Huh. Coates's looks pretty different from Sullivan's, which seems largely the same (in terms of the amount of text placed before a jump). Don't make me look at McMegan's.
Oh, I hadn't checked Sullivan yet, just Coates.
I want the judge to slam your annoying pro se person.
I have hopes. My office has been full of horrible boxes and boxes of paper relating to her case for two years now (most of my cases are one-redweld (those big reddish expandable folders) deals). Being able to send those back to the client would make me very happy.
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Olivia Wilde aka 13 aka The Hot Chick from House is the daughter of Andrew and Leslie Cockburn (niece of Alexander Cockburn, and related to all the rest of that clan of Irish writers). Who knew?
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Re: The Atlantic Redesign -- I hate it, but it won't change my habits.
"Something about the 'one sentence teaser, click through for the post' format is just more trouble than I'm willing to go to."
Likewise. I pretty much stopped reading Tbogg when he/she moved to Firedoglake, precisely for this reason.
Who knew?
GQ readers. (A former resident of my house didn't bother to change his subscription address.)
The ideal format for a blog is all of the material above the fold unless the piece is long, and when you click "Read More" the post unfolds as part of the front page, so you can scroll up to the post above and down to the one below. Non of this click to read a single post and then when you want to read the next one you have to sit and wait for the same old rubbish ads and decoration to download. Also the now ubiquitous "share this" link should require an actual click to pop up a window - this bollocks where just accidentally moving your mouse over the link pops up something that blocks the stuff you're interested in is bloody annoying.
Finally, anyone who puts anything on their page that automatically starts playing when the page is loaded should be shot.
- this bollocks where just accidentally moving your mouse over the link pops up something that blocks the stuff you're interested in is bloody annoying.
Tell me about it. A whole bunch of websites I read have recently started doing this and it drives me nuts.
10: Yeah, I've been fiddling with a wordpress blog, and you can turn that preview feature-bug off. But I keep wondering: who the fuck wants it on in the first place?
Yep. Fallows is the only one that I'll click through for. Coates was mostly interesting, but not enough for all that back-and-forth.
I think the one-sentence lead may disadvantage Coates. He does a nice build-up to an interesting conclusion in long pieces, but I don't always know that I'm intrigued until the second or third paragraph. (Hey, he IS going to land this thing. Good one!)
The really annoying thing about the preview pop ups is that they take just as long to load as the actual page they are linking to. What's the point of a preview if it isn't quicker that the view?
Oh, I kinda like the preview. Saves me from clicking over if I can tell there isn't a new post.
OMG. Remember when people used to argue about full text in RSS feeds? Now we have to worry about full text on the actual home page? Too annoying for words.
But I keep wondering: who the fuck wants it on in the first place?
When Wordpress initially introduced it they turned it on by default (sort of a smaller-scale version of the Buzz debacle). It was very annoying.
There's a reason I don't read Spackerman enough. I click through on links, glance at other stuff but can't stand the one sentence 'read more' posts. Unless you're Glenn Greenwald most of your posts should be up in full text. Also, the FoE readmore style is much better. Shorter me: what everybody else said.
I read all blogs (including this one) from Google Reader, so I don't see those pages at all...or, uh, any of them, because they renamed their rss feeds without a polite announcement at the old address. Unless that's coming. Anyway.
(Yes, I then open the full page to see comments.)
14: Megan (1) likes the preview thing (2) hates wine (3) thinks California's not insane (4) hates puns.
It's becoming evident she's right only about the couches thing and wrong in all non-couch instances.
She's also wrong about the couch thing.
18: That's who I was feeling guilty about not reading -- I was trying to remember which blog I should care about that I don't read at all because of the format, and it's Spack.
It's becoming evident she's right only about the couches thing and wrong in all non-couch instances.
Careful, she is also excellent at holding grudges.
21: I'm holding out judgment until I hear her opinions on nonstick cookware, Fat Tire Brewing Company, stand mixers, and whether having a famous chef spend five minutes scattering dessert all over the tablecloth is an experience worth paying a lot of money for. Oh, and also the phrase "mom jeans".
3) I think California is working under an insane system, if that helps.
Teo is wrong about the wrongness of Megan about the couch thing.
M/tch is wrong about the wrongness of teo regarding the wrongness of Megan about couches.
Unless teo links to an xkcd about it, in which case I'll withdraw my support.
I think comment 30 should be sung to the tune of "there's a wart on the frog on bump on the log in the hole at the bottom of the sea . . .".
M/tch is wrong about New Belgium Brewing Company, starting with its name. I don't care about the rest of the stuff in 27.
Well, not-working under an insane system.
Want to hear something even more crazy? A judge ruled our furloughs were illegal. There's lots more wrangling to be done, but we might get back pay. I fucking loved the furloughs, and getting back pay for them would make "embarrassment of riches" very accurate.
Fat Tire Brewing Company
You mean New Belgium?
