Hello fellow Word afficianados.

This is my first posting here. hope you can help me shed some light on this phrase.

A dear friend used this description for me and it has perplexed me. I understand that boorish means rude, crude and is negative in general.

But cant figure out the meaning of this combination.

And help with this boggling matter would be a ppreciated.

Thanks,

D

boorish charmer

While I cannot be 100% sure about it, it might be in reference to a sentence in Dryden, cited in the OED entry for boorish:
It (link) comes from Dryden's translation of Virgil's Eclogues, in the dedicatory preface. Theocritus was the inventor of bucolic poetry, of which the Eclogues are an example.

Welcome, DBerman.

I googled around on various permutations of "boorish charmer" (e.g., "boorish charm", "charming boor", etc.) and one gets hits: my favorite was a reference to the cartoon character Bender (the robot) from Futurama. It's almost an oxymoron, but not quite.

Maybe in this case it means Im old or ancient like Virgil.

Its also been used on the web to describe Bob Hope and Seth Rogen in "Knocked Up". Does it mean "schticky"? or "hairy"?

Is there absolutely no way to suppose something more flattering or positive?

I think some people are easily both. We've all met workmen or neighbors or classmates who lack manners or refinement or grace but are naturally charming, nonetheless. The clumsy oaf who is friendly and self-effacing; the country bumpkin with the irresistible smile; etc. They're out there.

Boor originally just meant farmer. The negative connotations came from the lack of a city-dweller's manners. Poetically it could simply mean that your friend considers you to be an unstudied charmer, one who charms without the guile that might be expected of a more sophisticated person. Honestly charming rather than one who is being charming with an eye towards benefiting from the feelings invoked in the person charmed.

The phrase makes me think of someone who, for example, breaks into an established group at a party and begins talking loudly about something on his own agenda, either not thinking or not caring that the group had been carrying on an enjoyable conversation; yet is so, well, charming in relating his tale that they put aside any initial annoyance.

Dog dung doodle, Jackie, have we met?

Em...perhaps we have met the same person(s), eh?

Hey, you two, let me tell you a ... oops, sorry for interrupting.

I also liked your...what was it? tw or yw, maybe--in the other thread.

Thank yw. I believe hwmor facilitates learning.

Thank yw.

In Middle Welsh orthography there are dotted ys (ẏ). In modern Welsh, there are plain y and w vowels and versions with circumflexes, ŷ and ŵ.

What sounds do each make?

Please pardon my boorish interruption of your stream of conversation, but I've a question regarding "boor," as meaning farmer: Is it the same word as the Dutch "Boer?" Is there any connection with "boar," a male swine?

If I've committed a faux pas, please forgive this first time poster.

Hal

No faux pas. We wander all over the map in many of these threads. And they're both good questions. I know the first one is "yes". In fact, we stole boor from Dutch, according to AHD4. It's also the same word as the German Bauer. According to AHD4, they're also related to the English word bower if you go back far enough. They're not related to boar, which is from Old English.

WELCOME

Yes, welcome aboard. Maybe you know what the vowels ẏ, y, ŷ and ŵ sound like in Welsh. "w" apparently has an "oo" sound.

Fẏr thŷm thŷt reallý ŵant to knoŵ.

link

Yeah, what Shea said.

we stole boor from Dutch Ssh! They might want it back.

Tough. It was their bad luck to meet up with us in a dark alley. They have to live with the consequences.

we stole boor from Dutch

Not necessarily. The origin of English boor is not so cut and dried. It might have come down via Middle and Old English from Proto-Germanic. Old English had gebūr 'dweller; farmer' and neāhbūr 'neighbor'.

Clark-Hall has ±būr, freeholder of the lowest class, peasant, farmer, where the ± signifies that it is found with and without the prefix ge-.

What is the ASCII code to get that plus and minus sign?

one way to get it (and many other special characters) is to copy/paste it from the (Windows) Character Map: ±

Start>All Programs>Accessories>System Tools>Character Map

Thanks.

What is the ASCII code to get that plus and minus sign?

The Unicode hex value for �xB1; is 0x00B1.

What is the ASCII code to get that plus and minus sign?

The Unicode hex value for ± is 0x00B1.

I got it from OpenOffice's Insert > Special Character function.

I guess Abulafia will have a similar option.

If you're using the Windows OS, you can enter the (decimal)number on the numpad while holding down the Alt key. Hex 0xB1 = Decimal 177.

And if that doesn't work enter 0177.

which makes no sense at all, for a decimal no. (but that's how I first learned to do it, too.)

which makes no sense at all

It's been a while since I've used Windows, so I forgot the leading zero.

okay, so why did I say 0177, as an entry for a decimal no., makes no sense at all? because in programming languages, octal literals are typically identified with a variety of prefixes, including the digit 0. that's why.
(esp. when the decimal number, in context, is extremely ambiguous; i.e. 0177 could be octal or hex or decimal.)

My understanding (completely self-generated, but based on some knowledge of basic computer programming) is that the routine that handles the input is looking for four digits and if it doesn't get them it's not going to work.

My understanding (completely self-generated, but based on some knowledge of basic computer programming) is that the routine that handles the input is looking for four digits and if it doesn't get them it's not going to work.

Which seems wrong to me. The fact that you are holding down a modifier key (the Alt key in this case) should be all that is necessary. Leading zeros add nothing to the mix. 70, 070, 0070 are all 70.

Of course, tsuwm's point is well-taken. 0177 does look a lot like octal. In my original posting to the thread about the Unicode value, I prepended a 0x to the number indicating it was hexadecimal.

Well, does it work without the leading zero?

I'd guess not, but that wasn't my point, was it?!

From my (possibly unfeminist) perspective, I can imagine a man being a "boorish charmer" but not a woman. women can often be attracted to someone who is a "rascal, scoundrel, raffish, devil-may-care, heartless" , all negative terms in some sense, but which imply a disrespect for convention and therefore an exciting sense of danger and adventure. "Boorish" has connotations of bad manners and rough conduct, but combined with "charmer" moves into the category of DELIBERATE intent to impress, therefore implying that the boorishness is a superficial affectation rather than an innate quality.

Well, I dunno. We were talking about how to get the ± character.

OK. I tried it on my work Windows machine and ALT-177 worked but it didn't give me ±. It gave me ▒. I put the two characters in a txt file and did a hex dump and got this:



The txt file was

±
▒

I put the two characters in a txt file and did a hex dump

Hmm.

1. What program did you use to create the text file on the Windows machine?
2. How did you transfer the text file to the Linux machine?

ff fe b1 00 0d 00 0a 00 92 25

Allowing for the little-endian-ness of Windows (and Linux) reordering of bytes:

0xFFFE : magic number for UTF-8
0x00B1 : decimal 177 for ±
0x000D : decimal 13 for CR (carriage return)
0x000A : decimal 10 for LF (linefeed)
0x2592 : decimal 9618 for Medium Shade ▒

According to this page, you can get it in Windows by typing Alt-2592 or Alt-177. Go figure.

on a mac, it's shift-option =

or I suppose it's option +

±

I did the original file (177.txt) in NotePad and transfered it to my home box with a flash drive. I did the hex dump with hexdump -C 177.txt.