User:Soap/scratchpad

This page may become very long, as I plan to archive content from my userpage here so that the userpage contains only things I want to focus on at a given time. This makes more sense than simply deleting sections from my userpage. However I admit that this page contains many unfinished projects and that my priorities are elsewhere.

convenience link to old userpage

09:59, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

for flippant, blatant, etc

08:11, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

This partly duplicates a section below but I havent had time to keep up lately.

a catch-all euphemism used in children's literature, and not just a replacement for shit, since it can appear where most readers would expect fuck instead, or even form a standalone expression (I really pooped on it this time!)

As I've written elsewhere, I expect essentially no children use these expressions in real life, so this could be considered a literary device, a substitution for resorting to asterisks or dashes while clearly getting the message across. At first I disliked this, because children reading the story might take it literally (at least in the case of I really pooped on it), but if the character in question was talking in odd expressions all along, perhaps readers would just assume this was his normal way of speaking.

Not sure if throw up is intended as a euphemism every time it's used, since it rhymes with grow up, but at least some people using it might be purposedly choosing an expression that expresses their emotions but is not obscene.

I heard what the blood in a YouTube video by a streamer who made it a point not to use even a single obscene word in any context, even when reading in-game dialogue.

06:57, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

At five-years-old, my daughter was convinced that after death we go to an amusement park in the sky–a place where you eat ice cream for breakfast, play all day long and never go to bed.

here, from a book by the author of Goodnight Moon

library

Garfield Feb 7 1999 ff

probably not from Psalm 89

20:54, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

Find some way to collect all the heartbeat sounds (e.g. Japanese どき, dhuk) together on a page.

• User:BigDom/List_of_ideophones_by_language has a list. i thought there was an appendix page too but maybe it was just for animal sounds.

01:53, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

A section for two-word phrases whose meanings are radically different depending on how the words are parsed.

The mid-2000s webcomic Silent Kimbly used both ice cream bar and candy bar as puns (showing ice creams and candies each relaxing at a restaurant).

consider also toy truck (see the Poortown story on my main userpage) and toy factory (linked from talk:toy)

politically correct usexes and expanded senses:

• Burger King is going 180 degrees away from politically correct food. --quoted by Jen Sorensen, 2005. I found the original Sorensen comic from 2005 but there's no context besides the single sentence above and the original press release by a fast food consultant (it was not actually from BK itself) may have never been published apart from that one sentence.
• a video game review where a male contestant was described as politically correct because he would not aim at the genitals of female characters ... from the mid 1990s, but I doubt i'll ever turn it up ... i found a site that hosts old video game magazines from the right era, but I couldnt find a full review of the game.

here a sandwich with a high fat content is called decadent

The politically correct page has 2 uses for food already, but both are to do with animal cruelty, whereas the Burger King representative used it as if eating a high-fat diet is politically incorrect even compared to other meat-based diets.

note that peecee is an attestable spelling of PC in the sense of politically correct; possibly used for no reason other than it contains the word pee and thus serves as an insult. This could perhaps also be PeeCee.

1. • 1986 February 17, Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes (comic):

     Heck, what's a little extortion among friends?

     <--- needs to go to the snowclones appendix, and best if a new page is created for it
   • 1990 June 23, Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes (comic):

     macabre

     <---- this is where i learned the word

08:09, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

• Im keeping this quote because it uses so many expressions with unexpected senses all in the same paragraph:

• He saw a gnarled old woman vigorously scrubbing a very dirty boy, who squirmed under the rough usage and screwed up his eyes and mouth to keep out the soap. "Drat the boy," cried the old lady, wrathfully. "Stand still, do! Will he ever come clean?" The rage of the breakfastless sculptor turned to delight. --- description of an event involving Pears soap, 1910/1911 https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Poster/tWOq9AcelioC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PT7&printsec=frontcover the pages are out of order

words for occupations ending in -boy can be found at but there are far more than i'd expected even given that the vast majority of results are not actually occupations. Many of these are outdated terms, belonging to a time when child labor was simply accepted as a part of everyday life. For example:

• surfboy, title of an Underworld song, possibly meant to complement cowgirl which is on the same album. Today it means a male surfer, with boy instead of man paralleling girl. In less affluent times, a surf boy may have been a term for a young man whose job involved staying close to shore and guiding ships. Context is difficult to work with. Book is in English but takes place in Namibia or S Africa ~1900. possible use of boy meaning a nonwhite man of any age, but without reading more its hard to tell. it could just as well be a literal use describing young child laborers whether white or native Africans

• soap boy is still uncited and i ended up just saving screenshots instead of copypasting the text. might be best to just start all over

• softboy ~ soft boy's cites make it clear that there is an involuntary meaning, whereas we list only a voluntary sense ... a man who is open about his emotions. Note that a good many of the cites, however, are just "soft" + "boy" used literally, not for men being used for sex

1. burn one's bagels found 2 cites plus a few puns where it is literal
2. anacontextual gets only one 1 google hit, ...all others are misscans of an acontextual, but the one true hit is a quote of someone else so it may hint at genuine use in scholarly work
3. w:Clogmia albipunctata clogs drains
4. sessi, sexxxy, etc all probably attestable as variant spellings for sexy

15:56, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

Are there any native words in any Germanic language with an umlaut in an unstressed syllable? These would be ireggulars along the lines of German Ahorn, (for expected *Achern), but with an umlauted vowel in place of an expected schwa.

German -tät is obviously not native, but has been in the language long enough that its resistance may be noteworthy. Yet we dont even have it listed. see Universität. The de.wikt de:-tät is a redirect to -ität, so maybe it isnt used without the /i/.

21:04, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

mear de pie

flippant blatant roughage

• Thesaurus:go to bed
• hit the sack <--- is this etymology really true? people have been sleeping in beds for tens of thousands of years. were farmers just somehow too poor to afford them, even in recent times, or was it that hay was somehow superior? either way i am skeptical

09:35, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

False cognates can go here if I think they'd be better presented plainly than worked into my humorous User:Soap/etymfun section. There is also an appendix listing at Category:False_cognates_and_false_friends_involving_English but i find the distinction between false friends and false cognates confusing when it involves different families.

