#fun with english

[king-of-men]

Badly calibrated but directionally correct.

I felt straight up downright left out in there <- sentence composed mostly of directions

[petermorwood]

Thoughts that go "Bump" in the night...

After which I lie awake, staring at the ceiling, knowing that getting up to check a reference book will easily resolve the problem.

Except...

It's four o'clock in the morning.

I'm nice and warm and pretty drowsy.

By the time I decide to get up I'll be asleep again.

By morning I'll have forgotten the thought that woke me up.

Though not always.

For instance...

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A boat can fit onto a ship, but a ship can't fit onto a boat.

Submarines are known as boats not ships, but they're outliers since in normal circumstances neither boats nor ships are meant to sink, and the ones which do seldom or never come back up again. Submarines, on the other hand, can submerge and rise at will.

Though not always, as in the memorably daft K-Class, which was steam-powered, meaning with boilers needing air intakes and funnels to let the smoke out. As one wag said: "Too Many Holes!"

The boilers had to be shut down and the funnels folded away every time the boat submerged, a procedure which could take almost 30 minutes.

An emergency "crash dive" might happen a lot faster but if, during all that haste, someone forgot to close just one of the too-many holes, things could go very wrong very fast and a crash dive could be just a crash.

Or indeed a crush, because these subs were so long that it was possible for the bow to reach hull-failure depth while the stern was still on the surface. Not much fun.

As another wag put it:

"I say, No. 1, my end is diving, what's your end doing?"

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The knightly honorific "Sir" and "Dame" isn't an upgraded version of Mr, Mrs or Ms. The honour is granted to one person, not to their family, so it goes with that person's own name not the family one.

Thus It's not "Sir McKellan", "Sir Pratchett", or "Sir Stewart" but Sir Ian, Sir Terry and Sir Patrick.

It's not "Dame Andrews", "Dame Dench" or "Dame Mirren" but Dame Julie, Dame Judi and Dame Helen.

Incidentally, the wife of a Knight adds the title "Lady" to her surname, but the husband of a Dame adds nothing to his.

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When writing abbreviations is it Dot or Not?

In British usage there's (or used to be) no dot if the abbreviation ends with the same letter as the full word.

For exampe Colonel / Doctor / Mister / Mistress (Missus) abbreviate to Col / Dr / Mr / Mrs without a dot, but Captain / Professor / Reverend abbreviate to Capt. / Prof. / Rev. with a dot.

Some style guides said British Broadcasting Corporation / BBC, United Kingdom / UK, Royal Air Force / RAF etc. should not only have dots but also a space after each - B. B. C. / U. K. / R. A. F. and so on.

First the spaces went away, then the dots went away, until now it's BBC, UK, RAF, which may be less pedantically accurate but also more tidy.

A bit less like someone's been eating a poppy-seed roll...

A lot of this stuff can appear in a Style Guide, but there are times when an Out-Of-Style guide would be more useful.

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Now, back to sleep...

[kyliafanfiction]

It is possible to:

Want a thing.

Want to want a thing.

Want a thing and want to want the thing.

Want a thing and not want to want the thing.

[got-into-worm-by-mistake]

We lifted a corner of a second floor’s floor, 

Nothing wrong with this phrasing, but I do love the oddites of English :rofl:

[petermorwood]

‘Pon my soul, when I made trial of this moving image I was chagrined to perceive, and that right soon, that th' “Old English” claimed spoken therein was, i’truth, nothing of the sort.

Neither was it the “Middle English” of Chaucer, nor yet th' “Early Modern English” of Will Shakespeare and his fellows - to which, I grant, in certain particulars of style and rhythm it hews right close.

Instead ‘twas Modern English of the current day, albeit couched in such structured formality and choice of words as might lend a feigned veneer of age.

Despite this exposition of linguistic pedantry, 'tis plain the purpose and intent of such antique speech i' so modern a setting is to amuse, and, of a certainty, amuse it does!

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Eald Ænglisċ ne lǣcð swā and ne sīeð swā "Modern English".

(Cough) That was a really bad translation - I haven't studied Old English since the late 1970s - but it conveys my intended meaning, which is that Old English doesn't look like, and doesn't sound like, "Modern English".

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At this point the usual approach is to provide an example from "Beowulf" in the original. Here's something different.

Bealocwealm hafað fréone frecan forþ onsended giedd sculon singan gléomenn sorgiende on Meduselde þæt he ma no wære his dryhtne dyrest and mæga deorost.

