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Post by Twoddle on Apr 2, 2019 21:38:16 GMT
Yesterday my daughter's boyfriend's twenty-year-old daughter sent him a text message to say he was gonna (sic) be a grand-dad. Apparently the look of shock and horror on his face was something to behold until he realised it was an April Fool's Day joke. When my amused daughter sent me a copy of the text I replied, "Don't you ever do that to ME! Don't you EVER write 'gonna'!".
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Apr 3, 2019 0:01:10 GMT
I have been bemused by the current idea of what is an acceptable April Fool joke. I learned as a child that the “joke” had to be something patently ridiculous or at least clearly ambiguous, certainly no lie was allowed. The whole point was to expose the recipient’s gullibility. One could say, “What’s this about your girlfriend’s having an STD?” but not, “Your girlfriend has an STD.” So, in my youth, the example in Twoddle’s post would not be allowed and the April Fool would be declared to be the perpetrator. I blame the hole in the ozone layer for the way the world is changing. I also blame the hole in the ozone layer for the abomination that is “gonna”.
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Post by Verbivore on Apr 3, 2019 2:30:15 GMT
Similarly, the Oz equivalent gunna. The one application of that term that I'll tolerate is the noun gunna (or gunner) that is used to describe someone who's always going to do something but never gets around to it (round tuits are a rare commodity); e.g. Dave's a real gunna.
I was a true April Fool on Monday when I left my wallet on the roof of a car I was test driving; the wallet fell off onto the main road and spilled its contents – cards, ID, cash – all over the road. Some considerate and honest person handed the wallet in to the local police station, but he reported that about 10 cars had stopped randomly in the middle of the road, causing a log-jam, while they scooped up the 32 $50 notes. At least all the cards, ID, car-related paperwork were stuffed back into the wallet; replacing those would have cost close to the sum of cash lost. I rarely carry cash, but that day I had need of it so had withdrawn $2,000.
Note to self: Do NOT place things on roof of car!
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Post by Twoddle on Apr 3, 2019 8:44:47 GMT
I've only just realised that I was two years adrift in my heading for this thread. I could claim it was an April Fool joke, but really we all know it was plain idiocy.
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Post by Twoddle on Apr 3, 2019 9:03:33 GMT
I can never understand the wicked mentality of people who would steal money in the way you described, Verbivore. The human race must have sunk really low for such behaviour to be considered normal and acceptable, but thank goodness there was at least one mortal who was sufficiently considerate, honest and civilised to take your wallet and non-cash items to the police.
By contrast, some years ago a friend and his wife were back-packing through New Zealand and stopped at a café for a snack. They were an hour's walk further up the track before either of them realised that they'd left one of their rucksacks - the one containing their passports, their credit and debit cards, and all of their cash - in the restaurant at the table where they'd sat. They almost ran back to the restaurant but it was nearly another hour before they got there, where they discovered the rucksack, unopened and in pristine condition, waiting for them behind the counter, it having been handed to the café owner by a customer. They obtained a lifelong affection for, and a high opinion of, Kiwis as a result of this incident.
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Post by Verbivore on Apr 13, 2019 10:58:15 GMT
A series of videos by The New Yorker’s Comma Queen. Short, simple, informative, and entertaining (for language geeks at least). Perhaps I should reference them in my style guide for the newspaper so that my successors can more readily grasp these basic concepts. It was gratifying – or ego-massaging – that during my recent five weeks' vacation the paper employed two people to substitute for me, and they couldn't handle the pace; the printer's deadline was missed all five weeks, whereas I've missed it twice in a decade. They'll need to get up to speed in order to take over my work when I retire in September (though it won't be my problem if they don't).
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Post by Verbivore on Apr 13, 2019 21:44:05 GMT
Hypercorrection gone askew?
A sentence I encountered in the course of my work yesterday:
The person I visited, whom’s house had recently burned down … .
