Hilarious quote of the day

[conuly]

Language is NOT always evolving and changing -- because if so the writings of Chaucer, Shakespeare, John Locke, David Hume, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, etc., would make no sense at all now.

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Oh, The Places You'll Go: Toilet Signs Try To Help

When a Court Ruled Whether the X-Men Are Human

The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete

Why your mental map of the world is (probably) wrong

Wombats are the only animals whose poop is a cube. Here’s how they do it.

All the Ways You Can Board a Plane, Ranked by Stupidity

The Last Place on Earth Where Everyone Still Loves Kmart

'Frog ladders' help critters escape death-trap drains

Killer Tulips Hiding in Plain Sight

The Land That Failed to Fail

'My Family Has Been Broken': Pakistanis Fear For Uighur Wives Held In China

As the fire neared, this 93-year-old knew she had to get out. Then her garbageman showed up.

This family fled the Camp Fire. Then they learned their garage became a makeshift hospital.

Tests Showed Children Were Exposed to Lead. The Official Response: Challenge the Tests

The Watcher A family bought their dream house. But according to the creepy letters they started to get, they weren’t the only ones interested in it. (The comments are chock full of people swearing that it's the homeowner's fault for "getting spooked" and "letting their imaginations run away with them". Yeah, sure thing, buddy.)

Ukraine transgender rally disrupted by far-right militants

How a Grieving Father Is Uncovering Mexico’s Mass Graves

The Earth is in a death spiral. It will take radical action to save us

Jonestown’s Victims Have a Lesson to Teach Us, So I Listened

Jonestown: Rebuilding my life after surviving the massacre

Comments

[alexseanchai]

Who the fuck said that, and do they require an annotated edition in order to get all Shakespeare's puns?

[conuly]

Some asshole on the internet.

[al_zorra]

One rather believes that whoever said that hasn't ever actually, you know, read or listened to those authors invoked to prove that language doesn't always change or evolve.

[conuly]

We can only hope.

[larryhammer]

That -- what the -- I can't --

Okay, talk about toxic binary thinking. Oy.

[conuly]

When confronted, he did a rough 180 and said that language can't be always changing or we wouldn't be able to understand what people said last year.

[flikkeren]

Hmm. Wonder if they've read Chaucer in the original.

[conuly]

Ye knowe eek, that in forme of speche is chaunge
Withinne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho
That hadden prys, now wonder nyce and straunge
Us thinketh hem; and yet they spake hem so,
And spedde as wel in love as men now do;
Eek for to winne love in sondry ages,
In sondry londes, sondry ben usages.

[elainegrey]

Ditto to comments so far.

And it is somewhat frightening to think of someone going through works of theology & philosophy unaware of how meanings have drifted.

[the_rck]

You mean like the Bible literalists who insist on the bedrock, God-inspired accuracy of their reading of an English translation of a Latin translation of a Greek translation of the Old Testament?

I know people like that.

[cactuswatcher]

It sounds like something from a book required by Trump University. And a reason why the suckers students enrollees might have wanted their money back.

[conuly]

*snrk*

[dhampyresa]

Language is NOT always evolving and changing -- because if so the writings of Chaucer, Shakespeare, John Locke, David Hume, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, etc., would make no sense at all now.

I Came Out To Have A Good Time (And I'm Honestly Feeling So Attacked Right Now)

[conuly]

?

[wpadmirer]

The fax thing I SO relate to, because as a medical/dental facility we cannot use email to send patient information - but we can fax it. It's a violation of HIPAA to use email that is unencrypted (and we as a small rural health clinic can't afford the $3000+ a year that encryption would cost).

I love the story about the garbage man and the elderly woman. What a wonderful bunch of people. I really admire him for insisting on finishing his route so he could check on people he knew were old or disabled.

[conuly]

Yes, I really wanted to avoid posting any of the more dismal fire stories, so I was glad we had two more or less happy ones!

[lizvogel]

What boggles me about the fax article isn't that bail is posted by fax, but that the $2000 payment went through fine and the jail hung on to the bail-ee for the want of the other $1.

(Okay, it doesn't boggle me, because I know how bureaucracies work. But seriously, they kept somebody in jail overnight for a buck, and people are focusing on the fax failure instead of that?)

[wpadmirer]

How many people who are reading the Jonestown stories were alive when it happened? I remember the horror of it all too well. I was in college at the time.

[conuly]

I wasn't, and I guess Jenn missed it all by a year. My mother told me yesterday, watching a documentary, that she had a clock radio back then and she was listening to the news one morning with increasing horror and disbelief.

[the_rck]

I remember a similar comment, many years back (possibly in a Heinlein book?), that claimed that Shakespeare was so utterly amazing that the English language never, after him, drifted far enough to make his work unintelligible to a native speaker.

[peristaltor]

They said this of Dante. His work was so amazing, the 13 or so dialects of Italian kinda congealed around his.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Rate of change and evolution and point of total unintelligibility not being defined...

[conuly]

Don't bring logic into this.

[pauamma]

I smell a false dichotomy here. Or something.

[kengr]

Someone needs to show this guy something in Old English (aka Anglo-Saxon). Beowulf, maybe?

For thast matter, he should be pointed at the differences between UK English, US English, Australian English and whatever other "significant dialects" there are.

"knocking someone up", "rubbers", "suspenders" and a host of others.

Heck, I know of one *major* difference where the same phrase means the exact *opposite* in the UK and the Us.

"Tabled the motion".

In the US, it means the motion was set aside to be dealt with later (if at all!).

In the UK, it means they are going to vote or otherwise take action on it!

[conuly]

I believe - but don't quote me! - that the "from the rubber plant" sense of the word rubber comes after the "eraser" sense of the word. A rubber is something you rub with, and you can do that with lots of things.

[ex_inklessej388]

*pokes head up from hours of searching and rabbit-holing on the Online Etymology Dictionary*

Thanks for this... :-)

[mindstalk]

BTW the date of this post seems to be "2018-Nov-22, Thursday 20:43"

[conuly]

Yup :)