English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

tchrist

12:05 AM

The bumblebees are of the genus Bombus. I wonder what they have to do with firefighters?

tchrist

12:17 AM

Ok, I give up: what the heck is a bumfuzzle? Well, or how does one bumfuzzle something, if a verb?

I do so need to get DARE.

> Thanks to DARE, we will always know that a “gospel bird” once meant a chicken, “long sugar” was molasses, a “toad-strangler” (a.k.a. “duck-drownder,” “belly-washer” or “cob-floater”) was a heavy rainstorm and “Old Huldy” was the sun.

> At a “waistline party,” mentioned in African-American circles, the price of admission corresponded to a reveler’s girth; at a “toe social,” a mid-20th- century term, women draped in sheets were picked as partners on the basis of their feet. (Presumably they then danced together uninhibitedly, or “fooped.”) In the 1950s, a man from the Ozarks might say his pregnant wife was “teemin’” or “with squirrel”—but not if she was around to hear him.

Sorry Jasper, but as the missus is with squirrel, she won’t be joinin’ usuns.

> Those fluffy bits beneath the bed, for instance, are dust kitties (Northeast), dust bunnies (Midwest), house moss (South) or woolies (Pennsylvania). A potluck is a tureen dinner in upstate New York or, in the Midwest, a pitch-in or scramble dinner. Almost a whole page of DARE is dedicated to “wampus,” a Southern term for a variety of real creatures (such as a wild horse) and imagined ones, such as swamp wampuses and whistling wampuses.

That, ’twould appear, is a wumpus.

Also known as a wampus.

Ooh ooh ooh! They have a quiz!

MετάEd

@tchrist Unseasonably warm, yes.

Today 17 °F above the mean.

@tchrist This was my Wumpus: atariarchives.org/bcc1/showpage.php?page=247

tchrist

12:37 AM

I’ve just learned that somehow who plays unscientific whist is known as a bumblepupper or bumblepuppist. Now, what the devil is unscientific whist? Somebody who can’t count tricks?

@MετάEd I get a Not Found.

KitFox

@tchrist Well, I'm sure that I typed an apostrophe. So. shrugs

@tchrist I said no such thing, you silly person.

tchrist

@KitFox Regarding that, it appears that the software has a broken algorithm for converting ASCII into curly quotes.

@KitFox And regarding that, it sure looked that way to me. BTW, I can’t find any actual examples for “Seamus’ writings”, nor, alas, for any possessive use of Seamus that way. I should think it would always have been Seamus’s, since otherwise it sounds like you have someone named Shama, or if non-rhotic, Shamer. I think that might have been a problem.

tchrist

1:28 AM

@MετάEd Your wumpus has mysteriously resolved. My DNS seems to have been whacked out.

Robusto

@tchrist Should've whacked out your DNA instead. Then you could be in the X-Men.

tchrist

@Robusto Well, I did spend my junior year in college abroad.

Robusto

I spent my junior year in a broad.

cornbread ninja

1:55 AM

@MετάEd we're at $2.97 today.

@Robusto rimshot

Robusto

@cornbreadninja Nah, it wasn't kinky like that.

cornbread ninja

@Robusto oh, more like Fantastic Voyage?

Robusto

@cornbreadninja No. Just no rimshots.

I suggest you look up the alternate meanings on Urban Dictionary.

cornbread ninja

@Robusto OIC.

@Robusto that's rim job. :P

Robusto

Also rimshot.

@cornbreadninja That's the correct emoticon, BTW.

cornbread ninja

2:01 AM

@Robusto followed by :d

Robusto

That's "licking the alphabet" for sure.

Cerberus

8:18 AM

Hello.

tweakers.net/nieuws/85646/…

Video of the world's oldest working computer restored, from 1949.

It looks cool. And it's decimal, not binary based!

It can hold several numbers in memory at once!

And it has cool lights.

And it makes fantastic clicking sounds.

Cerberus

8:45 AM

Distribution of Android versions over time.

RegDwighт

10:21 AM

What's with the typos questions today?

Cerberus

Are you saying I'm a typos question?

RegDwighт

I am saying it can be see that you are as could as ice.

@Cerberus they started with five versions simultaneously? The first one never getting any traction at all?

Cerberus

@RegDwighт plugs ears

@RegDwighт Well...what do you think?

RegDwighт

Also, nobody likes honeycombs. Ice cream sandwiches, on the other hand!

Cerberus

Presumably the history of Android goes back further than the graph shows.

RegDwighт

10:26 AM

@Cerberus I think that the graph is rubbish, that's what I think.

Cerberus

@RegDwighт Yes, ICS is cool.

@RegDwighт Wai?

RegDwighт

Because:

33 secs ago, by Cerberus

Presumably the history of Android goes back further than the graph shows.

Cerberus

They probably measured user agents on some website.

Which is known to be unreliable.

RegDwighт

Yeah.

I still get hits with IE 4.0.

Cerberus

But it will give us some impression.

Hits?

Oh, on your website.

RegDwighт

10:27 AM

Yes. Wrong impression is also an impression.

Cerberus

Well, those may be real.

@RegDwighт Well, other sources seem to indicate somewhat similar distributions.

RegDwighт

@Cerberus on my site they may indeed. It will work in Netscape 4.4.

Cerberus

Yay.

RegDwighт

But that's beside the point.

The point is not that if someone visits my site with NS4 it will work; the point is what the heck is he doing visiting my site with NS4?

He probably can't even Google in it. AltaVista might work, but I'm not so sure.

@Cerberus also, why the hell do Cupcake, Donut, and Froyo have brackets? What for, pray tell.

Not to mention the X axis, which is labeled in a most dumb way; you can smell the graph was made by a geek with no knowledge of graphs.

Cerberus

@RegDwighт Long live Altavista! I used that all the time.

In 1999.

RegDwighт

10:32 AM

Yeah. All the time, for small values of all.

Cerberus

@RegDwighт Looks neater that way.

Now you know that, say, Froyo and ICS are equals, not one a header and the other an instance, or whatever.

RegDwighт

What?

I'm not following.

He even uses hyphens for dashes.

And the justification of ICS is horrible.

Verdict: he cannot pass.

Cerberus

Then go and break your silly staff, if that rocks your ~~boat~~ bridge.

RegDwighт

I'm not in a hurry. It's not like he can fly away or something.

Cerberus

11:11 AM

Well, do you know what he looks like?

He may have—let's call them umbratic protuberances.

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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…