This is Éowyn's lament for Théodred, from "The Two Towers" (extended version, I think.) Various translations are on-line, but most are word-for-word and a bit clunky, while some seem just wrong.

Here's a paraphrase rather than a translation, with an attempt at the alliteration common in Old English poetry:

A worthy warrior goes forth to death's dark domain. Mourning minstrels sing now their sorrowful songs In Meduseld the mead-hall, that he is no more, Lost alike to loving kinfolk and his noble lord.

Here's how it sounds in the film:

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Here, too, is an Old English translation of "Where now is the horse and the rider?" It's mostly a foreign language to modern ears, but on several occasions the spelling of OE words hides an audible echo from the past of what Modern English has become.

Give it a listen.

Here is how it sounded in "The Two Towers".

RIP Bernard Hill...

[petermorwood]

"Monitory" or "Admonitory"?

A question raised by @rembrandtswife about This Post.

"Monitory" is correct here. ( @dduane uses it in this entry of the Young Wizards "Errantry Concordance".)

Both are from the same root, but while monitory / monition is a be-careful warning, as in "watch out", admonitory / admonition with its prefix ad- (to, towards) is a behave-yourself rebuke, as in "You'd better watch out."

(Links are to the on-line Merriam-Webster dictionary).

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However, when I saw the word I thought of a nugget from history which amused us both when we first encountered it and must have been pretty memorable to recall so easily, Archbishop Dunbar of Glasgow's "Great Monition of Cursing".

Oddly enough, this monition is a rebuke, so it's actually an admonition. Maybe in the 1500s there was a difference between admonishing one person and monishing the whole bunch of them, including their individual body parts, their comings and goings, their crops and beasts, their goods and chattels... (Once Dunbar got going, he didn't mess around.)

Or maybe once a furious Glaswegian archbishop had turned admonishment up to eleven so hard that the knob fell off, he got an exemption from the more pettifogging rules of grammar.

Welcome to The Fun That Is The English Language (even when the actual language in use is Scots...)

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The Great Monition is more than 1500 words of episcopal fulmination directed against the Border Reivers - lawless clans who lived along the English-Scottish Borders and ran that "Debatable Land" as they saw fit, in a manner not too dissimilar to how certain other Families ran 1920s Chicago.

This involved what I once described as "undocumented reallocation of livestock ownership by night", but also kidnapping for ransom, arson, murder, blackmail and multi-generational feuds, all the merry Romantick stuff that's entertaining to read about as long as it happened long ago and far away even (or perhaps especially) if it involves ancestors which, in this instance, it does...

Or, as I wrote about ten years back:

Is your house a smoking, blackened shell?

If it’s still intact, have you been paying to keep it that way?

Are your cattle heading for the other side of the Border?

Are all your household goods with them?

Are you expecting the ransom demand for your wife or son any day now?

Did you see one of the men who did all these things?

Congratulations, you have just Identified a Border Reiver.

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The Great Monition can be read HERE in both its original Scots and an English translation. Ignore the bit in bold, a grovelling modern prayer for forgiveness which would have made the Reivers laugh their steel bonnets off.

What's a steel bonnet? It's AKA a "burgonet", and it's one of these.

Part of the Monition was carved into The Cursing Stone, currently on display in Carlisle...

...which - stone or curse, no-one's quite sure - has since been blamed for such sundry misfortunes as fire, floods, foot-and-mouth disease and even (gasp, woe) football failures.

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People even re-enact being Reivers, with accurate costume but (probably or at least hopefully) less-accurate behaviour...

[ffeatherisffeather]

[gallade-x-treme]

imagine being such a 12 outta 10 that your mere smile winds up domesticating the nation's deadliest hitman 😳

[petermorwood]

Even to a (mostly) Cat Person, that's really, really cute. :->

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ETA: @take-a-dip-in-the-deadpool posted: "I used voice to text and didn't proof read lol" and made the appropriate correction...

...so none of the following linguistic pedantry applies any more, and I hope it was accepted in the intended spirit of amusement at how English Spellings Are Eccentric rather than any kind of snark.

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The original doggo video remains just as cute as ever.

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I've caught VTT alternatives from my own app (Dragon Naturally Speaking) hinting at a feline i.e. nasty sense of humour.

Sometimes it doesn't bother with a homophone like pallet-palate-palette / breech-breach or indeed beach-peach, but "hears" a word like prostrate, Regina, glands, rowlocks, can't, etc., and substitutes a "Sounds Like" that's almost always highly inappropriate.

