in English of 'commentator on X' being expressed as 'X commentator' ('sports commentator' comes immediately to mind) - I'm not sure but what it's the more common syntax when there's no material difference between 'commentator on the subject of'' and 'commentator who is part of'. But when the two are not semantically equivalent, well....

A local news service tweets: "With COVID-19 taking a stronghold on Texas and its educational system ..."

Presumably they mean "stranglehold".

from an e-mail ad:

Just In! This UV-C Sterilizing Robot is No Match for Germs & Bacteria

when I think they mean the other way around

Just saw a group of novellas described as "a serial series."

From a website: "Corpotative Solutions".

I think they mean "corporative solutions". By which they may mean "corporate solutions".

I think they may be recommending ethanol (potative being drinkable, corp "by the body").

Distilled from potatoes?

Cooperative? (That word seems to give lots of people trouble, quite aside from orthography.)

It doesn't appear to be "cooperative", from context. The page header uses "corporate" and the section that uses "corpotative" includes "[X] offers solutions for the ever-increasing needs of corporations and corporations in cellular communication."

Note the redundancy in that last.

When I search for definitions of "corporative", I see several instances of people asking what the difference is from "corporate". The answers make no sense to me: "Corporate is commonly used when talking about large businesses or corporations. [...] Corporative means something that is related to a corporation." "As adjectives the difference between corporate and corporative is that corporate is of or relating to a corporation while corporative is pertaining to a corporation; corporate." As far as I can see, it's all bafflegab trying to justify a management-speak complicationization.

Putative potato potative?

Joel #483:

Condolences on having encountered that entire document/webthingy at all.

P J Evans #484:

Potential potent potable?

I was once offered, at a party, some liquor brewed with, I think, spruce tips. My response was "Evah drink a pine tree? Many pahts ah potable."

I was at a bid party where they had chili-pepper vodka. Drinking a sample of it got you a badge ribbon reading "guinea pig". (I think it was for Calgary.)

@P J Evans: close to 40 years ago, somebody on what there was of the net asked for recipes for a Pan-Galactic Gargleblaster. Most concentrated on strangeness rather than aligning with Adams's recipe (as a bartending friend had done); one of the more extreme involved leaving several Szechuan finger peppers in a bottle of vodka until they'd lost all color. IIRC this was supposed to be served straight from the freezer.

seen on twitter:
"Mr. McCloskey will be in full oratory splendor at the RNC,"

"He had a feeling someone could have fired a canon in the parlor and he wouldn’t have noticed."

Since only a bishop can fire a canon, I'd think he'd do so in the cathedral, not the parlor.

What's that smell of burning paper?

Oh, we're firing a canon.

aauugghh....
(but apt, considering how "canon" has recently been a subject of increasingly intemperate arguments.)

491
The multiple meanings involved with *that* one are interesting.

Fond memories of singing "Lorem Ipsum" do the maybe-Palestrina canon "Dona Nobis Pacem."

Xopher Halftongue @490: It rather depends on what the canon was up to in the parlor, and its environs.

https://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/97/May/noladle.html

I continue to believe that executions at the stake should not take place indoors.

And the day after I post about Lorem Ipsum, it appears in an unexpected place.

protruderance

The one-n canon, that's an ordinance
The two-n cannon, that's an ordnance

[The church] was built in 1703 and then was deconstructed.

(from a clickbait article about abandoned places)

"Every time I looked up, he would advert his eyes."

BEST EYES AVAILABLE! NOW 20% OFF!

From IMDB:

With murderous demons on the loose in Los Angeles, it's up to Lucifer to reign in the chaos and protect the ones he most cares about.

Xopher @502:

I see three possibilities:

1. Lucifer steps in to be the ruler amidst the chaos, therefore it is up to him to reign in the chaos.
2. Lucifer steps in to limit the amount of chaos, therefore it is up to him to rein in the chaos.
3. Lucifer decides to greatly increase the chaos to throw off the murderous demons, therefore it is up to him to rain in the chaos.

