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> Muster, not mustard.

Wrong. "Cut the muster" only came along after "cut the mustard." There are no appearances of it in print before O. Henry's 1907 use of "cut the mustard."

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-cut1.htm

The word "shyster" is not and never has been an anti-semitic slur, nor does it arise from any anti-semitic slur.

It does not mean "Jew" or even any particular kind of Jew. It has never been selectively applied to Jews.

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-shy1.htm.

Sure it is. Article on the subject.

Don't read more into this than is there!

Bizspeak
http://www.atrixnet.com/bs-generator.html

Euphemism
http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=53011

Bafflegab
http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-baf1.htm

Pretentious Powergrabbing
http://www.weknownext.com/trends/shrm-2012-commercial-leading-people-leading-organizations

I've heard of Spic in Span though. Is that where you're thinking of?

No, Spic and Span is what I meant.

Although it appears that it's seen on the official web site's title as Spic 'n Span, but that's missing an apostrophe. The product appears to say Spic and Span.

Like how people abbreviate "until" to "till" instead of "'til" - missing the apostrophe and adding a letter L, making it a different word (till as in cash till, or verb: to till the land, etc.)

Or, better example, Rock 'n Roll.

Interesting tidbit from World Wide Words, via Wikipedia:

A spick was a spike or nail, a span was a very fresh wood chip, and thus the phrase meant clean and neat and all in place, as in being nailed down. The "span" in the idiom also is part of "brand span new," now more commonly rendered "brand spanking new."

Googled that for you:
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-sou4.htm

Etymology dates to horse racing from the early 20th century, when horses would be injected with mysterious liquids ("soups") to improve their performance in races.

Sorry, but it seems "meteoric rise" has been used a lot lately and it's almost as if people are being tested to see how stupid they are.

Actually, it's a test of how quickly some people jump to erroneous conclusions without bothering to check if there is a reasonable explanation they simply don't know about. We could call it the "true knowledge test for males between the ages of 15 and 30".

The phrase "meteoric rise" has been in use at least since 1865 - and, given the context, it makes perfect sense.

Maybe, maybe not. 'Couldn't care less' is more accepted and straightforward, but 'could care less' is used and according to some speculation here, it probably developed as sarcasm, much like 'I should be so lucky'.

Only counting words that are entirely lower case my /usr/share/dict/words has 355543 lines which is some 19 bits. However: I would not know most of them. Estimates on vocabulary size are ''10,000-12,000 words for a 16-year-old, and 20,000-25,000 for a college graduate''. Lets be a pessimist and take 10,000 words. Ignoring the small words my phrase contained 5 words, so the number of permutations is about 10,000^5 which is about 10^21 combinations.

Using their Massive Cracking of 10^14 guesses/second - my pass phrase would take some 10^6 seconds or 11 days to crack. Not many organisations have the computational hardware for Massive Cracking, so I am probably reasonably save from all except CIA/GCHQ - and they would probably get me by other ways.

Can anyone give a better estimate ?

That's better than "octothorpe" and some of it's other names.

No, this is a boldface lie (well, it was a lie about being a lie)

his was a baldface lie.

And here are more facts for you...

"According to Beck and McKeown (1991), 5 to 6 year olds have a working vocabulary of 2,500 to 5,000 words."

"The average student learns about 3,000 words per year in the early school years -- that's 8 words per day (Baumann & Kameenui, 1991; Beck & McKeown, 1991; Graves, 1986), but vocabulary growth is considerably worse for disadvantaged students than it is for advantaged students (White, Graves & Slater, 1990)."
http://www.balancedreading.com/vocabulary.html

"David Crystal described a simple research project — using random pages from a dictionary — that suggests these figures are severe underestimates. He concludes that a better average for a college graduate might be 60,000 active words and 75,000 passive ones. But this method of assessing vocabulary counts dictionary headwords only; it would be possible to multiply it several-fold to include different senses, inflected forms, and compounds. Another assessment — of a million-word collection of American texts — identified about 38,000 headwords. Bearing in mind this was all general writing, this doesn’t sound so different from David Crystal’s estimates for graduate vocabularies."

http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/howmany.htm

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-bal2.htm

It depends on who you ask. (According to this site, boldfaced was used by Shakespeare, but not boldfaced lie.)

Bold-faced doesn't make sense to me, because it really doesn't convey the meaning of how obvious the lie is. :) That's why I use bald-faced lie. :)

BATED breath. http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-bai1.htm

I'm totally cool with misuse of the language to be ironic or whatever, but that requires a degree of cleverness I don't detect here. Please learn language idioms before you try to use them. Just sayin'.