I suppose it's an improvement (?) on that's (so many folk use that for who/m – a major source of the irrits to me). People criticise me for my insistence on who/m rather than that when referring to people, but I was pleased to note the Comma Queen's approach (see previous post) to these usages: who/m for people (and, as she allows, named pets), that for objects.
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Apr 13, 2019 22:55:59 GMT
I am on holiday for a few days and will listen to the videos later.
In the meantime, I was driving by Stratford upon Avon yesterday and recalled an anecdote regarding which I would welcome some help.
In Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet says to Horatio,
“There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will”
So far so good, but I recall, some years ago reading a story by a Shakespearean actor who mentioned going a country walk (near Stratford upon Avon?) and meeting two men who were working by the roadside. The actor asked about their work and one of the men said, “I rough hew them and he shapes the ends”. The actor was thrilled to hear this in a modern context. Does anyone recognise this story and is able perhaps to name the actor or the nature of the work the two men were doing? Hedge-laying?
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Post by Verbivore on Apr 13, 2019 23:11:57 GMT
All I can offer, LJH, is this from the OED:
rough-hew, v: To hew (timber, etc.) roughly; to shape out roughly, give crude form to; to work or execute in the rough,
and this from the American Oxford:
rough-hewn, adj: denoting wood or stone that has been cut with a tool such as an axe, so that its surface is not smooth: rough-hewn logs.
The Am. Oxford entry gives the derivative rough-hew (verb), but gives no other detail on it.
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Post by Verbivore on Apr 14, 2019 4:59:02 GMT
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Apr 14, 2019 17:13:58 GMT
Thank you Vv for your response but I actually believe the reference is to hedge-laying where, in some styles, vertical posts are hammered into the ground and the hedge elements are bent and tied to them as in the pictures on the website below. I think the posts are “rough-hewed” from larger poles and their ends are “shaped” (i.e. trimmed) to a point to facilitate their being hammered into the ground. I was mainly wondering if I am correct in my assumption but also the name of the actor in question. www.gardensillustrated.com/garden-design/how-to-lay-a-hedge/
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Post by Verbivore on Apr 19, 2019 13:27:40 GMT
Life in the slow lane? I recently encountered the (to me) new term New York Minute in a spoken narrative and wondered what it meant. Having lived in NY in the early ’80s my first expectation was that a NYM might imply a span considerably shorter than 60 seconds. Seems I was right. Am I the only one here who’d not previously encountered New York Minute? (If so, I plead a considerable ignorance of popular culture.) Perhaps the term hadn’t been coined or wasn’t yet current during my domicile in NYC. Desultory research reveals: Urban Dictionary (first entry 2003) New York MinuteA New York minute is an instant. Or as Johnny Carson once said, it's the interval between a Manhattan traffic light turning green and the guy behind you honking his horn. It appears to have originated in Texas around 1967. It is a reference to the frenzied and hectic pace of New Yorkers' lives. A New Yorker does in an instant what a Texan would take a minute to do. Merriam-Webster New York Minutea very brief span of time : INSTANT, FLASH If he asks if everything is to your liking, he does it in a tone that suggests he'll fix any little thing that's wrong in a New York minute. — John Mariani … no-one believes for a New York minute that 16 acres of prime Manhattan real estate will be left undeveloped … — Cathleen McGuigan Merriam-Webster Thesaurus Synonyms of New York Minutebeat, eyeblink, flash, heartbeat, instant, jiff, jiffy, minute, moment, nanosecond, second, shake, split second, trice, twinkle, twinkling, wink
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Post by Dave Miller on Apr 19, 2019 16:14:42 GMT
You’re not alone, Vv. I’d not heard it before, either.
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Post by Twoddle on Apr 19, 2019 17:24:16 GMT
I've heard it only once, when Harrison Ford was asked on a chat show whether he's consider doing another Indiana Jones film. "In a New York minute", was his reply.
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Apr 19, 2019 23:49:34 GMT
Not exactly relevant, but it reminds me of a country mile. But I had never heard of a New York minute. .
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