I had a comment that didn't go through.
WHY would anyone try a denial of service here?... just for kicks, right? Or do you suspect Powerline?
I do'nt thinj nop revieq issuch a goood ideaa,
Preview still works for me. Is this a joke, where we all pretend we can't preview anymore?
Or do you suspect Powerline?
I think Weiner's got it in for us.
Yeah, it's not yet useless, Ogged.
Yes, preview is momentarily working again. Now, I will Remove Your Button! (Rebuild takes a while.)
WHY would anyone try a denial of service here?
They hate America, of course.
Preview still works for me
Ah but you're missing that it has been renamed to "Useless!" -- so it makes no sense to refer to it as "preview" any longer. What you are doing is not previewing, but useless!ing.
Ogged just doesn't know what he's doing.
This is America? Good grief. I've been sold a pup.
Button gone.
Now, I will Remove Your Button!
Female circumcision is no laughing matter, Ogged.
No sooner was the Useless! function introduced, than the powers-that-be took it away again.
This is America?
Sure. I mean, ogged could be a young man, in a t-shirt, listening to a rock and roll station.
It's not that someone is trying to do a DOS against us because we're so influential and awesome that they want to take us down. Sometimes we get surges of spam that are so overwhelming that they essentially act like a DOS as our server tries to repel them all.
Most of the blogosphere seems to be running very slowly today. I'd like to reiterate my support for brutal vigilante violence against spammers.
20 -- so how does Preview tie into this? I would not expect spam bots to use preview -- but maybe they are more sophisticated than I thought. Like I thought their not using preview was what made 'Pastra Phari's strategy work.
I don't think preview makes a bit of difference, actually.
Requiring preview has pretty much eliminated comment spam on my site. Trackback spam, on the other hand, is like a frickin' tsunami.
It's not that someone is trying to do a DOS against us because we're so influential and awesome that they want to take us down. Sometimes we get surges of spam that are so overwhelming that they essentially act like a DOS as our server tries to repel them all.
Assuming the x=y hack works at all, this isn't the issue, because those spams don't ever reach mt-comments.cgi, but get 403 FORBIDDEN by apache.
Look, you nosey parkers, what happened is that about twelve instances of mt-search.cgi had made the site basically unreachable, so I started by killing them and renaming mt-search to make it unusable. That really might have been a DOS attack, for all I know. Now, I also saw a bunch of mt-comments.cgi instances, and, mistakenly believing that only preview still used that, I tried to do away with it too. Turns out that comment posting still uses that script, and I broke the comments. After fixing comments, I went ahead and got rid of the preview button because, what the hell, I was messing with stuff anyway. It'll probably come back soon.
mt-comments uses mt-search? Crap. I was going to eliminate that script from my site, as I just looked at my MT log and it's pages and pages of searches for spam URLs.
mt-comments uses mt-search?
No no, it's just that they were both mega-spawning at the same time.
mt-search is gone from Unfogged, and it doesn't seem to have hurt anything. (But the hoohole is almost filled in!)
Nothing to do with comments. I have a usage question, and this thread looks like a good place to dump that sort of thing:
Does anyone use 'any more'? I can't even remember what I used myself the time before last. But as I look at it this minute, 'any more' seems preferable to 'anymore'. Help?
30 -- both usages are fine.
(But the hoohole is almost filled in!)
How are you measuring progress? My personal hoohole metric has Google lagging Yahoo by a fair margin.
I search for phrases in old comment threads. I submitted a sitemap to google a week or so ago, and the site has been crawled I think three times since then, each time including more old threads. I'm hoping that a couple more crawls will have it nearly up to date. But yes, Yahoo is still the way to search for now (and has a very small hoohole, best as I can tell).
a very small hoohole
'Til I get through with it.
What am I missing in the pit pull comment SCMT?
I have painful memories of the "lines" the usage of anymore brought me when in junior school. Which made my indignation at the discovery that no one gives a hoot all the worse.
