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I'm feeling a mite cranky this morning. Failing to fall asleep at all despite having been too tired to drag myself to 3LF rehearsal that I really wanted to get to may be a factor. So in the spirit of tired-&-cranky, a few demands ...
To writers of fiction who don't have editors or proofreaders:
- If it involves strips of adhesive-coated material, the verb you want is 'tape/taped/taping'; if it involves very lightly striking with an object or one's fingers, it's 'tap/tapped/tapping'. I've got no idea what "untapping" would mean, but I've sure seen it written a lot.
- A 'hinny' may be an ass, but not the kind I think you mean -- at least I hope you really meant 'heinie', given the context.
- While we're at it, keep an eye out for that switched-letters typo that converts 'untied' into 'united', okay? The spalling-chalker than gets ewe in two sew mulch trouble wont even cats id.
To webmasters of amateur fiction sites:
- Recruit an editor to fix up what your authors submit, damn it.
- Hey, if you offer decent editing, maybe in exchange you can get permission to use the stories swiped from other sites.
- Let the doggone browser figure out where to break lines so that increasing the font size doesn't mean scrolling horizontally, and use <P> tags so a story doesn't wind up looking like One F'ing HUGE Paragraph! (I don't bother to read those -- I see that kind of mess, and I hit the 'back' button.)
To folks arguing about politics:
- One side of the aisle may not seem to understand the meaning of 'hypocrisy', but the other side apparently can't spell it (despite being able to write 'hypocrite' and not 'hypocrat', which surprised me given how many instances of 'hypocrasy' I've read lately). I guess my being able to simultaneously spell it and define it means I'm third-party or something.
- It sure sounded to me as though Lincoln Davis said 'tenet', not 'tenant' (as it was transcribed by someone and then quoted by others). Having read the transcript first, I was listening for a misplaced 'n' sound when I finally watched it, and I didn't hear one.
In my fatigue-addled state, I keep trying to figure out who
the 'tenants of marriage' are (do spicespouses pay
rent to each other?) and what it would mean for them to 'untap'
a 'hypocrat' (izzat someone who leads from below, or a nominal
ruler who rules insufficiently?)
Like I warned y'all: cranky. :-P
[Edit: Would 'untapping' be akin to removing the cock from a keg?]
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Ok, this struck me as funny. My soon to be spouse does get rent from me, and most likely will after we are married as well. So the answer is/will be YES.
"[Edit: Would 'untapping' be akin to removing the cock from a keg?]"
To TAP a keg is to UNCORK it. I don't know about cocks in kegs, sounds like cruelty to animals if you ask me. :)
I do hope the crankies go away soon for you. Huggs.
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A bit of etymology; 'cock' as slang for a penis comes from the resemblance in form and function to this sense of the word 'cock', i.e. spout/spigot/tap (if I'm correctly remembering what the OED said when I looked it up because I was curious which direction that transfer of meanings had gone). If the cock has a valve, it's a 'stopcock'. No clue how roosters tie into this etymologically.
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My favorite slogan/button
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Some people see these as misspellings. I see them as whole new descriptive opportunity.
Hypocrat: n. A ruler who governs others using laws and measures that he refuses to apply to himself, esp in legal conduct.
In usage, it would not be exactly synonymous to a tyrant, who views himself as above the law. The connotation here is of someone who can't or refuses to see that a law *should* apply to him as it does to others.
Hypocracy: n. A government that systematically applies laws in a capricious and inconsistent manner, especially as it favors some and disfavors others. This favoritism can be covert or overt, but most importantly it should be based on highly objectionable, subjective, and above all, inconsistent standards.
Usages:
His steadfast refusal to allow his staff's conduct to come under scrutiny, even as he called for more surveillance of millions of people for suspicion of illegal activity, was a crowning factor in earning George W. Bush the label: hypocrat.
The hypocracy of the right wing of the Government, was as blatant as ever when, as they called for more faith-based activism and government support of religious social programmes, steadfastly and often mockingly rejected support and participation from Pagan activist groups.
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That is, the <P> tag, absent specific stylesheet info packed into it, means, "Oh web browser, this here is the start of a new paragraph. Do be a decent application and do whatever it is you do to render a paragraph break correctly and show it to your user, if you don't mind. Thank you very much."
(If you wanted to get fancy about it, you could make a single copy of a document in HTML render with indented paragraphs when printed and blank lines between paragraphs when displayed on a monitor, if your browser can be set to automatically use two different stylesheets for the two different output modes, or if you use one browser for viewing and another for printing. That's a cool thing about separating content from layout. Giving users the ability to say, "Oh web browser, from now on I'd like you to render paragraph breaks according to my idiosyncratic tastes, thank you," is another.)
So to do it wrong, you have to go out of your way, or do a really brain-dead conversion from a non-webbed source.
If you're posting to a newsgroup or archiving a text file on an FTP server, you want to insert the blank lines -- and the carriage returns at the ends of reasonable-length lines of text within the paragraph -- by hand. Okay, maybe not literally by hand, since the task is easy to automate, but those things should be in the file. Having a glimmer of a clue about the particular medium one is using is a good thing.
The thing is, this is So Easy to Get Right that it frustrates me all the more to see how often it is gotten wrong.
Ooh ooh ooh!!
If you are wishing to have someone restrain or prevent someone from doing something, you want someone to rein them in, not reign them in. The former refers to the restraining, or, as we'd call it in the biz, curbing or checking action of a rider using reins on a horse. It has nothing whatsoever to do with monarchical rulers.
If you are talking about a group of people who live in a place, rather than referring to that place's having many occupants, you must talk about the populace, not the populous. The former is a noun meaning "inhabitants"; the latter is an adjective meaning "having many inhabitants."
If you are exhorting other people to pay attention to someone else's comment, you want to say, "Hear, hear!," and not "Here, here!", since what you are doing is encouraging other people to listen to that person. The "hear" in this case is an imperative (command), not an abbreviated form of "look over here," or something.
*grumble mutter*
Re: Ooh ooh ooh!!
I probably am saying "Here, here!" – look my direction, playing Frisbee or something.