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I bring to you:
http://www.wiktionary.org/

So just use a Chadless punch! Humorously enough, the name of the machine and the term "chad" seems to be a complete coincidence.

From TFS:

The digits in the numerical notation for the date add up to 13—whether you write it in the US or the European form.

Or did they mean to imply that the dæmons who govern paraskevidekatria are too preoccupied to uphold mathematical principles today?

In a related article:

Thirteen people, pledged to eliminate triskaidecaphobia, fear of the number 13, today tried to reassure American sufferers by renting a 13ft plot of land in Brooklyn for 13 cents (10d) a month. (Daily Telegraph, 1967)

This side thread was amusing... it got pushed up a notch when the "low hanging fruit" expression was misused by the guy who posted the link to cynicism because some people just don't get it. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/low_hanging_fruit
I almost think he did it on purpose... that's what my cover story would be.

I'm not a grammar/spelling nazi, really I'm not, but a coo in progress? You mean like a pigeon? Or do you mean a coup?

I'm not a grammar/spelling nazi, really I'm not, but a coo in progress? You mean like a pigeon? Or do you mean a coup?

and make this argument mute in the near future

You don't make arguments (or points) mute. You make them moot.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/moot

Um... Notice how very few Israelis are actually disagreeing with that assesment? Victory isn't making piles of rubble. If you look at the larger picture, this was a victory for Hezbollah without a doubt.

There was no way Hezbollah, some rag-tag little militia, was supposed to be able to stand up the IDF.

What happened is that Israel got hit very hard. They lost a lot of soldiers, and worse a lot of tanks.

Hezbollah was able to fight the ground forces of Israel to a standstill,

Sure, Israel destroyed a lot of infrastructure with a little "shock and awe" air power. Doesn't really do much other than harm the citizenry and piss them off. In the end, Israel couldn't do what mattered, and that's occupy the land that was and still is controlled by Hezbollah.

Make no bones about it. Hezbollah lured Israel into a fight at the time and place of their choosing,

...handed Israel an unexpected spanking, and sent them packing without giving up much of anything.

At the strategic level, this was a stunning victory for Hezbollah and all the nations/groups that oppose Israel. It would be very foolish to view it otherwise.

Umm... jelly?

It's "wine". Not "whine". Jesus.

Allow me to elucidate:

pun, n. A joke or type of wordplay in which similar senses or sounds of two words or phrases, or different senses of the same word, are deliberately confused.

They also host wiktionary. For example:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ensure
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/insure

Just saying...

They also host wiktionary. For example:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ensure
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/insure

Just saying...

Don't get upset so easily. I'm a Gentoo diehard too -my home desktop runs it almost from 2 years. I'm accustomed in using tons of Linux distros -and I like Linux for the very fact we have many different distros- but I just wanted to joke on the usual "my-distro-is-better-than-yours" flaming. As for the meaning of "ricers", you can check http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ricer , meaning 2.

-ade -- Suffix that can be used to form collectives. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ade

collectives [def] -- Of, relating to, characteristic of, or made by a number of people acting as a group: a collective decision. http://www.answers.com/collectives

of course, it's just a guess....

In my humble opinion, we have an unjustified polemic in the world of mathematics, yet again. My background is tertiary level mathematics and concomitant research in specialised areas

Polemic
Tertiary
Concomitant

It's not that they're driving more slowly, it's just that they don't drive in straight lines, so it takes them a little longer to get there.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/joke

More specifically plonkers

Artificial primarily means that it comes from artifice (ingenuity) or art. It doesn't (directly) mean it's fake, it just means it's a consciously created work of humankind rather than nature. I think that in modern times with so many knock-offs of natural goods, such as artificial sweetener, the secondary definition has gained the upper hand.

Check out wictionary (It's the hive-mind wikipedia, it must be right!)

When you read enough literature from the 16th and 17th centuries you get more familiar with the original, literal meanings of words such as this one. A favorite subject was to compare art to nature, and they'd freely use the word "artificial" to mean that which comes from human arts. This is not to say that the secondary definition is wrong: for example, when in Book 3 of The Faerie Queene a troll creates an artificial woman to replace the girl who left him out of snow, "virgin" wax and some gold wire (and of course wackiness ensues) it is repeatedly underscored that this "False Florimell" is a cheap immitation.