Granted, the last would be more in line with Loki or Desire (perhaps Delirium) than with Lucifer, but you never know. I am assuming this is the Lucifer from Sandman, right?

Buddha 503: The TV series Lucifer is based on the character from Sandman. This is from the series, so yes.

SPOILER: Ur trgf zbfg bs gurz va bar cynpr, gnxrf ba uvf shyy nfcrpg nf Xvat bs Uryy, naq pbzznaqf gurz gb tb ubzr. Fb ur xvaq bs qbrf obgu. I suspect they thought they were making a pun, but it doesn't work in writing.

I gather that as with most Hollywood "based on"s, a more accurate phrase here might be "inspired by"? I admit that I've never actually watched the show, although I did see the cameo appearance in "Crisis on Infinite Earths".

David 505: Well, IIRC Lucifer doesn't actually have much of a storyline in Sandman. He leaves Hell for a "vacation," they try to get him to go back, he doesn't (so far all in the series), an angel is appointed to take his place and starts torturing people "for their own good," which is, of course, even worse for the torturees.

He appears briefly when Delirium goes looking for her dog. That's all I remember.

The Endless are not characters in the series, so Delirium does not appear. The rest is in there, including half-faced demon Mazikeen (in a human guise most of the time). I'd say that's a pretty good argument for "based on," given that for a series they have to leave the central conflict ("Will Lucifer return to Hell? And what about Naomi?") unresolved.

There's an intermediate step worth noting: After Sandman finished, there was a spin-off series about what Lucifer did next (which ended up running for as many issues as its parent, though it didn't make as much of a cultural impact). It was conceived and written by Mike Carey, who went on to do The Unwritten and The Girl with All the Gifts. The TV show is based on the premise of Carey's version, rather than directly on Gaiman's.

...actually, you know what, I could be wrong about that. (The last sentence, I mean. The existence of Mike Carey's Lucifer isn't in doubt.)

I'd always assumed that the Lucifer TV series was based on the Lucifer comic book series, because that made sense, but now that I really think about it I'm having trouble thinking of any aspects of the TV series that relate specifically to Carey's version and not just to Lucifer's appearance in the last Sandman story arc.

From reading about the TV series I gather that Lucifer uses his demonic powers to, well, solve crimes. That doesn't strike me as in character for any of the comics versions. I'm entirely prepared to hear that I'm misinformed.

No, I believe the "passes the time by solving crime" bit was added for the TV series.

If memory serves, his last appearance in Sandman was around the same time Loki was running around impersonating a police officer for reasons of his own, but I'm pretty sure Lucifer wasn't in on that particular weasel's nest.

"Whale Shark With Over 50 Fish in Its Mouth Wins Underwater Photo Contest"

How do you hold a camera steady with so many fish in your mouth?

Reading real estate ads, there was one for a small, somewhat older townhome that said there was a large basement space with "small chicken." I thought perhaps it had a play area for small children. Looking at the photos, it had a small kitchen in the basement. Bwawk.

OtterB (512): That's a spill-chicken* error if I ever saw one!

(These days it's more likely an auto-corrupt error, of course.)

*spell-checker

A certain star had "a problem with subscription medication."

Clickbait articles are awful, but they're a rich source of amusing errors.

Xopher @514:

My pharmacy auto-fills my orders on a monthly basis. Does that count as subscription medication?

As an expression of relief: "Oh few!"
(Not sure if that was someone who has never seen 'phew' written down or an auto-miscorrect error).

Buddha 515: I guess so! ...bet they don't do that with meds that are widely abused, though.

dcb 516: Huh. That's an error that never would have occurred to me, possibly because I've always assumed that 'phew' was pronounced with a bilabial fricative (φ), rather than the standard-English labiodental one (f). So it's more of a noise transcribed than an actual word.

Now of course there are dialects (all UK AFAIK) where φ (not f) is the pronunciation for 'th' (unvoiced; β is the voiced version). So "mother thing" is something like /məβər φiŋ/, as opposed to //məðər θiŋ/ in standard dialects. But if the writer you cite spoke one of those, I'd expect the mispelling to be 'thew'.

