Home » Open thread 9/28/22

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Open thread 9/28/22 — 27 Comments

  1. I’m watching hurricane news, having friends and connections in SW Florida. The mayor of Sarasota just pointed out that the Florida Guard, for whose creation DeSantis was heavily criticized, is actively involved in helping preparations, as is the National Guard. DeSantis has corrected a Politico story, saying that he has in fact talked to Biden, that all requested aid is being provided, and that this is no time to play politics.

  2. Fun video. I sometimes use the word queue, partly because I’m a bit of an Anglophile watching many Brit shows, but perhaps because the word “line” has so many usages and queue is very specific. The British expletives are good fun too.

  3. New Email on Hunter Biden’s honey trap Chinese spy finds Jesse Waters reprising the especially damning Democrat history of Chinese corruption from President Clinton and Charlie Tre, to California’s Senator Feinstein employing a Chinese spy as a driver for 20 years, to California Congressman Eric Swalwell sleeping with a Chinese spy. Now Hunter Biden’s gas trading Chinese Spy urging him to get old Joe to run for President!

    Given Russiagate, Waters asks the FIB to respond and they
    do…with “No comment.”

    Of course, it’s not just the Dems, as Lee Smith explains. It’s the Uniparty — which explains the failure of the “opposition” party to exercise oversight responsibilities and hold anyone to account.

    Play this five minute clip to innocent and ignorant friends:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RU14B0NyPs

    Save the link. It’s going to stay useful for a long time.

  4. It’s surprising he neglected the most obvious differences: petrol (gasoline), lorry (truck), lift (elevator), flat (apartment), pram (baby carriage) and the tube (the subway).

  5. Re: British words

    I don’t know what the problem is. You just have to watch a lot of British films and all the Monty Python episodes.
    ___________________________

    I was sitting in the public library of
    Sermon Street just now skimming
    through Rogue Herries by Horace
    Walpole when I came over all peckish
    oh hungry in a nutshell …

    –Monty Python, “The Cheese Shop”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz1JWzyvv8A

    ___________________________

    Among computer programmers “queue” is held in high regard as a linear data structure organized in “First-In-First-Out” (FIFO) order.

    As opposed to a “stack” which is “Last-In-First-Out” (LIFO) order.

    You can’t say you didn’t learn something today.

  6. Lost In The Pond (Lawrence Brown) is a fun light hearted YouTube channel. Lawrence’s sense of humor appeals to me for some reason. I subscribed to it a couple years ago when he was at about 50K subscribers now he is nearing 400K.

  7. I’ve read BritLit and watched Python etc so there is a bunch of familiar Britishisms in my vocab. But one, which I don’t come across even now was a word I heard in a weather report on my first trip to the UK.
    In context it was intuitively obvious and it’s imo charming so I’m puzzled why I don’t hear it from time to time.
    It was a cool morning and the lady said– It’s a bit “parky” out.

  8. Re: parky

    JimNorCal:

    My guess from your example was that parky came from “better wear your parka.” I’m still keen on the idea, but the only derivation I find on the net suggests it comes from “perky.”

  9. Parky might potentially originate from being at the park, thus exposed to the elements (in this case chilly air). Rather than safe and snug at home in front of a fire.

    You’re right that its derivation is not obvious. But its meaning IS obvious from context and I was eager for a chance to use it in conversation once back in the States.

  10. Regarding the pipeline and why or what happened. I expect that an anchor bumped it, or a fish ran into it, possibly a it was snapped by disgruntled crustacean, pierced by a burrowing mollusc. All possibilities.

    Or it was made of cardboard, as in “The Front Fell Off.”

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM

  11. I remember teaching my little brother what queue meant by using the lyrics from The Who’s Magic Bus. He was studying for a spelling test.

    Do the Brits still use “go snacks” for splitting the cost? I think I’ve only encountered it in Patrick O’Brian novels.

  12. om,

    It could have been two crustaceans in the throws of passion. As I learned from watching PBS in my youth: https://montycasinos.com/montypython/scripts/mollusc.php.html

    The mollusc is a randy little fellow whose primitive brain scarcely strays from the subject of the you know what. The randiest of the gastropods is the limpet. This hot-blooded little beast with its tent-like shell is always on the job. Its extra-marital activities are something startling. Frankly I don’t know how the female limpet finds the time to adhere to the rock-face. Another loose-living gastropod is the periwinkle. This shameless little libertine with its characteristic ventral locomotion is not the marrying kind: ‘Anywhere anytime’ is its motto. Up with the shell and they’re at it. The great scallop, this tatty, scrofulous old rapist, is second in depravity only to the common clam. This latter is a right whore, a harlot, a trollop, a cynical bed-hopping firm-breasted Rabelaisian bit of sea food that makes Fanny Hill look like a dead Pope.