Megan is the anti-heebie!
heebie's wrong about couches? I thought she was wrong only about that left-turn thing.
31: This seems like the most appropriate one, although it's still not particularly relevant.
"Also, the FoE readmore style is much better. "
The Fistful readmore style doesn't result in extra page views, so it's unlikely to be adopted anywhere else.
I suppose the one sentence teaser thing is meant to give even more page views, but I have to believe it's counterproductive.
What are M/tch's opinions regarding New Belgium? I dig New Belgium. But I don't particularly care for Fat Tire.
What are M/tch's opinions regarding New Belgium?
He's agin' it.
I don't like beer any more than I like wine. I presume it is the same deficiency in taste buds.
37: One link closer to the link re-directing script. I meant to discuss strategies on this with you at the meetup, but more pressing matters came up.
Where is Megan on the right to arm bears?
http://raincoaster.com/2008/08/18/fair-warning-bear-warning/
Since I do most of my reading on the iPhone, any blog with promiscuous previewing that demands clicking out of my RSS reader app to the site through Safari is pretty much a deal-breaker for me.
I don't care about the rest of the stuff in 27.
I'm not soliciting your opinion, wrong person.
Agin' New Belgium? Agin' La Folie? The Transatlantique Kriek? 1554? Bah.
I will attempt to distract neb from the link by basically agreeing with him about New Belgium/Fat Tire. I definitely prefer 1554 and Abbey among New Belgium beers. The nice thing about Fat Tire, though, is that it's very widely available, at least in NM, and considerably better than most of the other offerings at many places.
What is the deal with Fat Tire? I'd rather drink a Bud, and that's saying something, since I'm all about Long Hammer and Surly Furious these days..
I'm not against New Belgium. I like what they're trying to do, and I want to like them, but almost all of their beers are disappointing. I tried the Transatlantique Kriek a week or two ago. For the price, it's just not very interesting or good, and I love krieks. Would not buy again. Their Trippel isn't bad, but not worth seeking out specially. And that wood-aged one they came out with this year was interesting, but again not something I would ever crave or specifically seek out.
Bears Discover Fire is a great story. Ties in nicely with the post on shuffling off.
For anyone who has access to but has not yet tried the Real Ale Brewing Company's latest seasonal (Phoenix Double IPA), it's really good. And I'm not generally a huge fan of the trend of the last few years of Imperializing (i.e. amping up the hops and alcohol content) every known beer style. Phoenix is big and rich and hoppy, but also very nicely balanced and just plain delicious.
I thought the kriek was pretty interesting, actually; most of the other krieks I've had have either been extremely sour or oversweetened, and I thought it was nicely cherry-y and dry and kind of funky.
Of course, I only paid $3 for it.
You know what beer is surprisingly good and uncharacteristically not-stupidly-hopocalyptic despite its origin brewery? Sierra Nevada's (ridiculously named) Glissade.
18, 23 - ditto. Make it a pain to read your opinions and I won't.
I suspect that 38 is correct and it frosts my nads. Nads: Frosted. Dammit!
Also: the local beer shop is on about barleywine of late. Not really a fan, but maybe I'm missing something or haven't tried the right one.
I suppose the one sentence teaser thing is meant to give even more page views, but I have to believe it's counterproductive.
Depending on what metrics they use, they might be just fine with losing some readers if the page views go up from the ones who stay.
Barleywines have pretty variable flavor profiles.
55: I haven't been able to find a kriek I like very much over here in the States. Most are too sweet and syrupy. Cantillon is the gold standard for my palate.
60: That just means they don't always taste the same, right?
I think M/tch's problem with New Belgium is that he's accustomed to actual Belgian beers, and in that context NB's offerings are likely to be pretty unimpressive. I'm coming more from the context of restaurants that have three beers on tap: Bud, Bud Light, and Fat Tire.
63: Really? I figure it's almostly certainly got something to do with New Belgium's presentation.
65: Exactly! Around here, the sommelier comes to the table with the bottle of 1554 and then slowly pours and splashes it all over the tablecloth. It's just not my mugga.
63: It's the hype around New Belgium, mostly. I think this all started when you said something to the effect of "New Belgium, great microbrewery, or greatest microbrewery?" in some ancient thread. Can't find it now though.
Note that my experience of microbreweries is considerably more limited than many people's. Also, no one should take my opinions on matters of aesthetics or taste at all seriously.
I was going to say that I don't care about the redesign because I subscribe to Ta-Nehisi in Google Reader, and nothing had changed there. But then I realized that nothing had changed there because the RSS feed had stopped working at the point the redesign took effect. Ah well.
72: I'm going to need a link before I believe you.
I've had the La Folie and liked it, but there's only so much of finishing everyone else's glasses from the bottle I can take until the acid buildup in my stomach cries to be set free.
That said, I finally tried Rodenbach brown for the first time. Much easier on the tummy.