Seen in a page of CVs of the trainers for our school district's anti-sexual-harassment training: "[the trainer] has testified in court marshals, [... and other legal settings]".

Giving the testimony inside the marshal sounds kind of uncomfortable for all involved.

Adding in the second level of not-quite-right -- shouldn't that be "courts martial/marshall"? That's the way my sense of logic plays.

Xopher 517: I'd have said your visualization would be spelled "whew", but I'm blanking on where or how frequently I hear either; I have a vague sense that "whew" is older, such that "phew" might have been a shift in pronunciation, but no hard data.

Tom 519: I don't know how many adjective-last titles/phrases we still have, but I'd expect any of them to be wrong-according-to-classic-rules more often than not. I don't remember the last time I saw a mention of a meeting of top state-government lawyers; it was probably spelled "attorneys general", but that would have been in a relatively-formal source. "court martial" has the additional problem that the verb form has a long history -- I suspect Melville would have cringed but also that generations of English teachers have taught that Billy Budd was court-martialed.

Right after writing the above I continued with Joe Abercrombie's The Trouble with Peace -- which also misuses "marshal" for "martial" (US hardback p. 289, describing music -- in the context, setting-things-in-order music (whatever that sounds like) was not intended.)

Xopher Halftongue @517: sadly I don't know much about the details of pronunciation, but after looking stuff up and thinking about how I pronounce this, definitely labiodental fricative not bilabial. I can't even work out HOW to pronounce it bilabially - 'pew' - like 'you' with a 'p' stuck on the front?

CHip 520: The difference between 'whew' and 'phew' pronounced bilabially is a slight tension in the lips; a bilabial glide (w*) versus a bilabial fricative (φ).

re yr ct Tom 519: We have a few adjectives that follow the noun in English; unsurprisingly, they're mostly relatively recent borrowings from French: the only one I can think of right now that always follows the noun is 'galore', but several others sometimes do, depending on the phrase: 'deluxe', 'martial', 'general'.

So 'We have options galore', never 'We have galore options' (or anything else).

'Burger deluxe', but 'deluxe accommodations'.

'Court(s) martial', but 'martial law'.

'Attorney(s) general' but 'the general case'.

dcb 522: The unvoiced bilabial fricative 'φ' is the blowing-out-a-candle sound, with perhaps a bit more lip tension. Alternatively, position your lips to say 'p' and say 'f' through that position (if you make a Bronx cheer, open your lips more, and add tension).

It is the sound that classists transcribe as 'f' when dialect-spelling certain lower-class British dialects: "I'm goin' out wif my mates" is actually (from my limited observation) not 'f' at the end of 'with', but 'φ'.

*In my dialect; there's no "hwich hwat hwether" in my speech; 'which' and 'witch' are pronounced identically.

dcb, op. cit.: I'd transcribe 'pew' as /pyu/. The p is followed by a 'y' glide and/or palatalized, but it's still a stop.

I'd always read and pronounced the "ph" in "phew" as exactly the same sound as in "Philadelphia" or "phone" - that is, indistinguishable to me from "f". Thank you for the "goin' out wif my mates" example, Xopher, I can hear that distinction. Thus for me there's much more distinction between "whew" and "phew" than there is for Xopher.

Xopher, do you pronounce "Phil" and "fill" the same?

lorax 525: I do. 'φ' isn't part of my native dialect's consonant inventory, which I guess is why 'phew' strikes me as a transcription of a noise, rather than an actual word.

Now I'm wondering if native speakers of the "'th' is a bilabial" dialects use it initially. I don't trust the writers who dialect-write them as saying 'fing', because writers with no respect for the characters they're writing about don't bother to research the people's actual dialect. I'm pretty sure they don't use the voiced bilabial at the beginning of a word ('the', 'there' as /βə/, /βer/ respectively), but I stand ready to be corrected.

The worst examples of this, of course, are when writers misspell words in dialogue to sound exactly how they sound in standard pronunciations, as a way of communicating that this character is stupid and can't spell. I want to throw their books across the room.

