[ExI] from quora - laugh of the day

spike at rainier66.com spike at rainier66.com
Sat Nov 20 01:58:22 UTC 2021


 

 

…> On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] from quora - laugh of the day

 

>…Now what kind of purist uses 'sorta'?  Maybe a confused one?

 

 

>…As for 'sorta', I'll bet you also use 'kinda'. 

 

Ja.  I wouldn’t put it in a tech paper, but rather I think of it as a phonetic spelling.  These creep into language over time.  After a while we get used to seeing them, and even the most reluctant among us will kinda accept it, as one of those vaguely annoying usages.  How we talk eventually impacts how we spell. 

 

In the internet age, with the reply key, it is easy to do accidental misattributions.  For this reason, having minor quirks in one’s writing style, such as using kinda sorta, and obsolete terms such as proles, constables, my bride, hipster, ja and so forth can serve as useful clues that it was the old spikester who wrote it, and perhaps prevent a later poster from being blamed for the silliness.

 

Besides that, think of how much less annoying it is to hear the occasional kinda sorta rather than the universally annoying hackneyed and annoying “like” inserted about every third word in teenspeak.  I challenge my scouts to form sentences without using the term unless actually comparing two things, as in a simile. 

 

 >…As for 'sorta', I'll bet you also use 'kinda'.  Right

 

Ja, far too often I fear.  It is a character flaw, on which I have focused far too little effort to correct.

 

 

>…I also say 'ghost poo' rather than 'packing peanuts'.  Do you?  Oh sorry, irrelevant example….

 

Oy vey, I have never heard either of these usages.  So tragically not hip I am.  I so need to get mod.

 

 

 

>…Year ago Edwin Newman wrote several books on words which I enjoyed ('the ize have it')…

 

I like Newman’s style too.

 

>… words that are not amenable to qualification, like 'perfect'….

 

That one I excuse because of the phrase “…in order to form a more perfect union…” which is understood to mean working towards a perfect union while recognizing a perfect union can never exist.

 

>…Called absolute words.  Fad usage has 'somewhat unique' or 'more unique' as acceptable.  Not me….

 

Ja, we know it means more rare, but it is possible to stretch a bit with some imagination.  Currently Magnus Carlsen is unique in that he is the only player with a current classical chess rating over 2800, but he whooped ass at the FIDE World Cup in September so he rose into the high 2800s, making him in a sense even more unique.  He is even uniquer than he was before the tournament and with that huuuuuge rating gap, he is now the uniquest chess player.

 

Agreed, it is ugly, but my breezy commentary served to remind us of another of my stylistic quirks: emphasizing an adjective by replicating a vowel, the way we would speak it, as in the word huuuuuge above. 

 

The internet has corrupted us all, Billw.  We are now all impuritans.  Well… I am.

 

spike   

 

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20211119/b6b88a44/attachment.htm>


More information about the extropy-chat mailing list