75: Ah, I misunderstood. I thought you were saying that in the old thread teo had claimed that Russian River was perhaps the greatest microbrewery. That wasn't my memory of it, but I couldn't find it, so I was asking for a link to that thread, because I thought you'd found it.
But now I see what you were doing there.
I am a fan of Rodenbach, but I've never seen it down here in Texas. Some place in Cleveland had it on tap though.
75: "traditionally aggressively hopped"
Ah yes, the ancient, pre-1998 traditions of California microbreweries.
OT food question:
Anyone make a killer BBQ sauce that they would recommend? (I'm a philistine so I do expect BBQ sauce to be sweetish.)
79: Is there a genre/style of BBQ that you have in mind and are shooting for?
80: Pulled Pork. Guess that would have helped.
Also, I know it's terrible (feel free to lecture!), but when it comes to bottled beer I almost always prefer Sierra Nevada Pale Ale to most everything else available cheaply at my grocery. (Except for Mendocino Brewing beers - Red Tail is my preferred every day bottled beer.) There's something about its reliability in the bottle that is perfect for me and my limited beer palate. However, when it comes to on tap there are about 20 other beers at the very least that I would choose before it.
81.1: I've never made pulled pork so can't help.
81.2: I don't think that's terrible. I appreciate the reliability of Sierra Nevada too, and it's pretty widely available so is a good go-to beer when buying from a supermarket or the like.
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Termagant: not a kind of bird! Who knew? And why do gaps in vocabulary seem like a more telling indicator of ignorance than gaps in any other sort of general knowledge?
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81.1 revisited: well, I could make a suggestion about what pork to use, but . . . I won't.
77: Yeah, I only saw Rodenbach here for the first time abut an hour before I drank it. Heard about it forever. Before 1998 even.
81: Have you tried Sierra's Torpedo Ale yet? You're right, reliability is a big issue in the bottles. Sierra Nevada does a good job, but the Pale Ale seems a shadow of it's former (before 1998) self.
And why do gaps in vocabulary seem like a more telling indicator of ignorance than gaps in any other sort of general knowledge?
A lot of people feel that vocabulary is a very good indicator. That's why SATs and related aptitude tests continue to look a lot like vocabulary tests, even while other tests of general knowledge are rejected as being culturally biased.
No, no. That's Russian River.
Pliny the Elder is one of the greatest beers ever. New Belgium's Ranger IPA is pretty good, for New Belgium.
84: What is the name of the bird we are confusing with this?
79: Regarding BBQ sauce, my mom swears by The Patio in Chicagoland(!) and buys copious amounts of their sauce whenever she visits. Bear in mind: what the fuck does anyone from Chicago (including my sainted mum) know about BBQ sauce?
Not "confusing with", exactly. Just reasoning in a wholly unjustified phonology recapitulates phylogeny sort of way.
Have you tried Sierra's Torpedo Ale yet? You're right, reliability is a big issue in the bottles. Sierra Nevada does a good job, but the Pale Ale seems a shadow of it's former (before 1998) self.
I haven't - I'll get some when next I run out of beer. And I couldn't legally drink in 1998* so I'm afraid I've only ever known the pale shadow that is Pale Ale today.
*Of course, this does not mean that I never drank in 1998, but it does mean that my choices were limited to the sorts of things poor high schoolers drink.
88: There's a cocktail at Hearth in NYC called "Pliny the Elder," but it is, you know, a cocktail made with St. Germaine.
90: Thanks! The dreaded silent "p".
92: I should have said "I" not "we" in 89.
84: I feel your pain. For some reason I cannot keep the meaning of the word "risible" available - nearly every time I encounter it I either figure it out from context or look it up.
92: It does sound like any number of birds, in fairness. I knew the correct definition and I still associate it with birds as well.
the sorts of things poor high schoolers drink.
Ah, freshman year of high school, when my lips first met the taste of a piña colada Slurpee™ doused with shitty rum, followed by a can of Icehouse. *shudder*
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Embarrassment narrowly avoided watch: the company at which I am doing some work is moving. They have rented moving crates from a company that I guess donates some of the proceeds from the rental to breast cancer research. Therefore, all of the crates are pink. They are stacked in an already narrow hallway, leaving only enough room for one person to pass at a time. As I let one of the women from accounting (who was headed in the opposite direction) pass before I entered the hall with the crates, I just barely stopped my self from saying, brightly "tight fit in the pink tunnel, eh?"
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50: since I'm all about Long Hammer and Surly Furious these days..
I'm not sure about this Odinist beer, but did you know that we have Surly Furious on tap at [place where I work] now for $3 a pint during happy hour? And only $5 non-happy hour? You should stop in soon!
81: I once made "The Renowned Mr Brown" from Smoke & Spice and was surprised how nicely it was complemented by the recommended vinegar sauce, though I usually prefer sweet-ish tomato-based sauces (here's the recipes). I also once made a sweet-ish tomato-based sauce from Smoke & Spice and didn't think it was much better than what I usually buy in a bottle.
