@Færd So why did you spend this time?

I don't know many people amongst whom he is popular.

The quotations from the article seemed fairly vague and nonsensical indeed.

@Færd Another bad mark.

@Færd What left? I have never witnessed this: the left criticises religion quite a lot, in my experience—certainly more so than the right.

@RegDwigнt I learnt the term over 9000 from you.

@Cerberus To familiarize myself with what is "attracting millions of followers". To learn something.

@Cerberus A vague quotation can serve to invite those curious to look inside and those uninterested to ignore the whole thing. This particular quotation is explained in the third paragraph, starting "... His 12 Rules for Life is the #1 most-read book on Amazon...", and elsewhere in that article.

@Cerberus Many among the left succumb to the confusion of criticism of Islam and Islamic states on the one hand with interventionist warmongering attitude towards some Muslim-majority countries and anti-Muslim bigotry on the other hand.

As many on the right conflate criticism of Zionism, Judaism, or the state of Israel on the one hand with anti-Semitism on the other hand.

Not everyone, but many. And yes, those are not exclusively left-right issues; that's an approximation. And It's good that it's not true for your experience.

Why do they use plural forenames in English-language documents? It's always singular name in Russian

@CowperKettle because an English person can have more than one forename. But every Russian only has one. (Except Dame Helen Mirren, who has two for some reason. But then again she's not a proper Russian really.)

@RegDwigнt But these several words still constitute a single forename, don't they?

making food is a pure labor which is needed persistently. If you are an illiterate and don't know engineering, you can still contribute to humans by making food.

@CaptainBohemian Very well said!

@Gigili I believe his outlook is more grisly than you took it

@M.A.R.ಠ_ಠ probably should switch to gmail then

@CowperKettle No: all names are either forenames or surnames.

A "middle name" should really be a forename.

For example, someone's full name might be Audrey Penelope Charlotte fforbes Hamilton (sic).

That's three forenames and two surnames.

Or perhaps a single, double-barrelled surname if you add a hyphen.

@CowperKettle I've never ever seen 'forename' in my life. It sounds like a German translated literally for foreigners likely to speak English instead of German.

Also for my entire life and up to this day and probably afterwards, I've never ever understood the English terms on forms 'surname' and 'given name'. All my names were given to me by my parents, I didn't choose any of them.

@Cerberus Why isn't it one first name and four surnames?

@MattE.Эллен nice

@Mitch What do you mean by "why"?

Forenames are forenames and surnames are surnames.

Surnames are inherited from one's parents, while forenames are not.

Forenames identify the individual person, while surnames identify the family.

@Cerberus Why do you ask a question 'what do you mean'?

@Cerberus That's not particularly defining.

@Mitch Y U MEAN 2 ME

@Mitch Indeed not.

@Cerberus That's defining but says nothing about any particular name.

@Mitch So what?

@Cerberus 😂

I mean that literally

I'm having a sneezing fit

also laughing at something funny

I'm sorry to hear that.

so I'm crying and laughing at the same time

everything is true even when it's not

@Cerberus It's not a terrible thing.

I just have to

type

@Mitch I hope I'm not being rude, but the fact that you don't recall seeing something does not mean it is not in use.

in be-

By saying that, you're suggesting it is wrong.

-tween sneezes or threats of sneezes

Which is not true.

It's only an Ngram check away.

@Cerberus I kind of take that, from introspection of my own experience, as good evidence. At least evidence in my own circle. My circle could be small or large, others may not know, but age and such lean in some direction.

@Cerberus In this case I'm saying it is not common in US forms that I've seen. (and remember, with all the qualifications of possible bias that I don't see).

If we're just talking, all we have is claims about one's own reliability.

@Cerberus And from that I trust that you and I don't have the same experiences (because I trust what you say about your own experience).

@Mitch Remember Popper's black swans.

@Mitch This line is a lot less definite than the one before. It expresses a different sentiment.

@Mitch Indeed not.

There's a whole gang of black swan's in Australia (which Popper probably saw when he was a prof in New Zealand)

@Cerberus OK more definite: I've never seen (or can't remember) ever seeing 'Forename' in a US form.

So all I'm saying is, don't be so quick to judge some word or expression as "wrong" just because you don't remember seeing it: because, in many cases that I've seen in this room, that turns out to be mistaken.

I've seen: name, given name, surname, family name, first name, last name, middle name...