At a higher stratum (lexical instead of phonological), Spider Robinson had his lower-class-dialect speaker character address an individual woman as 'youse', which is flat-out wrong.

Just to clarify: I mean flat-out wrong by Spider. That is, he got the dialect (one spoken here in Hoboken, among other places) wrong. 'Youse' is the plural of 'you', and only the plural of 'you'.

(Yes, I'm aware there's controversy about "y'all." There is none about 'youse' as far as I know.

I don't know if Spider was trying to write dialect and just didn't research it, or if he was just trying to make Eddie sound stupid, but given the other problems with Spider's writing, I suspect a combination of the two.

526-527
Even *I* know "youse" is plural (as in "youse guys"). "Y'all" is maybe plural, but if you want to be sure, it's "all y'all", at least in Texas.

Sometimes it's just summa y'all, rather than all y'all. As Honest Abe said, "I can fool all y'all summa the time, and summa y'all alla the time, but I can't fool all y'all alla the time."

For what it's worth, I pronounce "phew" (the sound one makes when one is relieved) as something like "fyoo". It's sort of one-and-a-half syllables; the initial f sound is a little softer than the f in (say) feather; less voiced, if that makes sense, and it immediately glides into the y sound.

(For what it's worth; I pronounce "Phil" and "fill" the same; I didn't realize it was possible to pronounce them differently. I also cannot hear or pronounce a difference between "Mary, marry, and merry", but I do pronounce "pin" and "pen" differently and I pronounce "which" and "witch" differently.)

I can hear marry, merry, and Mary differently if someone does that, but I'd have to practice to make the distinction. (The eastern isogloss (dialect boundary) for that is apparently the Alleghenies, a fact I learned in 1977 and still, for some reason, retain.)

I was born in Illinois of Chicagoan parents, and it bewildered me that my Michigander schoolmates said "ink pen." It wasn't til college that I found out why: /i/ as in pin and /e/ as in pen are not distinct in their dialect. The word 'disambiguate' is universally known now, but it was the province of a few language geeks back then!

I was thinking about it, and I pronounce "few" and "phew" very similarly but not QUITE the same. I'm not honestly sure if it's an audible difference or just a difference in my head, but "phew" is breathier; less voiced. Like the difference between "witch" and "which"; "which" is breathier. hhhoowich, as it were.

Cassy B. @532:

For me, "which" has a more aspirated "w", while "witch" isn't aspirated, but there is a hint of a stop after the vowel. The "-wich" in "sandwich" is like "which" without the aspiration, or "witch" without the stop.

"Now I'm wondering if native speakers of the "'th' is a bilabial" dialects use it initially. I don't trust the writers who dialect-write them as saying 'fing', because writers with no respect for the characters they're writing about don't bother to research the people's actual dialect. I'm pretty sure they don't use the voiced bilabial at the beginning of a word ('the', 'there' as /βə/, /βer/ respectively), but I stand ready to be corrected."

Cliff Parisi on Call the Midwife is a good example (his accent is genuine). He says "fing" part of the time and "thing" part of the time, as far as I can hear.

HelenS 534: Well, that's interesting. Does it depend who he's talking to? Or is the actor just forgetting he's supposed to talk his hometalk, and slip into toffish?

Which British accents do this?

I don't know. It may depend on which words come in front of fing/thing, or it may be his accent waxing and waning during the interview, not sure. Or I might be hearing wrong. I definitely hear an awful lot of "anovver fing" from East End characters on Call the Midwife, but a lot of the actors didn't grow up with the accent, and Parisi did. Oh, and I was in Bristol last August and did hear it there as well. http://dialectblog.com/2011/12/06/anovver-fing-about-th-fronting/

OK, a stop is a consonant that completely blocks the airflow, and then (sometimes) releases it. English examples are (unvoiced) p, t, k, (voiced) b, d, g. Those are phonemes; sometimes they're realized differently in actual speech, often as a glottal stop (see working-class British pronunciations of 'bottle', for example).