• dšrt ≠ desert
• ϣⲱⲡ ≠ shop

The omega above is invisible on my mobile client.

• parent ≠ apparent, even though both words could conceivably come from a common root such as "bring forth"

H5 means 500mb height and so on for other numbers, but seems not to be used much. It is actually capitalized, even though mb and mbar are not, and may have evolved from a subscript system as in this paper.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Maine/comments/6mnyid/hamburghamburger_pizza_the_great_debate/

07:48, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

is hugbox really the most popular word for it? it was definitely called the squeeze machine in 1995 before it came to wider attn

21:56, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

the word problematic can be used to describe people, but all three senses we list focus on inanimates. Describing someone as problematic may be a double insult, as it both describes their behavior and tosses them in a bin with a bunch of inanimate objects.

https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=AB5stBgB_ofLfAw4WhN1ik4ASb98kDPTUA:1689815256215&q=%22smart+as+a+bar+of+soap%22&tbm=bks&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjtpNSwjJyAAxXpLFkFHQc1CSQQ0pQJegQILxAB&biw=1527&bih=825&dpr=1.1

https://books.google.com/books?id=do6aAAAAIAAJ&q=gonadodysgenesis&dq=gonadodysgenesis&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=1&printsec=frontcover&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi7irPt08j_AhWPFlkFHTVNDgI4ChDoAXoECAkQAg https://books.google.com/books?id=y7cTAQAAMAAJ&q=gonadodysgenesis&dq=gonadodysgenesis&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=1&printsec=frontcover&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi7irPt08j_AhWPFlkFHTVNDgI4ChDoAXoECAYQAg https://books.google.com/books?id=cNNrAAAAMAAJ&q=gonadodysgenesis&dq=gonadodysgenesis&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=1&printsec=frontcover&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi7irPt08j_AhWPFlkFHTVNDgI4ChDoAXoECAgQAg https://books.google.com/books?id=boqRCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA234&dq=gonadodysgenesis&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi59d6b1sj_AhWpGlkFHc9bBL0Q6AF6BAgHEAI https://books.google.com/books?id=lcI3BQAAQBAJ&pg=PA106&dq=gonadodysgenesis&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi59d6b1sj_AhWpGlkFHc9bBL0Q6AF6BAgJEAI https://books.google.com/books?id=R99sAAAAMAAJ&q=gonadodysgenesis&dq=gonadodysgenesis&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=1&printsec=frontcover&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi59d6b1sj_AhWpGlkFHc9bBL0Q6AF6BAgGEAI

It's an octopodotropholophophorophosphostroboscoposporogonoconophonospodosolopornopomponoctophobodontoproctoplooooprotozoon.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Still_Water_Fifties/t16CcWw-uhIC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=piss+off+a+bridge&pg=PA117&printsec=frontcover

pharm boy, someone who gets their drugs from originally legal pharmaceutical prescriptions, and either consumes them on their own or passes them along. somehow i knew what this meant without needing to ask, even in the 1990s when i knew nothing about street drugs or even drugs in general, but yet it's not even listed in urbandictionary (even checked bunched spelling). Possibly a 1990s slang word that died out, despite the fact that prescription drug abuse is actually more common now

larval stage was real: http://zvon.org/comp/r/ref-Jargon_file.html#Terms~larval_stage (see early history of wheel war which was taken from http://zvon.org/comp/r/ref-Jargon_file.html#Terms~wheel_wars )

16:16, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

I just now realized highlighted is a standout example of the regularization I'm explaining below, such that almost nobody says highlit. I think this is because we perceive highlight as a noun first, and a verb only secondarily. More precisely, the chain

----> ---->

tends to regularize the verb, even if the final verb isn't a compound.

07:54, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

I wrote the usage note at sleeped stating that the new form of the verb is often used when the verb is transitive, and hinting without asserting outright that it might be because such expressions are elliptical for sleep mode, sleep spell, and so on, where sleep is a noun and not a verb. Thus, these senses of the verb are derived from an associated noun, not from the original verb.

If this still seems odd, think of a hypothetical verb no-sleep meaning to stay up all night, derived from the nominal phrase no sleep. Which past tense would feel more natural:

I no-sleeped it last night.

I no-slept it last night.

I would go with the first sentence.

Another explanation, though, is that the new regularized forms of verbs like these are common in senses further afield from the literal and most common meaning, as evidenced by strike, where we say a baseball player struck out with a heavy missed swing, but workers striked for better working conditions.

airstriked may combine both reasons .... it is clearly derived from the noun airstrike, not just from the verb strike, and it is a sense somewhat removed from the original senses of strike. I remember on social media someone briefly making fun of another person who had used the simple struck as the past tense form in a sentence about airstrikes in Libya.

A similar case is at ], where the bleeded form is concentrated in senses derived from bleed as a noun ("color bleed", "bleed valve"), rather than a verb.

how did i find these cites? google is pretty much useless now since there's no way to search for the explicit word "bleeded" without getting vastly more hits for "bled".

flied out

• possibly slided from a noun sense of slide
• jailbreaked, because jailbreak is really a noun
• is sunshiney a popular spelling because it looks like sunshine + -y, whereas the standard spelling sunshiny looks like sun + shiny? Or is it just because the extra letter just looks somehow like a happier word? I used to think that -ey in and of itself was cute, regardless of meaning.

mouse has rare plural mouses for the computer sense. what about the side of beef (currently sense 12)? do people actually eat mice?

11:39, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

words where english -y represents French -é~-ée in its sense as a patient of some action:

Also on this list are word pairs from heraldry, e.g. pellet / pellety, and some unpaired such as trefly.

Fundy is a similar example, but represents French -u instead of -ée. Both are passives in a sense.

Per https://en.wiktionary.orghttps://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=handies&action=history and duckies, i think there should not be two separate definitions if they are just two spellings of the same word. Separate listings would be good when an -ie diminutive and a -y diminutive have distinct senses, and Im sure there are some, though I cant think of any offhand.

