Trip's spellings and cunning linguisticisms

[Nephew Twiddleton]

000- English has too many words as it is. It's a pretty versatile language and is always expanding its vocabulary, for both good and ill. Then there is also the jargon problem. For about a year and a half I was an administrative assistant to two epidemiologists, which means that I had to proofread their articles prior to submission. I had to find out from them that words like generalizability and suicidality, while not real words, are acceptable for publication in a medical journal. Go figure.

Out of curiosity, how similar is Dutch to English? I heard that Frisian is the closest living language to English, so Dutch can't be that much further off.

[BabylonHoruv]

"carryable" is apparently not a word. says my spellchecker. what is the right word?

fuck, "spellchecker" is not even a word ...

oh and also Badge told me that "demention" is not a word, either.

English language needs more words, obviously. It's got holes.

what does demention mean?  Spellchecker is a word in American English, the word for carryable is portable, although that is a bit closer to movable than actually carryable.

[Don Coyote]

000- English has too many words as it is. It's a pretty versatile language and is always expanding its vocabulary, for both good and ill. Then there is also the jargon problem. For about a year and a half I was an administrative assistant to two epidemiologists, which means that I had to proofread their articles prior to submission. I had to find out from them that words like generalizability and suicidality, while not real words, are acceptable for publication in a medical journal. Go figure.

Out of curiosity, how similar is Dutch to English? I heard that Frisian is the closest living language to English, so Dutch can't be that much further off.

Your answer.

000- Het Engels heeft teveel woorden zoals het is. It' de S.A. vrij veelzijdige taal en breidt altijd zijn woordenschat, voor zowel goed als Illinois uit. Dan is er ook het jargonprobleem. Voor ongeveer anderhalf jaar was ik een administratieve medewerker aan twee epidemiologen, zo betekent het dat ik hun artikelen voorafgaand aan voorlegging moest corrigeren. Ik moest te weten komen van hen dat woorden zoals veralgemeenbaarheid en suicidality, terwijl de niet echte woorden, voor publicatie in een medisch dagboek aanvaardbaar zijn. Ga cijfer. Uit hoe gelijkaardige nieuwsgierigheid, is Nederlands aan het Engels? Ik hoorde dat Frisian de dichtste het leven taal aan Engelse, zo Nederlandse can' is; t is verder weg dat veel.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

But I never even mentioned Illinois....

[Triple Zero]

Out of curiosity, how similar is Dutch to English? I heard that Frisian is the closest living language to English, so Dutch can't be that much further off.

Afaik, Dutch comes second in being closest. Frysian has more words and grammar bits that are really like English.

Then, common current spoken Dutch uses a lot of English loanwords. We actually have rules for loaned English verbs, creating funny things such as the past tense of "delete", when used in Dutch (used when referring to an action in a computer program), will be deletete ... 

[Triple Zero]

(this is in reply to the "Benefits of Madness" thread, and in particular Ratatosk's post, but I didn't want to jack the thread, or get under people's skins by suddenly talking about mental disorders as swearwords)

I think that madness is a trick word that tends to get abused. It can mean mental illness and it can mean foolishness and/or senselessness. I think that behaving in a foolish/senseless/silly manner can indeed be healthy and useful. It's the fictional Mad Hero, like the Hatter in Wonderland, Willy Wonka and Hunter S Thompson. While all of them may also have been ill (mercury poison, obsessive compulsive, crazy drug overload etc), their oddity is celebrated and the beloved nature of the character is based on their 'madness'.

"A little madness now and then, is relished by the wisest men."

The eighteenth century and nineteenth century are full of the same kind of thinking, often treating as synonyms "madness, quirky, unserious, demented, foolish, absurdity". In retrospect, we can often see dementia, mercury poisoning and other physical causes in many of the cases... but the legend, the myth continues onward. If we consider Kerry Thornley, we can see great creativity in his madness... but there was also some serious badwrong aspects to his madness as well. The same for our beloved Emperor Norton. Norton was respected by many, including Sam Clemens, but in the end he was also ill and suffered from serious problems. Its this myth that we struggle with... the trying to explain the value of not being serious, of being absurd or silly.. and invariably, due to hundreds of years of use the term madness gets tossed in. In return, people with actual illnesses may try to justify their behavior by invoking the myth of madness.

"Madness" in one sense can be incredibly freeing, in another sense entirely debilitating. If the context indicates that an author is using it as a synonym for 'absurd' then I don' think its a problem. If they're using it to justify mental illness, that seems unhealthy. It falls to the reader to determine the context, and for some who suffer (or have family that suffers) from a real illness, it can be a word the evokes a very visceral response.

Those who choose to use the term 'madness' should be careful and clear in how they use it... as Inigo Montoya said, "You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means."

Hm come to think of it, I said the Dutch are one of the few cultures that use diseases as swearwords.

But if you consider that a word like "retard" actually refers to mental illness. In the 19th and early 20th centure, an "idiot" was a person with a very severe mental retardation (before that time it meant "layman"). Same goes for moron and imbecile.

Ooh, I found another one: Cretin. You use that as a swearword, and it's an actual physical (and mental) condition.

Swearwords are fucking interesting, that's what.

Ooh and check this out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pejorative_terms_for_people
Now, ethnic and religious pejoratives aren't that interesting--to me--fortunately they are separate categories. Probably is old hat to native speakers, though.