As far as bottled sauces are concerned, I think Spicy KC Masterpiece is totally fine. My current favorite Bone Suckin' Sauce.
Ah high school. I suppose the younger among us missed out on Meister Brau entirely. Lucky bastards.
84: I knew the word and its meaning, but also associate it with birds, like Paren. Also, I just now noticed that it has two a's and only one e, instead of the other way around. I don't think I've ever written it myself or even said it, just read it.
101: Thanks for the recommendations.
And thanks to Stanley too!
Also: termagant -> shrew -> IT'S MOLE!
99: "tight fit in the pink tunnel, eh?"
A former supervisor was not so lucky when she, in a mixed-gender meeting about reassigning desks, which included handy, lettered seating charts of the area to be rearranged, said "Oh, just put him in any one of those 'G' spots". And then she found $5. And she was semi-notorious for having had an affair with a much younger cow-orker. So yeah.
97, 103: this is comforting. Especially 97, given Paren's level of bird-knowledge. Out of curiosity, what other bird names does it summon for you?
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Unfogged dream last night: There was some kind of glitch in the site's code, and to fix it, Nosflow had to change something so that everyone's real name was displayed with their comments. Hilarity and chagrin ensued.
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Thanks, CCarp. I always liked how gentle and matter-of-fact it is.
Does () have a position on Moose Drool?
Ah, so that's why Google Reader suddenly swelled by 50 posts, all TNC's.
107: Sea birds, mostly - Gannets, Terns, Brants*, Cormorants. No idea why, since obviously they are not all that close to termagant, but I always imagine a bird somewhere close to these ones when I hear the word.
*Not quite a sea bird, but rather a goose that likes the shore.
Termagant: not a kind of bird! Who knew?
110: The first time I had Moose Drool, it was bottled (and I think rather old - not quite skunked but not tasting great either), and I managed to get food poisoning on the same day. It was hard to overcome that first encounter but I did have it on tap in Missoula and enjoyed it. You all have some fantastic bars.
108- Opinionated Grandma's long-secret identity was finally revealed to be Mrs. Ethel G. Bennimeyer of Cleveland, Ohio. Much to her chagrin.
108: I also had a dream about an Unfogged glitch last night, which had something to do with neb writing a script to rewrite and mock random comments that started accidentally posting them to the front page instead. It... wasn't the most coherent or interesting dream I've ever had.
I think this means I need to spend less time here.
PLEASE TAKE THAT COMMENT DOWN RIGHT AWAY IT IS PEOPLE LIKE YOU WHO ARE RUINING PRIVACY
Just yesterday I found myself saying "Maaaximum respect" to some confused soul.
Sea birds, mostly - Gannets, Terns, Brants*, Cormorants.
Also "Trogon".
I recently had an anxiety dream about an irritating case I'm working on that involved all the Unfogged lawyers milling about watching me screw up.
Elegant Trogons are gorgeous. Not a sea bird, though, so it doesn't fit with my strange association.
I think what adds to the confusion is that "termagant" is usually encountered in really old texts that sometimes have funny spellings or archaic forms of words anyway, so it's not unreasonable to assume it's an old way of writing "ptarmigan", like, I dunno, "ourang-outang" for "orangutan".
Or maybe I'm just making excuses because I, too, had no idea what "termagant" actually meant until today.
I continue to think that bird names are the great untapped treasure-trove of online pseuds. Inaccesible Island Rail was the greatest pseud ever. I am still mad that Parenthetical didn't go with the far superior "Ouzel" option. I realize no one else shares this view.
The inability to remember dreams is something I've never regretted.
There's no Google hit for "Madonna of the Permanganate", sadly.
I like when they name streets in alphabetical order, with a theme. Birds are as good a theme for a neighborhood as any.
124: Emerson shared your view. And I like it. I'm saving it for my next online iteration. (Really, I just thought everyone would be rather frustrated if I chose one thing and then immediately switched again. And by everyone, I mean LB.)
The other thing is that you can get from virago-sense to bird-sense very easily: termagant > harpy > ptarmigan. Though looking at pictures of ptarmigans, they look too nearly spherical to be all about the ripping talons; you might want an intermediate step between rapacious bird-woman and this fellow.
I continue to think that bird names are the great untapped treasure-trove of online pseuds. Inaccesible Island Rail was the greatest pseud ever. I am still mad that Parenthetical didn't go with the far superior "Ouzel" option. I realize no one else shares this view.
I was thinking about adopting the persona of bluff Edwardian adventurer Ruddy Turnstone.
The good thing about bird names for things like streets or pseuds is that there are such a huge number of them. I suspect that Apple Computer is regretting the decision to go with big cats for OS names - we're about two revisions away from OS X 10.x: Really Fat Tabby.
Of course the true treasure trove of thematic names is bacteria.