1. -y (the most common and most flexible)
2. -ie (scrunchie, quickie, etc; less common than -y, perhaps more bound to nouns; also common in names)
3. -ey (girls' names mostly, like Abbey, though Mickey is an example of a name for boys)
4. -ee (possibly whoopee and sense 2 of standee)
5. -i (uncommon except perhaps in truncations and loans)
6. -ies, even for a singular (That's because you're pressing the offies! Probably not a single lexified standard use)
7. -sie ~ -sies (similar to above; see handsies)
8. -a (that one children's song). Although this could be considered not a diminutive, it definitely makes the song more cute.
9. -o (not used much as a diminutive)
10. -bie has a separate existence, no longer confined to appearing after vowels
11. Reduplication (night-night!)
12. baby talk (widdle, etc)
13. baby talk with reduplication (look! its a DOGGY-WOGGY!!!!!!!)
14. loaned morphemes
15. anything else, such as compounds and anything at Category:English_diminutive_suffixes not listed above. The line between a diminutive and a compound is not always clear; consider -kins which sounds cute enough but is most likely perceived as deriving from kin despite its most likely etymology (note inanimates such as napkin).

The change of vowel from a to i in the ancestor of the word kitten is unexplained. I dont know offhand of any other examples of this; I had been willing to accept it as a simple expressive formation, but I would think there would be at least a few other examples of it. The word chook seems to be unrelated to chicken but could have been influenced by it (an early example of so-called Pokemon speak perhaps, where animals' characteristic sound is their name).

11:31, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

what is the difference between a phrase and an intj?

Wiktionary:Requests_for_moves,_mergers_and_splits#spit_in_someone's_face is the thread with the one/someone distinction.

sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you

blush over, a deliberate variant of brush over i use. where did my list go? i may have dleeted it on purpose.

i hate to throw out expired food, but throwing up expired food is a lot worse. <---what is the term for this? only other one i know offhand is "piss off / piss on". it is not w:zeugma, which i think is a much more clever form of wordplay, but i'm still interested.

it is not quite antanaclasis either, but i'm labeling this section with that word because its the closest i can find.

22:41, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

English has odd use restrictions on very simple words:

1. in usually turns into inside when phrase-final, but there are a few exceptions.

    a box with a rabbit in

    a box with a rabbit inside

2. except for clothes, on rarely occurs phrase-finally. it can either be omitted or replaced by an expression like "on top".

    a frog with red stripes

    a frog with red stripes on

    a frog with red stripes on top

the indefinite article a rarely gets used to mean more than one, even though one might expect that it would.

1. *there is a car on the road

Perhaps we are more willing to use some, even if the case may be that there is in fact only one, than to use a(n) and risk underestimation.

1. a can substitute for every and per in some constructions:

   i eat an apple every day

   i eat an apple per day

   i eat an apple a day

but cf

 it doubles every day

 it doubles per day

 it doubles a day

Perhaps this is because we are most used to hearing a when it links two nouns: "apple a day", and so on.

this is a true run-on sentence. the technical term for this specific type is an apo koinou construction.

15:01, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

if all else fails, pesty CSS classes can be removed by javascript.

13:40, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Note that any thread that allows subscription puts every comment into a unique ID. it might be possible to use the "ENGLISH!!!!" system below to highlight certain comments and not others, and this could perhaps even be extended to the bubbles around them (but it would be easier to only do the text).

on user talk pages only, the new talkpage features gadget causes the round pink buttons to inflate so much that they smother the text above them. relevant code may be here:

‹span class="ext-discussiontools-init-replybutton oo-ui-widget oo-ui-widget-enabled oo-ui-buttonElement oo-ui-buttonElement-frameless oo-ui-labelElement oo-ui-flaggedElement-progressive oo-ui-buttonWidget" id="ooui-php-15" data-ooui=""›‹a class="oo-ui-buttonElement-button" role="button" tabindex="0" rel="nofollow"›‹span class="oo-ui-iconElement-icon oo-ui-iconElement-noIcon oo-ui-image-progressive"›‹/span›‹span class="oo-ui-labelElement-label"›Reply‹/span›‹span class="oo-ui-indicatorElement-indicator oo-ui-indicatorElement-noIndicator oo-ui-image-progressive"›‹/span›‹/a›‹/span›

the new code affects the visual editor reply function, leaving lots of yellow space (that is, whitespace but filled in with the yellow bg inherited from the parent). i dont think it actually takes up any more space than it did before, but it looks more barren without all the round pink buttons to press.

06:55, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

For the time being, the more tab (which contains the move function) protrudes above the egg-shaped buttons I've created to replace all of the other tabs. If it did not do this, it would be inaccessible because the round shapes crowd it out and there's no room for the mouse cursor to fit in. Presumably, I should be able to replace the More tab with an egg just like I replaced all the others, but because it is the only tab that produces a pulldown menu, it was ignored by the CSS code I used, and I need to find time to get back into this in order to see what new code I need to write.

16:16, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

w:User:Alexis_Jazz/Factotum.js is a very large script of which I might want to use just a small part. I can test it out on a different account since i think it might not play well with the CSS I have loaded here.

10:22, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

it might be possible to use the "English!!!!!!!" code to highlight links that have an inbuilt sense ID, and to highlight links by language. In both cases it would be the same "search within the tag" CSS function but the searching would be for two different things.

11:33, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

might need to enwrap dd in a bubble as well, since otherwise some discussions where everyone uses a single colon will look as though only one person is typing. —Soap— 11:33, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

However, it seems that dd is also the timestamp, and that there is no specific CSS class for timestamps, which surprises me since they are rendered dynamically from the server. Therefore I cannot do this.

19:24, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

my only reason for abstaining was that the sidebar was too large, but thats clearly not a problem anymore.

18:20, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

it is possible to use the rem HTML measurement as an alternative to explicit measurement in pixels. this is like em but not recursive.

Font size in replies to discussions is now smaller than that of the original post. This is not bad in and of itself, since often the first post in a thread is the most salient, but there's no way to zoom in without zooming everything. The recursive expansion problem is solved as of 19:04, 26 April 2023 (UTC) .

