palordrolap

The nasal infix for present or very recent actions which was a feature in Proto-Indo-European. Best example is how vicit becomes vincit in Latin. (You’ll recognise the first one from “veni vidi vici” and the second from “invincible”. Both have to do with conquering. Or not being.)

It might also be the root of the word “now” in English, but the evidence for that is scant at best and it’s not in the Wikipedia article. Ditto the n in “recent”, which would be pre-PIE if true.

Also Linux kernel version history and smear frame to double check what I was talking about in recent Fediverse comments.

Relevant Sarah Andersen comic

It’s hard to be sure on the genetics front. There’s evidence to suggest there might be some weaknesses there, but then most of my ancestors and relatives who have had severe problems have all been smokers, and I’m not.

Sounds like someone has butted heads with an HOA or enforcement of some other covenant on look and feel.

Some people apparently have unseemly feelings about everything fitting to a certain design plan.

At the other end of the scale, there’s painting your house neon yellow. A house is not a tennis ball. It should not cause road accidents.

My weakest gums are weak precisely because I floss there more often.

Those locations happen to be where there’s a natural gap between teeth, they’re the first place food gets stuck and the first place I have to take a toothpick or floss to. Gentle as I am, that still takes a toll on the gum between them.

There’s also been a feedback loop of food getting stuck there making those gaps wider over time, meaning larger food getting stuck and more flossing. Over the course of a few decades, tiny movements add up.

The dentists I’ve seen are clueless what to suggest; suggesting I floss less would make their heads explode.

Came here to say something similar. And also to point out that this opinion is a perfectly sound argument in and of itself, thus making it somewhat paradoxical in context.

Unexpected mention of Allie Brosh in the thanks at the end. Genuinely nice to be able to confirm she’s still out there, alive and kicking, doing whatever it is she’s doing now.

Proof: You could create that potaturd as a plush and someone would buy it.

There are so many. Perhaps because I occasionally go back and watch a compilation or two for the nostalgia - even though I missed the whole phenomenon when they were new - and weep not only for what was lost, but also for how the world was back then.

Here’s just a handful:

Look at all those chickens.

Oh my God, they were roommates.

Five feet apart because they’re not gay.

Fre Shavocado

Stahp! I nearly dropped my croissant!

Road work ahead? Boy, I sure hope it does!

The Kermit singing one. And the fact there’s an extended cut which is probably the origin not the Vine. Also the fact there at least two more Kermit clips from the same car that are super hard to find.

There’s only one thing worse than a r-pist… A child!

Someone already mentioned T-T-T-T-Target

Shalissa is not Beyonce. (And the fact there’s at least one return of Shalissa in the super-rare Vines.)

There’s a bunch of others, but I think I might be dredging them up now because I’m thinking about them rather than ones that come to me randomly.

There are stories that contain devices that can create realities, so even if the top level can’t be a story you create yourself, deeper levels can be anything you like.

The hard part would be convincing someone in the top level to let you, a mysterious interloper, use such a device.

And the next hard part would be readjusting to mundane reality and trying to pick up where you left off when you finally come home.

… just ask anyone who has “returned” to what ought to be a familiar computer game world after an extended break in the real world and/or other games. Or even other worlds in the same game.

In before someone wants to reboot a server and the hypervisor is unresponsive.

YouTube’s algorithm seems to think that if someone watches one video by a creator they’ve never watched before, that their feed of recommendations should immediately be filled by everything that creator ever made, so unless someone at YouTube made a conscious decision for it to do that, it would suggest that people generally go nuts and watch everything.

The fact I noticed and was annoyed by it suggests I’m the exception rather than the rule.

Can’t mention Anton Yelchin without mentioning Grant Imahara. Both gone far too soon.

Whoever’s writing this reality really pulled a GRR Martin there.

Various factors have caused this to spring to mind over everything else and it wasn’t technically part of the cartoon:

Way back when I was a kid, a friend had invited me over to his house and somehow we ended up watching a VHS of The Real Ghostbusters. The episode centred around a baseball match between good and evil. Good had to play fair and Evil could cheat.

At one point, the batter for the evil side, some kind of demon, rather than hitting the ball, chose to swallow it and spit it back out at high speed.

The funny part is that my friend happened to hit freeze-frame with the ball just about to enter the demon’s mouth. I forget why he did that. Maybe we got distracted and wanted to watch it again. Rewind, stop/freeze-frame, play or something like that.

Anyway, because of animation smearing, the way the demon was drawn for that one frame was goofy as hell. The demon looked stupid enough already in a baseball uniform and cap, stretching suspension of disbelief. That goofy frame pushed it right over the edge. We fell about laughing.

I don’t think this is a British thing. I’m also British and had never seen the -y spelling until today.

I mean, I suppose it’s rare enough that it’s possible I’ve only ever seen American English instances of it, but I would have thought it would have come up at some point well before now.

Off-topic linguistic rambling follows:

TIL “eery” is a valid spelling for “eerie”.

Google Ngrams suggests that “eerie” is a whopping 109 times more common, but nonetheless, “eery” is there. Even my browser’s spellchecker isn’t highlighting it.

I tried going down the rabbit hole of why that word has kept an older “-ie” ending but I’ve come away more confused more than I went in. I’m going to guess that an -e at the end balances with those e’s at the start has a lot to do with it.

Relevant 4 minute story

Cockles are literally heart shaped when viewed side on. The cardioid in mathematics gets its name from the same thing and that’s bulbous by comparison.

Wiktionary also suggests that “cockles” may be a corruption of cochlea(e) which is one of at least a couple of names for the heart’s ventricles.

There’s an ancient rule along the lines of “If a new invention can be used for sexual purposes, then it will be used for sexual purposes.”

Internet Rules 34 and 35 are descendents of this rule.

People who don’t know are due a rude awakening.

(Writing this comment in the style it describes is self-referential and confusing, and I might get it wrong, but I’m going to give it a go.)

It’s often good to start out with self-deprecation (if not self-reference). Something like “English can be a bit odd” or “English has traps for the unwary” and then gently segue into what’s bugging you and what’s right and what’s wrong.

We’ve got to at least try to be nice, even if the natural instinct might be to be offended and direct.

There’s a meme on my homepage at the moment that uses the template of Gordon Ramsay giving a hug versus calling someone a donkey. The underlying gag it’s being used for isn’t all that important. The point is most people would prefer the hug from the expert rather than the alternative.

It would be even better if we could give the scientific, linguistic reason as to why other than just “it sounds wrong”, but, yes, that’d be really going the extra mile. Most of us have no idea (myself included), precious little idea on what exactly to go research, and the recipient might not be able to do much with that information anyway.

I will undoubtedly fail at following this advice myself at some point. Hopefully, this isn’t it.