and yes I was a huge FF fan as a kid, remember playing through FF3 as a kid, FF4, FF5, FF7, but seriously could not give two ----s about any further sequels.
While I admit that many of the later sequels are disappointing (I'm looking at you FF8, and I'm honestly not too happy with FF10 either), if you are a fan of the older FF games I highly recommend that you give FF9 another shot. 5 and 9 are the best of the series, IMO.
You were probably kidding, but I'd like to point out that our local humane society has rules against adopting out animals for the purpose of pest management or hunting.
That's the stupidest thing I've heard all week. Humans have been using cats for pest control for thousands of years. We even explicitly engineered them for that purpose through countless generations of selective breeding. Your local shelter would really rather euthanize a cat (or "just" imprison it for life if it's one of those no-kill places) than let it lead a normal happy existence hunting rodents in somebody's barn? That's seriously fucked up. What bizarre "logic" do they base this policy on?
Hell, being anti-American isn't even a crime, much less being communist, or socialist. What the hell does "anti-American" even mean, really? I hated Bush, his policies, his wars, his abuse of the constitution; does that make me anti-American? I really dislike much of our culture; does this make me anti-American? I'm a social libertarian; does that? I'm not a fan of our economic philosophies and our view that they are superior to everyone else's (or worse, that their sinonymous with democracy or freedom); am I anti-American?
As far as I'm concerned, these positions make you actively pro-American, not anti-American.
So, in essence, you want to eradicate masculinity in the English language completely. I'm guessing you're a feminist.
Interesting assumption, but probably incorrect (depending on how you define "feminism").
I do believe in sexual equality and building an egalitarian society, but I do not believe in the policy of "swinging the pendulum the other way" that so many seemingly man-hating "feminists" advocate. The answer to thousands of years of patriarchy is NOT making men into second-class citizens. That's just stupid, petty, and ultimately counter-productive.
First problem: confusion. There are a plethora of unisex names in American society. Casey, Stacey, Aaron/Erin, Alex, just to name a few. The neutering of "he" and "his" when using those names as the subject of a sentence is only going to result in confusion when that name turns out to be masculine instead of feminine.
Good point, but I think you're missing the big picture. It only results in confusion as long as the term "she" exists.
Second problem: identity. The presence of only one sex in a language never works. Hence the reason there are no languages that have only one sex. Russian, Spanish, English, Czech, and Slavic are all languages I know at least a few words in, and all of them have at least 2 sexes present, they have to.
Other posters have already done a good job of debunking that wacky assumption, so I don't see the need to.
Sexuality is a major and important part of our identity, and is often how we personalize ourselves within our speech.
I'm not proposing removing all reference to gender from the language. In cases where gender actually matters, you can still say something like "he's a female." I just want to remove inherent references to gender from situations where it doesn't matter.
I agree that sexuality is one of the ways that we personalize ourselves in speech. That's precisely why I want to kill it in situations where gender does not apply - it subtly contributes to a sexist mental model.
To make an analogy, race is a major part of identity as well, but we don't have separate pronouns for members of different races. Or hair colors. Or religions. Or ANY identifying characteristic, other than gender. When race is relevant, we don't need to use special pronouns to communicate it, so why should it be any different for other identifying characteristics? Do we need the pronoun "bhe" to refer to black men and "whe" to refer to white men?
You wouldn't appreciate it in the least if I referred to you as a handsome man (or handsome for that matter, it is a masculine adjective; whereas beautiful is unisex, and pretty is feminine), nor would I appreciate it if you referred to me as a pretty woman.
Two problems with that statement. Firstly, as I do happen to be male, I would appreciate the compliment. Secondly, if you do a little digging, you will find that "handsome" is indeed a unisex term, and was regularly applied to females less than 100 years ago.
Third problem: sexuality. Sex is half of our identity. It drives our instincts and our demeanor. Masculinity in communication is just as important as neuter or femininity, for the simple reason that it needs to be communicated. Neutering the adjectives that describe men as men only alienates, and does not help facilitate communication. Women are vastly superior at communication on average than men, so it may not bother or hinder them as much, but men identify themselves in everything they do. From work, to play, to speech and even in nonverbal communication, they identify themselves as men. Taking away that ability to do so in speech serves absolutely no purpose, nor any service to a society as a whole.