@Cerberus For me or in general?

In general.

But I saw you do it, so it seemed like a fun occasion to broach the subject.

I've made many mistakes.

Just an example.

forename vs surname - forename is almost nonexistent in US books

I am complaining about the possible suggestion that forename would be "wrong" or "a mistaken translation from German".

'surname' is pretty rare anyway (only ever on forms)

But that is irrelevant.

@Cerberus I think I prefaced that with 'it sounds like... (a mistaken translation from German)' where 'Vorname' is how you say it.

@Mitch Yes, but it is the suggestion.

@Cerberus It's totally relevant because the graph shows that the frequency of 'forename ' is negligeable with respect to 'surname', and if 'surname' is rare to begin with then 'forename' has little chance of existing at all.

@Mitch As I have proven, that conclusion is wrong.

@CowperKettle Well no. When your name is "Anna Christina Katharina Helena Bach", people will generally say that you have four forenames, and quite clearly not just one.

Here's a great question for @Cerberus I guess.

musescore.com/groups/piano/discuss/…

> Anyone know of musical instrument stores in St. Martin? Where do the musicians get their gear?

Well. Maybe not all that great. And maybe not really for Cerberus. But still. It's a question alright!

Umm I'd have no idea.

It is a question, indeed!

@Cerberus It's all relative. Also, NGrams is case sensitive. Allosaurus should be rare in lowercase since it is correct to capitalize it.

@Cerberus I would like to suggest that forename is wrong because it's a mistaken translation from German.

@Cerberus I have failed to see you line of reasoning then.

I would like to relieve you of your stress of having to fight imaginary dragons. Let's move it to the realm of the real and put it behind us.

And now that my work here is done, see you later.

@RegDwigнt I don't know. Dragons might be fun.

Little dragons

very small dragons.

maybe bird sized

like hummingbirds

something you can take down with a tennis racket

@Mitch All right then. But forename still wins:

@RegDwigнt Silence!

@Mitch The fact that one terms has a lower frequency than another does not prove that it is "wrong" at all. I have given a page of recent instances of forename in respectable publications.

Wikipaedia also has forename.

@Cerberus I never doubted that 'forename' isn't understandable (and could possible appear in text. I only ever said that 'forename' never occurred as a label on forms ... that I've seen.

@Cerberus Wikipedia has a lot of weirdos on it.

@Mitch Well, I think you've suggested a bit more than that?

@Cerberus I could suggest a lot more things.

Like airplane seating order. What's up with that?

You didn't say "I don't remember ever seeing that, so it must be extremely rare in America".

@Cerberus I didn't say that. I don't disagree with it though.

Right.

If we can't put some faith in recognizability, then how can we trust anything we think?

Are you sure 2+2=4? You've never proved it, have you?

What about 2342342342432+5675757657567567? When was the last time you calculated that?

Well, in many cases where people have made similar suggestions in this room, the suggestion (that it was wrong) was proven wrong.

I'm pretty sure you have, you just don't remember well.

So perhaps it would be wise for people to phrase their impression a bit less...suggestively?

@Mitch See, I don't assert that such suggestions were never right...

@Cerberus Does that mean they are always wrong? Or rather that they didn't specify the context fully enough?

You're trying to trap me!

Specify the context, yes, that would be a way of phrasing it.

@Cerberus Don't you think a suggestion is much more open and tolerant than a bald statement?

I do.

@Cerberus Specifying context is a big part of justification (or refinement) of a theory.

But I think the suggestion that it is wrong is still wrong.

@Cerberus To say that that is wrong would be ... suggestive.

@Mitch No: it is a plain statement!

@Cerberus oh, you mean in the concrete instance about 'forename'?

@Mitch Yes, but also in many other cases I've seen in this room.

Not just the room then but all over ELU

I did not mean to "attack" you specifically.

Hasty generalizations

Yes.

but just because a generalization is wrong doesn't mean the original specific context is wrong.

Although it probably happens more often in chat, proportionally, because people don't have the time to look things up.

sure

or specify exactly

Yeah.

@Mitch Sure.

But in my experience, whose memory may be faulty and often is, and often biased, I have never seen 'Forename' as a label in a form, in the US (of my narrow experience (it should go without saying) of those places I've had to fill out forms.

Now, if the context had been, should I use "forename" in this software I'm writing for NASA, then your suggestion that the word is "wrong" would properly translate into "inadvisable in that situation".