We could have a Switch Your Pseud Day the first Thursday of every month (or something like that), with a different theme each month. March's SYP Day Theme would be birdnames.
There's an Ousel Peak in the Great Bear Wilderness (near Glacier), and that is the older spelling. If you're ever seized with the need to make a change, maybe S rather than Z.
Back to the OP -- LB commented on Na-Tehisi's site.
I guess she decided the site wasn't that big of a pain.
But bacteria names haven't got the charm of old common names. Birds and plants (meadowsweet dropwort! powdery live-forever!) may even edge out English villages to win the naming stakes.
(A friend of mine went up it once -- an easy day trip -- and said the view was magnificent).
Pity there's no Wry Coot. But really, I think Inaccessible Island Rail is the greatest bird name ever, and cannot possibly be improved on.
I have to say I agree with 136. Plants for April then!
briefly visible, you should totally be Lesser Spotted Gull.
I wanted the computing center at Berkeley to name their computers after STDs.
Ok, not an easy day hike, but clearly worth doing. When are you coming up, ()?
I was fixing on Snail Kite, but that's pretty good too.
I suspect that Apple Computer is regretting the decision to go with big cats for OS names - we're about two revisions away from OS X 10.x: Really Fat Tabby.
There's plenty of non-big cats for the increasingly minor upgrades. Manul, margay, jaguarundi...
135: I really do like Coates -- I figure maybe if I comment, I'll get used to it enough to not let him drop of my radar. And I have thoughts about Paterson.
145: I "liked" your comment! I also liked it.
142: Not soon enough. I think for the next few years all of my traveling is going to be work related. I want a major conference to happen there - that would be great.
Hey, Mütch, when's turtle pseud week? Because, boy, have I got an idea...
A lot of people feel that vocabulary is a very good indicator. That's why SATs and related aptitude tests continue to look a lot like vocabulary tests, even while other tests of general knowledge are rejected as being culturally biased.
This is true, and I cop to being one of those people.
At the same time, though, having a large vocabulary is not always viewed as positive. There are definitely situations in which one's social standing goes up by not knowing certain words (and many situations where it goes down if you reveal too great a knowledge of esoteric words).
Vocabulary is one of the particular challenges in doing a public presentation to a socially and cultural diverse audience. In a well-lit room you can make eye contact with enough people in an audience of 150 to be sure they are hearing your message. Beyond that, it gets tricky.
Some presenters can recognize it when a presentation is going sideways, and others can't. I saw one woman pause and reframe when she was talking about parents wanting a child to be "big," sensing that not all of her audience got it, and another who stumbled in trying to convey "hold in abeyance."
I saw one woman pause and reframe when she was talking about parents wanting a child to be "big," sensing that not all of her audience got it
???????
saw one woman pause and reframe when she was talking about parents wanting a child to be "big," sensing that not all of her audience got it,
This, I'm not getting. What point was she making that escaped her audience?
Vocabulary is one of the particular challenges in doing a public presentation to a socially and cultural diverse audience.
Quite.
Big like make it big, or big like large?
Halford and LB are my plants. Thank you, lady and gentleman, for proving my point.
The speaker was the author of this book, and she was trying to communicate the idea that adults who had been raised in slavery wanted their (free) children to be somebody of importance -- to accomplish something in the world. Not to be physically big/strong.
She was doing the presentation in a fairly well-lit room with a middle/upper-middle class audience of white and black Americans (and one single solitary Asian American). The whole thing was a pretty impressive performance of double-checking to make sure the audience was absorbing her narrative.
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I don't quite know what to make of this.
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You know, even as a melanin-deficient American, I'm pretty sure that I would have understood that use of the word "big" in context -- it's fairly common! -- and that, in any event, my failure to do so would not have been a product of not knowing that the term "big" can mean "make it big." But maybe I'm missing the point.
Every conference on Ousel Peak is major.
And yet, Southern white people are fatter, and thus bigger. Ironic.
At the same time, though, having a large vocabulary is not always viewed as positive. There are definitely situations in which one's social standing goes up by not knowing certain words (and many situations where it goes down if you reveal too great a knowledge of esoteric words).
Or too great a knowledge of not at all esoteric words, for that matter. IME, depending on who you're talking to in these situations, you can either lose status or sort of move sideways, getting marked as Quite Smart, But Let's Not Invite Her To A Party Any Time Soon---the latter when people value vocabulary as a proxy for aptitude but feel self-conscious about falling short of the mark. I've been surprised by how far into my academic career the latter has persisted.
Dumb Southerner defense rejected.
This is true, and I cop to being one of those people.
For me it depends. Are you unfamiliar with a word? Okay, no big deal, here's what it means. Do you confidently and incessantly misuse not-uncommon words? I'M JUDGING YOU RIGHT NOW.
161: It's 48 degrees in Missoula right now? You guys are all wearing Hawaiian shirts and doing a little windsurfing, right?