Lastly, some headlines are smaller than the text within, though I dont consider this a problem at all, as the heaadlines still stand out due to being in colored bubbles.

07:00, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

I am currently bubblifying the desktop UI as much as is possible, which makes it easier for me to read, although I am taking it to a wild extent such that I don't think others would use the theme I'm creating. I may push it to an extreme, save the CSS, and then dial it back down so that there will be two versions of the theme.

it might be possible to treat ol li as a separate class in CSS, meaning that it would affect only those listitems that are within ordered lists, which would probably serve to excluse the tabs which happen to also be listitems.

it might be possible to control the sixze of buttons on the watchlist and other pages, if they have a different "body" type than the mainspace, so that they will not be as absurdly large balloons smooshing everything between and around them.

the giant bubble theme breaks the bell and inbox notices at the top, but perhaps they could be salvaged with padding, even if they would essentially fill the screen, much to the dislike of everyone else (which is why I dont think this theme will be used by many others).

mobile css is User:Lollipop/minerva.css, even if the skin is set to Vector. This means that the same user can have two completely different UI's without needing two accounts.

11:02, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

all three can have irregular final stress when the speaker is irritated, but only puh-lease gets a respelling, perhaps because it adds a n ew syllable.

Actually, hello has final stress all the time, but it is lengthened in the sarcastic use:

Hel-LOOO... the system's still rebooting!

And can retract to the first syllable for an emphatic positive use:

Oh hel-lo, that's a big fish all right.

09:29, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

We consider beration and debation and surbation^{(for surbate)} to be wrong, but combative has claimed the top spot over combatative. Three of these contain a Latin root cognate to English battle.

09:01, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

Entries like Toparch might just be signs of the early tendency to capitalize nouns, with no clear pattern visible from the standpoint of modern English, rather than genuine alternative forms. It would be a waste of time to RFV all of these, but if I can find a lot of such words, perhaps I could present them at RFD .... the more there are, the clearer it becomes that there is no pattern of special words that are distinguished by capitalization.

NYT article on a supposed ;) emoticon in an 1862 reporter's transcript of an Abraham Lincoln speech, with only a brief mention of the obvious fact that typesetting standards have changed in the past 150 years, and a lot of time spent talking about ways that it might possibly be an emoticon. The NYT reporter and their sources apparently missed all of the other examples of similar punctuation typeset in writings of that era, including the sequence .; in the 1862 reporter's own headline, perhaps because mentioning it would deflate the make-believe fantasy that they spent so much effort building up.

Actually, it seems that the .; sequence does not appear in the headline, and that the NYT reporter just miscopied what was right in front of them. Which doesn't make me any more confident. But it is plain from viewing the original print newspaper that punctuation was set inside parentheses at the time, and that when it did not make a new sentence, the appropriate punctuation was still used, as seen by elsewhere in the transcript.

Maybe the NYT was right after all, at least in the sense that :) ;) (: seem to be attested in old-fashioned typography but I have not seen the expected variant forms :( ;( ): anywhere.

• 1643, Roger Williams, A key into the languages of America‎, page 50:

  I cannot hear of any disease of the stone amongst them (the corne of the Countrey, with which they are fed from the wombe, being an admirable cleanser and opener :) but the paine of their womens childbirth (of which I shall speake afterward in the Chapter of Marriage) never forces their women to cry, as I have heard some of their men in this paine.

• 1643, Roger Williams, A key into the languages of America‎, page 52:

  Hence they call a Blackamore (themſelves are tawnie, by the Sunne and their annoyntings, yet they are borne white :)

• 1643, Roger Williams, A key into the languages of America‎, page 88:

  Against the Birds the Indians are very carefull, both to set their corne deep enough that it may have a strong root, not so apt to be pluckt up, (yet not too deep, lest they bury it, and it never come up :) as also they put up little watch-houses in the middle of their fields, in which they, or their biggest children lodge, and early in the morning prevent the Birds. &c.

An alternate URL for the and it never come up :) quote is this paper, which spells it without the preceding space.

07:23, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

• flora and fauna. i've seen two other people believe that fauna are plants because the phrase flora and fauna occurs more often than fauna by itself. I made the same mistake myself when I was younger.
• hidebound etymology ... I'd always believed that this meant someone who could not think beyond their own skin, e.g. bound by human nature, and perhaps even by their own individual nature, unable to relate to others. But it may in fact come from a form of torture in which we were bound up in the hides of animals with much thicker skin than us, which we were unable to punch through to break free. Or perhaps it comes from a third sense, of stiffness (because the animal skin is tight and not easily stretched), that didnt survive except to describe inanimate objects such as books? Its not clear the torture sense was a widespread practice.
• i will likely always mentally pronounce abort with a full /eɪ/ in the initial syllable. Perhaps I heard it on a cartoon when I was young where a robot or computer used the word and pronounced it that way.
• saved by the bell <---- apparently not a school metaphor. I think I read something in a comic once and assumed it was the original meaning. I never watched the TV show.
• ciucciariello is not a kids' word for Christmas presents; it's just the diminutive of the word for donkey.
• this Garfield strip made me think that blessing was another word for cupcake for many years. Like many things I just never questioned it since I knew what the primary sense of the word blessing was and that's what people seemed to use. Then one day I saw a greeting card that said COUNT YOUR 🧁🧁🧁 (best I can do writing it on one line) and I wanted to believe I'd been right all along. I still doubt it, but it's no surprise to me that people are using the word blessing for various baked goods ... this is probably just pure chance, the way obscene can also be used as a noun for a baked good containing a lot of chocolate.

• remember the possible go-cart (“baby walker”) ----> go-kart (“motorized racing vehicle”) semantic shift, whereby these downhill pedal vehicles for kids might have been a middle step

13:48, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

So does fair-haired exclude red hair? fair says so. Also posting here, originally from talk:rubio.

