Thread for words you never bothered to look up & one day you realized "I still don't know what that means"

i mean yeah, i find the whole thing hateful and abusive of the King's English and all, but i've never had to corral a bunch of people who don't care or flat out don't like each other to make something that nobody on earth really cares about, for money, and that's basically the world of quote-unquote productive enterprise. no wonder the language gets mangled.

i have been told to "action this going forward" by someone who meant "do this now".

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

there ya go. bullshit!

ha i guess i'm lucky enough to have avoided that kind of heavy businessese so far

distinction of jargon from technical language, no? (fuckin many xposts) altho I'm stupid enough to think that what even many of the wackier cont. phil. folks are doing could be described as technical writing.

poisonouse

I looked this up. Ought've read next post.

dude i am telling you the shit that people will say when they are trying to explain to a client why they made a logo/layout look a certain way (ie why it cost so much $$$$) would make you self-harm

yeah well people sure can get lost in their own world, especially when they think they ought to be paid. that's the danger i guess, jargon insulates you from thinking, rather than speeding up the process. and when you hit a difficult spot, it's like a panic button that doesn't do anything anymore. "b-but i'm LEVERAGING here"

patients would ask me to take 'em on smoke break and I'd be like "ahora no, estoy muy preocupado"

lmao this is awesome

"Action this going forward" sounds like the birth of a new language.

As in the syntax starting to tear completely away from standard English.

'action it going forward year on year' to give it it's full due.

I'm pretty sure that is code for "kick me in the neck"

lol

LETHAL WEAPON 7: ACTION THIS

ameliorate

heh insufferably tempted to just post what these words all mean as they come up, which would garner huge sb action

hahaha I am right there with you on that

thread of not using Google

but i mean seriously who doesn't know what ameliorate means

^ sb

I thought ameliorate was what you do on yelp

ameliorate = a lecture given by an acne-ridden teenager

it's a site for grading disappearances over the atlantic

uh...pacific?

yeah pacific

get your dead American female pilot deaths straight

mine was better

i don't get yours

hey there's fuck all evidence that earhart died over the pacific, lay offa me

a mealy orate

mealy = acne ridden??

a me a li or a te

(sound of music sequel)

hey there's fuck all evidence that earhart died over the pacific, lay offa me

well sure, but she certainly didn't die anywhere near THE ATLANTIC OCEAN

land, survive, float, starve

there's a helluva CSI: 1920's episode waiting to be written right there

darragh's post would work better if the word was spelled atitanicorate

eh 1930's.

1940 by the time she'da starved, maybe. anyway, that's not important.

darragh's posts would work better if there was a 'fact' equivalent of spellcheck

it's called google iirc

know your oceans, read your blogs

you want to integrate google factchecker, talk to keith.

best you go through tuomas tho

I used "felicity" today, then had a moment of doubt and decided I should have said "facility". But they totally can mean the same thing!

fellacity

is that like dudetown

Here's one:

I can't seem to find the correct definition of the term "cosmic joke", which I understand relates to something specific, as opposed to well, gags about space aliens.

Ayn Rand used this (very minor part of the plot) of The Fountainhead to explain a "cosmic joke":

Keating reads a book by Lois Cook, and reasons that it must be very deep indeed, since he doesn't understand it. Keating meets with Lois Cook. She makes him uncomfortable; he tries to compliment her on her book, but she replies that it's tiresome to be understood by everyone. For her house she wants something ugly, simply for the sake of going against what is thought to be beautiful. Keating (an architect) tries to object, but takes the commission. When it is built, (a syndicated critic named ) Toohey refers to it as "a cosmic joke."
http://www.bookrags.com/notes/fou/PART19…

It was a joke on Keating because Keating didn't understand what had happened, but Toohey did.

hilarious imo

yeah, that was the only definition I could find, but it seemed rather contrived and WTF to be honest.

what makes you think it is a thing? did you read the rest of that yahoo answers page?