Speaker: Mixing it up, with stats like
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Che's site is blocked where I work, for its pornographic content.
Actually, if you squint your eyes, that whole duck pictorial kind of looks like porn.
Not that I am suggesting anyone do so. That would be weird.
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Like your delicate embroidery and light-as-air sponges?
Meanwhile I wear size 11 shoes...
Crikey! More tea, vicar?
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yeah, dunno aeh. that whole food porn this is just a bit gay, you know?
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that whole food porn this is just a bit gay, you know?
Was it a Mallard you were eating?
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"Refute" used as "deny"
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3410,
I always feel inadequate when there is talk of rules of thumbs involve handspans and shoe size. I mean, if I was a guy, I wouldn't have much to brag about. :(
But since you're not, you would, surely. ;)
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Che does not make a hash job of the duck though.
'Course not. He's working with a Global there. Single-piece Japanese stainless steel, and the favoured blade of Anthony Bourdain. Respect.
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Indeed. Members of the community are cordially invited to now come up with examples of words whose "wrong" meaning has become generally accepted through sheer currency in the language.
Or, knock off and have a drink.Or both.
Cheers.
Words, now...
My folks, especially my dad, use the term "coon" to mean basically anyone who looks odd.
I can still remember ...and this really shows my age...Dad waking up on the couch (he used to crashout after dinner) in the middle of Studio One when Space Waltz came on the Teev doing 'Out in the Street" and saying "who's that funny looking coon?" (this would have been about 1974)
I managed to find out the racist meaning of it, fortunately before creating any faux pas.
Words often used wrongly...well pet peeve - curmudgeon time (and here the Glenmorangie is kicking in nicely....)
'flout' the law. The number of times you hear people say "flaunt the law" which sort of means waving it in someones face. Which could happen, I guess, but its not what the speaker is trying to convey. I've heard this on National Radio news.
'infer' being used instead of 'imply'. Real pet peeve this one...
I've kind of given up on misuse of 'liberal'. Only people who have wasted their youth studying political philosophy tend to use this correctly.
I had one flatmate, years ago, who had some beaut genuine malapropisms.
The only one I recall was when she was being hassled about saying one thing and doing another and she got all dignified and declared "It's a woman's provocative to change her mind" and could not see why this was met with laughter.
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it just occurred to me that 'gay' has gone thru at least two changes.
once from happy to gay. and again from gay to [insert whatever the hell the kids are using it to mean these days].
and, bourdain is a hero of mine. wrote kitchens like kitchens are.
but <blush> the knife belongs to the camera operator </blush>
planning on buying a BIG version of the paring knife tho. yeehaw.
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PS. I'm off to drink a whisky. then get enough sleep to not be blurry when england get stomped on by rsa.
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My folks, especially my dad, use the term "coon" to mean basically anyone who looks odd.
Ha! My mum would use 'honky' to mean agitated. Eg "Don't tell your father or he'll get honky about it."
This got me in trouble at school, with one of my friends assuming my mum was racist, but I'm not sure how that worked.
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planning on buying a BIG version of the paring knife tho. yeehaw.
Moore Wilson has really good prices on the Globals. The most useful is the 30cm chef's knife. But I strongly advise you to also buy a water sharpener (same place). It's actually not good to get Globals commercially sharpened all the time.
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We thought that a snowball was a sex thing, and a snowjob was a PR thing (I won't make any comment on the connection between PR and sex). We learnt that both could be both.
They could? Jesus, I'm really behind the times. I'm off to a very civilised dinner tonight. I may need to throw those terms around, with a bit of a dirty cackle, and see if I can get a rise out of anyone.
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BTW, what exactly is a snowjob when it's not a whitewash?
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They could? Jesus, I'm really behind the times. I'm off to a very civilised dinner tonight. I may need to throw those terms around, with a bit of a dirty cackle, and see if I can get a rise out of anyone.
That's probably exactly how people end up getting written about by Bridget Saunders.
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Members of the community are cordially invited to now come up with examples of words whose "wrong" meaning has become generally accepted through sheer currency in the language.
"jealous", when they really mean "envious".
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Oh, and sheer fucking WAFFLE.
Maharey in the House this week talking about "a range of initiatives we have put in place."
No-one just DOES anything thing anymore.....
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Speaking of thoroughly offensive words, my Cajun relatives affectionately refer to themselves as 'coon-asses', which, um... yeah. So, originally they were supposedly 'worse' than African-Americans to non-Cajuns, and are now using the term internally in an ethnic-pride sort of sense... it's all quite weird, since it's not as though many of them aren't horrendously racist in the traditional American way themselves. My brain hurts to think about it.
My 89-year-old NZ grandfather, with whom I watch all rugby games (aha! relevance!), seems to have missed the evolution of the word 'queer' from 'odd' to 'gay slur' to 'reclaimed', and simply refers to people as 'queer', meaning plain old strange, in blissful ignorance. We haven't had the heart to tell him. Thus, Grandad's gossipy remarks, such as 'he's a queer sort of a joker, isn't he?' have caused several sotto voce snickers at family gatherings. (I particularly like imagining blokey old Grandad, an old-school walk-shorts-socks-and-sandals-wearer, as a newly minted postmodern LGBT crusader of some kind.)
