I find myself amused and surprised (though I shouldn't be, I suppose) that the word google already has it's own dictionary definition. I thought it was simply vernacular to refer to 'googling' something.

I also find myself checking the definitions of words I know well before I use them to post on this site because I'm terrified of being ridiculed, which means I'm assuming that everyone here is actually smarter than I am.

Funny.

Be not daunted there, Porcupine, if you'll take such exhortation from a fellow stranger.

I found some comfort today upon discovering Grammar Puss: the fallacies of the language mavens by Steven Pinker.

Lots of things here go over my head. People mainly ridicule those they have known long enough to be comfortable with. On the other hand they will correct anyone but that is just stating facts, not meant to belittle. Occasionally someone will be wearing their grumpy pants but that is their problem. (Grumpy pants chafe something fierce.)

I find myself amused and surprised [...] that the word google already has it's own dictionary definition.

I find myself amused, but not surprised, that a self-anointed prescriptivist would shove a solecistic apostrophe into the possessive form of it.

I find myself surprised, but not amused, that a new member who is "...terrified of being ridiculed" must be publicly flogged (as it were) for committing a "solecistic apostrophe".

However zmjezhd, for your catch of Porcupine's egregious misuse of the apostrophe the tribunal has decided to award you ten merit points.

Congratulations!

Just asking like, but did you mean that you thought that the name of the search engine was taken from the verb?

I now find myself annoyed.

FYI Grumpy Pants - I'm actually not a self-anointed prescriptivist, but thanks for the compliment. And I'd like to painfully shove a solecistic apostrophe (whatever the hell that may be) into one or more of your self-anointed prescriptivist orifices.

No, Faldage, I did not.

And thanks, everyone, (except for zkhmzhdg or whatever his/her user name is, who seems to have his/her grumpy pants on rather tightly) for the reassurances!

Hang in there, Porcupine. We like to argue. Ad hominems aren't kosher, of course, but whatchagonnado?

Welcome! It's great to have a new and intelligent voice around here.

(edited for typo)

Google: proper noun; ranked #847,031 of surnames in U.S. (1934) See below...

Barney Google, with the goo-goo-goo-ga-ly eyes.
Barney Google had a wife three times his size
She sued Barney for divorce
Now he's living on his horse

Barney Google, with the goo-goo-goo-ga-ly eyes.
Barney Google is the guy who never buys.
Women take him out to dine, then he steals the waiter's dime.
Barney Google, with the goo-goo-goo-ga-ly eyes

Barney Google, with the goo-goo-goo-ga-ly eyes.
Barney Google tried to enter paradise.
When Saint Peter saw his face, he said, "Go to the other place.
Barney Google*, with the goo-goo-goo-ga-ly eyes."


* In 1998 Barney was awarded $5,000,000,000 in a copyright infringement lawsuit against Google Inc. and immediately bought a stable of race horses and became transgendered. Today, he and/or she, both live in Sunnydale California.

_________________________ __________________________

Humblest apologies for my breach of forum etiquette. I am not sure what Ad Hominem means but am afraid it's an offense I may have committed.

I will be more judicious about my posts in the future and will try to be less retaliatory.

Porky,

solecistic means erroneous, as in that apostrophe was. ad hominem is Latin for 'to the person', meaning the response was a personal attack rather than a rebuttal of ideas.

It's considered poor form to complain about usage (the verbing of Google®) whilst committing a common usage error.

>..which means I'm assuming that everyone here is actually smarter than I am.

You may actually be smarter than you realize!

-joe (just kidding) friday

I now find myself annoyed.

Sorry to roil you, Porcupine. Please do stay. It's possible that you'll mellow and get used to the place. It took me awhile when I first got here. I only correct typos or solecisms when the writer is trying to impugn some common usage.

the tribunal has decided to award you ten merit points

How graphically plutarchian. I congratulate you on your emergence from the chrysalis. The transformation is now complete. How fitting the paranoia. How minor the consequences.

I'll donate my points to Greenpeace in your name.

ooh, I don't think so, but that could be speculatorily fun!

From zmjezhd's link:
solecism

SYLLABICATION: sol·e·cism
PRONUNCIATION: sl-szm, sl-
NOUN: 1. A nonstandard usage or grammatical construction. 2. A violation of etiquette. 3. An impropriety, mistake, or incongruity.

Hmm--so, can we say that solipsism is a solecism?

Just for the record, I my comment was not meant as a complaint about the use of google as a verb as much as it was meant as a curious observation. We are witnessing the evolution of our language, the ubiquitous influence of technology. We are witnessing history, which is still a novel concept to me as I refuse to acknowledge having aged out of my twenties.