Something I've wondered about for a very long time ... do we know what semantic shift was involved in Spanish? Did the word once include red-haired people too? I could see how the word for red, being shorter than the word for yellow, might be a convenient term to use for light hair colors in general, and then, because blond hair is more common than red hair, it eventually came to mean blond hair exclusively. (Just as how in English we don't say "orange-haired", and we need a longer phrase like "dyed crimson red" when a cardinal red color is meant.) That seems the most likely theory to me. But it's also occurred to me that it might have referred to skin tone originally, since people with blond hair tend to have redder skin tones than those with darker shades of hair. Old literature might help here, just as some Shakespeare plays have "translations" into modern English to show when a word that seems transparent actually had a different meaning 500 years ago. —Soap— 09:32, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

08:25, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

User:Soap/SOP

For the time being, this is for accidental typos, unlike the list at User:Soap#Portmanteaus which contains deliberate coinages or ones that may have been accidental at first but have value in future use.

An assymetrical phonemenon of erorrs govereigned by ireggular mispellings and vice verbsa. Handwriting errors can also be motor memory.

Put another way, these are mistakes made by people who certainly know the correct spelling of the word, but are most likely touch typists who don't consciously think about the spelling of each word they type. What I call motor memory may be better described as fine muscle memory. I worked for years at a job where I closed the store most nights with a 6-digit code, but when I was working at a different branch and had to call my home store to give the code to the closer that night, I realized I didnt know the numbers because I had memorized it as a series of finger motions on the keypad. I was able to give her the numbers once I looked at the keypad in the store I was in that night.

• childwish, a childish wish. Although I wrote this as just a typo for childish, as an adjective
• explantion, an expansion of a previous comment that explains it better. but i like examplanation much better. i've also typed exmaple quite a few times, so i seem to have trouble with this word in general
• planet for plant among astronomy fans, and vice versa among botanists. I also once saw planted
• maleware, which i've never seen anyone but me use. I dont think of everything as gendered, but i would say computer viruses are definitely male.
• prestaurant. i dont even know what this means, so i cant really claim it's clever. Perhaps a restaurant that has food already cooked when the customer arrives, as a soup kitchen does. Since restaurant indeed contains re-, this word is at least etymologically justified.
• defiantly for definitely is certainly a motor memory typo, since few people would confuse the two words and fewer still mispronounce them. (h/t xkcd)

• you yoused to
• wovel for vowel. this was always a handwriting error for me, not typing. I think it's because the bowls of the letters are similar in print, but the keys on the keyboard arent particularly close.
• i keep mistyping parens as parents, though i usually correct myself unless im in a hurry and its the last word on the line.
• reknowned
• wastewaster

• See also and

Even those who have perfect spelling sometimes write homophones. Perhaps this tends to be most common among people who read their words aloud as they type.

• air for error from someone with a Midwestern accent
• pop page instead of talk page on Wikipedia (though the person may have been using speech-to-text)
• mistakes among homophones such as their~there~they're and your ~ you're from people with advanced language ability who clearly know better.

13:27, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

I keep deleting these and bringing them back. I guess there are too many possibilities that the list grows out of control.

• dispursed
• bratant and blazen
• pinicky
• peeny (puny and teeny)

14:26, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Either Google Translate became suddenly much worse on Mar 28 2023, or I somehow never noticed it all this time. I've pointed out its errors in languages like Latin before, but attributed those to a small corpus and the infrequent need to translate modern words into Latin. But just now in Spanish it gave me

tengo un desgarrón

I have a tear

but with a sub-script of tengo una lagrima, which is what it back-translated into. That is, it confused the English words tear (fabric) and tear (cry). Also, the accent over the a in lágrima is missing, meaning that Google gave me a verb form where a noun was clearly expected. It is possible that they changed out their algorithm today for a much worse one, and that this is the testing phase of a planned switch to a less resource-intensive algorithm, possibly based on AI.

Update. This has now improved somewhat. The wrong translation of tear is still the primary, but it now offers rip as an alternative.

Update II: I suspect Gooɡle is in fact using ChatGPT, as I saw the exact same error when translating the same Spanish phrase into English and then back into Spanish again. I think it's reasonable to assume that, if Gooɡle indeed had changed its algorithm, they would not announce it, as it would entail admitting that the software they had been working on for fifteen years had proven itself inferior to an outside party's project that not only took much less time to be created, but wasn't even intended as a translation bot. I should add that I actually think the old Gooɡle Translate interface was superior, so my explanation for why they may have switched is that 1) ChatGPT is expected to get better, and 2) it likely uses less computer resources than their old algorithm. Note that ChatGPT is an open-source project, so Gooɡle can simply copy the code over to their own servers and strip it of anything unnecessary in order to streamline performance. Perhaps I should call it OpenAI instead of ChatGPT in this case, but Im using the name people are more likely to recognize.

I realize now that Google is a competitor of ChatGPT and thus likely not using it, but on the other hand, OpenAI is open so maybe they really did use their competitor's product if their own wasn't ready at the time. The same error is still appearing now, one year later than my original post.

IPA^(key): . Yet another thing I remember from the period of about 2004-2014 where old video games were my main hobby. The voice actor was clearly British, but is this a normal British pronunciation, an exaggeration of one, or was he just being silly like anyone would be silly? I think the last is most likely.

A section for childish taunts, playful insults, and other such words that aren't commonly used.

don't get your panties in a bunch was repurposed as don't get your tutu in a twist or something similar on a show meant for young children. Very young children, so there's almost no chance that the main audience would understand the reference. This is part of a longstanding tradition of TV shows putting "adults only" jokes into the programming to keep parents close by so that they don't leave their children unattended. Not all of these are obscene: remember Sesame Street with its many, many songs like "Oh how I miss my X" which will seem new to any young child but are at the same time parodies of songs familiar to adults.

Or maybe this song really was original??? Even so, I assume nearly all adults would see the X on the screen and still think of ex(-lover).

With the rise of tablets I think this is much less effective now, and so likely less common, as the chance of the parent watching the kids' content is much lower.

There is a children's book called Poop Happened! A History of the World from the Bottom Up which at first seems like an exception, but since when do toddlers choose their own books? So, no, the title is aimed at adults.