  13. I learned to use “queue” in a business logistics class many long years ago. The basic idea was about “on time” versus “stockpiled” delivery systems…or some such. I haven’t used those particular learnings in quite a while, but “queue” is still part of my vocabulary.

    I despise the diminutive language so frequently used among Commonwealth dwellers…brolly, brekkie, bikkie…blah! But peckish I can keep…especially since they’re a brand of Crackers (aka biscuits).

  14. “Queue” became a little more common in the COVID years. I remember when “vetting” and to “vet” were anglicisms. Now they’ve become more common. If you want to find more, look under “Britishisms.” Anglicisms refers to English words in foreign languages, whether they come from the UK, the US or were coined on the spot.

    Just as the English took “fancy” words from French, so we now take them from Britain (even though they are actually French): abbatoir, aubergine, duvet, cul-de-sac). For me, it seemed like England and the US were growing closer together in the early days of the internet when we could read British newspapers without a pay wall. Now that the paywalls are in place we’re drawing apart (or at least I’m not going to be as up on British slang and trivia as I once was).

  15. When my dad was sent to the UK in early 1944 in preparation for D-Day, he and the rest of his division was given a list of words to be used with care because they had different meanings to American and British soldiers. One was “bum,” which meant a hobo or Skid Row alcoholic to my dad, but to his British counterpart was the part of you that you sit on. Then there were the different words for the parts of a car or Jeep: my dad called the front of the Jeep he drove in Italy the “hood,” but there’s a photo of King George VI inspecting an early Jeep in 1942– the caption reads, “A Vickers machine gun has been fitted to the bonnet.”

    The most serious warning, though, concerned the word “bloody,” which American GIs were told is a most corrosive blasphemy to the British, and was best left as an adjective to the field surgeons and medics. Apropos of “bloody,” there is an anecdote about one of Gilbert and Sullivan’s less well-known operettas, Ruddigore. The title was originally spelled “Ruddygore,” but was changed when some critics argued that “ruddy” was too close to “bloody” for late Victorian comfort. After Gilbert was told that the spelling change accomplished little, he reportedly replied to one commenter, “Not at all, for that would mean that if I said that I admired your ruddy countenance, which I do, I would be saying that I liked your bloody cheek, which I don’t.”

    Well, anyway, my dad was relieved that he never developed a nosebleed or any other injury involving blood before leaving the UK for Normandy.

  16. @ PA Cat > when the video host brought up “cheeky” I thought immediately of the Gilbert anecdote, which is one of my all-time favorites.

    “Peckish” was prevalent in Texas when I was young, with exactly that meaning.

    “Perky” in Texan means having a cheerful, bubbling personality. We called one of my aunts “Perky” instead of her given name, because she was.
    For “parky” — no idea, but I’ve had some good parky weather here in Colorado lately.

    As a fan of British mysteries, I sometimes slip a few Britishisms into my conversation, and try to pronounce them “correctly” — although it’s necessary to have heard them, which reading doesn’t help with. Hooray for movies and tv!

  17. PA+cat @ 12:04: My Dad was Welsh (thus fully fluent in Brit Speak). “Bloody” was in constant use to emphasize one’s idiocy or the fouled-up state of things. The variant of which I am most fond is “bloodyminded,” meaning “deliberately difficult; willfully obtuse; needlessly argumentative.” I can still hear him saying that to me. A lot.

  18. If you use parky be sure to draw it out a bit, carefully divide the syllables.
    “Today is a bit PAR-kee, innit?”

    Speaking of which, I guess “innit” is a BritSpeak or English lower class dialect version of “isn’t it”?

  19. Looks like “Biden”‘s allies in Teheran have a bit of a problem on their hands:
    “Iran Oil Workers Threaten To Strike If Government Doesn’t End Crackdown”—
    https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/iran-oil-workers-threaten-strike-if-government-doesnt-end-crackdown

    So will they try to buy them off?
    And/or send in the goons?
    And/or “double—or triple—down”? (Seems to work pretty well for “Biden”…)

    To be sure, they could always use the tried-and-true “distraction” gambit….
    “Hezbollah Is Now on Israel’s Border”—
    https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/hezbollah-now-on-israel-border-sarit-zehavi
    “Hamas warns Israel: Don’t desecrate Al-Aqsa”—
    https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/360488

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