RIP Billie Hayes (Witchiepoo), 96. What a talent!

https://deadline.com/2021/05/billie-hayes-dead-obituary-witchiepoo-h-r-pufnstuf-actress-was-96-1234749037/

As another obit mentioned,1970s kids rooted for her in the same way they did for Wile E. Coyote.

She got mentioned at the Daily Mail, too. But as you might guess, the first UK commentator said he/she was completely unfamiliar with her. Solution: Tell any Brits you encounter that she co-starred with British singing/dancing child star Jack Wild, aka the Artful Dodger. That should make them head to YouTube.

• Tweet from Sommers re: Gates.

• This is just a bribe to get people to stop paying attention to government, and piss away their attention on SJ. It will likely succeed.

Divorce is painful, and Gates' seems unremarkably typical… But ten hours after the announcement, the jokes are getting good.

McWhorter at his best: What George Carlin Got Wrong About Profanity

I the under sign fucked Mrs Geo. H, Ruth March 12 1906 on her dinging room floor whitch She ask me to do

Iowahawk shares some pillow talk.

https://twitter.com/iowahawkblog/status/1389351971774255104

Wait. I thought BLM was only about police brutality and bettering the lives of poor black people.

Seems to me this list of seven new demands goes well beyond that.

Re: the chef's casually-perfect wife platter -

"Because that's just the way we roll, you plebes. Envy us."

On second thought, maybe she's just terrified of the chef's own perfectionism.

*The rosemary sprigs are poorly arranged on the gherkins? That's a beatin'.*

Y’know, thruſh is a bad way to go.

And at first glance, 𝓦𝓲𝓷𝓭𝓮, 𝓣𝓮𝓮𝓽𝓱, and 𝓒𝓱𝓲𝓵𝓭𝓫𝓮𝓭 seem like pathetically naive explainations for loss of life.

But some book about forensics once included this wonderful sentence: “It’s against the law to die for no reason.”

Horrible things happen when a government, or a powerful employer somewhere, is allowed to say ‘Ah, well, a bunch of people died over in the valley last week. Nobody knows why. Yeah, it’s a cryin’ shame. Okay, see you at the Christmas party.’ Demanding some sort of name be affixed to each death is a profound move forward both for comity and medical science.


Also, it's almost certain that "childbed" is exactly the horror you think it is. So, I mean, we're still chipping away at the problem.

Crid, I like McWhorter's writings, so, thanks. Two paragraphs - such as the first paragraph - sound remarkably like many of Carlin's more linguistic monologues.

(But I was shocked to see McWhorter use "realer" more than once! I'm not even sure "more real" would be grammatically correct. At any rate, the auto-correct function certainly didn't allow "realer," just now.)

Also, McWhorter missed one big point himself, here:

"...The point, then, the essence, is the squawking sense of offense, our coping with a blow via the visceral and immediate gesture of swatting back to cause a compensatory offense. You level this revenge by saying something you have been told that you should not, by breaking a rule—that is, by doing something taboo. Herein lies profanity’s punch..."

That is, yes, we often do that, when it comes to interjections, to the point of using profanity even when no one else is around. BUT...using profanity in casual speech, when others ARE in the same room, is different. Especially when you're talking about innocent listeners who haven't done anything to you and who don't tend to use profanity themselves.

My point is that McWhorter missed/ignored the fact that a lot of immature or insecure people use profanity simply because, like the character, in "Fatal Attraction," they will not be ignored, regardless of the cost. Not because they're necessarily feeling truly angry or hurt about anything. More in a sec...

To appreciate many of the news items about this freak-of-the-week story, you need to know that CIT means "cash in transit."

> My point is that McWhorter
> missed/ignored the fact that a
> lot of immature or insecure
> people use profanity simply
> because

You're clucking.

Also, he talks about things like "realer" on his podcast all the time. The man likes language, and not just the high-falutin stuff… He's anything but a priss.

Why would a linguist be concerned with the elegance (or 'maturity') of a speaker's interior motives?

"Snowden was invited to a Get-Rich-Quick real estate investing conference and called out the host’s alleged involvement in a Ponzi Scheme Live on Air."

In this comic strip, Michael is 13, I think.

https://fborfw.com/strip_fix/monday-november-13-2017/

Originally, it's from 1988.