11:27, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Words that seem childish but are more often used by parents, or which appear mostly in children's books. this was originally part of the section above but i needed to outdent one or the other.

these are all words for fart i've heard, used in an unambiguous context, at one time or another, but can't really verify:

pump refers only to silent farts. we have it listed, but so far as I know its not just a Britishism.

a recent discussion adds clack, but im listing it separately because i've never heard or come across it.

if funny is a euphemism for fart, i would say silly is the coordinate term for shit.

• sillyass is in the title of a novel, perhaps a parody of the Iliad

• the etymology of ass, entry 2, explains the history well but this does not rule out it being a euphemism. it would help to find examples of ass being used in British speech before the arse version came to dominate. talk:paleass might be a good example of this. see also, in a recent RFV, ass-under and Pythagor-Asses both from the same author in the same paragraph. These could be referring to the animal, but at least with ass-under that seems unlikely. And all are from British writing.

• if half-assed really comes from haphazard it may help with dating the above

10:34, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

I believe -ussy is a suffix, not a blend with pussy as was argued at the RFD. Rather, the best example of a blend is probably octopussy, since the -y diminutive of English rarely attaches so far from the stressed syllable of a word. If it were not already in use for something else, in fact, I'd think the most probable diminutive of octopus would just be pussy by itself.

pussy pad arguably has three different sense of pussy (wimp, sexual partner, vagina) and three different senses of pad (soft barrier, cushion, towel) for its three definitions.

puss-gentleman (which Ive never heard before) and pussyfoot (which I think is quite common) are terms used by adults in mixed company such that listeners are surely aware of the implication but yet the words are not considered obscene (i even heard pussyfoot on a news broadcast once, to me genuine surprise). cocksure may be similar

piss off a bridge might be a polite variant of jump off a bridge that I heard once, because even though the word itself is more vulgar, the consequence of taking it literally is much less dire. However this might also be a calque from a foreign language. (To be fair, my preference for obscenity over violence doesn't seem to be shared by many.)

Google has trouble translating go piss off a bridge!, due to the three possible meanings of piss off in English, where in this expression, the otherwise uncommon literal one is the only semantically reasonable one. But this may help me track down the original language, if there is one, since the original language will be more likely to have a proper translation.

09:39, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

Remember pissoff plant, a derived term from piss off, Coleus caninus. Supposedly because it is unpleasant to garden pests, but attractive to humans. But that doesnt explain why this specific plant got such a distinctive name when there are many other such plants.

07:48, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

Yes Im bringing this back. Most likely none of these senses will ever have three CFI-compliant cites, but I've found leads that I didnt think I would ever turn up. This is helped by archive.org having a much more targeted search than Google Books, especially good for searching terms that primarily or entirely occur in the plural. also, there are various uses of pissies on Twitter that are not typos for pussies.

pissy (pl pissies)

1. a performance-stepped salary increase (PSSI).
2. terms of abuse:
   1. (euphemism of pussy "wimp")^[1]; possibly a blend of sissy +‎ pussy in the manner of wuss.
   2. (science fiction, fantasy)any creature whose body is primarily yellow; if humanoid, someone with yellow skin^[2]or possibly blond hair

      PISSIES dont hatch plots. They havent the brains for it.

   3. a general term of abuse^[3]
3. An inferior medical treatment involving chemicals applied to the skin, intended to flush out the sickness through the urine.
4. A urinal.^[4]
5. fish^[5] (probably mocking a speech impediment)
6. someone who enjoys urolagnia

12:18, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

• Russian ссать (ssatʹ, “piss”) is not sound symbolism, but comes from Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/seykʷ- which is cognate to German seichen and claims an unlisted Latin verb siat ~ sissiat perhaps attested only in the third person. Perseus is of no use here, as they seem not to list vulgar words. (For example, they happily provide me with four words beginning in piss-, but all four refer to pine resin. Thus I wouldn't expect to find other vulgar words there either.)

spritzen is not sound symbolism either, but comes from another perfectly good PIE root.

urinators means divers and divers means diverse.

Yourself, in the second tome of usefulness, have twice told them what you know of the skill of some urinators. And it is more than ten years since his majesty's urinator, Mr. Curtis, published in the Gazette, how he had practised, and was furnished with instruments divers, and shipping, to recover permanent goods which are lost by shipwreck; which minds me how easy it were, and advantageous for our merchants, in all their voyages, to be furnished with such urinators.

10:46, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

This topic will make sailors blush. I still remember a YouTuber who would use all manner of vulgar words but seemed flustered and settled on sanitary napkin when he had to pick up a used menstrual pad in a video game (just from that, anyone who's played it can likely identify the game). I would like to find non-euphemistic words for menstrual pad in other languages. (English has rag, and on the rag.) Tampons seem not to have so many synonyms, but this may be simply because the word tampon is perceived as artificial enough to be neither vulgar nor a euphemism, and therefore no replacement term is needed.

Icelandic túrtappi seems amusing enough. is túr a loan from French? in a language that historically despises loanwords. if so, this could be a case of the same phenomenon found in English where "feminine things" like lingerie and ... yes, tampons ... are often given French names to make them sound more beautiful. this assumes that túr is still perceived as French by the Icelanders.

10:46, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

I've seen the word cwat used for female ejaculate. The Urban Dictionary listing from 2006 may have originated from my small social circle (the person who posted it used a generic name so there's no way anyone could possibly trace it back to us). It was coined as a blend of cum +‎ twat, but the first time I saw it I said something like, "oh, I get it! it's from kumquat!"

13:43, 18 June 2023 (UTC)

I want to go to the toilet is much more polite than I need to vomit. It's a tired old joke, but i wonder to what extent the politeness levels of the more intricate languages like Japanese & Korean fall away when the person speaking is in such an urgent situation that they may not be able to get all the words out in time.