And I don't think you can tell me that that part is actually wrong.

I certainly can't.

@Cerberus As with most everything.

But you suggested a bit more than that; you suggested it was just wrong, or at least wrong in the original context.

@Cerberus You could if you shared most of my experience or possible had quantifiable data to the contrary (like an actual form that I signed that had 'Forename' as a label.)

@Mitch I found the word "forename" in a form used in the UK since 1911 for keeping a person's medical history.

So it's unlikely to be a German or other non-native word

@Mitch No, I meant to agree with you ^.

@Cerberus In the US I think that 'Forename' is wrong. Do you think it is correct?

@Mitch I don't think "wrong" is the right word to describe that a term is probably used in a different region, but that is better already.

@CowperKettle I was just saying what it sounded like to me (having seen many German forms with 'Vorname'.)

And I'm still not sure whether it isn't used at all in America, or just very rarely or only in the past.

@Mitch So I would not have responded to the way you phrase it here.

@Cerberus Having lived here for a while it is rare to nonexistent in my experience (allowing for 'Wrong' is convenient shorthand for that.)

I think "forenames" is exclusionary to those of us who only have three.

It hurts

Tag yourself: I'm meta-forgetfullness

@MattE.Эллен Simply changing themes would work

So will complicatedly changing themes

For some people, using Outlook is the closest you can get to feeling like Shakespeare trying to figure out how to use a typewriter if any existed at his time.

Don't take that away with all the hip gmail and stuff

@MattE.Эллен I'm status-declined

Lovely.

I'm sure you get a lot of love from users.

@Mitch Nice.

Though I see some overlap!

You don't get love from people you beat up. This isn't Canada.

@Mitch So "rare to non-existent in modern American English" is conveniently called "wrong"? I don't think that makes much sense. When you see a British text using "forename", what would you call that? And an older American text? Any of the ten thousand hits in Google Books? Would it make sense to call them "wrong"? No, I don't think that shorthand works at al unless it is used in a context excluding all those possibilities and more.

The context did not exclude those at all.

Which, incidentally, is a lovely show.

Not as lovely as Breaking Bad, but then again nothing is.

In other news, I see @Cerberus is still shamelessly milking my ELL nonsense for reps.

184! That is OVER 9000!

@RegDwigнt Yeah, it's crazy.

But I'm still surprised you didn't get the joke!

@Cerberus you know what I've been doing the last couple days. You don't know what I've been doing the last couple days.

I'm now following that channel on YouTube where a Dutch ambulance just posts their dashcam videos of responding to emergency calls.

So now I know every road around Soest by heart.

The Dutch Soest, not the German impostor Soest.

Haha.

I have one question for you.

Can you guess what it is?

Every video is like 20 minutes. Of them driving with lights and siren.

I wonder what my neighbors must be thinking.

For the last week or so, there's been medical sirens coming out of my flat for hours. Any time of the day.

@Cerberus how you pronounce "soest" in Dutch vs German?

"Why?"

I dunno. YouTube suggested it to me. And I watched just one video. Just for 25 minutes. And then I couldn't stop.

Perhaps they think you're into minimalist music now.

There's something very ASMR about it.

What an odd addiction!

Hmm.

And I'm not into ASMR at all, as you know.

Do you get the tingles?

Yeah.

If I didn't get the tingles, I'd find all of those videos incredibly boring and embarrassing.

I actually did the first couple times. It was very exciting. Here were actual people actually rushing through traffic to save an actual person.

And other actual people making way.

And the person was saved.

It was exciting alright I can tell you.

Hmm the real tingles or some other sensation?

No really like pumped with adrenaline.

All the jazz.

I guess I can vaguely understand the attraction.

OK that's different from the tingles, but still good.

It's very well put together actually. There's subtitles in English that explain certain situations and point out things and teach you things.

Like, I don't even have a driver's license, but even I learn things. How to make way. How to help ambulances help people. It's very illuminating.

And there's always something new. Road construction, traffic jams. Rain. Snow. Engine failure.

Real life.

@RegDwigнt Neither do I!

There's a lot to learn from real life, turns out.

So those subtitles are actually all written by hand.

Yes.

At least Dutch and English.

By the guy that's in the driver's seat.

He used to be a firefighter.

That is a ton of work!

