March 2010
37 posts
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the japanese are such an interesting little people
in his treatise on bromides, burgess lists 47 trite remarks used by the narrow-minded. he says:
It is not merely because this remark is trite; it is because that, with the Bromide, the remark is inevitable. One expects it from him, and one is never disappointed. And, moreover, it is always offered by the Bromide as a fresh, new, apt and rather clever thing to say. He really believes, no doubt,...
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audiobooks out of context #9
this is the ninth...
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words wholly related
horde & urdu
english is a dirty whore who will sleep with just about any other language out there. because of longstanding affairs with latin and french and greek and german, there are trillions and trillions of english words that are wholly related to trillions of other english words. english’s relationship with the the turkī language (spoken by the turks of eastern turkestan) was a...
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frequentative flyers
it turns out that the guy who was sitting next to me on my æroplane was studying linguistics so i axed him what was the hawt new thing in his field that gave him wood every time he thought about it. he didn’t answer me outright but he did tell me a little bit about frequentatives.
according to him, there are some languages (finnish, lithuanian, and turkish) that can slap a suffix on a verb...
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concerning oatmeal
When rolling through the glens of the Highlands in your touring car, you may be overcome by the desire to ‘go antiquing’. Aside from the whole stake-through-the-groin noun-as-verb pitfall, and the logistics of tying wooden furniture to your Mazda Miata, there is another booby trap lurking for the unwary. Never buy a sweet granny’s Scots pine dresser without checking first for the...
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syllable & sillabub
Syllable comes from the greek syllambanein, meaning to gather together. Sillabubs are made by using booze to tighten milk into a set mass of smooth spoonable curds, but the OED claims the etymology of the name is unknown (although they feel perfectly competent to decree a preferred spelling). Frankly, what the eff? A sillabub should be the grammarian’s go-to...
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terms of dismemberment
After this morning’s transparent attempt to rouse some interdenominational interest, I thought I should come clean. The truth is that, despite a selection of blades on my knife strip that Lizzie Borden would approve of, I’m totally squeamish about horror films, and I mainly use just two knives to cook with: a biggish one and a smaller one. The real reason I want to see a cutlery...
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f-words to fluff your fritters
Now that I am a foodie (now there’s an f-word for you) and can converse fluently on the subject of what my steak ate before I ate it, and how the apples I prefer grow on trees mentioned in the Magna Carta or spared by the tyro George Washington, it seems appropriate that the ragbag should rustle up a list of those f-words that help create the right vibe at the farmers’ market. These...
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know your commonplace figurative uses of animal...
bullshit · connotes hypocrisy, lies, and red tape as in why should i put up with all this bullshit? to bullshit is to bluff or to make small talk.
horseshit · connotes crumminess as in he did a horseshit job, and this motor is running horseshit.
chickenshit · means “something petty” as a noun and “trivial” as an adjective as in mom is making me do all these chickenshit...
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something that happened
here we have a list of original titles of famous books. some of them are absolutely mindboggling. would alice in wonderland have done as well at the boxoffice this last weekend if it was still called alice’s adventures underground? is there something appealing about catch-22 that catch-18 lacks? would anyone have ever purchased gone with the wind if it were instead published under...
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words wholly related
font & fondue
both come from the french word fondre which means “to melt.” fondue makes use of melted cheese and/or chocolate. fonts were originally made from cast metal but are now made from discarded pixels.
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the current minister of human settlements of south...
tokyo sexwale
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words wholly unrelated
[spoiler alert: this one will fuck you up]
island & isle
sweet scrotumburgers with mayo and relish! am i trying to tell you that the words island and isle ARE NOT etymological cousins or even cogneighbours?! that even though they are almost pronounced the same, almost spelled the same, contain the same ridiculous silent s, and mean the same thing, they don’t come from a common source?...
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audiobooks out of context #8
this is the eighth...