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Post by Little Jack Horner on Feb 21, 2022 23:43:59 GMT
I have just come across this website from Merriam-Webster which lists the first time a word appeared in print searchable by date. One can insert any date and receive a list of “new words” for that year. I find many quite extraordinary for 1940, the year of my birth.
Bomber jacket Cherry picker Citizen’s arrest Acronym Cribsheet Flash flood Glass jaw Fortune cookie Dust off Estate-bottled
Free world Hardstanding Hatchet job Groundbreaker
To mention just a few. I am particularly astonished to see “acronym” dating from 1940.
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 22, 2022 0:50:37 GMT
LJH: Was this the site to which you refer?
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Feb 22, 2022 10:16:10 GMT
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 22, 2022 10:21:23 GMT
Ah – thanks, LJH.
*
Although American cinema is not my favourite entertainment, I’ve been pigging out lately on Sidney Poitier movies.
Tonight it was Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Soppy, romantic mush, but hey, it had Mr Poitier in it.
What struck me most was the flap-ts so evident in the theme song That’s the Story of Love. Every liddle (little) grated on my ears: to my elocution-trained former aspiring singer's ear (opera and Lieder) it was simply poor diction.
Yes, I know that the flap-t is an American speciality, and reluctantly I must accept that, but I can’t help feeling that the frequent liddles let down the film.
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Post by Twoddle on Feb 22, 2022 10:41:38 GMT
I discovered a new term in this morning’s news: Snapchat dysmorphia. Why people (men included) try to ‘improve’ on Nature is, I posit, vanity, or perhaps poor self-esteem. Dissatisfaction is born of comparisons of themselves with others, increasingly via (anti)social media such as Snapchat and Instagram. ’Tis a 21st-century disease of the mind and a 'selfie' society. Good grief, those selfie filters would have their work cut out improving my fizzog!
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Post by Twoddle on Feb 22, 2022 10:47:34 GMT
Today's date - 22.02.2022 - is not only a palindrome, but if you use the kind of numbers you see on a calculator it's also an ambigram.
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Feb 22, 2022 11:19:11 GMT
If you add 22:22 to represent the time this evening it would not be a palindrome but it would certainly have a lot of number twos on it.
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Feb 22, 2022 22:22:28 GMT
In regard to the palindrome date, someone has sent me this. It takes things just that little bit further.
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 25, 2022 11:31:57 GMT
This is a technically induced error – autocorrect or a voice-to-text – surely. It’s from an article on the wet weather we’re having at present, where in places half a metre of rain has fallen over a few hours. "If you're unlucky enough to be next to some typography or some persistent rain bands, you could see totals up to 500 mm, without a question." I've seen some 500 mm typography, but I'm sure that's not what the article refers to.
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Post by Dave Miller on Feb 25, 2022 15:03:34 GMT
I’m sure they meant “topography”, Vv, but even then it’s a silly thing to say.
It’s relevant when the topography that you’re next to is of the type that will induce rainfall (eg you’re near the top of a high, rising slope which faces towards the prevailing winds), but everyone is “next to some topography”. It might be the topography of a flat salt lake, the Himalayas, Kansas farmland, or desert dunes … but it's all ”topography”!
It’s the same nonsensical shortening of the facts which leads people to say “I’ve got a temperature”. Well, of course you have!
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 25, 2022 17:52:24 GMT
I’m sure they meant “topography”, Vv, but even then it’s a silly thing to say. […] Indeed so, Dave. The article was so littered with nonsense that I gave up reading it part way through, but the typography for topography was the first instance that alerted me. The increasing reliance on voice-to-text software and autocorrect is fraught with similar silliness. If voice-to-text was used, I suspect the person talking to the machine was a closed-mouth * Aussie with sloppy diction. * The stereotype of Aussies talking without moving the lips is attributed to the need to keep the flies out of one's mouth.
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Feb 25, 2022 21:06:16 GMT
As I have mentioned before, one has to be very careful with voice to print software. I thought that Vv said he didn’t have any problems but I certainly do. A few weeks ago I bought an antique vase and wrote to a correspondent to say that I was attaching a photograph of my vase to my email. I learnt to be very careful to read what I had written because the software produced, “I attach a photograph of my arse”. It could have been very embarrassing as my correspondent was completely unknown to me apart from online.
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 25, 2022 21:28:17 GMT
LJH: I don't have problems of my own with voice-to-text – principally because I don't use it; but many are the edits I've had to make to others' material that's been recorded that way.
One client, who claimed "I have a book inside me just waiting to find a way out" but who was subliterate and computer illiterate, dictated his book to a voice recorder. I then loaded that recording into my text-to-speech software (Dragon Naturally Speaking, an early version) and tried to make sense of the output. The editing required was at least as extensive as the worst written MS I've worked on; the software just didn't cope well with the chap's broad (i.e. 'standard') Aussie speech.
Even more are the edits I've had to make to autocorrect-generated garbage; that software feature is particularly bad at mangling names, both personal and geographical. One newspaper columnist whose work I proofed weekly was very reliant on autocorrect, and because she was the Entertainment editor there were many, many garbled names for me to correct each week.
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Post by Dave Miller on Feb 25, 2022 21:45:00 GMT
As I have mentioned before, one has to be very careful with voice to print software. I thought that Vv said he didn’t have any problems but I certainly do. A few weeks ago I bought an antique vase and wrote to a correspondent to say that I was attaching a photograph of my vase to my email. I learnt to be very careful to read what I had written because the software produced, “I attach a photograph of my arse”. It could have been very embarrassing as my correspondent was completely unknown to me apart from online. Much of the available voice-to-text software is American, and the Americans don’t say “varze”, of course. The software may well have correctly written vase if you’d said “vayze”.
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 26, 2022 4:38:22 GMT
[…] “I attach a photograph of my arse”. […] For reason unknown that reminds me of the Ronnies' Fork 'Andles.
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