I am not proposing removing the ability for men or women to identify themselves as such in speech if they choose to. I just want to remove the AUTOMATIC identific
Ah, I was hoping someone would bring up sie and hir. (Couldn't remember them precisely at the time I posted earlier.)
While I appreciate these terms as valiant attempts to rectify the situation, I see them as ultimately impractical, mostly because almost no one knows them. (Heck, I'm a pretty well-read liberal living in the SF Bay Area, with friends and family active in the LGBT community, and I couldn't even honestly clearly remember the terms.)
Neutering "he" and "his" will simply be easier for the masses to accept than brand-new words. People have an innate aversion to anything that is new, and most of the people that need converting are especially adverse to anything that makes them think about the existence of "freaky homos". Neutering "he" doesn't trigger the same kind of knee-jerk rejection that trying to shoehorn a new unpopular word does.
Also, the fact that "hir" is a homonym for "her" and "sie" is a near-homonym for "she" just add confusion, IMO. If you're going to try to add a new word, at least make it clearly distinct in spoken form from the one you're trying to replace.
Without taxes to support the fire department, I guess we should just let your house burn down when it catches fire unless you've got a private fire squad. Or maybe the fire department should just send you a bill for their time?
Same goes for driving on public roads (they don't pave and clean themselves, you know), how about we make all roads into toll roads, that ok with you?
Been the victim of a rape/robbery/etc? Tough luck unless you've got a private security force.
Do you like using electricity and eating beef? You might not if you actually had to pay the FULL price.
Want your kids to learn basic literacy, math, science, and history? Better pony up for a tutor, taxes currently pay for that too. Not to mention the whole, "it's in your best interest for that other guy's kids to be educated" argument.
This one might not apply if you're a total anarchist, but wouldn't it be nice if the people making the laws and carrying out diplomatic relations with other countries had some source of income other than bribery or personal wealth? You think lobbyists and "campaign contributors" run shit now? Just wait until the Senators actually rely on them to pay for their next meal.
Unless you're living totally off the grid, growing your own food, using tools and equipment that you manufactured yourself from scratch (or acquired from someone else who did the same), never set foot in a public school, never drive on a public road (you would also need a car that you built from scratch and gasoline that you refined yourself), and are willing to defend yourself from robbers/foreign invading armies all by your lonesome, just STFU right now.
In fact, even if you do somehow miraculously meet the above criteria, just STFU anyway, because the rest of us don't want to live like that.
Ever hear of something called economy of scale? It's way cheaper for everyone to pool our resources.
P.S. Taxes paid for (at least part of) the copper that carried your post from your house to the rest of us. You shouldn't even be posting on slashdot if you truly believe tax is theft, or you're a thief and a hypocrite too.
Since our language lacks appropriate non-derogatory neuter pronouns, can you offer a better word for this situation where GP does not know the gender of the individual referred to? And please don't say "he or she", as that is incredibly clunky.
I just wish "s/he" were pronounceable in the spoken language...
Either that, or ditch "she" entirely and make "he" neuter.
I'm in favor of dropping "-ess" from job titles for females as well. Linguistic segregation just adds to the sexism problem. If we just called female "waitstaff" (gawd I hate that word) "waiters", we could actually start to undermine one of the cultural bases for sexism.
And before anyone jumps on me for preferring the traditionally "male" terms as the default, I think they're the best way to go because they are already used more prevalently than than the "female" terms, so the transition would be smoother and meet with less public resistance.
While I understand that the tax bracket system is very widely misunderstood in this manner, please note that there are some edge cases where a small raise can make your WITHHOLDING amount larger than your raise. For example (looking at 2007 tables because it's what I've got handy) someone making $449 weekly has $52 withheld from their check, but someone making $450 weekly has $54 withheld. I believe it all works out on April 15 though.
These links were all found in 10 minutes with cursory google searches, so I don't think you really tried all that hard to see these, but now you really have zero excuse.
I was aware, at all times, that if I picked up any kind of weapon, be it chainsaw or magical phoenix wand, if I killed someone they weren't coming back.
Did you read your own link? It described the type of word as "Nonstandard", and goes on to say:
Irregardless is a word that many mistakenly believe to be correct usage in formal style, when in fact it is used chiefly in nonstandard speech or casual writing. Coined in the United States in the early 20th century, it has met with a blizzard of condemnation for being an improper yoking of irrespective and regardless and for the logical absurdity of combining the negative ir- prefix and -less suffix in a single term.
