mike carey

Hehe, I took that to be deliberate, in the spirit of the thread!

On the ABC's talk network this morning, the presenter was talking to a China expert about the death of Liu Xiaobo, a prominent dissident, and mispronouncing his name. Mispronunciation of Chinese names is common. The one way that the network is far from conservative (not in the political sense, rather in how it adopts modern methods) is that it invites comments from listeners via text and tweets. In the course of the interview, the presenter raised the fact that tweeters had challenged her pronunciation and she clarified with the expert what was the correct way of saying Liu's name.

It's a little jarring for me when Americans say 'erb (for herb) and fillay for fillet. To me they are not just assimilated French words but English words in their own right. (They came from French to middle English.) Here both have all their letters pronounced, so the h and the t are both vocalised.

I had a psych major working for me in one of my later jobs. She said that in that context an issue is something that is there, but a problem is something that action is being taken to resolve. In a more general context, the Oxford dictionary has problem as one of the meanings of issue.

Is that Argentine stake being burnt at the steak?

Yep, that's what I meant. If you post the link to the tweet, people can click on that, open the tweet and view the video from there. You can do that from that drop down menu rather than doing what you did to select what you posted. It's the pillow fight, right? The link to the tweet is in the middle of the alphabet soup you posted: https://twitter.com/LILAFRIMANE/status/883942930666442752

The cat on the left (from out perspective) needs to be taught that if it rings the other cat's bell, the other cat gets fed! It's usually easier to insert a link to the tweet rather than the video ('copy link to tweet' in the drop down menu at the top right of the tweet, for anyone who didn't know).

This just showed up in my twitter time line, as a retweet from 3 years ago: "My wife's just asked what 'mansplaining' is. Not sure what to do."

I need a new cup of coffee now. Brilliant.

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I can't thank you enough for continuing to chronicle this amazing journey.

Not just Brits. Although I generally use them for their intended purpose (or to close bags of frozen veges in the freezer).

I think it would be better to let nature take its course rather than force the pace. But it's not my family so what I think is unimportant.

I can scarcely imagine how hard it must have been to begin this conversation in the forum, with no idea whether the response would be positive, negative or 'meh'. I would like to think that the positive response was a foregone conclusion but in some things I'm pessimistic. You have lightened up our lives. We have enjoyed your joys and shared your disappointments vicariously and we are the better for it. I shed a tear at the thought of your son quietly crying in the back seat of the car, and another at his going to sleep in his brother's bed, and I do so again writing this. You encapsulated the pathos and the beauty of those moments. I don't know what MIDN Basketballer meant when he said 'Be Happy', but the implicit love in that murmured statement was clear. Don't presume that he has seen through you, neither assume that he hasn't. That will become clear. Just let things play out as they will. Hugs, big time!

@BasketBaller, Be Happy.

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Love your dark side!

I suspect that they would both have given and taken cocks in equal measure. Of course, I am in no position to know.

So sorry I missed it, I hope that Baby Boomer has identified why I did so. (Note I decided not to call him BB, cognisant of the possible ambiguity of his reference to MF.) I hope you had a great day!

I'm sure this has been posted here before, but it's worth another run.

Sometimes 'literally' can be used for precision when whatever wording had been used could be taken figuratively.

To be contrarian? Provocative? Subversive? Who knows?

I don't know that people would use 'azz' because they thought 'ass' was offensive. Offence, I'd have thought, is the last thing that the typical texter would be thinking of! I don't use 'ass' in that context because the Australian word is 'arse' (which, incidentally, rhymes with the way I say 'pass'), nothing to do with being offensive. I, too, don't think that ass/arse is offensive any more. [in spoken language, I'd put ass/arse down to accent rather than different words and I'd have thought nothing of just saying it the way I do, on paper it sort of becomes a decision. So if there were a time when I would have said 'ass' as if I were switching to an American accent, I'd write 'ass'.]

Lol (did you see what I did then?), azz isn't even a short-cut! I wouldn't use ass to start with unless I meant donkey. I have to confess I've started using bc for because in texts, but not all the time. In twitter I'll write what I want to say and try to edit it down to 140 characters, and I'll use ur, 4, 2 and some other text-speak at times, but not if I can do it differently and convey what I want to say.

I don't pay attention to music all that much, but Steeleye Span would be up there, and as I recall they have come up in the forum in the past.