If it makes you feel any better, "anymore" makes my teeth ache in much the same way "alot" and "allright" (or, even worse, "alright") do.
30, 36 -- actually grammar Nazis will prefer "any more".
And I'm not even so much of a grammar nazi. But I have graded a lot of freshman essays.
1. Don't take usage advice from the Clown. He thinks that the would-have subjunctive is acceptable.
2. Re: 33. To search with yahoo, does one go to the Yahoo site and enter a search that says "unfogged: [Search term]". I ask, because I don't see a "Search with Yahoo" bar on the main page.
Huh, B. "Alot" and "allright" are teeth-achey to me, but alright is alright. Why is it the worst?
Bitch -- to me it seems like a totally parallel construction to "nevermore" -- and if it was good enough for E. Allen Poe, well it's good enough for my, by God.
Unfogged seems to attract a strongly prescriptivist crowd, which seems a little weird to me.
And, "alright" is in the OED, earlliest usage 1893.
What about Caligula? Dance, Little Boots?
Now I want to construct a cryptic clue incorporating the phrase "dance, little boots," but, alas, nothing springs immediately to mind.
See.. totally a taste thing. Giving children into the hands of an unbending grammar nazi causes alot of pain and is not alright. It should not be allowed anymore.
You know the irony of the button removal? My previous incartnation never previewed, ever. Now I disciplin my commenting self to read the fluff I write and what happens?
Frustration is writ large in my soul, ogged.
43: I'm not B, but here goes. "all right" means that everything is okay or entirely correct. "Alright" seems to be misspelled based on an incorrect analogy to "already." The reason that "alright" is no good is that "al" is not a free-standing word. Would "al right" be okay? No.
(blushing) Edgar Allan Poe
42(2): I go to yahoo and enter "[search term] site:unfogged.com".
47 -- he became emperor in 37.
People who spend their working lives immersed in formal prose are going to have a different sense of what's a descriptive norm than others. If your environment is academia or law, most usages that a prescriptivist would sneer at are going to be descriptively rare as well, and so will seem more unusual and distasteful.
A friend used to sign his emails:
"As allways,
Hisname"
The reason that "alright" is no good is that "al" is not a free-standing word. Would "al right" be okay?
Your argument is not al together sound.
41: I wonder if these terms bother you for themselves, or more because of correllation to painful marking.
55: Fair point, but that's an older usage and therefore ok. "Alright" is practically a neologism, and we all know that CHANGE is BAD.
53 -- but you guys read novels and poetry, and have conversations, don'tcha?
The reason that "alright" is no good is that "al" is not a free-standing word. Would "al right" be okay?
I'd have thought that the usage "alright", which is standard British usage, is analogue in its foundation to the "usefull rule about "alls" in combinations. But hey. I read science.
(I exclude Teo from the "read novels and poetry" clause, and well I guess he doesn't really have conversations either to speak of; but he's a linguist.)
"Alright" bugs because, like "alot," it's something that undergrads use because they've never thought about what they're actually saying.
But "nevermore" is fine. And I don't care if it's inconsistent; usage isn't always consistent.
Sure. I mean, ogged could be a young man, in a t-shirt, listening to a rock and roll station
Why does the notion of ogged with an e-guitar dissonate?
61: that's what I was wondering about in 56
61 is ridiculous: "alright" is an actual word. It's in dictionaries and books and everything.
It still looks like a solecism to me. Have you really seen it in books where it's not actively making a point about being an unedited version of oral speech, or something like that?
45: Lefties.
Anyway, I did a quick trawl of my personal archives and found no uses of 'anymore' and only one 'any more'. I don't know why I would worry about consistency, but I do. Anyhow, my thanks to you all for your reassurances.
what 65 is missing is the german "und Überhaupt!"