We'll see 50 next week. The loss of our winter is very serious business: we don't just curse and try to get rid of our snow, but live on it through the summer.
Not quite as good as IIR, but I am fond of "Fulvous-vented Euphonia".
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I just screamed, ran across the room, and turned of the radio, because I heard the Marketplace anchor say "With me today is a writer for the Atlantic Monthly, Megan McArdle"
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Sounds like one of those puzzlers" "A man walks into a room turns on the radio and shoots himself. Why?"
Because he had been mercilessly mocked for a typo in a blog comment earlier in the day and he wanted to muffle the sound of the gunshot.
166: We live in a fallen world, Mr Helpy-Chalk. Yeah, I would have turned off the radio too.
US men's hockey team to play winner of tonight's match (Canada? Slovakia?) for the gold medal.
From the Inaccessible Island Rail wiki page, I discover the Ascension Flightless Rail. I would like its species to be funicularis, please.
141: at the company I worked at before grad school all of our network printers were named euphemisms for male masturbators. Our file server was named "Mofo."
For example, we had Yanker, Spanker, Wanker, etc.
Sounds like one of those puzzlers" "A man walks into a room turns on the radio and shoots himself. Why?"
I always find it odd that so many of these puzzles involve violent death.
Like this list. Extremely morbid. And some of them have answers that look like they were thought up by a psychopath.
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Non-cloying all-star charity single.
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Huh. Back in the early 80s, I attended summer science camp at Appalachian State with the new White House social secretary.
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174 also suggests suicide is a logically necessary response to most setbacks.
156: Right, I didn't meant to imply a simplistic notion that people from X ethnic/class group know this word, and people outside the group don't know it. Just that if a word is not evenly distributed across social groups, a savvy presenter will be paying attention to whether most of her mixed audience is getting it.
Or too great a knowledge of not at all esoteric words, for that matter.
Do you mean slang? That's part of what I was getting at in the first half of my comment. You can alienate a room pretty quickly by knowing the "wrong" kind of slang. I wish I could think now of the most recent example I saw of this....
178.2: No, I wasn't thinking of slang, though of course it creates the sort of problems you were talking about. More that I've gotten raised eyebrows for using words that I learned in ninth-grade vocabulary lessons, and have been taken aback in turn.
There's a federal appellate judge, Bruce Selya, who famously sprinkles his opinions with extremely estoteric words (not just legal jargon, which is specialized but not esoteric language). List here. This could be sort of funny in the abstract, but since part of one's job in writing a judicial opinion is to be clear, it's fairly annoying.
178 makes good sense.
179: Damn! I only got 6. In my defence, I never took Latin or Greek, and am very stupid.
Quite a few lend themselves to alternate definitions:
Decurtate - ten urtates
Dehors - work for Depimps
Exigible - available for divorce
Anent - Treebeard
Gallimaufry - where Doctor Who is from
etc...
9 made me think again that togolosh and I share a brain, but 181 convinces me this is not the case. I got zero.
since part of one's job in writing a judicial opinion is to be clear, it's fairly annoying.
One of the things that bothers me most is writers who allow their desire to be clever or quippy to override whether the audience will actually understand them. A movie review, fine. Health and safety instructions? A newspaper article about critical public issues? Booooooooo.
Quite Smart, But Let's Not Invite Her To A Party Any Time Soon
I can't imagine a word the knowledge and use of which would cause one to not be invited to a party. This must be why I keep receiving invitations.
181, 182: What are you referring to? Where is this quiz? I must find out how stupid I am!
183: It's not like people are actively organizing their guestlists by people's scores on the Selya quiz, but many people have told me that they feel like they need to watch their grammar and vocabulary around me (162.last notwithstanding, this is not true; I can keep a lid on my inner nosflow), which for many people is not conducive to the party funtimes.
Paren: follow Halford's link in 180.
Off to beer hour. Will I commit egregious vocabulary missteps? Time will tell!
185.2: Ooh, thanks. Yeah, those are bitchy words.
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I hope y'all ain't missing the great curling final.
Whoot
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Just stopped in at my local place and was very pleasantly surprised to find two bottles of Clear Creek's Douglas Fir Eau de Vie in stock. I decided to splurge and buy one. Initial verdict: very nice. I'm not sure it's worth the premium price over their other (extremely excellent) fruit brandies, but I'm not experiencing any buyer's remorse either.
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184: See 180.
I only knew 5. Probably would have figured out a couple more if I had tried to figure out the etymology. Those are awfully obscure words, though. (Except "chiaroscuro". That one doesn't seem very obscure to me, except insofar as its definition relates to obscurity.)
McArdle didn't sound any stranger than any other Marketplace commenter. It's all soundbites and mutual stroking.
I can't imagine a word the knowledge and use of which would cause one to not be invited to a party.