But you only learn that after watching like 20 videos so SPOILERS you don't know that.

And do they cut, or is it integral?

Oh, dear, no spoilers!

They sometimes cut out bits where they discuss personal information. But for the most part they just blur and/or mute it. So most videos are completely uncut. That's the beauty of it. It's mesmerising.

You get the whole thing start to finish. Them getting the call, them arriving at the place, them going to the hospital.

So anyway. I only wanted to mention that because they are Dutch and you are Dutch and I'm racist so I thought that was of utmost interest to you.

@Cerberus thing is, you learn a lot what to do as a pedestrian, or when you're riding a bike.

It is very educational without being overtly so.

Okay, I can see how this might be addictive...

Like, nobody drives cars in the NL anyway, everyone rides bicycles. So there's a lot of that actually.

Most cars seem to know what to do. The vastest majority.

@RegDwigнt Also because then you get a good sense of the time these operations take.

Bikers, not so much. And not because they're idiots but because, well, what do you do.

So I watch and learn.

@RegDwigнt Does that mean you absolve the Dutch from the Großdeutschen race, as a separate race?

@RegDwigнt So what are they supposed to do?

@Cerberus yeah that's another thing. Like they rush with lights and siren and all, but every time you see them starting up, they take a lot of time. They drive out very slowly from their garage, checking the nav and discussing things. And at first you're like WTF guys you just lost 20 seconds right there. But then you begin to understand.

So how is that understandable?

@Cerberus depends on the situation. The most common mistake people seem to make is that they cross even though they can hear the ambulance. And not because they don't care, but because they plain forget that it's not going 50. It's going 120. It's there way before you expect.

The other thing that mostly applies to drivers but actually appliest to everyone is what they call "LoLo". "Leave open lines open".

I saw cyclists cross the road, but perhaps they hadn't realised yet how close the ambulance was when they began crossing the road (it's hard to cyclists to stop halfway).

@RegDwigнt That makes sense.

So why is that in English?

@Cerberus because what he does when he checks the nav, he quickly memorizes the entire way to the accident, start to finish. Turn left here, then take the second right. Stuff like that. So he never has to check the nav again and ends up saving time overall.

OK.

Because my left ear is deaf, I cannot hear direction. So I have to guess from which way the ambulance might be coming.

@Cerberus the videos are in Dutch throughout. The subtitles are in English. They have like 150k followers. You don't have that many people in Dutchland! So they have the audience in mind.

You mean they actually speak English, "lolo", just because they know they will be watched online?

@Cerberus keep in mind that most if not all of the accidents are in the obscurest places. You have to take the highway and the usual main streets at first, but at the end you always have to take some stupid country road or service lane that nobody even knows exists.

But he always knows.

@Cerberus no, they don't say that. It's from the supplementary stuff they write up for the closed captions.

To each other they always talk in Dutch. As you should.

They don't talk to the audience while driving. That would be silly and dangerous and stupid and I would not watch that. They are just doing their job saving people. But it just so happens that they have dashcams in their vehicles. Possibly by law.

@RegDwigнt I can imagine the desire!

@RegDwigнt Ah, OK. Then I wonder what it will say in the Dutch subtitles.

So they put it to good use by checking what bits they can publish and supplement with useful information. I can appreciate that.

@Cerberus I never checked the Dutch subtitles. In fact before you said I didn't even know there were any.

@RegDwigнt You can talk for the audience at quiet moments, not to?

But hey, there's homework for you. Watch all their videos in Dutch and tell me.

How many years will that take?

@Cerberus I dunno. As I said, even so much as thinking of the camera while driving to an accident would strike me as silly and pretentions.

This is real life, not reality TV.

@Cerberus It's under 200 videos, each about 10-25 minutes long.

Incidentally, I still wonder how long it takes him to produce those subtitles. Longer than the play time, I'm sure.

You do the math.

No really, you do the math.

I'll go do the drinking.

Proost.

@RegDwigнt Yes. That was why I was surprised.

Well don't be, then. This is not recorded to make money of YouTube, it's just happens to be recorded anyway and then they put it to good use.

I'm also surprised at how the firemen saved this guy twenty minutes before the ambulance arrived.

I would imagine firefighters in my city might have dashcams as well. But I wouldn't know.

@RegDwigнt I believe it.