So, yes, there are plenty of things wrong with that word.
(Emphasis mine)
Did you not read your own post? Or did I miss the memo about Slashdot requiring formal speech?
Despite the pedantry of you and your ilk, "irregardless" has already become a valid word in colloquial american english. Languages evolve. Deal with it.
Of course the reason most home 'hunting' animals (dogs, cats) dont react much to tv is that they have excellent depth perception, so the flat screen is obviously false to them.
I have observed that cats and dogs seem oblivious to the TV, and I have assumed this is the reason, but do you know of any research that backs this up?
Interestingly, my cat has reacted to the TV exactly once. It was during an episode of Star Trek TNG (I forget which one). Data's cat made a noise and my cat (who was sleeping on the floor in front of the TV) completely freaked out and went into high-alert ready-for-combat mode. After cautiously approaching and sniffing the TV and then leaping away from it, he decided that it wasn't a big deal after all and he could go back to sleep. Weirdest reaction I've ever seen, and when I backed up the episode to replay that moment to see if he would respond again he totally ignored it.
...and that boys and girls, is the definition of irony.
I'd say that the fact that we can still understand what the parent was trying to say despite their mangling of "proper" english is a testament to how awesome our communication system is, not an example of irony.
I don't care if people use it. I don't even care all that much if it's used incorrectly, because it's a pretty common thing for an average person to use a word incorrectly. But when the word means the opposite of the intended meaning, I tend to point it out, and/or break a door.
At what point does popular (mis)usage create an acceptable (or even preferred) alternate definition? I presume you don't go around correcting people who use the word "nice" to mean something other than "foolish", for example.
Furthermore, the INTENDED meaning of "irregardless" IS as a synonym for "regardless", despite the (mis)use of the ir- prefix.
I hope that most- even yourself- would agree that the simple fact that a phenomenon has oozed it's way into our culture... of extremely high academic and intellectual standards... is a really bad way to judge it's acceptability or quality.
Actually I would have to say that successfully becoming part of our culture is fundamentally the ONLY reasonable metric by which to judge acceptability.
Quality is another issue entirely, but try not to forget that it's purely subjective. (Although I believe we are in agreement on the subjective point that "irregardless" is a poor-quality word).
Like it or not, "irregardless" has already made its way into the common vernacular. [snip]...[snip] and its definition is unambiguous, so, really, what's the problem?
Unambiguous. You use that word all the time. I don't think that word means what you think it means.
IOW: irregardless would mean "regarding". !!b == b, after all. I don't give a flying fuck about neologisms, as long as they are meaningful. "Irregardless" is just idiotic.
Anonymous because I have already used mod points in this page.
I appreciate Princess Bride references as much as any other child of the 80's, but I don't know why you say I use the word "unambiguous" all the time. I don't even post on Slashdot often enough for the phrase "all the time" to apply. For the record, I understand it to mean "clear, easy to understand, and free of dual meanings".
I concede that if you pedantically dissect "irregardless" it means something along the lines of "regarding," but you are ignoring context, which clearly establishes it as a synonym for "regardless".
P.S. I don't use the word "irregardless" myself, but as I am fully capable of parsing its meaning, I think the energy spent trying to "correct" it would be better spent on, well, damn near anything else.
Dude, chill out and let the language evolve. Like it or not, "irregardless" has already made its way into the common vernacular. At this point, trying to put that genie back in the bottle is just a waste of time. Just accept it and move on. Nobody's forcing you to use it yourself, and its definition is unambiguous, so, really, what's the problem?
A better comparison would be trying to explain colors to a blind person
I'll take a stab at that. I'd say color is roughly analogous to pitch in sound. It's more of a qualitative analysis gradient type difference. Loss of color vision would be like hearing the world in speak-and-spell monotone. Annoying, but ultimately not a terribly critical difference.
Continuing the comparison of audio to visual, brightness is akin to volume, and just like with volume, a low brightness level makes it very difficult to discern details. Ability to discern color also fades out when the brightness does.
Also, just like with pitch, certain colors "carry" better than others. Indeed, just like sound, it's the higher frequency colors that are more discernable over long distance.
Um, is it just me or did the USDA just say that their mad cow test doesn't work?
What's the point of the little bit of testing they are currently doing if the test is "unlikely to catch the disease" for "most cattle slaughtered in the U.S."?
In my experience being marked as troll in slashdot does not depend on _what_ you say, but on _how_ you say it.