• que te folle un pez <--- surprised to find this in the real world. it sounds like something an animal would say, or a human in a world where we were every animal's favorite prey. unless it is a veiled reference to killing and then disposing of someone in the sea

• for a long time i thought i made a mistake with the Dutch word prostituant (“prostitute's client”), but it is real. Etymologically, it seems that it should just be another word for prostitute, but in Dutch the meaning is different.

meat, used in Animorphs where we would use dead meat. Possibly a creation of the author, with multiple possible explanations:

The book is about animals so it is meant literally (you (humans) are literally meat that i can eat)

The speaker is young and therefore the author assigns her incorrect expressions on purpose. unlikely because they are in their early teen years and portrayed as very intelligent, comparable if not superior to adults (kids being smarter than adults is a common trope in YA fiction)

the speaker simply didnt have enough time to speak a longer sentence during the animal transformation

most likely, the author was just being creative

This section is for words and phrases where I might be embarrassing myself, either by seeing a double entendre that's not there, or missing one that is.

• A woman in a hardware store is refused service due to her lack of toolbelt ... i think we're just supposed to draw our own conclusions on what that means. The same company has used odd-but-clever language before, like food dispensers for breasts and a woman talking about a pantiliner in an "aroused" voice (referring to it as "SAM"). A literal interpretation of toolbelt is unlikely (who among us goes to a hardware store dressed like we just got off the worksite?) so at the risk of stating the obvious i think this is either deriving from tool "penis" or that they are using toolbelt as a word like "manhood" and that it's a pun since it's taking place in a hardware store.

I dont think toolbelt is a widely used term for male genitalia. It relies on context to be understood. It's just like rod among fishermen.... the context needs to be set up, or else the listener will miss the cue. (i saw something like "That's a nice rod he's sporting." in an Instagram post around 2017 where a visibly erect man was posing in an ad for a fishing product) For what it's worth, I think iSpot may have missed this as well, though there's no way to tell.

This isnt mansplaining, but what else can we call it?

The video is offline now. I think this may have been what some call hepeating.

two different people in two different online communities have said that ice cream facial is obscene, despite this being an actual product that women apply to their faces to brighten their skin. this product does not contain icecream (just as sleep milk does not contain milk; i guess they assume the customers know that dairy products cant just sit on a shelf for months), and it might be a pun based on ice cream social which is what i'd always assumed. though my original use of the phrase ice cream facial was to describe a scene on a postcard where a literal ice cream cone blows away in the wind and hits a friend in the face (making fun of the poor weather where they were staying).

again i have to end up stating the obvious ... i think both of these people were familiar with the word facial from pornography and may not have even been aware that its primary meaning is a beauty treatment, and so i could have put almost any other words before facial and it would have still been obscene. yet it seems some people feel icecream can be obscene just by itself, as i have seen in three separate situaitons

yes, yes, i know that a buttery is another word for pantry, but kiss-her-in-the-buttery is a double entendre if i ever saw one, as is its longer form, meet-her-in-the-entry-kiss-her-in-the-buttery.

telltale#Adjective has happy to see someone presented ambiguously. In the original quote, the blusher was female, so it was perhaps intended literally.

Messing-cum-Inworth apparently funny only to me, and I still think the ordering of the names was deliberate

business in the front, party in the back

12:38, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Words that mean much the same thing, but in very different contexts. I had this typed up somewhere else but I cant find it now. A lot of these are words with one sense used in the military and one sense used for things relating to women and children.

• layette
• troop (but admittedly, a ballet troop is usually spelled troupe so this works better in German (cf Balletttruppe))
• possibly regime
• People make jokes about MANPADS

From User:Soap#what_have_you. Moved here because of indent problems, but will probably move back. This is formatted in a strange way for now because it is not a list of definitions, but rather a list of usage contexts. This is because the only common word to all of them is what, and even that could be changed out in the right context.

1. What have you, ...

   I'm sorry I can't come out tonight! My wife won't let me out of the house!
   What have you, got no balls?

   I spent all last week binge-watching Quest of Courage and now I can't wait for the next episode.
   What have you, got no friends?

2. What are you, ...

   I hope a bird poops in your hair and when you go to wash it off poop comes out of the showerhead!
   What are you, five years old?

3. What do you, ....?"

   When I woke up my whole body was covered with bedbug bites!
   What do you, sleep naked?

4. What are they, ...?

   They're driving the ambulance down the road to the swamp. What are they, blind?

5. What am I, ...?

   I've been waiting for fifteen minutes with no response but as soon as someone else shows up you answer them? What am I, invisible?

6. Who am I, ...?

   So, you knew the toilet was clogged up, but you tell anyone until I clocked in? Who am I, your slave?

As the last example demonstrates, there is not even a single word common to all of these constructions.

If the comma is replaced with a sentence break, we get sentences like

What have you? Got no friends?

This is grammatical, because both sentences can stand alone. But there would also be sentences like

What are you? Five years old?

Or even

What are you? Five?

This time we don't have a verb in the second sentence. It's readily intelligible only because it wholly depends on the first. Indeed, it might be that the grammatically of the first example is an illusion, because the have in "what have you?" used by itself is not the same have used in the contraction what've.

If the sentences are rewritten to place a question mark after the question word, and the second sentence adopt the rest, we get perfectly normal sentences:

What? Have you got no balls?

What? Have you got no friends?

What? Are you five years old?

What? Do you sleep naked?

What? Are they blind?

What? Am I invisible?

But the last one doesn't fit:

 Who? Am I your slave?

The sentence with who is just one of many such possible sentences. It is possible that the who-sentences would be better analyzed with the punctuation in place, but the what sentences better analyzed as a prosody-shifted form of "What?" followed by a longer sentence.

08:03, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

People nowadays say bzzzt in imitation of a gameshow buzzer when someone says something incorrect. But why do gameshow buzzers have that sound? Are we imitating something instinctual? Did people say bzzzt, or at least something similar, even before the invention of electricity?

• sproing is sound symbolism of a vowel mixed with the verb spring.

• from 1817, but no text search. i doubt this is actually the source of the word poppy but it is interesting

• fire flower might have some non-videogame meaning just as sleep flower does ... for example, it occurs in this story, but I can't tell from just skimming through whether the author is talking about a specific and well-known type of flower or whether it is made up for the story.

