Three times in the past two or three days, I've heard people say "deets" for "details." And what they tell you three times is true, so I guess it must be a widespread usage. Surprises me, though, 'cause I don't think I've ever heard it before.
Oh noes! I may not be up on the latest hip Internet slang you kids are using!
Get off my lawn, yo!
According to Wikipedia, "kuzbu" is "an Akkadian word which means 'seductive allure' or 'sexual appeal.'" Or, in the vernacular, "hotness." As in, "Whoa, his entire body is adorned with kuzbu." (That's what Shamhat said about Gilgamesh, according to that Wikipedia article.)
I'm hoping we can revive the word. Like: "Yow, check out that dude's fine kuzbu." Or "Hey, babe, you've got major kuzbu." I think it could be expanded into adjective form, too: "You look totally kuzbu in that dress."
This morning, the phrase "comma sutra" popped into my head, don't know why.
I immediately thought it would make a good name for this blog, which I've been thinking of renaming for a while now.
Sadly, I am not the first to come up with this pun. For example, there's a comma sutra T-shirt, and a grammar book called Comma Sutra: Position Yourself For Success With Good Grammar. (It appears to be full of cheap sex-related puns along with the grammar lessons, with chapter titles like "Assume the Position: Nouns, Pronouns, Verbs.")
Also, it was unclear to me whether the phrase would come across as disrespectful to Hindus and Buddhists.
So I'll keep looking for a replacement title. But in the meantime, thought the phrase was cute enough to be worth posting.
When you want your service to sound great, you might be tempted to label it with a superlative, like, say, "Premium."
But if you want to distinguish two levels of service, you might be tempted to label one as, say, "Basic," and the other as, say, "Plus."
Both of those impulses are pretty reasonable. The problem comes when you try to combine them:
[...] Adobe Systems June 15 moved Acrobat.com out of public beta with two premium paid subscription services for businesses.
[...]
To wit, the company unveiled Premium Basic and Premium Plus services.
—eweek article, 15 June 2009
I'm hoping that the Premium Basic service will become so popular that they'll have to split it into two tiers, say Premium Basic Pro and Premium Basic Home.
Or perhaps Premium Basic Gold and Premium Basic Silver.
I occasionally see people use "virii" as the plural of "virus," but there's no good reason (that I know of) to do so.
See Wikipedia's entry on the plural of virus for details. Excerpts:
The plural of virus is viruses. In reference to a computer virus, the plural is often believed to be virii or, less commonly, viri, but both forms are neologistic folk etymology and no major dictionary recognizes them as alternative forms.
[...]
Virus comes to English from Latin. The Latin word vīrus [...] means "poison; venom", denoting the venom of a snake. [...] Since vīrus in antiquity denoted something uncountable, it was a mass noun. Mass nouns—such as air, rice, and helpfulness in English—pluralize only under special circumstances, hence the non-existence of plural forms [of vīrus] in the texts.
Just came across two quotes attributed to physicist Murray Gell-Mann:
(In case you're unfamiliar with the original of that first bit, the line is a parody of a line from Newton.)
An "energumen" turns out to be a person possessed by an evil spirit, or someone who acts like they're possessed, or a fanatic.
I'm now surprised that I haven't seen this term used in fandom.
But in fact where I came across it was an L.A. Times article about Pelosi and torture, in which the article's author wrote: "I oppose the sort of witch hunt Pelosi and her energumens clearly crave."
(I ask that commenters not comment on the politics of that statement; I'm quoting it only to give an example of word use. The opinions of people quoted in this blog are not necessarily shared by the blogger.)
According to a variety of sources, the word "TASER" was coined as an acronym for "Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle." Apparently the Taser's inventor was a fan of the Tom Swift books, and named it after Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle. (Wikipedia says that the inventor made up the "A" middle initial.)
I find that hard to believe, but several independent sources mention it, and I can't find any that contradict it.
