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Ben X

Didactic Thumbs (Pedantry Corner)

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I guess this is more about style than anything else, and I think I may have complained about it before, but!

 

It really bothers me when someone feels the need to use an abbreviation or initialism or anything like that, then define it parenthetically, and proceed to not use it again in whatever they're typing up. There's no point to saying RoI (Return on Investment) or VTE (Venous Thromboembolism) or whatever if you're only going to say it once. You put in the short version so that when you use that term or phrase again, you can save some time. You don't put it in there to just say, "Look how smart I am, I only use three letters instead of all those other ones, but I suppose I can elucidate the meaning of my enigmatic initialism for you ignorant peasants."

 

Either fuckin say NASA or say the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. No one is going to see you say something about Lambda CDM (Cold Dark Matter) and think you know anything but some trivia.

 

This does not apply to adorable things like LABRADOR (Large Analog Bandwidth Recorder And Digitizer with Ordered Readout). They are too cute to be annoying.

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The final Broken Age doc ep spurred me to post this: people now use "see how the sausage is made" in a positive or neutral way. I'm pretty sure it used to be used in a negative way - ie, see how bland and repetitive products with all kinds of crap in them are made. Now it's like people are talking about artisanal sausages or something.

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I think that problem is that some people still like sausages even when they know all about the crap that goes into them.

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lol nice trolling SBM

 

EDIT: OH NOOOOES HOW EMBARRASSING A NEW PAGE NOW NO ONE WILL POSSIBLY UNDERSTAND WHAT CONTEXT I'M POSTING IN!

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I'm being sincere for once! Some people don't care if a sausage/game is actually quite gross/bland if it's pleasing enough to consume.

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No you're not! Well played SBM, but I'm not falling for it.

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Has anyone else noticed how "misadventures" has mostly replaced "adventures" in daily speech, outside of media titling?

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Well the show's not called Misadventure Time now is it? Maybe a different show is though.

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Well the show's not called Misadventure Time now is it? Maybe a different show is though.

 

That's what I mean. TV shows and movies are about adventures, people in everyday life only have misadventures. It's probably not an absolute trend, of course.

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The final Broken Age doc ep spurred me to post this: people now use "see how the sausage is made" in a positive or neutral way. I'm pretty sure it used to be used in a negative way - ie, see how bland and repetitive products with all kinds of crap in them are made. Now it's like people are talking about artisanal sausages or something.

well isn't it more like, "you like that sausage, do ya? well you won't after you see the inner workings of how it's made." like knowledge of the gross process ruins the [strikethrough]proverbial[/strikethrough] delicious product? I could be wrong

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Yeah, that's a good point - it's the seeing of the making that reveals them to be mechanically produced and full of eyelids and arseholes. Whereas people now use it to refer to seeing the creative ways in which good things are made.

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So you know how some people are objectively wrong about the pronunciation of "gif", insisting that it has a hard g because it stands for "graphics interchange format", and graphics has a hard g? I finally found a simple and concise way to show that they're wrong, which I shall share with all of you, my fellow pedants:

 

Pronounce "SCUBA". The hard g gif proponents had better have just said "scubbah" instead of "scoobah", because the U stands for "underwater", not "oonderwater".

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Personally I loathe and will never say gif with a j sound. : >

A) it sounds like I'm talking about Jiff the cleaning product

B) I've always loved the 'guh-hih' or 'ghu' sounds ever since my primary school teachers decided we should all learn Sanskrit so we could talk gooder. (Also to better contextualise the Upanishuds and the Bhagavad Gita so we could better absorb their Abrahmic Faith meet Veidic Scripture meet Classical Philosopher New Age Ideology. But Hey that's another story entirely.)

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Jiff and gib

What authority endorses the latter? Since it's a neologism derived from "giblet", surely it must be /dʒɪb/.

 

Or am I missing the obvious hilarity?

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What authority endorses the latter? Since it's a neologism derived from "giblet", surely it must be /dʒɪb/.

 

Or am I missing the obvious hilarity?

 

I have heard people pronounce the word "giblets" with a hard G! That is totally retrofitting that excuse onto the way I learned to say it, however. My group of friends picked up "gib" outside of the context of giblet, so in reading it we pronounced it how you would if it was its own one syllable word. I have no excuse for my actions.

 

You will note that I am at most jokingly making this argument for pronunciation. It is strikingly weird to hear people pronounce the soft "g" though. Similar to how it's still weird to hear someone say "SNES" as if it was an actual word and not, correctly, pronounced letters (ES en ee es).

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