Not so much, actually.

Taken literally, "I could care less" does mean you at least care a little bit right now. See this continuum of caring I found.

Although "I couldn't care less" is the original form, "I could care less" is classic American sarcasm - a positive phrase meant negatively. I wouldn't consider it any more "wrong" than phrases like "Lucky you!" (said to someone suffering misfortune), or "Tell me about it!" (said when you've heard it all before and really don't want to be told all about it.)

This page was also interesting.

Yup! Tell me about it!

Taken literally, "I could care less" does mean you at least care a little bit right now. See this continuum of caring I found.

Although "I couldn't care less" is the original form, "I could care less" is classic American sarcasm - a positive phrase meant negatively. I wouldn't consider it any more "wrong" than phrases like "Lucky you!" (said to someone suffering misfortune), or "Tell me about it!" (said when you've heard it all before and really don't want to be told all about it.)

This page was also interesting.

There’s a close link between the stress pattern of I could care less and the kind that appears in certain sarcastic or self-deprecatory phrases that are associated with the Yiddish heritage and (especially) New York Jewish speech. Perhaps the best known is I should be so lucky!, in which the real sense is often “I have no hope of being so lucky”, a closely similar stress pattern with the same sarcastic inversion of meaning. There’s no evidence to suggest that I could care less came directly from Yiddish, but the similarity is suggestive. There are other American expressions that have a similar sarcastic inversion of apparent sense, such as Tell me about it!, which usually means “Don’t tell me about it, because I know all about it already”. These may come from similar sources.

Wow, I had no idea that this particular nitpick had gotten so polarized.

The best reference I've found is from http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ico1.htm

So the internally-consistent Queen's British version "couldn't care less" sounds fine, but in reality admit that you'd just ream the guy by pointing out "ha! You cared /enough/ to write a post about it!" and gloat in your fine ability to feel superior at picking at the pointless flaws of others.

The sarcastic yankee-yiddish version "could care less" would be used by the more rebellious folk, if only to allow them to weasel out of that kind of predicament by varying the degree of sarcasm implied depending upon the listener. I like it.

shoe-in

That's "shoo-in".

As they say, "the proof's in the pudding."

That's how it has been corrupted over time. The actual quote is, "The proof of the pudding is in the eating."

From that article:

"The full proverb is indeed the proof of the pudding is in the eating and proof has the sense of “test” (as it also has, or used to have, in phrases such as proving-ground and printer’s proof). The proverb literally says that you won’t know whether food has been cooked properly until you try it. Or, putting it figuratively, don’t assume that something is in order or believe what you are told, but judge the matter by testing it; it’s much the same philosophy as in seeing is believing and actions speak louder than words.

The proverb is ancient — it has been traced back to 1300 and was popularised by Cervantes in his Don Quixote of 1605. It’s sad that it has lasted so long, only to be corrupted in modern times."

Unfortunately, the story itself does not appear to be a real one (although, it is a cool story). http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-qui1.htm

Are you trolling or misinformed? "Shyster" is a corruption of "Scheisser", as in someone who produces shit, and has nothing to do with Jews. Disabuse yourself of your persecution complex.

(Perhaps you're thinking of "Shylock", whose original portrayal could be argued as anti-Semitic - but that doesn't mean the word's current use suggests any opinion by the user on Jews.)

According to World Wide Words, "Sir Humphry made a bit of a mess of naming this new element, at first spelling it alumium (this was in 1807) then changing it to aluminum, and finally settling on aluminium in 1812. His classically educated scientific colleagues preferred aluminium right from the start, because it had more of a classical ring, and chimed harmoniously with many other elements whose names ended in –ium, like potassium, sodium, and magnesium, all of which had been named by Davy."

And that would be almost-excusable, except for the brain-dead "open source is king" approach for updates: "The whole-thing's free anyway, why not just re-send the whole thing?" binary patches are pretty-much unheard of. Of course, sending the whole thing is really just a work-around because-

SuSE has been doing binary deltas since Hector was a pup. Haven't others too?

Package managers generally do NOT bother to detect when they are about to clobber or alter "the wrong file". When they do, they don't bother to keep a record of what they /would/ consider to be "the right file", making "merging" impossible and difference examination a guessing game. That doesn't even matter, because the first step in an "Upgrade" is usually to just completely remove the existing package, which means...

That's not true. Most dependencies are given for files and their specific versions. If the "to-be-installed" package offers a different version of the file/library that no longer satisfies the dependency, the package manager complains, and most of the time, tries to automatically find the best solution from available packages.

Multiple versions of a single package co-existing on the same base install is generally impossible. Which really makes you wonder what the hell a package manager /does/ manage.