@Cerberus it's always different, that's the other thing. You never know what you're in for when you open a new video. Again, like real life. They don't know, either. Sometimes there's another ambulance being sent from a neighbor city. Sometimes there's police on their way. Sometimes a doctor on a motorbike. Sometimes a helicopter, even.

A doctor on a motorbike??

Sometimes they get called by the police or firefighters that have been on the scene and decided that an ambulance is in order.

@Cerberus I know, right? Those crazy Dutchies, what will they invent next.

There's at least one video actually where both the police and the ambulance rush to the same accident and arrive at the same junction at once.

And they take the opportunity to explain in the subtitles who gives way to whom in such situations.

It's awesome.

Like, when it's a heart attack, the police will let you go first. If it's a shooting, the ambulance prefers to give way to the police.

Anyway I didn't quite intend to bother you for quite this long with all of this. In fact I'll go play some piano or something. Just wanted to mention it in passing while we're both here.

Skol!

@RegDwigнt So I figured; but I would imagine you'd call both firemen and ambulance immediately as you noticed someone was in the water.

@RegDwigнt Have fun!

Too bad they don't show they actual handling of the patient. They cut that out, obviously for privacy.

Yeah.

Actually I think I know now. I guess at the end of the day, at least for me personally, it all comes down to this: it's watching a master of their craft do their thing.

You know, like I'd watch a 30-minute video on how a contrabass is made. Or how someone makes a shoe. You know.

I don't give a fuck how to make a shoe or a contrabass. But that's the thing. It's illuminating to watch someone who does give a great deal of fuck about it.

So same here. Again, I don't even have a driver's license. I have never saved a human life. At least not that I remember. So it's quite new and incredible to watch someone over the shoulder who knows exactly how to do it, who has been doing it for the longest time, who knows how to do it best and does give it their best every single time. It's mesmerising.

You know, when I still watched TV, there was that show on German television, probably still is. "Der letzte seines Standes". The last one of his craft. I think we actually discussed it before, but that's like seven years ago.

Where they'd do research to find a profession that's about to completely die out, and they hunt down the very last person working in that profession. And show what exactly they do, and how exactly it's done.

I watched it a lot. Loved every episode of it.

Plus hey, if I ever end up in Amersfoort or whatever it's spelled, now I can find my way around the city with my eyes tied.

No, what's the English word.

Blindfolded.

@RegDwigнt True enough.

@RegDwigнt I would get super depressed watching that!

@Cerberus I actually don't remember that many episodes at all. The ones that are the most fresh still were: someone who operated a hand-loom to weave most intricate brocade or something, then yes a shoemaker actually, a shoemaker for the Queen or some such, not sure, but there must have been something special about it because of course shoemakers are still a thing. And then, then, fasten your seatbelt: someone who makes drape tussels.

Quastenmacher.

Not the curtains, mind. Not the drapes. Not even the cords. Just the tussels at the end. That was his specialization. And he was the best in the world at it. And the last.

@RegDwigнt That's important!

Can't find him on YouTube right now, but lots of episodes, or even all, are all up there.

Like, look at this:

WTF is a "weißbinder"??

And it's a fucking 50 minutes long.

And I would watch all of it back in the day. And love every last minute of it.

And if you don't understand a word, that's because literally nobody does. Actually you might understand more than I do.

It's an idiolect of a dialect of a dialect of a language that no longer exists.

Fascinating stuff.

On that note, I forgot to say:

@tchrist that's the loveliest thing I watched in a long time.

It's enchanting in more respects than there are respects. And respect really is the word here.

Such striking similarities to German, too. Really goes to show how English is the most non-English language out there. It's deviated from its ancestor more than anybody else has.

And then the English make fun of Americans. For deviating yet another quarter of an inch, where they themselves have deviated a thousand miles.

For shame, really.

@RegDwigнt Still surprisingly intelligible.

@Cerberus Yes I know exactly what you mean and I feel the same way personally.

So with that in mind you can actually believe me when I say that most of the time it wasn't depressing at all.

Fascinating, rather.

There was always an undertone of bittersweetness and longing for the past, for sure.

But outright depression, or indeed anger even, was only justified when you realized that actual know-how and actual passion was going to be lost forever.

There were a few episodes like that, true.

But most of the time it was perfectly clear why the profession would vanish, or indeed actually not vanish at all, just getting automated or superseded by other professions, or indeed just embraced by a larger field and swallowed by it.

