Here's a malapropism that made me chortle all day yesterday:
"…in other words, the [object] is [a thing], as succinct from [that other thing]"
Succinct? SUCCINCT?
OH, MR ATTORNEY. YOU MEAN DISTINCT.
Now, I'll grant you, there's a passing aural resemblance on account of that -inct suffix business, but I don't care to admit that as a valid excuse for gettin' it wrong. Not when we can safely assume that the author of the sentence in question passed not only primary and secondary education levels but also some (usually respected) form of tertiary education. Surely, somewhere along the way, he learnt the difference between a word that means clearly distinguishable and another that means concise?
Country Road / Another Brick In The Wall / The Gambler (Carbon Leaf — Live)
28 November 2009 @ 6:29 |
Yesterday I spotted the following on an invitation to a baby shower:
you know, it almost works...but not
Eggcorn? Malapropism? Both?
Definitely funny, definitely wrong.
6 February 2009 @ 8:48 |
5 Comments
As a brief addendum on the when can I buy it? issue, I am reliably informed at least one store is talking about December 19 as the on-shelf date. Make of this information what you will.
I have spent most of the weekend pondering the pc vs mac dilemma, and am no closer to an answer. I suspect I desire a MacBook for three very important reasons: the pretty, the Scrivener, and the avoidance of Vista. But are these enough to make the switch? H'mm… I have researched the word processing options available on the Mac, and am not thrilled with iWork's Pages inability to save in rich text format as a default option. Exporting a file all the time? Bugger that for an idea, if you'll excuse the vernacular.
Anyway. While I'm sure the inner workings of my mind, and my inability to make a snap decision, are of the utmost interest to you all, perhaps I'd best move right along, eh?
Unfortunately for the lot of you, there's very little to move on to, my free time at the moment being entirely consumed by the novel revisions, so I will leave you with an absolute corker of a malapropism I discovered today (but cannot find again now to link to or take a snapshot of) buried in the reviews of apple's time capsule:
It's an ascetically pleasing addition…
15 December 2008 @ 19:03 |
7 Comments
The problem with drinking while working is that it can quickly turn into just plain drinking, and from there it's a short stumble to "work? what? yes, of course, definitely pour me another."
Er…oops.
To keep things language-focussed, I did start a new game of awarding "vocabulary points" to those who used neglected or difficult or otherwise-impressive words, which resulted in our drunken conversation being relatively highbrow. (Although I must admit, toward the end of the night, the words did get harder to pronounce. This is when I started up the corollary game of awarding "enunciation points".) And I made everyone play freerice (which has evolved from being just about vocabulary and is now also about maps, chemical symbols, learning foreign languages, and artwork), so although we were drunken idjits, we were charitable drunken idjits.
At least I managed to get half of my words for the day before becoming totally delinquent, so that should help minimise today's catch-up.
In the meantime, the evolution of vampire moths is unspeakably cool.
On The Steps Of The Palace (Into The Woods)
3 November 2008 @ 16:09 |
16 Comments
The Alien Onion reports on a new trend wherein "book" evolves into meaning "cool", which I am linking both because I find the evolution of the english language a fascinating process, and because my publishers really do rock.
Lately, my brain appears to be fixating on txtspeak and lolspeak. For example, the dinner discussion last night centred for some time around whether we could discern a kiwi accent in the sender's choice of spelling, or whether we were making it up. I've spent a good part of the last week training Spawn in lolspeak. Also, I appear to have degenerated entirely in my own standards. A lolspeak habit, I has one.
I wonder if my brain is working on a story about language that I don't know about yet.
1 November 2008 @ 7:52 |
5 Comments
Proofreading: the process perhaps best described as "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
The Winner Takes It All (Mamma Mia!)
2 September 2008 @ 10:38 |
4 Comments
- a word you never expected your aunt to know: frottage.
- i had a haircut three whole days ago now. i still hate it. sign of a truly bad haircut. this one's gonna take a few months to undo.
- is leonard cohen's "hallelujah" the most covered song ever in the history of mankind? i have twenty-seven versions of it on my hard drive, only one of them by the man himself, and i wasn't actually trying for a collection.
- i am on annual leave from the dayjob, ostensibly to write lots on the novel. then the baby was born and the family descended. so while i'm still writing, i'm not getting much more done than i would have were i at work. life, and novels, they are sneaky.
- i have no plot for my novel. stupid recalcitrant novel. we're coming up for the deathmarch now, the plot can't go walkabout now
Clocks (Coldplay — Rush of Blood to the Head)
5 October 2007 @ 17:37 |
2 Comments