It is possible and easily done. Package managers do not have any such restrictions and are able to happily manage multiple versions of the libraries quite well.

You want the bleeding-edge version of something? You just want to patch a broken package? That means you're not using the package manager, and that means you're on your own for everything. Either you build a /package/ for what you're doing on the side, or you don't get access to any of the supposed features. And anything that depends on what you're doing, you may as well just compile and track yourself- 'cause that's what you like doing, right?

Exactly right. Blame the packager, not the package manager. There's nothing in package managers that says you can't have KDE3 and KDE4 installed at the same time.

The short of it is: Package managers seem so fundamentally broken that giving them another task seems like a waste of time. They'll just be replaced by a better system eventually anyway, right? And then you'll need to do it all again.

The closest to "right" I've seen is GoboLinux.

I don't see how they are "broken" at all.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-pro1.htm

just FYI :-)

That etymology is very questionable. See http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-swe1.htm http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=20010214

EVERYTHING is better with a cyber- prefix.

We actually call them beer tokens.

http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/money.htm

I've long been bothered about the expression "I could care less" and it seems I'm not the only one. I wasn't even aware it was uniquely American, but it never made sense to me when it clearly means, "I couldn't care less." It reminds me of how odd it is that "flammable" and "inflammable" are synonyms, though the process to produce the alternate forms is probably very different.

Hey AC, http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-tea1.htm

GP probably does not understand the terms. He should read these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine
http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/engine.htm

The correct cliche is TOW the line. TOW. -1 FAIL.

You are savagely retarded.

Much to my chagrin, I found that "could care less" is actually a proper phrase. Unfortunately, it means the same exact thing as "couldn't care less." Reference.

<troll>Who would of guessed?</troll>

Not to be condescending: the proper cliched phrase is "case IN point". It's a linking preposition, not a conjunction, in the phrase. I'm not sure of the historical evolution of the phrase.

Ah, here we go:

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-cas1.htm

Actually, Roland did make a mistake...

On the last line it reads:
I'm not sure if this analogy is right, but the team said it was able to precisely define the size of a planet called WASP-10b which is orbiting around the star WASP-10, about 300 light-years from Earth."

He needs a comma "," after the "WASP-10b" in order to make the usage of "which" correct. If there's no comma in that context he needs to use "that" instead of "which." It's a common mistake. Actually, he'd be better off braking that sentence in two with the diction he chose.

>=)

Citation: http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/which.htm

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ico1.htm

We're gonna throw dinner rolls at one another?

Amazingly enough, the term bunfight has nothing to do with fighting or buns (or indeed food of any sort).

Oh well, it's not exactly like it's the first time a Briticism has been used incorrectly on /.

Well that's one theory. Here's another.

Lame of me to pick a nit with such a cute joke. But:

Widely used? Yes. "Correct". Not at all. Check your dictionary. In the U.S. it's "pound sign," "number sign," or "sharp sign", depending on the context. In the U.K. it's "hash mark".

Here's the American Heritage dictionary entry for octothorpe:

Alteration (influenced by OCTO-) of earlier octalthorpe, the pound key, probably humorous blend of octal, an eight-point pin used in electronic connections (from the eight points of the symbol) and the name of James Edward OGLETHORPE.

Hmm, I've never heard of an octal connector. There actually is such a thing but it's obscure enough to make me dubious. And Oglethorpe is even more obscure (unless you're from Georgia). Here's a web page that casts doubt on the AH version.

The Oxford English Dictionary, which relies on actual research, has this:

Forms: 19- octothorp, 19- octothorpe. [Origin uncertain; perhaps < OCTO- comb. form + the surname Thorpe (compare THORP n.: see note below).
    The term was reportedly coined in the early 1960s by Don Macpherson, an employee of Bell Laboratories:
    1996 Telecom Heritage No. 28. 53 His thought process was as follows: There are eight points on the symbol so octo should be part of the name. We need a few more letters or another syllable to make a noun... (Don Macpherson..was active in a group that was trying to get Jim Thorpe's Olympic medals returned from Sweden). The phrase thorpe would be unique.
    For an alternative explanation see quot. 1996; in a variant of this explanation, the word is explained as arising from the use of the symbol in cartography to represent a village.
    For a different explanation from a former employee of Bell Laboratories, arguing that the word is a completely arbitrary formation (and that it originally had the form octatherp) see D. A. Kerr 'The ASCII Character Octatherp' in http://doug.kerr.home.att.net/ (2006).]

        The hash sign (#), as it appears on the buttons of touch-tone telephones and some other keypads.