Anyway, you can chose any definition you like. I sort of prefer artificial intelligence to synthetic intelligence or whatever, just because how you regard the word artificial says a lot about you and what you think of human creativity. And I don't like euphamism treadmills, which is effectively what we're talking about here.

If you consider a monopoly ( http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/monopoly ):
"A situation in which solely one company exclusively provides a particular product or service, dominating that market and generally exerting powerful control over it."
Then Microsoft most certainly is not a monopoly because if the product in question is a computer Operating System then you have both Linux and Mac OSX as great examples of choice in the market. Again, people have choice, if they wish to get locked into a Microsoft product that is their prerogative. However, you may say that many people don't have a choice and must use the Microsoft OS as a kind of standard technological commodity in which case:
"An exclusive control over the trade or manufacture of a commodity"
However if the Microsoft OS is to be designated as a commodity then one must ask what grants Microsoft the control over this commodity. Patents and Copyright law. Both examples of government backed monopoly. Without these laws anyone could have an "unlicensed" copy Windows and even freely use the source code if they got their hands on it. Thus even if Microsoft is a monopoly, I'm still right, the government did it.

competition (countable and uncountable; plural competitions)

      1. (uncountable) the action of competing

                    The competition for this job is strong.

Yes, but there are more definitions:
Google.com, Answers.com, Wiktionary.

Particularly "Any one of various liquids for drinking, usually excluding water"/"A liquid to be consumed, usually excluding water; a drink".

Any behavior can become psychologically addicting (we'll ignore physically addicting activities like substance abuse for the moment). People argue that gambling should be banned or at least tightly controlled because it can become a harmful addiction. Using that logic, video games, skydiving, sex, shopping and even food and drink (non-alcoholic) would have to be banned. There are known instances where people have wrecked their lives, because these addictions have led to money problems, lost jobs, disease, physical injury, and even death. Of course, there are people who already have proposed the banning of any combination of these activities. The Temperance Movement wasn't about temperance (i.e. moderation). It was about an ideology of social engineering, attempting to remove from society those activities one found objectionable merely because a minority of the people partaking abused the activity. Let's not go back down that road.

A small amount, according to Wiktionary. It comes from the small amount that could be carried by a tit. At some point in the last century, the common US pronunciation changed to tidbit, because the average American was unable to say 'tit' without sniggering. Titbit is still in common use in the rest of the English-speaking world.

Speaking of which, the term "mouse potato" was apparently important enough to warrant an entry in Wiktionary... ...way back in 2002. The citations they gave are from 1994 and 2001. The word seems to have fallen into disusage since the '90s, signifying to me that it was slang belonging to the same class as the '80s era "boss," "tight," and "the bomb." Ah, well, the Dictionary Overlords that we have for so long welcomed have changed the rules yet again.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/irony

It's discrete, not discreet.

It's discrete, not discreet.

The guy that designed, built & launched a (suborbital) spaceship ? Or the guy that's actually selling tickets for spaceflight (which qualifies as commercial by definition).

Learnt: (UK) past tense of to learn.

Not everyone lives in the US or speaks US English.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reserve. Definition #6.

I oppose the US invasion of Iraq as much as anyone; but the whole "you can't send the reserves!" issue is silly. They are a part of the military, and this is exactly their purpose -- to augment the standing military when it gets stretched too thinly.

Someone(s) were circumventing the "censorship" (how is filtering boobies, at school, censorship?) software and the school wanted it stopped.

Couldn't help but look this one up.
"Strictly speaking there's no redundancy, as the word could in theory be applied to anything bent into a curved shape. But from the very earliest recorded references, it seems to have been used exclusively in reference to that characteristic position of the arms, so the phrase arms akimbo has for many years been a fossil idiom, with the redundant arms given respectability by convention."
semantics
1. (linguistics) The science of the meaning of words. Semantics is part of linguistics.
2. The study of the relationship between words and their meanings.
3. The individual meanings of words, as opposed to the supposedly more important intent of their author.


http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-aki1.htm http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/akimbo

It's[sic] pretty open...