And, IMO, both the dad and (maybe) the cartoonist, Ms. Lynn Johnston, missed what was likely obvious to most readers; Mike was bored, irritable because of the bad weather, and thus was demanding attention from his parents in a way they couldn't ignore. Not because he's dumb or illiterate.

Of course, the dad is not a "sensitive guy" type. But there have to be better ways to get kids to be polite other than insulting them. Telling them to stay in their rooms when they can't control their rotten moods is a classic method. (Trouble is, modern kids, with all their electronics, isolate themselves too much anyway, which hurts their social skills even more!)

Allergy to Originality, 5 min YouTube

Why would a linguist be concerned with the elegance (or 'maturity') of a speaker's interior motives?
___________________________________

Because those tend to be such common factors in the use of such words?

It says—

This strip was done when certain 4 letter words were rarely used and never in mixed company. Now, they are commonplace. How sad.

There's nothing new under the sun. People who think there's been some broad emergence of human expression were probably, merely in their own experience, raised in coddled isolation from the popular mind, and never learned how to deal.

Maybe they should go back.

This is kind of how I feel about all sorts of efforts to make Twitter, Facebook, Reddit (et al) less "offensive" through some sort of editorial control.

If you don't like what people have to say, you shouldn't try to communicate with them.

"Seems to me this list of seven new demands goes well beyond that."

Once any Socialists, not just Nazis, get into power their masks drop and it's jail all opposition.

Don't you feel at ease to know these are the kind of people running Silicon Valley?

https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1389402205032095746

A thought on swearing:

"Under certain circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer." ~ Mark Twain

> Because those tend to be such
> common factors in the use of
> such words?

Again, Lenona… So what? I say "Why should he pass judgment on them for being little shits when he's studying the language?" And you reply with "But they're little shits!"

> regardless of the cost.

"Cost" is an interesting choice of words there.

It took six hours to figure out what a dinging room was, and I own one.

Never laid a hand on Ms. Ruth in there, though.

Sometimes I wish to have a Twitter account to upload a First World Problems meme picture:

https://twitter.com/conor64/status/1389430285704462343

Nice meat spread, but I would trade the saltines and the bagette slices for some wheat flour tortillas or pita bread.

Pretty sporty at about 330,000 MPH.

https://www.cnet.com/news/nasa-solar-probe-becomes-fastest-object-ever-built-as-it-touches-the-sun/

Another Bill Gates joke:

But.. What if that actually worked?

https://twitter.com/joserosado/status/1389650281466564616

I wanna hear more about the hopping Lezboat, too.

This computer internet tweet from a West Coast redhead deserves your attention.

> Pretty sporty

Article says:

Parker was traveling at an almost unfathomable speed -- fast enough to circle the Earth 13 times in a single hour.

The size of the Earth may not actually be humanly comprehensible, but I've flown over stretches of it enough times to imagine what we're talking about when someone says seven and a half times per second.

I was wrong about childbed, but still.

Some online drama:

https://twitter.com/JekoJekoUEM/status/1389375051833696260

If you're in the mood to worry about something for the next week or so, consider this twitter thread and adjacent links from Cosh & Fraser:

Part of a huge rocket that launched China’s first module for its Tianhe space station is falling back to Earth and could make an uncontrolled re-entry at an unknown landing point…

“What’s bad is that it’s really negligent on China’s part. Things more than ten tonnes we don’t let them fall out of the sky uncontrolled deliberately,” McDowell said…

Given its velocity, a small change in its path could make a big difference to where it ends up. It’s expected to return to Earth on 10 May, plus or minus two days.

If you want to track this threat of impending violent death as it plunges ever-closer, with handsome graphics and real-time calculated metrics, this is a good website…

But it can take a long time to load, because there's so much traffic. And even some of the Google resources which it links are overloaded. People are interested when the Chinese drop twenty tons of caustic material onto the surface of the Earth!

If you don't like what people have to say, you shouldn't try to communicate with them.
_________________________________

As the old saying goes: "It's not what you say, it's how you say it."

Adults have every reasonable right not to put up with those who refuse to take that rule seriously, regardless of the ages or educational levels of the latter. If children can be expected to watch their language at home and in class, even if that takes up most of the day, why can't adults?

(Leaving aside those events where foul language is part of the evening's entertainment, obviously.)

Or, to put it another way, it's just as easy to say something clearly but calmly as it is to yell it. Yelling implies a lack of control, after all. (This is one reason why PARENTS are advised not to yell at their kids; they get less respect in the long run when they do. As the saying goes: "act, don't yak.")