The first times I came here and dared to speak I was modded down half of the time because I was too exited to write clearly and taking the time to justify my reasoning and not to offend the poster I was replying to (or at least to clearly justify why I was offending them).
I looked back at my "Troll" posts and I realized that I was assuming everyone did agree with me from the beginning.
Then I learned and built my karma up. Your post was, more or less, a good argumented post (except for the final provocation, of course), and it was not marked as Troll.
So, no, you are not a troll if you disagree with the crowd, you are a Troll if you treat people who disagree with you like dumb ignorant and insult them. Explain what you mean to them and they will mark you "Interesting" (or maybe just ignore you) most of the time.
Excellent post. (Where's my mod points when I want them?)
Something a lot of us geeks don't realize until much later in life (if at all) is that this applies to face-to-face interactions as well. It gets harder to do the "take the time to justify reasoning without offending" bit in meatspace, though...
There once was a man on Venus Who decided to play with his penis But the sulfuric acid Made it far worse than flaccid And he was left with no cock for his genius
Slashdot Mirror
and yes I was a huge FF fan as a kid, remember playing through FF3 as a kid, FF4, FF5, FF7, but seriously could not give two ----s about any further sequels.
While I admit that many of the later sequels are disappointing (I'm looking at you FF8, and I'm honestly not too happy with FF10 either), if you are a fan of the older FF games I highly recommend that you give FF9 another shot. 5 and 9 are the best of the series, IMO.
You were probably kidding, but I'd like to point out that our local humane society has rules against adopting out animals for the purpose of pest management or hunting.
That's the stupidest thing I've heard all week. Humans have been using cats for pest control for thousands of years. We even explicitly engineered them for that purpose through countless generations of selective breeding. Your local shelter would really rather euthanize a cat (or "just" imprison it for life if it's one of those no-kill places) than let it lead a normal happy existence hunting rodents in somebody's barn? That's seriously fucked up. What bizarre "logic" do they base this policy on?
Hell, being anti-American isn't even a crime, much less being communist, or socialist. What the hell does "anti-American" even mean, really? I hated Bush, his policies, his wars, his abuse of the constitution; does that make me anti-American? I really dislike much of our culture; does this make me anti-American? I'm a social libertarian; does that? I'm not a fan of our economic philosophies and our view that they are superior to everyone else's (or worse, that their sinonymous with democracy or freedom); am I anti-American?
As far as I'm concerned, these positions make you actively pro-American, not anti-American.
Sadly, most of America has become anti-American.
Of all the biases exhibited here at Slashdot---and there are many!---the bias favoring low-id users is probably the most idiotic.
It's just an extension of the same cultural bias that favors age. Yes, it's idiotic, but it is at least understandable.
If only I had bothered to sign up for an account when I first started lurking, I could have had a low 5 digit UID. Oh well.
So, in essence, you want to eradicate masculinity in the English language completely. I'm guessing you're a feminist.
Interesting assumption, but probably incorrect (depending on how you define "feminism").
I do believe in sexual equality and building an egalitarian society, but I do not believe in the policy of "swinging the pendulum the other way" that so many seemingly man-hating "feminists" advocate. The answer to thousands of years of patriarchy is NOT making men into second-class citizens. That's just stupid, petty, and ultimately counter-productive.
First problem: confusion. There are a plethora of unisex names in American society. Casey, Stacey, Aaron/Erin, Alex, just to name a few. The neutering of "he" and "his" when using those names as the subject of a sentence is only going to result in confusion when that name turns out to be masculine instead of feminine.
Good point, but I think you're missing the big picture. It only results in confusion as long as the term "she" exists.
Second problem: identity. The presence of only one sex in a language never works. Hence the reason there are no languages that have only one sex. Russian, Spanish, English, Czech, and Slavic are all languages I know at least a few words in, and all of them have at least 2 sexes present, they have to.
Other posters have already done a good job of debunking that wacky assumption, so I don't see the need to.
Sexuality is a major and important part of our identity, and is often how we personalize ourselves within our speech.
I'm not proposing removing all reference to gender from the language. In cases where gender actually matters, you can still say something like "he's a female." I just want to remove inherent references to gender from situations where it doesn't matter.
I agree that sexuality is one of the ways that we personalize ourselves in speech. That's precisely why I want to kill it in situations where gender does not apply - it subtly contributes to a sexist mental model.
