Speaker: Mixing it up, with stats like
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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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My favourite variance in pronunciation was Angela D'Audney who always, without fail, said day as dee - as in: Thursdee, Wed nes dee etc Lovely and never heard these days. Or should I say, dees?
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D'Audney, like my late Mum who was also a -dee person, went to Epsom Girls Grammar, and I would be highly surprised to hear any ex-EGGS girl of that generation who wasn't exceptionally well-spoken.
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The 1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand has a section on New Zealand speech, and has this to say on the pronunciation of -day:
Both in New Zealand and in Australia the names of the days, also holiday, and yesterday are given the full sound of -day instead of the standard English Mondi, etc. This is not a relic of traditional usage but a pedantic following of the spelling.
The whole section is quite an interesting read. My favourite part is when someone gets to have a moan about New Zealanders "incorrectly" pronouncing ate as 'ayt' rather than 'ett'. Chur.
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I woke up this morning realising that I hate it when people use "refute" when they mean "deny."
I blame David Benson-Pope.
What he should have said was: "I deny those allegations. And I intend to confront the alligators."
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While we're all getting pendantic about TV presenters' pronunciation, how about teaching some of the presenters to pronounciate their final Ws properly?
Mark Sainsbury, for example, can't say "how about". It comes out How Rabout. Mike McRoberts on TV3 does the same. I haven't been keeping a list, but you'll find several blokes on TV1 and TV3 saying Now Ravailable, etc any time a final W is followed by a vowel sound starting the next word. The only woman I can think of that does it is the one asking us to donate money to build a well and a school in Africa.
They must be sloppy kissers.
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Dyan,
Good comment, but "adoo"? Do you mean "ado"?Yes, I do thank you 1310, I had the spelling of ado mixed up with igloo and skidoo (the old Canadian name for snowmobile).
Groundhog Day was indeed a very good movie, but again, it somehow hijacks the True Meaning of Groundhog Day.
Like Valentine's Day and Halloween you didn't get the day off but they were each days in which everything at school was fun. No work would be done - in the morning you'd paint pictures or make models of groundhogs - which don't exist on the westcoast, so everyone would be looking them up in the encyclopedias at the back of the classroom and asking the teacher "what does a groundhog look like?"
In the afternoon there would be a class party - sometimes with a chocolate cake in the shape of a mound of dirt, where presumably a groundhog was about to burst forth. We'd play records, dance and have party snacks. Canadian schools use any excuse for a party, and silliness is hugely encouraged. My cousin - when teaching 8 year olds - turned up for class on Halloween dressed as a cat, complete with ears, whiskers and a tail. When the kids said "nice costume" she said "what costume?" and continued teaching. This is so peculiarly Canadian, like the time in 1967 when the Queen visited Canada and our then PM Pierre Trudeau turned a perfectly-executed and extremely fruity pirouette behind her back while the tv cameras were rolling. Silly, unserious and a little weird. Not that the Queen minded - women liked anything Trudeau did in those days.
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3410,
Another one: people using "light year" as a unit of time.
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Morning chaps!
Dragging the thread back to the original subject here...
I came across this exact question about our Pacific Island-born players on the Guardian blogs last night - They like the Irish in Bordeaux, and they like their wine too
The question was:
Is it true that a fair number og the NZ team are in fact Samoans, Fijians, Tongas aand so on , and if so how many?
Is it true that if players from these islands want to play rugby for teams in NZ or OZ they must first agree first forgo any ambition to be selected for their home country's national sides and be availbale to play only for the NZ OZ national team?
After trawling through the ABs website for the numbers and posting my first response (and putting them straight on the whole "can't play for their country if they play in the S14" misconception) I found this post and "borrowed" a bit of it to further enlighten the Guardianistas - hope you guys don't mind.
A couple of interesting responses from the Guardian blog this morning:
make it 96.5% for South Africa, Percy was born in waalvisbaai when it was actually a part of the Cape Province of South Africa and not part of what was to become Namibia.
Pedantic I know but hey, I only found this out last week when reading that he was Namibian!
and
Of the five Irish players you mention Ronan O'Gara, Malcolm O'Kelly and Frankie Sheahan were all born to Irish parents who happened to be living abroad when they were born and all were schooled in Ireland.
So there you go - and now you know!
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Webweaver reprazents!
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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.
It's a metaphor. Y'know. Like "South Africa just killed England." Or "England sucked the big one." "Robinson the only Englishman who could catch a cold." None of these things actually happened, but they're also not inaccurate.
And while decimated has origins in selecting people by lot and killing them (one in every ten men), it's also just as valid to use it as 'lots of people died'. As in 'The bubonic plague decimated the town.' The dictionary tells me so.
There's pedantry and then there's complaining about people using plain English in easily understood ways.
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