My brother and I use it, although with a touch of jocularity. That said, yes, I’ve heard it used without any trace of irony.
I would think an oenologist would be familiar with it, though. Chemists in general, probably not so much.
I could see “nerf” getting into wider usage very easily:
“That bill to regulate CDOs had some teeth, but the banking lobby totally nerfed it.”
“Bah, now that prisoners are getting ketchup on their prison loaf and heated prisons in winter, the prison experience has been nerfed.”
“Now that football helmets are lined with foam on the outside as well as the inside, the whole tackling thing is nerfed.”
“Now that psychiatric hospitals have rooms covered with padding for violent patients, getting thrown in the booby-hatch has been nerfed!”
“Since they added bumpers that absorb the force of collisions between vehicles, car crashes have been nerfed!”
“Since they coated kindergardeners with spongy foam rubber before letting them outside, recess has been nerfed!”
Inflation has really nerfed the dollar.
Progressives are always trying to nerf the power of money in politics, claiming that it is OP and gives rich people the ability to zerg the hell out of the poor.
Tide nerfs the living shit out of germs and stains!
Ok, “nerf” totally needs to be mainstreamed.
I am a tournament Scrabble ® player, have been for many years, and I have heard all the arguments about the OSPD (Official Scrabble® Player’s Dictionary and OTaCWL (Offical Tournament and Club Word List, often referred simply as TWL or OWL).
First, I’d like to point out that Funk & Wagnells is no more. It was used for OSPD1, possibly 2. When OSPD3 was introduced, it had been expurgated, removing words such as “fuck” and “jew,” while leaving in really offensive words such as “war” and “hate.”
The players of the National Scrabble Association demanded to be able to play with “their” words, so the TWL was produced that included the expurgated words.
The notion that a word in the Scrabble ® dictionary is there to stay is incorrect. “DA,” “AINE,” and many others were removed in OSPD2. In 2004-5, when the new dictionary was being readied, the Yahoo! group CGP (Crossword Game Players) was inundated with people’s favorite words to add and to delete. I know, however, of only one deletion in that edition, EMF, primarily because it is universally pronounced ee-em-eff. So, even though electrical engineers may use “emf” (non-capitalized) in writing, they still pronounce it as the abbreviation of electromotive force.
Nowadays, as OSPD5 and TWL3 are being prepared, I have heard some people requesting that multiple spellings be reduced to a single spelling. Fro instance, the word GANEF (thief) can also be spelled GANEV, GONIF, GONIPH, plus others that I know I missed.
That’s all in the US, Canada, and Israel. The rest of the world plays Collins, so named for the dictionary maker that published the OSW (Official Scrabble Words), which replaced SOWPODS (OSW + OSPD), since that was the nickname given to the previous version, Chambers. (The reason OSPD is included in the SOWPODS acronym was that the Brits decided to combine the two dictionaries (OSW and OSPD) for world usage. Problem is, the US and Canada backed away from the deal.) At any rate, the Collins dictionary is a superset of TWL.
Players in the US or Canada that want to play internationally have two choices: play only Collins, or play Collins and TWL. Neither is a good choice, since playing Collins only will limit how many tournament games the player can play, since the overwhelming majority of tournaments are TWL only; the player that decides to play both word lists have to remember which words are Collins-only, so that they do not play them in TWL games.
(In one of the finals games played for the National Championship, one of the players, a Collins/TWL devotee, opened with a Collins-only word. His opponent, also a Collins/TWL player, let it go!)
OffByOne
0x1