Sp has flores blancas "white flowers", as a term for an abnormal vaginal secretion, seemingly from a Latin word meaning a white flow. Thus, it might be that the word flor in Spanish is a euphemism of sorts, and this may in turn explain why the English word flower was once used for menstruation (as if from flow + -er). Confusingly, English flow and the Latin root flu- are not cognates; the similarity is a coincidence. Indeed it may be another coincidence that the same flower=menstruation metaphor was used in English just like Spanish, as I wouldnt expect much influence in that direction in the 1600s.

very slight chance that "flying the red flag" also derives from a flower metaphor, since flag is the name of some species of flower, perhaps named after some characteristic of their petals. but i doubt this. War and Peas used red flags to show menstruation but again this is dependent on context. still, we have flying the red flag linked from thesaurus:menstruation.

With three unrelated examples, I would say that the fl- is just a coincidence, because describing menstruation as a flower seems to be a common metaphor.

うつろ

i labeled amberlamps as vulgar once but havent gone back to it since it was removed. yet we have empiltrarse, meaning to sleep, listed as vulgar, and it is not a sexual term. the etymology of this word is against what es.wikt says, but their etmyology claims eau>il

Seems to be a poetic coinage that didnt spread well. It would be difficult to find three cites for the meaning unknown because we can't be absolutely sure what something means when it's used only in poems. There may be a citable second sense meaning "having no known values" used in science.

Could this be considered English? It seems it should be just as nativized by now in English as it is in Latin. Importantly, this would help show the pronunciation, which is just as we'd expect it to be for an English word with this spelling.

unlike all others linked from pages like tough cookies, tough sledding seems not to be used as an interjection. It should probably be removed from those lists, but i will wait until i find a better place to put it, since i dont want it to be orphaned. even tough luck is not really the same

1. Used in C&H. The commenter using parentese on GoComics is not me, but I've used that word that way.
   • 1994 February 2, Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes (comic):

     I've even got subtitles for parentisms like "you're going to poke somebody's eye out with that".

entrée. google search for "amazon's entrée" turns up dozens of unrelated stories, so the one story i remember from way back when wasnt such an anomaly. Is this for some reason popular among tech writers? But note that Amazon isnt just a tech company. Is this 1) a rare sense we dont list, 2) L2 English, or 3) just plain wrong?

I'll probably just leave this alone, as my impression now is that people using this term are using definition 3, The act of entering somewhere, or permission to enter; admittance. This implies a third party, and I suspect people who use this word don't quite understand that, but that simply makes them incorrect, so there's no need to edit our entry. And I admit that the 1796 quote at least comes close to describing entry without the permission of a third party, since the third party in this case is riding animals.

• true religion in fantasy writing, a religion which is true in the context of the world. For example, gods might be physically and undeniably present, not merely believed in. I've seen this used only a few times and like so many such phrases, it is very difficult to search for, even when adding additional words to the search like fantasy and writing. Possibly unattestable, but Im sure this is real because I remember seeing it used without explanation and being understood. It just must be confined to a small group of people, the only people who would need to have such a concept.

• in trouble is not listed as childish but rather "chiefly of a child". This may be the best way to desscribe it. Remember Caldwell Tanner's comic strip where a man is arrested and his neighbor says ♫ Youre ♬ in ♫ TROU-♪-BLE !♫"

• Cant find what i was looking for but this uses the same words in a childish way. indeed it is essentially the same joke

• in a pickle should have some similar label, ... remember Chrono Trigger where a boss named Ozzie used this phrase and was the most incompetent of all the bosses, serving as comic relief. There is a small chance that the programmers built a second layer to this, since in a pickle apparently originates from Shakespeare, and Ozzie appears only in a part of the game in which other characters speak in old-fashioned English.

may be from the Bible. "youre in trouble" could even be used as an example of a taunt song, along with childrens' "na-na-na-na NA-na" etc

• fi pilkkalaulu

It seems thw phrase taunt song does not actually appear in the text of the Bible, but it seems a common enough description of the verses in English as at https://enterthebible.org/passage/isaiah-143-23-taunt-song-against-the-king-of-babylon

i've always suspected Jim Davis used the less common word catsup instead of ketchup because his comic strip is about a cat, but Marvin Comics also used catsup, and the artists of both strips are from Indiana. So perhaps catsup is a regionalism. On the other hand, I believe the two artists are friendly to each other, so the use of catsup may have been a tribute.

• reform school even if it's dated, i saw this in a children's book that isnt that old, and I dont have any other term for this. this was probably a euphemism already when it was coined, and if alternative school is a euphemism for reform school, it's quite a vague one, as it means several other things
• going to Abilene, see Abilene paradox
• poplolly (search wikipedia)
• Mary Suetopia ... a fictional nation where society is prospering and there is little crime because "we just dont do that here" despite usually lacking crime prevention measures and the like; essentially nobody exploits the society's weaknesses
• still small voice is from 1 Kings 19:12 KJV and still apparently does not mean "sturdy". Consider original Hebrew & Greek versions
• circle the bowl <--- probably a toilet metaphor
• jams, used in Calvin & Hobbes for what looks like a swimsuit. Could be jam#Etymology 2 but why didnt Watterson just call it a swimsuit?
• same shit, different toilet used in a comic
• rotsa ruck according to a newspaper, already well established in 1959, and originally mocking a Japanese accent, hence not related to ruh-roh etc

This is similar to a list of pages i have on my userpage on Wikipedia here, but these are probably a lot more self-similar and rely largely on the fact that the templates no longer work for their strangeness.

• ladbdanum (sic!)

18:44, 19 January 2020‎ (UTC)

1. Bad Place <--- from a children's Bible
2. down under (probably too rare to list)

   I was able to find three print-book cites for this, and actually posted four in case they were questioned.

3. downtown (I think this was in a movie ... no idea if they made it up on the spot or not)
4. tarnation <--- almost always used in fixed expressions, not as a literal use, but we list it as such even so

1. darnation

1. down there <--- saw in a comic ... again, possibly too rare to list