Twitter & badness

I have an apology to make. It's been called to my attention that for the past several days I've been splashing a word around my blog, podcast, Facebook page, and Twitter stream that many people find offensive.

No affront nor slur was intended, yet I have come to realize that in the 21st century such hurtful relics of a benighted past have no place amongst us—not in civil discourse, not in right-thinking minds, and certainly not in popular culture.

There is no room on our airwaves for the employment of any sense of this word that could be construed as imputing fun, cuteness, or endearment to such a condition as this term pejoratively describes.

No self-respecting purveyor of books should allow any volume adorned with such a term to disgrace its shelves.



And furthermore, any collective artistic endeavor of entertainment that dares apply this denigrating term to itself in part or in whole should be banned, shunned, and otherwise made to wander without end in the wilderness of pariahdom. Really, do we want our children exposed to corruption like this?

Let me repeat more vigorously, only brutes and clods would march into the arena of entertainment under a banner emblazoned with such a rubric.

Please don't fall into this same trap I did and allow yourself to perpetuate such perversity.

Again, my deepest apologies for such unthinking, archaic belittlement. Now I must lie down. I find myself overcome by the vapors.

Crossposted from Inhuman Swill

Riddle me this

My light bedtime reading lately has been from a fascinating little book called The Making of English, by Henry Bradley. Bradley was a mostly self-taught linguist and lexicographer who would eventually become editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. The Making of English, published in 1904, is a compact, elegant distillation of everything he had learned about the development of the English language.

It's not a quick read, but it's often quite delightful. Here's a prime example from the chapter on how the meanings of words change over time:

A word was needed to describe the action of interpreting the meaning of written characters; and our ancestors supplied the want by using the verb read (in Old English rǣdan), which meant, like its modern German equivalent rathen, to guess a riddle. The noun riddle (in Old English rǣdels) is a derivative of this word. To the early English a piece of writing was, we see, a mystery which only the wise could solve.

The Making of English is available as a free download at Archive.org. Happy riddling.


Crossposted from Inhuman Swill