posted
"Honey, I don't like you sleeping with that other woman, even though both of 'our' children are a result of my seeping with another man."
Yeah, I even feel sorry for her. She cheated and shouldn't have, but she still had to have it rubbed in her face that her husband was sleeping with another (younger, hotter) woman 3x a week. I'd feel bad for her for that alone, much less the embarrassment of the "2nd reveal."
Though arguably the "2nd reveal" does mitigate somewhat my feeling bad for her in the 1st place.
Posts: 1323 | Registered: Aug 2001
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posted
No offense, Magson, but a question to the forum: Is it OK to be mad at reality TV for turning "reveal" into a noun? (I mean, is "revelation" just too religious-sounding?)
Posts: 4287 | Registered: Mar 2005
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posted
People who are guilty of a specific sin are often the most vocally aggressive in discussing it.
I've heard people accuse their spouses of infidelity over the most stupid things, only to find out later the spouse was actually cheating at the time.
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posted
Could I be mad at them for popularizing the nouned form of the word? (Hee, I just verbed noun!)
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quote:Originally posted by Mucus: I'm thinking ...
Yup! German national health insurance will cover infertility treatment, including the first three tries at IVF. Why would anyone pay thousands to a neighbor to impregnate his wife when he could have gone to a doctor and had the government pick up the cost?
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quote:Originally posted by scifibum: Could I be mad at them for popularizing the nouned form of the word? (Hee, I just verbed noun!)
Only if you show proper outrage at the US airlines for inventing the word "deplane'. It makes me cringe every time I hear it. 'Disembark' is a perfectly good English word, why not use it.
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quote:Originally posted by scifibum: No offense, Magson, but a question to the forum: Is it OK to be mad at reality TV for turning "reveal" into a noun? (I mean, is "revelation" just too religious-sounding?)
Seventy years ago, people were still kvetching over "contact" as a verb. I figure that "reveal" as a noun simply balances the universe.
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: Only if you show proper outrage at the US airlines for inventing the word "deplane'. It makes me cringe every time I hear it. 'Disembark' is a perfectly good English word, why not use it.
I'm normally a bit of a stickler but that one doesn't bother me. Considering that disembark basically means to get off a boat, why not have an airplane-specific term?
Now, "interface" used instead of "interact" bugs me to death.
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quote:I'm normally a bit of a stickler but that one doesn't bother me. Considering that disembark basically means to get off a boat, why not have an airplane-specific term?
We don't "plane" when we get on the plane -- we board. Why in the world then should we "deplane" rather than "disembark"? It works just fine on non-US airlines. If 'disembark' is too big a word for Americans understand, why not say "get off the plane", it only adds two syllables?
And now that I've said that, some idiot airline is going to start "planing" rather than boarding, and will start having "planing passes". Arrrggg!
Why do Americans have to be so obtuse and stubborn about doing things their own way even when its clearly a worse way (metric system vs. US engineering system, dates, toilets, electicity . . .).
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posted
I like the UK dating system. It goes rationally in order of smallest unit of time to largest (dd/mm/yy).
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quote:Now, "interface" used instead of "interact" bugs me to death.
Curious. I see the two as having subtle but distinctly different meanings. "Interface", implies to make or a facilitate a connection, whereas "interact" implies any kind of reciprocal action. So Interfacing is a specific form of interaction.
If I say "Joe's job is to interface with media", it implies that he is to act as a bridge connecting other parts of the company with the media. If his job is to interact with the media, it does not have the same implication.
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quote:Originally posted by mr_porteiro_head: How are non-US toilets supposedly superior?
My experiences with non-US toilets were not pleasant.
What specific kind of non-US toilets were you using and how recently? I'm sure there are worse designs than the common US household toilet, but there are much better designs as well. Toilets that are now standard in much of Europe use a syphoning mechanism instead of a "flapper" so that you never have to jiggle the handle to get them to stop running after they are flushed. They also have a half flush and a full flush option.
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quote:Originally posted by paigereader: Why do you get "released" from jail or the hospital? When you go in are you leased?
Release is a fine English word which has been used in this context since at least the 14th century. It stems from the same latin roots as the word relax and is not a cognate of the word "lease".
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posted
Guys, this thread is way off topic. Can we get back on track and start talking about having sex with our neighbors' wives?