To make an analogy, race is a major part of identity as well, but we don't have separate pronouns for members of different races. Or hair colors. Or religions. Or ANY identifying characteristic, other than gender. When race is relevant, we don't need to use special pronouns to communicate it, so why should it be any different for other identifying characteristics? Do we need the pronoun "bhe" to refer to black men and "whe" to refer to white men?
You wouldn't appreciate it in the least if I referred to you as a handsome man (or handsome for that matter, it is a masculine adjective; whereas beautiful is unisex, and pretty is feminine), nor would I appreciate it if you referred to me as a pretty woman.
Two problems with that statement. Firstly, as I do happen to be male, I would appreciate the compliment. Secondly, if you do a little digging, you will find that "handsome" is indeed a unisex term, and was regularly applied to females less than 100 years ago.
Third problem: sexuality. Sex is half of our identity. It drives our instincts and our demeanor. Masculinity in communication is just as important as neuter or femininity, for the simple reason that it needs to be communicated. Neutering the adjectives that describe men as men only alienates, and does not help facilitate communication. Women are vastly superior at communication on average than men, so it may not bother or hinder them as much, but men identify themselves in everything they do. From work, to play, to speech and even in nonverbal communication, they identify themselves as men. Taking away that ability to do so in speech serves absolutely no purpose, nor any service to a society as a whole.
I am not proposing removing the ability for men or women to identify themselves as such in speech if they choose to. I just want to remove the AUTOMATIC identific
Ah, I was hoping someone would bring up sie and hir. (Couldn't remember them precisely at the time I posted earlier.)
While I appreciate these terms as valiant attempts to rectify the situation, I see them as ultimately impractical, mostly because almost no one knows them. (Heck, I'm a pretty well-read liberal living in the SF Bay Area, with friends and family active in the LGBT community, and I couldn't even honestly clearly remember the terms.)
Neutering "he" and "his" will simply be easier for the masses to accept than brand-new words. People have an innate aversion to anything that is new, and most of the people that need converting are especially adverse to anything that makes them think about the existence of "freaky homos". Neutering "he" doesn't trigger the same kind of knee-jerk rejection that trying to shoehorn a new unpopular word does.
Also, the fact that "hir" is a homonym for "her" and "sie" is a near-homonym for "she" just add confusion, IMO. If you're going to try to add a new word, at least make it clearly distinct in spoken form from the one you're trying to replace.
TAX IS THEFT.
Ok, I don't normally feed the AC trolls, but...
Without taxes to support the fire department, I guess we should just let your house burn down when it catches fire unless you've got a private fire squad. Or maybe the fire department should just send you a bill for their time?
Same goes for driving on public roads (they don't pave and clean themselves, you know), how about we make all roads into toll roads, that ok with you?
Been the victim of a rape/robbery/etc? Tough luck unless you've got a private security force.
Do you like using electricity and eating beef? You might not if you actually had to pay the FULL price.
Want your kids to learn basic literacy, math, science, and history? Better pony up for a tutor, taxes currently pay for that too. Not to mention the whole, "it's in your best interest for that other guy's kids to be educated" argument.
This one might not apply if you're a total anarchist, but wouldn't it be nice if the people making the laws and carrying out diplomatic relations with other countries had some source of income other than bribery or personal wealth? You think lobbyists and "campaign contributors" run shit now? Just wait until the Senators actually rely on them to pay for their next meal.
Unless you're living totally off the grid, growing your own food, using tools and equipment that you manufactured yourself from scratch (or acquired from someone else who did the same), never set foot in a public school, never drive on a public road (you would also need a car that you built from scratch and gasoline that you refined yourself), and are willing to defend yourself from robbers/foreign invading armies all by your lonesome, just STFU right now.
In fact, even if you do somehow miraculously meet the above criteria, just STFU anyway, because the rest of us don't want to live like that.
Ever hear of something called economy of scale? It's way cheaper for everyone to pool our resources.
P.S. Taxes paid for (at least part of) the copper that carried your post from your house to the rest of us. You shouldn't even be posting on slashdot if you truly believe tax is theft, or you're a thief and a hypocrite too.
God wrote the Bible in King James, it's the only "real" Bible. The Jews just got an early copy.
So you're saying the old testament is the beta version?
> s/he
now, who the fuck are we kidding?