Yeah, seriously, 65 is right. "Alright" is not like "alot," it's not just two words mushed together, it's a specific concept, just as "maybe" is in between yes and no, "alright" is between good and bad.
But I agree, it would seem to have little place in an undergraduate paper.
"Alright" bugs because, like "alot," it's something that undergrads use because they've never thought about what they're actually saying.
This isn't true at all. "Alright" or "all right", no matter how you spell it, doesn't mean the same thing as literally saying that something is entirely right. It's an idiomatic phrase in which the two words don't mean the same thing that they would in isolation.
And "a lot" is the same way. Nobody says "I ate a lot of gravy" in order to imply that they ate so much gravy that it could fill a parking lot, or that it could be auctioned off. I don't see why the space between "a" and "lot" couldn't be removed.
No, no. "Alot" is not the same!
I agree with Ned's first paragraph though.
Thinking on it now, maybe is a word made by the very same joining process that made alright.
70: I'm quite prepared to believe that she's seen a lot of undergraduate papers written by people who've never thought about what they are saying. You aren't?
65: Dictionaries aren't prescriptive; they're descriptive.
Okay, arguing logically about usage is doomed to failure. "Alright" is a solecism if not enough respectable people use it in formal writing, and it's acceptable if enough of them do. I think it still falls into the first category, but it's not at all about what makes sense, it's about history and usage.
73: Oh, I agree with you entirely. I just think these two examples are innocuous and are more like spelling mistakes than anything else.
People who've never thought about what they are saying can be better identified by the use of grossly mixed metaphors, or referring to Emily Dickinson as a "wreck loose in society" because they didn't realize the professor had said "recluse in society".
65: Dictionaries aren't prescriptive; they're descriptive.
Lexicographers are descriptive, but dictionaries can be put to whatever use one pleases.
73 -- sure, it could be that "the person writing the paper doesn't think about what he is saying" and "the person used 'alright'" -- I just don't think these are necessarily connected, or at any rate that they are connected in such a way that if the first were false, the person would have used "all right" instead.
74 -- true but.
What I'm saying is that it's possible for someone who does think carefully about what they're saying to use "alright".
Ok, I guess I didn't really say that before, but I'm saying it now.
80: fair enough. correllation is just correllation
79 is what I meant by 78.
I'm thinking that now may be the time for another great English language rationalisation project. We could start with 'many more'. It's begging to be compounded: 'manymore'. That's a nice looking word.
I'll kill the next employer of "manymore" I see. Far too cutesy.
70 is right that "all right" is an idiomatic usage. I was not comfortable, even as I typed it, equating "all right" with "entirely right." I jusy couldn't think of a good definition, because it si an idiomatic phrase.
Speakign of idiomatic phrases, I was recently told by someone from Texas that "all set," as in "Are you all set?" is not standarrd usage down there.
This withdrawal of the preview button from service is a test, isn't it? How petty.
"Manymore" puts me in mind of "agenbite of inwit", for some reason.
"Manymore", qua word and compound, should go by swirl of water and bend of pipe down a commode.
With this chanoun I dwelt have seven yeer,
And of his science am I never the neer.
Al that I hadde I have lost therby,
And, God woot, so hath manymore than I.
- The Canon Yeoman's Tale
A garden is a lovesome thing, God wzerozerot.
What's the big idea, rendering my —s as doubled hyphens?
You want an em dash, you write "—". So has it ever been and so will it ever be.
I often get the "A garden is a lovesome thing, got wot" line in my head. It got there via Dorothy Sayers rather than the original T. E. Brown verse, however.
I exclude Teo from the "read novels and poetry" clause
I've read plenty of Vachel Lindsay.
It's mdash, not emdash.
&mrsdash;
This hich tech stuff is too much for me.
