Nah, These Won’t Traumatize the Kids at ALL
“Yay! Dead elephants!”
There’s also When Common Sense Isn’t, where the decorator has copied, rather than followed, the written instructions.
We Love Freymoto
put Heart in Place of Word Love
All at Cake Wrecks
A Cake Wreck is any cake that is unintentionally sad, silly, creepy, inappropriate – you name it. A Wreck is not necessarily a poorly-made cake; it’s simply one I find funny, for any of a number of reasons.
Probably NSFW
Has this ever happened to you?
You work very horde on a paper for English clash
And then get a very glow raid (like a D or even a D=)
and all because you are the word¹s liverwurst spoiler.
Proofreading your peppers is a matter of the the utmost impotence.This is a problem that affects manly, manly students.
I myself was such a bed spiller once upon a term
that my English teacher in my sophomoric year,
Mrs. Myth, said I would never get into a good colleague.
And that¹s all I wanted, just to get into a good colleague.
Of course its impotent to note that four proofreading two bee effective in catching substitution errors, you have too actually know that you’ve used the wrong word, you looser.
Useful little phrase translation site (but no phrase rotation), in this case “I do not like green eggs and ham” into German.
Interesting, or perhaps disturbing, that “I do not want to die alone” is considered a related phrase.
h/t to Caroline
Where was this a year ago, when all I could think of was last-name-phonetic-translation-of-first-initial?
William bleeping Safire explains the blanking difference between profanities, obscenities, expletives, and vulgarities, and more, in Bleeping Expletives. Just in case anyone wants to become qualified to become the bleeping Governer of blanking Illinois.
Today we are going to deal with the media coverage of profanities, expletives, vulgarisms, obscenities, execrations, epithets and imprecations, nouns often lumped together by the Bluenose Generation as coarseness, crudeness, bawdiness, scatology or swearing. But roundheeled readers should stop smacking their lips and rubbing their hands because the deliberately shocking subject can be treated with decorum, in plain words, without the titillating examples of “dirty words.” (Titillating, from the Latin titillare, “to tickle,” is clean.)
If you want to fulminate about such prissiness about prurience in print, feel free to rattle your jowls, blow your stack and otherwise express your outrage with the typographical device to which cartoonists have resorted for generations: !#*&%@%!!!
(The last example being grawlix)
It’s that time of year again. In a desperate search for an icon, from Wall Street to Main Street, do I find a game-changer of a maverick monkey? Not so much. I need a bailout.
Missing from the list is blogohedron, “popularized” by … me (sort of), so really it’s not a surprise. I just happened to see Brian Switek using it at Laelaps, and acknowledging Blake Stacey for it, and Blake crediting me in the comments (and, BTW, the link is a good summary of a recent blogger vs. journalist caged-death-match exchange).
I can’t and won’t take credit for coining the term, as a quick search shows it predates any use of it here. But I have no recollection of seeing it anywhere before using it, so as far as I know it’s new to me and an example of convergent etymology. I like it better than blogosphere, which gives me the impression of smoothness and uniformity, which doesn’t describe blogging as far as I’m concerned. The world of blogging has facets and edges and pointy bits; it has texture, if not structure.
Maybe we make the 2009 list.
Who has the worst jargon?
I was recently asked to fill out a questionnaire to evaluate how my place of work was doing in terms of some business metrics. It was hell. Two groups that love their jargon and acronyms, the government and business. I thought that it could have been worse, because science could have been involved, too, so I wonder: who does the worst job with their jargon? I’m biased, but I think in general, science is not the worst offender — in the defense of myself and colleagues, it’s at least expected practice that you define any terms you’ve made up before you use them elsewhere in your presentation. In business and government/military (at least in my anecdotal experience), not so much. I’ve heard the stories (and seen once or twice for myself) of instances where someone will talk about FLURG at length, and then finally someone asks what FLURG stands for, because it turns out that nobody knew.
Unnecessary jargon obfuscates, er, hides meaning, because you focus on some buzzword without knowing what it means. So how does one distinguish between necessary and unnecessary jargon? In order to justify its use, the jargon has to give some benefit. The most obvious is shortening a long term to save time. To take some examples from atomic physics, Coherent Anti-Stokes Raman Spectroscopy is CARS, a Magneto-Optic Trap is a MOT. I consider these to be reasonable jargon, even though you may not know what Raman Spectroscopy is (it’s not the study of inexpensive noodles, that’s Ramen Spectroscopy). But no information has been lost.
Continue reading
[H]ere instead is a list of phrases that (at the time of this posting) turn up no hits on Google:
“ate a violin”
“driver-side bidet”
“unlike normal furries,”
“Sarah, plain and tall and a cyborg”
“people are too civil on the internet”
And some more in the comments
“differential equations saved my life” – 0 results
“chess for Wookies” – 0 results
“erotic vector calculus” – 0 hits
“Luke, I am your third grade teacher” – 0
“Search your kitchen counter, you know it to be true” > 0 results
“Buttered graphite” – 0