The sound at the end of the word 'which' is the affricate č, which is phonetically the stop /t/ followed by a sh sound (/š/), but which functions as a single phoneme in English.

Buddha, is that what you mean by a "hint of a stop" after the vowel?

HelenS 537: Thank you. People code-switch and code-mix when they know multiple dialects, so it's hard to sort it out. I guess I'd really need to listen to someone who only speaks that home accent, and they've all heard Toffish* on TV.

Sigh. Contamination frustration.

*I'm using that term as a shorthand, lumping together all the accents spoken by the British upper classes, including but not limited to RP and the accent(s) used by radio and TV news presenters.

Xopher @538:

On the site IPA Chart, I run into the problem that the sound, to me, is closest to either the voiceless palato-alveolar afficate (t͡ʃ) or the voiceless alveolo-palatal afficate (t͡ɕ), but I can't distinguish between them when listening to the sound recordings (they use different readers for the two).

Looking at Wikipedia, their sound recordings...are the exact same recordings. But by reading the description of the two, I think it's more like the palato-alveolar affricate (which Wikipedia says is, in the American tradition, written as ⟨č⟩.

After saying "which" and "witch" so many times paying attention to how I say them, I can no longer tell the difference.

Buddha 540: Thanks for trying. IPA is phonetic, and I'm pretty sure that distinction is too subtle for most ears. We don't need to get that granular for these purposes. We don't distinguish between the ell sounds in 'love' and in 'vole', either, and IPA would.

After saying "which" and "witch" so many times paying attention to how I say them, I can no longer tell the difference.

Happens to the best of us, especially linguists. So often, in fact, that it has a name: scant-out. The first person to describe it was trying to figure out which uses of 'scant' were grammatical, and found after a while that they could no longer decide, because 'scant' had become a meaningless series of sounds.

See also Terry Carr's story "Stanley Toothbrush", originally published as by Carl Brandon.

For me, 'marry' merry' and 'Mary' are totally distinct from one another and I have a hard time working out how they would sound if all pronounced the same.
The 't' sound is slightly more distinct in 'witch' than in 'which' (for me).

dcb 543: If we're ever in the same place at the same time (again? Have we met?) I'll demonstrate it for you.

There's a character in a Lanford Wilson play who proposed to his wife by saying "Marry me, Mary" over and over. They got it right and pronounced the two words identically. Then Wilson had to spoil it by having another character refer to the "nosh" in the kitchen. Irish-American Catholics in Chicago in the 80s did not use that word.

"Mary Mack's Father's Making Mary Mack Marry Me" pronounces the three words differently, in this version in an Irish accent.

One of my great-grandfathers, born in Canada, with a mother from Roxburghshire, pronounced the name close to May-ry, according to my mother.

Xopher: Thank you! And yes, we met at LonCon.

Another pronunciation difference I had problems with during my time in the USA (3-month internship at the Crane Foundation in Baraboo, Wisconsin) was 'd' for 't' - the name 'Patty' being pronounced 'Paddy'. I also realised later that when I'd referred to something as being from a 'Noddy' book (meaning 'really simple/easy' (from the Noddy books for young children, by Edid Blyton) not only was the set of books not known but it was coming across as 'naughty' book - quite a different meaning!

dcb 547: I thought so!

In most American dialects, /t/ and /d/ are both reduced to a flap /D/ between a stressed vowel and an unstressed one. Unlike a real /d/, /D/ is ballistic; that is, the tongue bounces off the alveolar ridge, rather than being held there and then released. That same flap is /r/ in some languages, so it can be a bit confusing!

So 'latter' and 'ladder' are pronounced identically. You can invent situations* where this causes misunderstandings, but they're not common.

Your case is a better example, but it depends on the accent difference. I pronounce 'Noddy' and 'naughty' with the same (phonetic) consonants, but the first vowel is different; 'Noddy' and 'father' share the same first vowel, but the first vowel in 'naughty' is darker, further back. It's the vowel in 'aw', not 'ah'.

* "Do you need a ladder to change that bulb, or can you make do with a chair?" "The [ladder|latter]."