I was recently discussing various words for "mother," and it occurred to me that words/spellings like mama, momma, mom, ma, and mamma have different connotations to me.
MW11 lists them all as synonyms or spelling variants, and sometimes I don't especially notice any difference between them. But if I'm paying close attention, I expect them to be used by different kinds of people. (Especially in prose fiction; in speech, I can't tell the difference between the "mama" variants.)
I think the connotations are more obvious with other variations; for example, not many adults use "mommy" except when talking to small kids; terms from other languages ("amma," "mère," "maman," "madre," etc), when used in English prose, also have particular connotations; "mammy" has very specific connotations in the US; "mum" and "mummy" and "mam" and "mater" are mostly British; etc.
But I think even for the quasi-synonymous group of American English terms I listed in the first paragraph above, the connotations vary by person, at least to some degree; for example, I've seen a story's narrator indicate that "mom" is a word used only by fairly young people, which doesn't match my experience.
So I'm curious: what different connotations, if any, do these words (and others like them) have for you? Are the connotations mostly about age, about class, about geographical region, about culture? Or is there no particular pattern?
Every year around this time, a question of the utmost importance occurs to me.
I refer, of course, to the question of whether this holiday honors mothers or a mother—that is, whether the apostrophe should go before or after the S.
Fortunately, since the advent of Wikipedia, it's easy to answer that question definitively. The Wikipedia article on the topic quotes a Vancouver Sun article from 2008. The article is about Anna Jarvis, who trademarked the term "Mother's Day" in 1912; it notes:
She was specific about the location of the apostrophe; it was to be a singular possessive, for each family to honour their mother, not a plural possessive commemorating all mothers in the world.
Of course, one could go against Jarvis's wishes—it's not like we pay much attention to her other intentions for the day:
"I wanted it to be a day of sentiment, not profit," Jarvis complained, dismissing greeting cards as "a poor excuse for the letter you are too lazy to write."
But other sources also suggest the singular apostrophe placement. For example, from Wikipedia again:
[The singular apostrophe has also been] used by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson in the law making official the holiday in the U.S., by the U.S. Congress on bills, and by other U.S. presidents on their declarations.
And MW11 supports that punctuation as well. So I'll go along with it.
(Yes, I could have just checked the dictionary in the first place. But this route was more interesting. I had no idea the term was trademarked, for example.)
Headline from a news story:
Gay rights activist makes Clinton stop
What did the activist make Clinton stop doing, and was it President Clinton or Secretary Clinton?
Answer: Neither: the story is from the Clinton Herald, a newspaper from Clinton, Iowa, and "stop" in that headline is a noun, not a verb.
I was amused.
Context disambiguates!
There's been some confusion in mainstream news venues lately about Twitter-related terminology. I imagine that most of y'all who read this blog know more about Twitter than I do, but still figured it couldn't hurt to try to clear up some confusion.
One point of confusion in the press lately is about what to call one who twitters. The answer is "twitterer," but some news sources have been calling such a person a "twitter."
Which ties in with the question of what to call a single Twitter posting, and what to call the act of posting such an item.
Twitter's official term has always been "tweet." For example, see their help page—it uses the plural noun "tweets" and the verb "tweeting."
There are a few people who dislike the word "tweet" and have tried to change it to "twit" or something else—for example, a blog entry from a year ago advocated "twit."
Which seems weird to me—perhaps she's just twitting us? The noun "twit" and the verb "twit" already have meanings that give a very different connotation to their use in connection to Twitter. To me, the noun and verb "tweet" sound playful and insubstantial—they suggest that the postings on Twitter are fun and small. Using "twit" for that would suggest to me that the postings there are obnoxious and/or taunting.
Anyway, that entry links to someone else's entry where he says he refuses to use the word "tweet." But then at the bottom of his entry, the automated blogging system has provided a link that allows readers to "Tweet This Post."
So despite some people's unhappiness with "tweet," I don't think it's going away anytime soon.
Recent Comments