Thanks all for the warm welcome and gentle initiation.

Nouns have been verbed and verbs nouned (in English) going on for a tad bit over half a millennium.

Yes, I imagine.

However, I would surmise that just as technology is advancing and at unprecedented speed, so is language being influenced by the advancement of technology at a rate that has never before been witnessed.

well, we're seemtainly more aware of it these days.

Calling someone a solipsist could be in some situations be taken as a solecism.

I should disclose that I’m only looking at solipsism from the egocentric predicament.

i don't think that the rate of change is different.. i think that what has happened is we are aware of all the changes, in all the dialects..

Scot's english is so different than the english of london (less so now, than 100 years ago.)
English in US is more unified too.. Newspapers, transportation, wars, TV and the internet have served to level the language.


The local differences (that 1000 years past resulted in vulgar latin becoming French, or Spanish, or Italian, or Romanian) are less localized.

I not only read about slang in Oz or NZ, i socialize (albeit infrequently) with friends from Oz or NZ, or Scotland, or South Africa.. and i learn their slang, their lexis, and while i don't use it--occationally a word comes along, that is just the right thing--and that word gets a much wider audience than ever before.

many computer users all over the world use google --it borders on defining a search engine.

100-150 years ago, chains (like woolworths, like A & P, like Sears (& Roebuck)) were becoming well known, not just in 1 place but in many--the created a world wide standard for shopping.

the same universality is now extending to language.

i don't think that the rate of change is different

Some linguists hold that the rate of language change is constant and can be measured: most famously Morris Swadesh and his glottochronology. (A modern proponent is Don Ringe of UPenn who uses computational model based on cladistics in biology to determine when languages split off into separate branches: some papers here.) Others reason that the rate is variable. R M W Dixon, an Australian linguist, wrote an interesting, short book, The Rise and Fall of Languages (1997), in which he posits a model for language change that replaces the familiar Stammbaumtheorie (family tree theory of Johann Schmidt) of languages genetic relationship with one borrowed from from evolutionary biology, i.e., punctuated equilibrium. (It is, in part, based on some ideas from areal linguistics, e.g., the concept of the Sprachbund.)

It can be observed that the change between Old and Modern English and between Vulgar Latin and the various Romance languages took place fairly rapidly during the so-called Dark Ages, a volutile period when little in the way of literature was written or survived.

The rate of language change is only incidental. The change of the language into a more effective vehicle for commuting complex ideas is the measure of a vibrant society. Contrast Shakespearian times with our own...

"I to the world am like a drop of water,
That in the ocean seeks another drop;
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,
Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself."
------------------------------------------- Comedy of Errors

“We have found that social networks are not monetising as well as we were expecting,” said George Reyes, chief financial officer, as Google reported its earnings for the final quarter of last year."
-------------------------------------------- Google press release today.

Yeah, you know, like "monetising"!
Silly Googledegop hip-hop, meaning little but sounding in the know...what fools you mortals be.

thanks, my shoulders were getting cold.

Monetising - the process of making an otherwise clear and vivid painting into a blurry mass of colors. Only applies to paintings depicting serene images of haystacks, colorful gardens, and still ponds with bridges.

Not to be confused with Manetising.

>Not to be confused with Manetising.

ha!

Or taking your Monet to Christie's.

Be careful, Porcupine, your playful depiction of the blurred haystacks, smokestacks, shacks, and colorful gardens painted by Monet might offend The BranShea -- our resident artist par excellence -- who has made stacks and sacks and shacks of money by monetising the Netherland's
colorful gardens.


What say, BranShe, will you show the Porcupine a picture?
.

The Porcupine could visit the site through the Profile.

.

I know your art is more avantguarde than mine.
Who can beat "black dot in a gray framed quadrangle?"

summer garden
The Sunday display changed to less space consuming peepshow.

midsummer garden (right! I did it)(you're perfectly free not to comment.)

I can say nothing except that I have about as much artistic talent as Monet's dog.

Beautiful Brushwork Branshea.

I like it, it makes me want to peep round the corner and see the rest of the garden..

Wonderful. Amazing composition.

Do you paint smaller pieces that poor people might afford?

Or could you paint an action oil painting of the New York Giant's great quarterback, Eli Manning, who is in the process of winning the XXXlV Super Bowl just now?

BranShea, yours is an exceptional talent. My hat is off and in my hand. My own talent is limited to a bawdy recitation of the famous Robert Service poem "The Shooting of Dirty Dan McGrew".

Salute!

Could I do an action painting of him sitting in my garden chair holding the Prize Bowl? Thank you and for the grewsome Ballad of Dan MacGrew.