1974 Telephony 25 Feb. 16/1 A few months ago, a story traveled through the Bell System that the familiar symbol '#'..at long last had a name: 'octothorp'. 1975 Vancouver Province 15 Nov. (Canad. Mag.) 32 Punch an octothorpe when you reach your desk every morning, and the accounting department automatically registers you in. 1987 Radio & Electronics World Feb. 47/1 As well as the numbers 1 to 9 and 0, you also have buttons marked with a star and square (also known as hash or octothorp). 1996 New Scientist 30 Mar. 54/3 The term 'octothorp(e)' (which MWCD10 dates 1971) was invented for '#', allegedly by Bell Labs engineers when touch-tone telephones were introduced in the mid-1960s. 'Octo-' means eight, and 'thorp' was an Old English word for village: apparently the sign was playfully construed as eight fields surrounding a village.

Except, of course, the "correct" name for the '#' character is only "octothorpe" in the world of spoofs. It's a fairly recent invented name ("recent" in terms of orthography, if not computing). http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-oct1.htm

AFAIK knocking on wood originates in Germanic and Slavic tribes' beliefs that trees are inhabited by spirits; knocking was supposed to alert the spirits to your presence, so that they could help you.

Michael Quinion's site is a nice resource for these types of phrases. http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-tou1.htm

"Bug" is more concise than "a software flaw which causes behavior the developers didn't intend"

It's also due to the fact that early in the history of computing, a fault was found to be due to a moth being trapped between the contacts of a relay.

For what it's worth, I don't like people calling the Internet "the Cloud" either.

Your second comment is appropriate. I could care less. It doesn't mean that I do care more. If you were to assign a scoring system of 1 to 10 to my level of care, where 1 is absolute lack of care, and 10 is absolute care, the Olympics may rate a 3, at which point there is room in the scale to raise or lower my level of care. I could care less, but it wouldn't even matter, because it's lower than a neutral level of care (5), and has no direct impact on myself.

    If there were to be a direct impact upon myself by the event, then that level of care would be more significant. Take the scenario "There's a truck coming down the road". If I were not in the road, I could care less, at a care level of 3, and it wouldn't matter. If I were standing in the road in front of the truck, at a care level of 3, and I did care less, that would definitely be a sign of deep depression, which would be resolved rather quickly, assuming the truck does it's job appropriately and runs me over. :)

    It becomes a moot point, as the phrase "I could care less" entered colloquial English approximately 40 years, and it is already commonly understood to mean the same, either in the positive or negative syntax. It is found in print as far back as 1966. I'm only 35 years old, and I started speaking at 1 year old, so both versions of the phrase were already in common usage for 8 years.

http://incompetech.com/gallimaufry/care_less.html
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/couldcare.html
http://dictionary.reference.com/help/faq/language/g09.html
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ico1.htm

Mercury didn't kill people, until it was dumped into drinking water by irresponsible companies primarily because no regulations were in place.

Oh? Never heard the saying "mad as a hatter"?
 

Lead didn't kill anyone, until it was used in cars and leached into ground water (although the current additives aren't much better).

Oh? The preponderance of historical evidence says otherwise.

It is actually an American word:

from http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-pop1.htm

OED reminds us, the word is actually American in origin, first turning up there about 1852. The OED is firm in dismissing one often-heard view of its origin, from the Dutch word pappekak for soft faeces. It says firmly "no such word appears to be attested in Dutch" but points to the very similar word poppekak, which appears only in the old set phrase zo fijn als gemalen poppekak, meaning to show excessive religious zeal, but which literally means "as fine as powdered doll shit". The word was presumably taken to the USA by Dutch settlers; the scatological associations were lost when the word moved into the English-language community.

The first half of the word is the Dutch pop for a doll, which may be related to our term of endearment, poppet; the second half is essentially the same as the old English cack for excrement; the verb form of this word is older than the noun, and has been recorded as far back as the fifteenth century.

Despite some uninformed speculation, there's no link with the vulgar meaning of cock. Nor is it linked to the sense of cock for rubbish (as in phrases like that's a load of old cock), as that's a shortened form of cock and bull story, which comes from a fable concerning a bull and a cockerel.

It is also a brand of candied popcorn....

Soon the misuse will become part of the definition, like "beg the question". I understand that language needs to be pliant and change, but I wish it wasn't so susceptible to laziness. This isn't out of any snobbery about purity; it's a practical matter. As words lose their distinctions and become more generic, the English language becomes diluted and loses its ability to be succinct. So now "robot" is losing its automation and is becoming just another remote-controlled device.

And, it looks like it really should be called "duck" tape then.

It's case in point.

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-cas1.htm