Speaking of adults who do nothing but scream (or swear) at smaller or younger people, here's some advice from a fictional child character:

"I never answer when I can help it. When people are insulting you, there is nothing so good for them as not to say a word- just to look at them and think. When you will not fly into a passion people know you are stronger than they are, because you are strong enough to hold in your rage, and they are not, and they say stupid things they wish they hadn’t said afterward. There’s nothing so strong as rage, except what makes you hold it in- that’s stronger. It’s a good thing not to answer your enemies."

And, on a different note, about the Marine Corps (from the Wall Street Journal, maybe in the early 1990s):

"Once notoriously foul-mouthed, Parris Island's drill instructors today are forbidden to use obscenities. At the same time, their recruits arrive steeped in casual vulgarity from pop music, cable TV, and everyday conversation. So it is all the more unnerving to face a D.I. who appears to be insanely angry - but who never swears."

Of course, when CHILDREN scream or swear, parents should take the same advice - that is, refuse to take the bait by getting emotional, while at the same time imposing consequences and demanding civilized forms of communication.

> Adults have every reasonable
> right not to put up with those
> who refuse to take that rule
> seriously

New rules? Says who? You did this last time too— a sudden, wordy explication of principles for which you are unlikely to be consulted. This one includes unidentified tales of fictional children. Popular language is what was being discussed, not children who offend. And who said anything about yelling?

The people to whom your attention is cast for this topic aren't likely to ask you for ways they might express themselves more agreeably.

Listen to McWhorter speaking in a conversation released a few hours ago. He talks about how our judgments of offensive language have migrated (often somewhat randomly), and in fact betoken an improvement in American values.

"hours to figure out what a dinging room was"

Today I learned that raman spectroscopy has nothing to do with noodles.

"Carbon-14" would be a great dating website for seniors.

Part of a huge rocket that launched China’s first module for its Tianhe space station is falling back to Earth and could make an uncontrolled re-entry at an unknown landing point… ~ Crid at May 4, 2021 3:54 PM

First, it was the virus in Wuhan. Now, it's a rocket. Can't this government keep track of stuff?

"To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness." ~ Oscar Wilde

https://dilbert.com/search_results?terms=dad%20at%20mall

"At the same time, their recruits arrive steeped in casual vulgarity ..."

Now, there's an achievement of which our culture can be proud.

Yes, /sarc

New rules? Says who?
___________________________

"It's not what you say, it's how you say it" is hardly a new rule. Also, swearing IS a type of yelling. Like using all-caps. All three are rude.

And often, deciding what "language" to use is as simple as the rule of the majority - or deferring to the host or the oldest members. But in business, one still has to be ready, willing and able to switch gears at a moment's notice, as Anthony Bourdain more or less spelled out in his books. That is, while foul language and lurid subjects may rule in the restaurant kitchen, 90% of the time or so, under no circumstances is one allowed to use four-letter words in the dining room, even when the swearing is friendly swearing.

You won't seem to take the point, the reason McWhorter could write his book: The world is a 'rude' place, and always has been. People, young and old, are rude because they want to be. No one's offering you a choice about that.

We can each champion our preferred offenses, though.

Wanna know mine? Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.

You mean, the album title is a peeve of yours because it's a grammatical misquotation? Or what?

At any rate, one doesn't make things better by giving up. As MM said: "When a society abandons its ideals just because most people can't live up to them, behavior gets very ugly indeed."

Besides, as she's also pointed out, refusing to agree on an etiquette system is like refusing to pick a common language. You end up with the unfinished Tower of Babel, with no end of nasty - and unnecessary- misunderstandings.

I trust John McWhorter doesn't believe in giving up when it comes to the value of civilized debates, since he no doubt has quite a few enemies with the same skin color, no matter how civilized he is in his presentations. Imagine how much WORSE things would be for him if he resorted to name-calling or snobbishness.

And, just to clarify, young people generally are willing to change when peers AND adults shun them for bad behavior (such as refusing to bathe), so why NOT put the pressure on them? It's the anti-social adults who are often - not always - past the point of no return and who are convinced that everyone else is in the wrong.

Long comment deleted, but you're affirming clarity and leadership which aren't yours to deploy.

They don't GAF. Don't get your heart broken, okay? And go easy with that 'misunderstanding' stuff.