Zed > to peep round the corner : a little table with cinnamon buns?

Porcupine: Monet's dog did a great job on the grassy parts and the lower parts of trees. A prime painter!

Thanks, olly.

Agree--gorgeous work! I too am interested--is your work available stateside?

I have a feeling that I'd better answer this by PM. Maven. I will.

Well Porky , that it's appears to be spelled correctly. Hopefully not likely to forget that it's means it is now. A. has a 'cow-orker' who used to be dead-certain it was the other way. That admittedly rather caustic reply post somehow left me the impression that our consonant-heavy linguistic expert suspected you of being a sock puppet. Perhaps it was about some earlier posts.

actually it was this from the original post, and the sock-puppet business was aimed at themilum.

It's own dictionary. It still confuses me. Is it's wrong here or is it's right? Aramis says right but.....

> that the word google already has it's own dictionary definition.

it's = wrong

Aramis was saying that the it's of

is correct. which it is.

That's it, I sort of had it right in my head, but this discussion made me doubt again. Thanks!

English is weird.

HA! "The Shooting of Dan McGrew".
is a real jolly Tale! I found a luxury page, really love it! This is what we call a "smartlap", :a "dishcloth of woe".
(from the idea you need alarge piece of cloth to wipe your tears)
Dangerous Dan McGrew it says and the Dirty one is the mystery man
who plays the piano "with his talon hands".

"Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear"?------- I guess all of you know this one very well, but I'll give the page anyway: Dan McGrew
.

See Porcupine: Even professional writers (and their editors!) let slip the occasional misplaced apostrophe.

Welcome to AWADtalk.

Dangerous Dan is fine but my favorite is that night on the marge of Lake Labarge I creamated Sam McGee. Especially if read aloud in truly lugubrious tones.
McGee

(Sorry, I can't figure out how to make a one word link.)

Hey, it worked!! Ain't technology wonderful.

{url=www.wherever.com/page.html}text{/url} using [] instead of {} Or either use that little clickey up on the left end of the icon bar at the top of the post window.

At least I got one of them right. Whew.

That's a blood curdling story too Zed. Bit on the long side, but speed slows down in the cold. At the same time I read with envious eyes about ice and snow up there in the North of the AmCan-continent. While we move from rain to rain via storm and storm.
Maybe I should move quickly to the marge of Lake Labarge.

(is that how you write creamated? Just like cream?) Ice cream?

Thanks, Dale.

I won't contact you outside of the forum, just because I prefer the safety of anonymity.

One cannot be too careful.

Ah!it worked.
As this is a threadful of cyberhash I get on where Sam McGee got smothered in cream.(you were kidding me, I really believed it.)
The second hand book shop had a little survey of English poetry, which I could trade for two books I brought in. I never ask money but trade books.

The poem of The Burning Babe caught my eye; just give you the first allineas.

As I in hoary winter's night stood shivering in the snow,
Surprised I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;
And lifting up a fearful eye to vieuw what fire was near,
A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear;
Who, scorchèd with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed,
As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed.
'Alas!'quoth he, 'but newly born in fiery heats I fry,
Yet none appraoch to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I.

By Robert Southwell, (1561-95)

(it runs on and turns out to be symbolic for the birth of Christ, but till the near end I wondered what horror story this was)

Whew--that is pretty awful.

Hi Porc: Yes that's what I used to think, but the as I began revealing my address I was astounded to find my Inbox no fuller than usual while I still get only two or three Spam per day

Nonetheless I can well understand your concern

Speaking of Google, they're celebrating New Year today.

rats! mantled again. [see Info & announcments]

Were your shoulders getting cold? (Hi, eta!)

Two threads. That'll give a real rat race.

Maybe not yesterday, but today they would have been without my generous gift of the mantle of permanence.

Faldage
Carpal Tunnel
Registered: Fri Dec 01 2000
Posts: 11111


11111!

That's 666 x 16.6831831...!!!

11111!

037? 31? 0x1F?

A short jump back to the subject of ballads that make nerves wreck and tears flow.Turn-of-the-century genre that was all around and subjects depending on region. Saloon-bar and mines for America , frozen deserts for Canada and shipwreck-and-drowning subjects for our waterland.
We had two great classics.

One about the old mother in the fisherman's hut, wind howling, flickering lamplight and souls swallowed by the waves.Husbands and sons never to return.
One about a father who proudly had made a little sailing boat from a wooden shoe and the following tragedy of the drowing of his little boy.
To be recited with exageration. (On parties and if you wanted to vex the recitation teacher).