Retired airman Stan Still, 76, from Cirencester, Gloucestershire, said his name had been “a blooming millstone around my neck my entire life. When I was in the RAF my commanding officer used to shout, ‘Stan Still, get a move on’ and roll about laughing. It got hugely boring after a while.
BBC News | ‘Most unfortunate names’ revealed
I really want to have a child just so that I can inflict a comical name on them. My surname isn’t particularly conducive to wordplay, but the girlfriend has a beauty of a surname that could be very funny with the right forename.
I don’t want to be rude but, really, you have the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk and the question I want to ask is: ‘Who are you? I’d never heard of you. Nobody in Europe had ever heard of you.’
Ukip MEP Nigel Farage criticises EU President Herman van Rompuy after his first speech to the EU Parliament.
OK, we know Nigel Farage is an utter twat of a politician, and that his party is wrong on so many points concerning Europe (but is happy to jump on the gravy train and absolutely milk the expenses for personal gain), but it amuses me when sentences start with “I don’t want to be rude, but…”, no matter who says it.
Invariably, something rude follows shortly thereafter, and it’s as if the speaker thinks his first words allow him to say whatever the fuck he wants, no matter how rude.
See also: “With all due respect…”
EDIT: Great comment on the Guardian story, from problemchimp:
who the f**ck is Nigel Farage, We’ve never heard of “him” in Europe. sounds like a small man in a small party looking for attention to please his handful of supporters. so UKIP are in tune with the British people with about 0.5% support? move on!
I was out at a Japanese restaurant for lunch today, with copious amounts of sake to wash it down, and all I could do was think of that incredibly pad pun from the first Austin Powers film as he attempts to seduce Alotta Fagina: “Sake it to me baby.”
This is how my mind works.
Yep, I’m just reading comics this evening whilst watching the Superbowl. This is a recent beauty from Girls With Slingshots, which is far too funny.
British Slang | Wikipedia
Learn to speak just like me. I genuinely use about 90% of these words on a regular basis.
Oh, and the way in which the English describe themselves as being drunk means that just about any word works in terms of being a synonym for being drunk. In this list, there’s plastered, pissed, steaming, lashed, and monged. Other words include twatted, mashed, leathered and so on. Drinking’s a big part of our culture…
sabine asked: E-squared infected me. Tag. You're it.
1. What is your favorite word?
2. What is your least favorite word?
3. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
4. What turns you off?
5. What is your favorite curse word?
6. What sound or noise do you love?
7. What sound or noise do you hate?
8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
9. What profession would you not like to do?
10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?
“Onomatopoeia”, because it’s fun to say and because I like the group of words it describes, because they’re generally fun to say too.
“Ugly”, because it sounds nasty and it means something nasty, which is untrue.
I get excited and interested by the mundane, the minor details that are probably completely uninteresting to anyone else. I have the attention span of a gnat, except when something properly tickles my fancy, in which case I need to know everything about it. I then feel the need to tell as many people as possible about what it is I’ve discovered or investigated.
I get bored by things that become ubiquitous, inescapable. They don’t interest me at all.
“Fuck”. This could probably be my answer for question 1 as well. Seriously, I use this word on average every 30 seconds during my waking hours. It’s a verb, a noun, an exclamation, and it’s an infixation, particularly the way I use it.
Call me sad, but I really love the sound of the girlfriend’s breathing as she’s asleep on my shoulder. It’s relaxing.
The alarm clock in the morning. It’s something I still cannot get used to, and every morning I hate it a little bit more.
I’d love to go back to being a journalist. The girlfriend tells me tales of her days, and it makes me fall in love with the profession all over again.
There’s got to be something masochistic about wanting to be a politician, to be in the public eye so much. I don’t have enough of an ego to make that work, and couldn’t deal with that kind of scrutiny.
a) It doesn’t. b) Erm, I’m at a loss here. I’m so totally convinced that heaven doesn’t exist that I can’t even imagine how it would be.
Ask me anything.
On Language - Crash Blossoms - NYTimes Magazine
I discovered this column in the New York Times Sunday Magazine whilst I was over there last September. We were hanging out in Central Park, flicking through the paper and just soaking up the city.
I have to admit that the usual writing style in the NYTimes grates on me; almost every news story is written as if it were a feature, and it takes until about the umpteenth paragraph before you can figure out what the hell is going on.
This little column, however, grabbed me. I like words, and I like etymology, plus I like to ramble about nothing in particular, so this was right up my alley.
Since returning to London, I found the RSS feed for it and popped it into my reader, so that every Monday I have something fresh to peruse.
It’s usually quite amusing, but I particularly liked this week’s column, detailing how headlines can be (deliberately) misleading for the reader, if different words are emphasised as they read it than the writer intended.
A little 2-minute distraction, at any rate.
vaiery
Evidently the person who sent me an email a few moments ago completely gave up with trying to spell the word ‘vary’ and just threw vowels at it…
Japan Airlines today filed for bankruptcy in an attempt to reverse the fortunes of a once-revered corporate icon now saddled with billions of dollars of debt and a reputation for mismanagement and inefficiency.
The Guardian has a habit of being overly wordy and lengthy in its intros to news articles, and this one is a doozy.
I feel physically out of breath each time I read it, not to mention thoroughly bored. Whatever happened to short, sharp, snappy opening paragraphs?