Thant sounds like a challenge. "Mud people" maybe? That's more of a phrase, I suppose. Per a recent discussion at EotAW I imagine that the set of people who know what a phylactery is to be disproportionately anti-social.
I can't imagine a word the knowledge and use of which would cause one to not be invited to a party.
You don't need "phylactery" for this. Try throwing "risible" around with any kind of frequency and see what happens.
Yeah, I only got five, possibly could have gotten a couple more with patience.
Try throwing "risible" around with any kind of frequency and see what happens.
Isthmian is surely not very esoteric, no? There's the Isthmian League, after all.
The rest (apart from chiaroscuro & dehors, which is trivial if one knows' ones' French) but isthmian?
Isthmian is surely not very esoteric, no? There's the Isthmian League, after all.
How many people, even those who are aware of the Isthmian League (what is that, one of the English football leagues seven levels below the top?), know what "isthmian" means?
In fact, I know what an isthmus is, and I have no idea what isthmus in southern England that name refers to. Thus being aware of the Isthmian League actually leads me to conclude that the word "isthmian" is unrelated to the word "isthmus" and therefore I don't know what it means after all.
Algid - Adjective. From my knowledge of the Iowa Pleistocene Snail I think this means icy.
Decurtate - Verb
Dehors - Not an English word. Means outside in French.
Exigible - Probably means either possible or impossible. Thanks for the clarity, judge!
Encincture - Belt
Asseverational - Having to do with making claims about something.
Chiaroscuro - Like, cloudy dark painting.
Solatium - Sun room
Isthmian - Having to do with southern England
Anent - Soon
Sockdolager - Blow to the head
Nonce - Soon
Purlieu - Not an English word. I don't know what it means in French either.
Gallimaufry - Argy-bargy
Perscrutation - Inspection for testicular cancer
Longiloquent - Grandiloquent
Integument - That's easy. The part of an enveloped virus outside the capsid but inside the membrane.
Asthenic - Asthmatic
I can't decide whether this article describes one of the most plausible sets of circumstances for encouraging terrorism or whether I just think that because it's written to evoke that sense in an upper-middle-class Western reader.
Back in the early 80s, I attended summer science camp at Appalachian State with the new White House social secretary.
UnfoggeDCon 2011?
I can't imagine a word the knowledge and use of which would cause one to not be invited to a party.
Try throwing "risible" around with any kind of frequency and see what happens.
People will think you're J/sh Tr/v/no?
204: I'd never particularly heard of that person, but I guess being him would do it.
Solatium - Sun room
That's "Solarium", Cogg-Willoughby old snoot.
Oh, all of them were inaccurate, actually. Ha.
Or rather most. I only know "anent" from the beginning of Springer's Progress.
201 sounds like a total Dune ripoff.
189 That better be some very good eau de vie at fifty books for a .375 bottle. I very rarely by bottles of that sort of stuff, but I did get a 0.5l bottle of slivovitz a couple years ago. Excellent, but barely drinkable at 140 proof. Still have most of it.
210: Everything I've tried by Clear Creek has been excellent. This is no exception, and it's very interesting and enjoyable so far. I'm inordinately fond of eaux de vie so I would say it was worth it for me, as I've been wanting to try the Fir stuff ever since I heard about it, but could never find it down here till now (I asked about it a couple of weeks ago and one of their buyers, who is originally from Alsace, said he'd see about getting some, which he was successful in doing).
On the other hand, I think I like CC's mirabelle plum eau de vie better overall, and it's about half the price, so I probably won't buy the Douglas Fir stuff again anytime soon. Of course this bottle will last me a long time as I'll probably only end up drinking a small snifter of it a week or so.
For the quality, most of Clear Creek's stuff is priced very attractively compared to similar quality stuff from Europe. I particularly like their version of Calvados: it's really good and is about 1/4 the price of anything comparable from France. I also just recently got a bottle of their McCarthy single malt and it's lovely too. Quite similar to Lagavulin, although it's not really a bargain in the same way the eaux de vie are.
How many people, even those who are aware of the Isthmian League (what is that, one of the English football leagues seven levels below the top?), know what "isthmian" means?
Of course the word's meaning may be esoteric, but the word I think isn't.
I suspect that far more speakers of English are able to link 'Isthmian' to 'isthmus, as in Panama' than to 'Isthmian League'.
The lower end one is $25 a bottle, which is very reasonable for Calvados, but one quarter of the French equivalent? At a hundred bucks you're getting some really high end stuff, above that it's mostly twenty plus year and vintage ones. Your standard good but not amazing will run in the forties and fifties. Their higher end one is $40. I don't think I've ever had Calvados that retails over around sixty, but that stuff is damn good. I've never bought mirabelle by the bottle, though I do love the stuff. Makes amazing jams too.
214: Oops, sorry. I should have said "anything comparable available where I live". There's very little actual Calvados for sale here in Austin, Texas, and all of it that there is is very high end. I've tasted a few of those here, and I've had great stuff in Europe, and the higher end Clear Creek really is most excellent, and very well priced for the market I can actually shop in.