Yet mostly it works superbly, suggesting that while the app is free of any virus, I'm not so sure about gremlins...

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Of course linguistic pedantry now requires me to point out that the correct spelling for that term is "palate" not "pallet".

And, because English Is Like That, it's not "palette" either.

Finally, three palate cleansers.

A bit of a pallet cleanser for everyone.

[prince4knights]

knights should let me touch their swords because I'm curious about the craftsmanship, and definitely not so I can flirt using thinly veiled sheath-themed euphemisms

[ivarismaybecrazy]

IMPULSE VS JIMMY IN TORTILLA SLAPPING!!!

feat skizz surprising impy with a rouge slap lmao

[zan0tix]

ALPHA KIDS: Draw your best friends!

DIRK: I'd say I'm better at one on one character interaction work of the more intimate variety, but I think this piece came together nicely. DIRK: Fun for the whole family style wholesomeness, any motherfucker in the radius of a screen displaying this image will instantly get hit with a sore case of heartburn and their tear ducts will clock in overtime at the weeping factory.

ROXY: im so proud of these i think these are my best designs yet :3 but omg dirk callie and jake were SOOO peculiar about their damn designs over my shoulder. jake wanted me to clarify that even in pink pen form his little guy is BLUE. so there. sigh this is the one occasion they could take notes from janey.. JUST LET LE ARTIST WORK!

JANE: Boy! I don't draw often but I always was fond of calligraphy growing up. I was kind of inspired by all of the other's works, but especially Calliope's swirls she puts in her art. It's very fun to add!

JAKE: Im not quite the best with posing, but i find the head very fun to study! Especially skulls.. so good ole calliope makes for the perfect muse! (hehe)

CALLIOPE: i realized i hadn't ever made a piece with Us in the same place at once. u_u CALLIOPE: bUt since it's reality now here's all of Us together, United at last! ^u^

==->

[petermorwood]

A photo which also clarifies phrases like "getting your (add body part of choice) caught in the wringer"...

Deciding it was spelt Ringer or Wringer was never an issue in our house, because this contraption was always called a "mangle" (that's its Wikipedia entry) and wet clothes were "put through the mangle". The "getting your..." phrases also always involved a mangle.

"Wringing" something like a hand towel or dishcloth was done by hand, twisting them like a rope to get the water out.

From that there's "wringing your hands", "wringing someone's neck", "wringing information out of someone" or indeed just looking / feeling "wrung out".

"Mangled" in that same figurative sense usually implies a messy level of damage, whether to a person, a vehicle or, sometimes even an awkward attempt to speak a foreign language - "sprechen Sie botch"... :-P

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Mum actually had two mangles, one built onto a Hoover washing-machine rather like this one, into which It folded away for storage.

It was a very economical contraption - forget to put the lid on securely while it was running, and the water agitation was vigorous enough that besides the laundry inside, it would try to wash - or at least manage to drench - the floor, walls, ceiling and any nearby children, all at once.

The other mangle, probably the older of the two, was of all things an Acme just like this (it clamped onto a stand)...

...and as a kid who spent many happy hours in the Cartoon Cinema on Great Victoria Street - which as the name suggests ran a constant programme of Looney Tunes, Merrie Melodies, etc. etc. - I always kept an eye open for our laundry mangle making an appearance to do something unnecessary to Wile E. Coyote.

I waited in vain, because though Acme supplied, and Wile E. got mangled by, falling anvils, explosive bird-seed and malfunctioning rockets, he never once got mangled by a mangle...

The phrase "to put [someone] through the wringer" is, of course, referring to a laundry wringer, a formerly popular but now little-used home appliance that looks like this:

It's easy to understand why being put through one would be an ordeal!

So here's the question I have: for the folks who just found out from this post what a laundry wringer is, and have been spelling it "through the ringer" all this time, what were you picturing when you said "ringer"?

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

OP parcticing English (Cr 阿琛英文剧场)

[petermorwood]

How do YOU say...

..."Chieftain"?

Is it cheeftin?

Is it cheeftun?

Is it cheeft'n?

Is it cheeftayn?

Or is it none of the above?

I heard that last one (-tayn) for the first time just now on Youtube (the speaker was an Englishman) and now I'm wondering if it's a common variant, a regional one, or a speaker-personal one.

Forward to 2:11 for first use.

[yudol-skorbi]

my worldstate is pretty fun