WHAT'S A MAN GOTTA DO?
I like "Puff Daddy Middle School". It reminds me of the way Judge Dredd writers would compete to give increasingly ludicrous names to the various Blocks of which Mega-City One was made up. https://2000ad.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Mega-City_One_blocks
Marty Mathers is clearly Eminem, and Alan Sandler is Adam Sandler, but I don't get Peter Pilate, unless it's just Pontius Pilate? The other two teachers are Charlotte Darwin and Henrietta Higgins, which I get, but I guess there's no overall theme.
I think heebie is right on Pilate. He's washing his hands, metaphorically, on the students and leaving them to unjustified punishment.
Ha, Charlotte Darwin weeds out all the unsuccessful students and keeps all the fittest students.
Henrietta Higgins relentlessly helps her students during her own personal time.
I got my only C in high school in a math class where my homework average was 50 and my exam average was over 100. I'm still salty about it.
Also that nonstandard use of "comprised" is going to incite a dance battle with the English teachers
9. Henry Higgins never marries Eliza Doolittle. In the play she leaves to marry the contemptible Freddy. In the movie musical she does return to HH sadly reduced to tractability, but they don't marry; she agrees to stay on as his unpaid "assistant" and "companion."
That's creepier. I admit to having never seen either the play or musical. I guess it's fine to ask your students to marry you if they say no.
I remember that one song. Shaw could write a catchy tune.
11: I have traumatized more than one medical writer into avoiding any form of the word "comprise" altogether.
Along with "comprised of" and "reticent" (in contexts where "reluctant" makes sense), a new front* has opened around usage of "refute" when "denied" is the most accurate description. I'm worried that one will be the most consequential because if you read a headline that says someone "refuted the allegations" you could be forgiven for thinking they provided conclusive evidence when often all they did was say "nuh-uh" or "didn't happen" and yet it got labeled as a refutation.
*Not entirely new but it seems to be more visible lately.
17 "casted" for "cast" has been driving me crazy.
Also "I resonate with this" instead of "it resonates with me". I feel like that's EVERYWHERE lately.
I have traumatized more than one medical writer into avoiding any form of the word "comprise" altogether.
Also me! As in, you've traumatized me into avoidance.
19: but "I resonate with this" is surely the correct version. The idea behind the metaphor is that there's some external thing to which you are attuned, so you respond to it. Like if you have a guitar E string, and you play an E at it, it'll vibrate and hum. That is literally called resonance.
If something resonates with you, it is responding to you, not you to it!
Yeah, "I resonate with this" is a well-meaning technical correction that sounds so excruciatingly new-agey, or like "The Sound of Music," that I can't ever bring myself to say it. I don't resonate. I'm not a bell. I'm not like a bell. I do not generally vibrate in response to things unless it's something mechanical, like the road under my car. If you wouldn't say "I vibe with that," then you can skip the other version.
However, I do want to reach for something like "that's resonant for me," like the way I feel when I hear a bell or an orchestra, but without reducing my whole self to my eardrums.
Are you more like a bell or a buzzer?
I do not generally vibrate in response to things unless it's something mechanical
Oh, behave.
But the people who say "I resonate with this" are also the people who say "exasperate" when they mean "exacerbate" so I'm having trouble trusting they've thought through the physics of it. (Which I hadn't done either, tbh.)
23, 24: you can talk this one out among yourselves. Apparently I'm busy.
The one that has bothered me for decades is people saying "in that aspect" rather than "in that respect." I rarely hear anyone complain, so maybe they're both perfectly correct? The latter sounds so much better to me, though.
I thought it was "in that aspic." Like an orange slice in a 50s dessert.
I hate "reticent" used instead of "reluctant"
I'm pretty sure it's "in that apricot". It refers to the cleft.
I get my apricots from a can, they were put there by a man.
The Grateful Dead used to play really loud. Everyone honest to God resonated.
A man, a can, an apricot,
To Ciprana Nacanama!
L'abricot du ciel c'est moi.
17: this is because people confuse "rebut" and "refute". to refute is to prove false, to rebut is just to deny.
We had an outbreak of "coronated" two years ago which was annoying.
I was at university with a nurse whose favourite doomed pedantry was that "ecstasy" was a very bad name for MDMA. Ecstasy literally means standing outside. Greek. Ec + stasis. Same thing as talking about being "beside yourself". The idea is that you've lost control; almost like having an out of body experience. So it's perfectly correct, if now a little old fashioned, to talk about "an ecstasy of hatred" - or for that matter being beside yourself with grief.
This, she would say with increasing force and authority, is not a good description at all of the experience of taking MDMA. You're not outside your body in any sense when you're on MDMA. If anything, you're very much more in it.
Ketamine, on the other hand? That's a great description of the sensation of taking ketamine. So we should call MDMA something else and reclaim "ecstasy" for ketamine.
Yes, this really is how our nurses talk.