And I do really recommend CC's Mirabelle. Their pear is also amazing.
212: Not that I'm an expert or anything, but I have a feeling that it's a far more esoteric word in the States than it is in the Commonwealth.
you'll be happy to know that I'm now sipping some Calvados. Nothing special, a very large producer's VSOP pays d'Auge, but it's nice. Unfortunately (fortunately?) I absent mindedly poured it as if it were wine, rather than an eighty proof brandy.
I absent mindedly poured it . . . .
A likely story.
re: 208
Anent is used in Scots, so is a live word. Absurd that someone would use it in written US English, though.
FWIW, I only knew, I think, three or four on the list, but could have made a close-enough guess for a couple more. That said, my guesses for a couple of others were wrong ...
Well then, it just so happens that I took a photo.
Were you having Munchkins™ with your Calvados?
My friend's son said that if he married a donut and they had Munchkins, then he would eat his wife and children.
192: Its true. The other day, Kai Ryssdal asked a writer from the Wall Street Journal if an agency to regulate consumer credit was a good idea, and the writer said "Absolutely not, the government should not regulate credit markets." He said it that flatly: Not regulate credit markets. At all.
Has he been asleep for the last three years? Is he so adept at bullshitting that he can stand in front of a white wall and call it black?
I had my first Unfogged dream and it starred . . . Knecht! Don't worry, it was very chaste. We sat on your couch and watched WGN and Steve Martin and Phil Silvers came over.
YIKES! Our Hawaii commenters are under a tsunami warning! Everybody think good thoughts (or whatever your equivalent).
And then think good thoughts for earthquake-struck Chile. Wow.
225:Dreams!
I had a dream yesterday that I was playing chess with an old friend. No idea who he was, just that he was a friend. Tall and skinny, and had a home dialysis bag. He was panicked that his gov't assistance for the home dialysis was being cut off.
I had white and the opening was d4 d6. Bastard.
Bob, you might get a kick out of this.
Bob, you might get a kick out of this.
Actually that's likely a lie. Also it's sort of NSFW.
230: Oh god, I saw that yesterday. Does one warn people prior, or just spring that on folks all unaware? That might be fairly unnerving to feel before seeing! So many questions! I want candid youtubes of all these situations!
231: it seems kind of painful all around, too. And what about the men? Is there no demand for dongjazzling? Are no celebrities getting balljazzled?
The link in 230 seems really weird. I totally thought this "trend" was a hoax.
I cannot imagine inhabiting a sex life in which having a bedazzled crotch is a turn-on. It's like science fiction to me.
You know what would be hip, though? If instead of crystals you used little spikes.
Well, sure. You could also rig up some very small trebuchets or barbed wire, if you were so inclined.
The cheap version would be to glue a fistful of Pop Rocks to your hootennanny.
148: For turtle pseud change day, I call dibs on Painted Box.
And here we see why I comment so infrequently these days. I can't be timely enough to make the joking worthwhile. Sigh.
And since I didn't preview, it suddenly became topical again. I love this place.
226.1: The sirens are going to get really annoying by later in the morning, but other than that it doesn't look like it's going to be a big deal around here. Hilo may get whomped a bit, but Hilo is very tsunami-aware and should get its people through OK.
242: Glad to hear it. It's hard to gauge the urgency from the news reports, because they all sound so urgent.
243: I was just watching some streaming news coverage out of Chile, and they're calling it a terremoto mentiroso because a lot of buildings look okay on the outside but have collapsed internally.
243: I have to admit that if I were a news producer I, too, would probably rather be reporting from Waikiki than trying to find my way into a disaster area in Chile.
232: I think we should start a craze for men to have eyeballs tattooed on their nuts and have their pubes shaved like a mustache so their genitals look like an upside down face with a long nose. That's what I think.
242: Ugh, my brother lives in Hilo. Crossing my fingers.
248: Bullet officially dodged. And I got a bonus day with a high school buddy and his family who were rousted from their vacation place near the beach at 6 am and needed a place to wait out their flight delay.
Yeah, just got word that they enjoyed a lovely morning/afternoon up in the hills.
Glad Hawaii came out of safely...now just to hear about my colleagues' families in Chile.
Yup. Chileans are the ones to be worrying about.
Is your brother also in the academical world?
Nope, he's in the tourism world. (And mighty good at it.)
(Though I say this without ever yet having experienced tourism in Hawaii. Some day!)
Ah. Don't really know anybody over there who does that. But I do like Hilo!
He just came back to Hawaii after a few years absence; he lived there for about 12 years previously, throughout my childhood (he's considerably older than me). I hear rumor that he's going back into design, but who knows. And that's more than anyone ever wanted to know about my brother!
Before this thread slips into the archive, I should point out that Coates has gone back to the old format, with multiple paragraphs above the fold.