Since our language lacks appropriate non-derogatory neuter pronouns, can you offer a better word for this situation where GP does not know the gender of the individual referred to? And please don't say "he or she", as that is incredibly clunky.
I just wish "s/he" were pronounceable in the spoken language...
Either that, or ditch "she" entirely and make "he" neuter.
I'm in favor of dropping "-ess" from job titles for females as well. Linguistic segregation just adds to the sexism problem. If we just called female "waitstaff" (gawd I hate that word) "waiters", we could actually start to undermine one of the cultural bases for sexism.
And before anyone jumps on me for preferring the traditionally "male" terms as the default, I think they're the best way to go because they are already used more prevalently than than the "female" terms, so the transition would be smoother and meet with less public resistance.
While I understand that the tax bracket system is very widely misunderstood in this manner, please note that there are some edge cases where a small raise can make your WITHHOLDING amount larger than your raise. For example (looking at 2007 tables because it's what I've got handy) someone making $449 weekly has $52 withheld from their check, but someone making $450 weekly has $54 withheld. I believe it all works out on April 15 though.
To this day I haven't seen ANY of them
Here you go (you did kinda ask for it), but please bear in mind that a couple of these really are the sickest things ever.
Tubgirl (still image, pretty damn sick) http://aimtools.serialchiller.org/images/tubgirl.jpg
Lemonparty (still image, more funny than anything else) http://images.encyclopediadramatica.com/images/d/db/Lemonparty.jpg
Meatspin (animated gif, again, more funny than sick) http://jj.am/gallery/d/5614-2/Meatspin.gif
Goatse (still image, mildly sick, satisfies some scientific curiosities) http://www.avitable.com/adam/blog/goatse.gif
Mr. Hands (This one is actually new to me. It's a video, mildly sick but kinda funny) http://lbn.threat.tv/mrhands.mpg
2 Girls 1 Cup (Video, probably the sickest one on the list. I sincerely hope these women were paid more than they probably were.) http://www.slutload.com/watch/wMfFtNmWz2/2girls1cup.html
These links were all found in 10 minutes with cursory google searches, so I don't think you really tried all that hard to see these, but now you really have zero excuse.
"You know what they say about Catholic girls..."
My favorite way to phrase it is "prohibition leads to excess".
My own anecdotal experiences with catholic girls definitely support this premise. ;)
(And before anyone asks, no, I don't have pics. But trust me, it's true.)
I was aware, at all times, that if I picked up any kind of weapon, be it chainsaw or magical phoenix wand, if I killed someone they weren't coming back.
Wussy. Real men play on Nightmare Mode. :)
Did you read your own link? It described the type of word as "Nonstandard", and goes on to say:
Irregardless is a word that many mistakenly believe to be correct usage in formal style, when in fact it is used chiefly in nonstandard speech or casual writing. Coined in the United States in the early 20th century, it has met with a blizzard of condemnation for being an improper yoking of irrespective and regardless and for the logical absurdity of combining the negative ir- prefix and -less suffix in a single term.
So, yes, there are plenty of things wrong with that word.
(Emphasis mine)
Did you not read your own post? Or did I miss the memo about Slashdot requiring formal speech?
Despite the pedantry of you and your ilk, "irregardless" has already become a valid word in colloquial american english. Languages evolve. Deal with it.
Of course the reason most home 'hunting' animals (dogs, cats) dont react much to tv is that they have excellent depth perception, so the flat screen is obviously false to them.
I have observed that cats and dogs seem oblivious to the TV, and I have assumed this is the reason, but do you know of any research that backs this up?
Interestingly, my cat has reacted to the TV exactly once. It was during an episode of Star Trek TNG (I forget which one). Data's cat made a noise and my cat (who was sleeping on the floor in front of the TV) completely freaked out and went into high-alert ready-for-combat mode. After cautiously approaching and sniffing the TV and then leaping away from it, he decided that it wasn't a big deal after all and he could go back to sleep. Weirdest reaction I've ever seen, and when I backed up the episode to replay that moment to see if he would respond again he totally ignored it.
A good a quite developed communication system
...and that boys and girls, is the definition of irony.
I'd say that the fact that we can still understand what the parent was trying to say despite their mangling of "proper" english is a testament to how awesome our communication system is, not an example of irony.
I don't care if people use it. I don't even care all that much if it's used incorrectly, because it's a pretty common thing for an average person to use a word incorrectly. But when the word means the opposite of the intended meaning, I tend to point it out, and/or break a door.