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BTW, what exactly is a snowjob when it's not a whitewash?
Jackie, I'd advise you to either hit urbandictionary.com or this comment for definitions. If you really need to know. I don't want tthis to be like the time when my sister made my dad ask me over dinner what felching was.
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thanks Joanna,that urban dictionary is a good find, and the Wellingtonista thread is a whole other thing.I'll keep up with that, since I'm very, very fond of Wellington, and it's been a very long time since I lived there. I was there for four days in July, and it was lovely to be. Reminded me of why I love it so much, notwithstanding my friend Sally who makes a mean herring salad (it's a Jewish thing). What a shame the Dixon St Deli doesn't do what it used to, so well. Mmm, the blintzes.......
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A word that has been used incorrectly for a long time is "quantum"
It is often used to mean something large ("a quantum leap" "a quantum change") when in fact means means the smallest possible thing.
Heard it used today and I laughed out loud at the speaker by accident, which is what sparked me to write this.
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A word that has been used incorrectly for a long time is "quantum"
It is often used to mean something large ("a quantum leap" "a quantum change") when in fact means means the smallest possible thing.
No, quantum doesn't mean small, it means portion or particle. The use the word quantum in physics came about when Newton's physics no longer described the world physicists were able to describe at the atomic level.
The term "quantum leap" in physics, refers to the tiny but explosive jump a particle makes in moving from one place to another. And that's only a tiny leap because the particle is tiny, if the particle were the size of an elephant, it would be one pretty big leap.
And while I'm on this quest to correct people and define terms: niggardly is from the same root as niggle, which I believe is Norse or Scandinavian in origin and nigger is from the Romance languages. It comes from the word "negre" which is French, which means "negro" and is pronounced "ne-grey" which is still in use in the deep south of the USA when really old people want to be polite and not say the contraction "nigger" - they say ni-gra, which is closer to the French word and - many years ago - was more polite.
Similarly the term "Metis" is a bastardisation of the French word "moite" meaning half, but it is not only perfectly polite but Metis are recognised as a distinct ethnic group in Canada.
AND, while were on a roll: pet peeve pronounciations. TV Newsreaders PLEASE TAKE NOTE:
Iroquois - as in helicopter - not "Er-qwoy" but "Ear-oh-quaw"
Debut - not "day-boo" but "de-bew"
Adoo - not "a-dew" as in goodbye in French, but "a-doo" as it is spelled.And three words used wrongly so long they're almost - but not entirely - acceptable:
quick - as in "the quick and the dead". It mean speedy but not in that context - in that context it refers to live as in opposite of dead, as in the old term for when a baby starts to kick in the womb, as "quickening".
mortified - now used to mean "scared" but it used to mean "embarrassed to the point of rigor mortis", as in "died of embarrassment".
gourmand used to mean "gourmet" but actually means "person who eats a helluva lot".
AND one last thing: "Groundhog Day" refers an actual day, celebrated all over Canada among small children (February 2) when - legend has it - groundhogs come out of their burrows to see if they can see their shadow. If they can't, spring is officially on its way early, if they can see their shadow, there's going to be a lot more winter. The American film"Groundhog Day" (based on Canadian Groundhog named "Bill Bailey" with Bill Murray and Andie McDowell seems to have come to mean repeating the same day over and over.
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The American film"Groundhog Day" (based on Canadian Groundhog named "Bill Bailey" with Bill Murray and Andie McDowell seems to have come to mean repeating the same day over and over.
Yeah, but it sort of fills a useful purpose when used in that way. It's not as if it takes over a useful word and changes the meanign to mean soemthign another word perfectly adequately covers.
There was a phrase used by a previous generation 'I think this is where we came in' which dates from when picture theatres rotated their features throughout the day. It's fallen into disuse for obvious reasons but Groundhog Day is kind of another way of saying 'we've been here before'.
Just seen another word misused, over the South AFrica - England game - at least one report claims England was 'decimated'.
People use this word to mean something like 'badly beaten' but it has a very precise meaning: it means losing one in ten men. So if 1.5 England players were killed during the game (or 2.2 if you include the reserves) then it would be accurate. But only then. Anything else is not just hyperbole (and getting back to the sport=war metaphor talked about earlier) it just plain inaccurate.
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Thriller used to refer to a horror movie, instead of a suspenseful movie (e.g. spy story).
You might be thrilled by a horror film, but that doesn't make it a thriller. -
3410,
Dyan,
Good comment, but "adoo"? Do you mean "ado"?Also, not convinced that there is such a usage of "mortified", but maybe I've just not come across it.
TV Newsreaders PLEASE TAKE NOTE:
The past tense of the verb "text" is "texted", not "text"; just because the end of it sort of sounds like "...ed", don't make it so.
pet peeve pronounciations
"Eye-rack" / "Eye-rahk", "Eye-ran" / "Eye-rahn", and "NicaRAG-u-uh". No excuses; just wrong. ("Nye-ger", I can live with, but it should be "nee-Zhair").
People pronouncing "albeit" as "AL-be-it", instead of "ALL-be-it".
And Brian Edwards can bite me if he thinks common usage based on error trumps correctness!
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