Like, the people operating the machines are still people.

They still have the passion and they still have the know-how.

If anything more so than before.

Picture an episode about the last architect of a Gothic cathedral, say. That's gone forever now. But is it. It is not. There's still architects and civic engineers. The knowledge is preserved. The passion. The tradition. If anything it's been expanded. They can build a bridge now, or a tunnel through the Saint-Gotthard Massif. But they can still build a Gothic cathedral if need be. Or rebuild one when needed.

Most episodes were like that. Nostalgic or even sad on a very personal level, because you got to get to learn all those people in person.

But the trade still survives. It's just called a different thing now, and is carried out differently.

And also, the very fact that there were people filming it, and cutting the footage and doing the sound and putting it on air, that was uplifting in a way. Because there used to be just this one lone person in the world entire who cared about what he did. But now suddenly there were dozens of people caring about it. And preserving it for the future.

And then hundreds of thousands of people would watch it. From all over the world. Like myself.

This is just like Titanic. weeps

@RegDwigнt I s'pose.

Still, it makes me sad.

@RegDwigнt Perhaps you mean tassels? I have no idea what a tussel is.

Yeah, and the reason I ain't using it is because it doesn't fucking work right.

Shows me months-old emails and nothing recent. I call that a POS.

Inbox, now there was an email app for my phone. Worked great, just showed me what I needed and let me respond.

So of course Google deep-sixed it.

Google has gone from promising upstart to best technology ever and now is making the long, slow descent into mediocrity and bureaucracy. In a couple of years they'll be indistinguishable from Microsoft, if it doesn't happen sooner.

How odd.

@Robusto For me, the Gmail app has issues when typing: it often creates duplicate words.

@Robusto Although they say M$ has improved quite a bit, over the past ten or fifteen years or so.

@Cerberus I wish my issues were so trivial.

@Cerberus Well, but the shitty updates they're sending out on Windows 10 ...

@Robusto It means I basically cannot type an e-mail except with great effort.

@Robusto Yes.

I can't even see any recent emails.

Okay, that's worse.

But both are unacceptable.

My most recent email is from April 16, according to mobile Gmail.

And seemingly rather basic.

The Outlook app had issues on my mother's phone, though.

@Robusto Perhaps it is wiser to use a third-party app for your Gmail.

Mobile Gmail can't even find its ass with both hands.

Like the Outlook app, or K9 or whatever.

@Cerberus No Outlook for me, thanks, that's a different kind of trap.

Maybe I'll just go with basic Android email app.

@Robusto K9 is well known and open source.

makeuseof.com/tag/5-excellent-email-apps-for-android-compared

@Cerberus Interesting. I'll give it a try.

I haven't tried it myself in years, though.

It worked well when I did use it.

Nine looks interesting, though. I would pay $15 to have a really decent email app.

@Robusto srs question for once. Can you say "nigh any" in English? As in, "almost any"?

But to answer yours, I don't know fuck about anything so I just typed "Quaste" into leo.org, and leo.org told me that "tussel" is the English word for whatever you now say the English word "tassel" is for.

@Cerberus I would not call that wrong. It's correct in that context. "My stomach hurts, I'm going to hospital" Is awfully wrong in the US, but it is the way you say it in the UK.

@Mitch that Rob slacker is kinda absent and this is kinda urgent. Tell me right now if "nigh any" is English or not.

It seems to me like it should be, but Google says I should go fuck myself.

@RegDwigнt Nobody's perfect.

@RegDwigнt Pfft @Robusto

@RegDwigнt I NEED A FUL SENTENSE

@RegDwigнt Hmm ... It would be archaic.

@Robusto yes thank you that is perfect.

Sounds ... hillbilly

I'm talking with someone about Bach.

Usually heard in "nigh on" contexts.

yeah, 'nigh on'

Ikr. The end is nigh is really the only usage I know of.

Which is why I'm asking.

'nigh any' might work but I can't think of a sentence right now

Synonym and cognate of near.

Is what I'm hoping it would be, yes.

Not that I care all too much as you should be able to tell from knowing me.

We don't care either so I guess it is even

I have all those get-out-of-jail-free cards lying around, they should be good for something.

nigh on even

Right gimme a sec, I'll just send this thing off then and then drink some more and then maybe rejoin unless I pass out.

Thanks a lot.

@RegDwigнt examples of 'nigh any'