At what point does popular (mis)usage create an acceptable (or even preferred) alternate definition? I presume you don't go around correcting people who use the word "nice" to mean something other than "foolish", for example.
Furthermore, the INTENDED meaning of "irregardless" IS as a synonym for "regardless", despite the (mis)use of the ir- prefix.
I hope that most- even yourself- would agree that the simple fact that a phenomenon has oozed it's way into our culture... of extremely high academic and intellectual standards... is a really bad way to judge it's acceptability or quality.
Actually I would have to say that successfully becoming part of our culture is fundamentally the ONLY reasonable metric by which to judge acceptability.
Quality is another issue entirely, but try not to forget that it's purely subjective. (Although I believe we are in agreement on the subjective point that "irregardless" is a poor-quality word).
Like it or not, "irregardless" has already made its way into the common vernacular. [snip]...[snip] and its definition is unambiguous, so, really, what's the problem?
Unambiguous. You use that word all the time. I don't think that word means what you think it means.
IOW: irregardless would mean "regarding".
!!b == b, after all. I don't give a flying fuck about neologisms, as long as they are meaningful. "Irregardless" is just idiotic.
Anonymous because I have already used mod points in this page.
I appreciate Princess Bride references as much as any other child of the 80's, but I don't know why you say I use the word "unambiguous" all the time. I don't even post on Slashdot often enough for the phrase "all the time" to apply. For the record, I understand it to mean "clear, easy to understand, and free of dual meanings".
I concede that if you pedantically dissect "irregardless" it means something along the lines of "regarding," but you are ignoring context, which clearly establishes it as a synonym for "regardless".
P.S. I don't use the word "irregardless" myself, but as I am fully capable of parsing its meaning, I think the energy spent trying to "correct" it would be better spent on, well, damn near anything else.
this article was written by a self-aware PC who is tired of the human race's waste of time and energy.
Would it still be self-aware if we turned it off?
Would you?
Dude, chill out and let the language evolve. Like it or not, "irregardless" has already made its way into the common vernacular. At this point, trying to put that genie back in the bottle is just a waste of time. Just accept it and move on. Nobody's forcing you to use it yourself, and its definition is unambiguous, so, really, what's the problem?
So, through the use of wishful thinking and vacuous statements, we can control market prices today?
I can't decide if it's freaking hilarious or pathetically sad, but, yeah, that does appear to be how the game of global finance is played.
A better comparison would be trying to explain colors to a blind person
I'll take a stab at that. I'd say color is roughly analogous to pitch in sound. It's more of a qualitative analysis gradient type difference. Loss of color vision would be like hearing the world in speak-and-spell monotone. Annoying, but ultimately not a terribly critical difference.
Continuing the comparison of audio to visual, brightness is akin to volume, and just like with volume, a low brightness level makes it very difficult to discern details. Ability to discern color also fades out when the brightness does.
Also, just like with pitch, certain colors "carry" better than others. Indeed, just like sound, it's the higher frequency colors that are more discernable over long distance.
Um, is it just me or did the USDA just say that their mad cow test doesn't work?
What's the point of the little bit of testing they are currently doing if the test is "unlikely to catch the disease" for "most cattle slaughtered in the U.S."?
In my experience being marked as troll in slashdot does not depend on _what_ you say, but on _how_ you say it.
The first times I came here and dared to speak I was modded down half of the time because I was too exited to write clearly and taking the time to justify my reasoning and not to offend the poster I was replying to (or at least to clearly justify why I was offending them).
I looked back at my "Troll" posts and I realized that I was assuming everyone did agree with me from the beginning.
Then I learned and built my karma up. Your post was, more or less, a good argumented post (except for the final provocation, of course), and it was not marked as Troll.
So, no, you are not a troll if you disagree with the crowd, you are a Troll if you treat people who disagree with you like dumb ignorant and insult them. Explain what you mean to them and they will mark you "Interesting" (or maybe just ignore you) most of the time.
Excellent post. (Where's my mod points when I want them?)
Something a lot of us geeks don't realize until much later in life (if at all) is that this applies to face-to-face interactions as well. It gets harder to do the "take the time to justify reasoning without offending" bit in meatspace, though...
There once was a man on Venus
Who decided to play with his penis
But the sulfuric acid
Made it far worse than flaccid
And he was left with no cock for his genius