It's. Contraction for It is. What is un-grammatical about that? You are perhaps confusing the rule about the possesive form of it where the usual apostrophe is not used.

It's[sic] pretty open...

It's. Contraction for It is. What is un-grammatical about that? You are perhaps confusing the rule about the possesive form of it where the usual apostrophe is not used.

Well, when I said it was used less in American English I should perhaps have mentioned where it is used strongly: not so much in Britain as in the remnants of the old empire.

Wiktionary lists it as Australian English, and archaic elsewhere. Being a New Zealander I can say it's quite backed by usage here, as well as over the Tasman. Keeping with the less authorative sources, there's a mention in this article of "Australian speakers who use 'span' as the past tense of 'spin'", and this article (from a Malaysian English newspaper) mentions its use.

As far as more prescriptive sources are concerned, I've only got the concise version of the Oxford Dictionary of New Zealand handy which doesn't list most conjugations anyway. I guess I can say pretty confidently, though, that, amongst the 25 million-odd English speakers in Australasia, nobody would bat an eye upon hearing 'span'.

Yes

In the US it is in fact spelled "judgment". See Wiktionary. Note there is also a page http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/judgement which has a note at the bottom mentioning US spellings.

In the US it is in fact spelled "judgment". See Wiktionary. Note there is also a page http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/judgement which has a note at the bottom mentioning US spellings.

If you want to put the kabash on

The generally accepted spelling for this term is kibosh. I know some people say that spelling doesn't matter if we can still figure it out. To that I say, "tell that to gcc." Anyhow, I know that most people don't read ACs, but if you see this find more at: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kibosh

If God would kindly reread the definitions of both therefor and therefore, God would find that while both are valid words, their meanings are somewhat different. God should note that, in the context He used it, "therefor" was incorrect.

Perhaps God should address the situation of His Divine Foot, finding it firmly in-Mouth.

If God would kindly reread the definitions of both therefor and therefore, God would find that while both are valid words, their meanings are somewhat different. God should note that, in the context He used it, "therefor" was incorrect.

Perhaps God should address the situation of His Divine Foot, finding it firmly in-Mouth.

"Therefor" is a valid word. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/therefor
How dare you imply I made a mistake, I condemn you to hell!

As for why I'm here: Slashdot is the latest hip place for deities and their buddies to hang out at. Its the only place us all-knowing gods can be surrounded by thousands of other know-it-alls who also think of themselves as gods. Me, Buddha and that freaky Hindu goddess with lots of arms come here all the time.

Adaption isn't even a word. You mean either adaptation (which doesn't make any sense in this context) or adoption.

Adaption isn't even a word. You mean either adaptation (which doesn't make any sense in this context) or adoption.

While I agree with most of what you say, there's just one thing I have to point out that makes you look really stupid:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spelt

What can I say but "wow"?

Apparently not much.

Apparently the person who submitted this story thinks "delete" and "censor" are synonomous - they are not.

I see no reason to believe that. They're not synonyms, but they're very closely related words.

Things get deleted from Wikipedia all the time; that doesn't mean it was censored.

Nor does it means they weren't censored.

Censor
Transitive Verb - 1. to review in order to remove objectionable content

Well, it is a definition, but certainly not the first that comes to mind. The one about a woman having sex for money usually is.

But then, I live in Amsterdam. ;)

The proposed Constitution, therefore, is, in strictness, neither a national nor a federal Constitution, but a composition of both. In its foundation it is federal, not national; in the sources from which the ordinary powers of the government are drawn, it is partly federal and partly national; in the operation of these powers, it is national, not federal; in the extent of them, again, it is federal, not national; and, finally, in the authoritative mode of introducing amendments, it is neither wholly federal nor wholly national.

So how do you pronounce it? Is it "see octothorpe or "see hash"?

Its not just MS either, "guh-nome" is just as bad.