zustifer: (comics: buster brown: try food)
Also Worth Your Time:

Buster Brown, a completely fabulous strip about an insane little weirdo with 'bad judgement'. Usually that means destruction and/or crazy eyes (but sometimes it is completely incomprehensible); check the graphic part of the last panel of this strip for some high-grade proof.
I also love the scary wide-mouthed profiles, the difference in drawing style and morphology between the householders and the help, the occasional big awkward hands, the amusing signage, and the baffling rambling 'resolutions' that Buster makes every strip. Oh, and the way he hates his mother wearing hats with birds on them. God, it's just a wondrous thing. I think you should read it.

Curses from 1920.
“[...]some reporter in the West referred to him as a regular guy. At first Mr. Chesterton was for going after the fellow with a stick. Certainly a topsy-turvy land, the United States, where you can’t tell opprobrium from flattering compliment.” [...] The American derivative verb, to guy, is unknown in English; its nearest equivalent is to spoof, which is used in the United States only as a conscious Briticism.

The Victorian era saw a great growth of absurd euphemisms in England, including second wing for the leg of a fowl, but it was in America that the thing was carried farthest. Bartlett hints that rooster came into use in place of cock as a matter of delicacy, the latter word having acquired an indecent significance, and tells us that, at one time, even bull was banned as too vulgar for refined ears. In place of it the early purists used cow-creature, male-cow and even gentleman-cow.


(I rather enjoyed today's Eegra, too.)
zustifer: (aoi)
The Tensor has a post about some big spelling bee, and it's pretty exhaustive with the words used. Ideally, I guess, spelling bees aren't about memorising all possible words; they're about learning linguistic rules so as to make good guesses at how things might be spelled. And then they try to freak you out by throwing weird irregular confusingly-pathed words at you.

The recap of what the winner said, at the bottom of the post, is also pretty awesome. Oh, little bullshit-rejecting mathbrained smartkid. Continue to rock.
zustifer: (lady of your acquaintance)
Does anyone know what this ebay seller meant to say? There're clearly some machine translation issues here, but I can't think of what the broken word (low-class harlot) is meant to actually be.

A low-class harlot works so that other fingers part from a thumb like a tabi, and there is an effect for the share that is easy to absorb sweat, bad-smelling prevention.
zustifer: (Negiwanikun)
Internet, I have a question. Why do people use this sort of construction (make-up)? Why is this even considered? What's wrong with 'make up'? I've seen this a lot, make-out, shut-up, set-up. It's like a verbing of a noun, only it STARTED as a verb. I can set up things. I can even set up a setup. I suspect that this is where it's coming from; people use the noun (setup, makeout (session?)) and forget that the original verb phrase was the cause of it.

I am also almost starting to think that 'should of' is cute, but it still bites at the back of my wordly pattern recogniser.
zustifer: (Nivlem says See Here)
Maybe this says more about me than about the languages involved, but I don't think any of these german examples is particularly inelegant or ugly. Jeez, it's sensical (uh, generally) and as my old teacher used to say, 'so logisch.'
Maybe I really should take that programming class. My art gland is clearly broken.

Also won't-fit-anywhere observation: when you're in a car and most of the low- and midrange of music on the radio is being white-noised out (and the volume isn't up too high), a lot of songs sound like they could be David Byrne.

Also also: I want a way to graph LJ usericon usage in relation to tags.



* 'The good salamander shoe!' From an ad for Salamander-brand shoes. I used to wear them when I was little. My wordpress blog that I don't use now is the number one hit for this search string still, somehow.
zustifer: (Beetlejuice: He likes it)
Mefi lunk this messageboard thread in which a russian guy talks about and posts photos of the fishing cat (maybe twice the volume of a domestic cat; lynxish-sized) that he and his wife own (I think they bought it from a zoo? It's a little hard to tell, what with the babelfishing). It's awesome, really (they fostered it on a housecat, and seem to feed it deer carcasses and non-scaly fish, which it catches in the bathtub), but one of the best bits is sifting through the babelfishy translation and trying to work out what's going on. At one point someone asks how 'hard' the cat's 'language' is, and from context you can tell that it's meant to be about its tongue instead, which is awesome.

Also, the guy often starts a post with 'How do you do everything!' which I eventually realized meant 'How do you do, everyone!' not 'How are you able to get everything done!' 'Everyone' must be gender-neutral, or else the word being used is more like 'all'. The cat's always referred to as a 'tomcat,' so boy-cat must be a term on its own. I'd almost say that cats-plural is masculine, too?
There is a good bit of conspicuous subject-object-verbing, which I just enjoy on its own.

Often a '4' will show up in sentences, and I don't know what that means. Just being a 4-number isn't right; maybe russian has a construction like 'a few' that literally translates to '4'? That doesn't even necessarily work, though. Oh - I think it's 'the', or some particle of that sort.
There's something that I assume IS 'a couple' or 'a few' that keeps getting rendered as 'pair-troika.'

Oh, and I think russian must have a word for animals-eating which is also used for eating-like-an-animal (as in german) because it's always rendered as 'gorging'.

It's possible there's a construction like in latin where you begin and end your 'thing and other thing' or 'thing or other thing' with a signifying word, too, given the structure of the title of this post. Sort of like 'both thing and other thing,' where 'both' and 'and' are the same word?


Anyway, it's strangely enjoyable. I love this sort of thing.

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Karla Z

February 2012

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