After a year with PriusChat...

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Oxo @ Sep 28 2006, 11:04 AM) [snapback]325032[/snapback]</div>

My goodness -- of course, I didn't mean that people would use this language with complete strangers. Definitely not shop assistants with their customers!

Which reminds me of a story that my half brother (who is 21 years younger than me) told me. About 15 years ago, he was working as a barman at a pub somewhere. There was a regular customer whom everybody knew to be particularly obnoxious. For example, he'd drink half his beer and then accuse the bartenders of not giving him a full glass. One night, he tried this on my brother, who simply told him to f* off. The customer got very angry and demanded to speak to the manager. "Your barman just told me to f* off!" he complained loudly. The manager looked at him and said, "Well, why don't you, then?"

 

Dude! Dude, is like totally neutral. K?

Most everything I know about the Queen's English is through Monty Python. Except for "Tighter than Dick's hatband." Something about King Richard being cheap? Cain yuh 'explain, Daddy O?

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(dachshund @ Sep 28 2006, 04:49 PM) [snapback]325309[/snapback]</div>

John Cleese is great.

As for his #13, that's easy: Jacquiline killed him. She was sick of the philandering SOB and wanted to leave him. John's dad was paying her not to divorce him, 'because it would have hurt him politically. This was her only way out of a miserable marriage.

P.S. People talk about how "brave" she was in her grief. Bullfeathers! She was as happy as a clam. She put on a good act, I'll grant her that.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(daniel @ Oct 3 2006, 12:54 PM) [snapback]327354[/snapback]</div>

The first time I saw a reference to "suck" in the usage being discussed here was in the '70's. There was a sign over a foxhole in Vietnam proclaiming "Gravity doesn't exist - The Earth Sucks!"

The original usage, I believe comes from early jazz musicians. A compliment would be " He can really blow that horn!". The opposite was " He's so bad that he must be sucking on that horn!". This became "He sucks!".

Of course "sucks" and "blows" are now used interchangibly.

That's the great thing about English - it's dynamic.

 

I do not know, Oxo, yous is too proper mate.
Them yanks just want to confuse the world with their weird lingo.
Down here in Oz, we uses correct English cause strailyan is hard to savvy. Cricky, it would be crook if some bloke got befuddled and stuffed up and put his Prius together arse up.
Oright, I aint the world's best orther but who cares.
She'll be right Oxo, keep them words acummin.

 

I love this discussion as I do the "ENGLISH" language. We borrow, create, change and generally make a hash out of our language. We use the same word to mean many things. Here we are a group of many English speakers spread over a world and each "group separated by a common language". I hope we never loose that. I can listen all day to someone speaking a dialect of English, and a girl from Georgia can melt my bones. You could build a device just to translate English to English. B)

 

It's been said that there's no such thing as a language. Every language is actually a collection of dialects. Sometimes, for political reasons, two almost-identical dialects are classified as separate "languages," (as in Swedish and Norweigan) and other times, also for political reasons, two dialects so different that speakers of one cannot understand speakers of the other, are classified as the same language (as Cockney and Oxford English) or Castillian and Andalucian. There are even language rings (not common, but examples exist) where adjacent dialect speakers can understand each other, but the farther apart the dialects are, the less their speakers can understand each other, until at some distance, they cannot understand each other at all and communication is impossible between them, but then as the circle closes on the other side, speakers of adjoining dialects understand each other again. Any two neighboring dialects understand each other, but on opposite sides of the ring, no two can understand each other. The latter would be said to be completely different languages, were it not for the fact that they are joined hands-around-the-circle by dialects only slightly different one from the next.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(daniel @ Oct 3 2006, 11:38 PM) [snapback]327713[/snapback]</div>

Your logic is circular. My head hurts.

 

While colourful language can be quite exciting using non standard English can be confusing and sometimes dangerous. To quote two examples where confusion resulted in a calamity:

1. An airliner coming in to land and the captain noticed a small plane taxying onto the runway. He called for take off power so that his aircraft would overshoot and go round for another attempt at landing. The co-pilot misunderstood the command and instead of applying full power he closed the throttles - took off power.

2. Two missions to Mars ended up in crashing into the planet. The cause, the American specifications were misinterpreted by the British who were engineering part of the project. Instead of using American measurements they used metric.

Bang bang.

 

Can someone explain Bob's your uncle? Seriously huh? :blink: And dude has never been a derogatory term by default. Tone can set what "dude" means.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(SiliconAddict @ Oct 4 2006, 08:51 PM) [snapback]328311[/snapback]</div>

According to the Wikipedia (wikipedia.org):

<div class=\'quotetop\'>QUOTE</div><div class=\'quotemain\'>Bob's your uncle is a slang expression in British English meaning "no problem" or "the solution is simple", as in: "insert the plug, press the switch, and Bob's your uncle." It is often thought to have originated when Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury promoted his nephew, Irish politician Arthur Balfour, to the esteemed post of Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1886. As he had previously appointed Balfour to the posts of President of the Local Government Board and Secretary for Scotland this led to accusations of nepotism. Balfour would ultimately prove that his uncle's faith was justified and rise to the position of Prime Minister in 1902.[1] This theory of origin is questionable as the first use in print is not until 1937.[/b][/quote]

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Oxo @ Oct 5 2006, 08:42 AM) [snapback]328392[/snapback]</div>

That's because we pinched the term to use in Oz. Us poor colonials couldn't allow you Poms to use such a beautiful expression.