Posts: 8741 | Registered: Apr 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Eaquae Legit: I like the UK dating system. It goes rationally in order of smallest unit of time to largest (dd/mm/yy).
But we say March 31, 2009. The US system just parallels that.
In other parts of the world, they also say "31 March, 2009". The fact that Americans are consistent in doing things in an irrational way doesn't make it rational.
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Actuall, I guess I should as "what is what?" since I have no idea what goes on either side of that equation.
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posted
For completion, I should probably post the sentence leading up to the snippet, which you so kindly extrapolated for me:
quote:I've been finding more and more recently that what I believe in my mind is rarely objectively true outside of it. On an unrelated note, I'd just like to say that The Rabbit is brilliant,
quote:Originally posted by Eaquae Legit: I like the UK dating system. It goes rationally in order of smallest unit of time to largest (dd/mm/yy).
But we say March 31, 2009. The US system just parallels that.
In other parts of the world, they also say "31 March, 2009". The fact that Americans are consistent in doing things in an irrational way doesn't make it rational.
Actually, I think 31 March 2009 is more common. The only reason for the comma is to separate the two numbers, and if you reverse the day and month, it becomes unnecessary.
And yes, the American way is dumb, but I think our conservation of "u"s in words like color, favor, flavor, honor, and so on, more than make up for it.
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quote:I'm normally a bit of a stickler but that one doesn't bother me. Considering that disembark basically means to get off a boat, why not have an airplane-specific term?
We don't "plane" when we get on the plane -- we board. Why in the world then should we "deplane" rather than "disembark"? It works just fine on non-US airlines. If 'disembark' is too big a word for Americans understand, why not say "get off the plane", it only adds two syllables?
Disembark is wrong. We embark on a journey; we don't embark onto a plane. Deboard would fit better, but I think deplane is more clear.
quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: Why do Americans have to be so obtuse and stubborn about doing things their own way even when its clearly a worse way (metric system vs. US engineering system, dates, toilets, electicity . . .).
Our TV and spelling is better. Our dates and electricity and measurements suck.
What's different about toilets?
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quote:Originally posted by Strider: If even talking about it is sin, I'm in HUGE trouble.
Or at least my mind is.
You weren't merely talking about it. You were encouraging it.
Sinner!
*stones again for good measure*
I was encouraging other people to talk about yet other people who have committed adultery.
If that's the kind of thing you can get stoned over, you'd need like a whole book to figure out all these rules! And then probably more books analyzing that book. I mean, you could spend your whole life just studying this stuff. I can't imagine there are people crazy enough to do something like that.
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quote:Disembark is wrong. We embark on a journey; we don't embark onto a plane. Deboard would fit better, but I think deplane is more clear.
No. The word embark originally meant to board a vessel, this is still the first definition in the OED, the freeonlinedictionary, and websters dictionary. To disembark meant to get off the vessel. Those two words used in that way go back at least as far as the mid sixteenth century. The use of the word "embark" to mean to begin a journey or some other venture are more modern.
Board has replaced the word embark in current usage, but the two are still synonyms. Disembark is the correct English word for getting off a boat, train, or airplane.
"Deplane" is a crime against the english language. Definitely a stoning offense if ever there was one.
[ March 31, 2009, 05:43 PM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]
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quote:Our TV and spelling is better. Our dates and electricity and measurements suck.
What's better about American TV? US broadcast technology has lagged behind European standards for decades. If you are talking content, that's clearly a matter of opinion. The German standard definition broadcast technology is quantitatively and qualitatively superior.
US spelling is indeed a modest improvement over British English spelling, but we could still learn a great deal from countries like Denmark which have much more phonetic languages and correspondingly higher literacy rates.
I already answered the question about the toilets.
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posted
I think the 'u' is a waste, but I agree that better phonetic spellings would be nice. I also agree with our singluar 'math' instead of the European/Australian 'maths'.
Also disembark is a perfectly good word, but I've never heard anybody say 'deplane' the fact my spell check accepts it concerns me. Can you tell a spell check to start marking a word as erroneous?
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quote:Originally posted by kmbboots: We say "mathmatics".
And the point of an abbreviation is to abbreviate. I just don't like the sound of 'maths" I get that there are abbreviations that tack an s on at the end to talk about plurals, 'autos' 'sweats' 'fridges' 'comps' but math just doesn't feel like one of those words.
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