In defense of 73 (and so as not to be an ass to Leblanc), what I mean is that undergrads use "alright" along with a lot of other near-homonyms for actual words in ways that demonstrate that they've never thought about "all right" being made up of two words they already know, or that "juxtapose" and "just suppose" have completely different meanings. When you see the latter kind of thing, you feel fairly okay saying that "alot" or "alright" are similarly unthinking errors made when they spell things by ear rather than by thinking about whether or not they already know words that sound awfully similar and have either the meaning they want, or a meaning that's completely different.
That said, I've been known to make the "begging the question" error and the "to the manor born" error, so it's not like smart people don't sometimes learn mistakes.
it's not like smart people don't sometimes learn mistakes
There is of course another possible explanation for your having made mistakes. (Ducks)
It was a stage direction, Teo.
109: I left that hanging there just for you, Clown.
111: I know. (Crossposted to Standpipe's blog.)
What's the "to the manor born" error?
Wait, do people actually substitute "to the manner born"?
in ways that demonstrate that they've never thought about "all right" being made up of two words they already know, or that "juxtapose" and "just suppose" have completely different meanings.
Or that a "fallacy" is different from a "fallis" [sic.]. That's an honest-to-god mistake from a paper I graded years ago. "There's a fallis in Descartes' argument about dreams." Around the time they were writing the papers, the class lectures had moved from Descartes to Freud so she was confused.
Oh, Jackmormon..."to the manner born" is actually the correct phrase. We can see how for some of these phrases it REALLY DOES NOT MATTER whether you use the historically justified spelling or not.
http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=19990721
116 -- I've never seen sic followed by a period. I know it's an abbreviation (for "sicut", right?) but I just never saw that. Is it done?
It's a damned good thing I've never written that phrase, then.
Argh. The period shouldn't be there.
118 is bullshit. Sic is not an abbreviation, it is a Latin word meaning "thus".
115: Get this, I snottily corrected someone about "to the manner born" on Berube's site. Which then he and about fifteen other people proceeded to point out that I had my head up my ass. Oops.
Which then he and about fifteen other people proceeded to point out that I had my head up my ass.
...
123 makes me want to use "to the manner born" in comments somewhere where somebody will mistakenly correct me so I can be snotty at them. Must resist.
Is it the "which then" you're getting stroppy over? B/c I did that deliberately and like the way it sounds, so piss off.
I figured you had. Indeed, I use constructions like that myself (though not that exact one, which is totally ungrammatical for me).
One of these days we should compare favorite unconventional grammar constructions.
Actually, that would make a really good thread.
Actually, that would make a really good thread.
Seriously, w-lfs-n, we're not supposed to post as each other.
I need advice, and I don't have time to call my live friends. After awkward date with guy who knows some of my friends, I said "See you round," as I walked into the T station.
I thought taht this was a subtle way of saying that I wasn't really interested in anything more. It was obviously too subtle.
I got the e-mail suggesting that he cook me a stir-fry. (It had an emoticon in it, and I really believe that there's a clear dividing line between thsoe who like emoticons and those who think that they're an abomination. It tells you a lot about a person.)
Yesterday I got a message on my phone which said, "Please call me."
I need a good way to say politely but firmly that I'm not interested. I want to avoid that--kindly meant, but I think rather hurtful--crap about wanting to be friends. He is a nice person, but I refuse to tell him taht he's a nice guy. I'm kind of a wuss and would love to do this by e-mail, but I kind of think that that's a dodge. I do need to send him an e-mail anyway, becasue I won't be home until late tonight and don't want to call then. So,
(1.) What's the best thing to say in an e-mail that won't lead him on but acknowledges the fact that I've kind of been ignoring him.
(2.) What should I say on the phone? I don't want to clobber him, but I'm afraid that if I'm not *really* blunt, he won't get it.
130: Bostoniangirl, I think this may be a problem that time will solve all on its own, so you don't have to do anything except not return calls / messages. Even better than that, you're now no longer the last commenter on this thread. :-)
131 -- She got lots of advice over at the pro-death (not amateur death) thread.