Quick! Someone make a “Just an empty word” meme.
Never mind, I’m sure the class has done it by now. (They’ve made dozens of “Lovely_Rhombus” memes, and have shared them with the world… but not their teacher.)
“Meme” as self-replicating idea has a lot of value. “Meme” as slang for a pic/poster with a faux pithy / cute / funny / unfunny / stupid caption was empty misnomer from the git-go.
I agree completely. But face it: we’re never going to get that first meaning back.
This isn’t a phrase or even a term, but it is part of language, and since this board is a text-based medium, I feel it qualifies. What’s with the use of the backslash instead of the regular slash? For example:
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Choose the adjective: quickly\slowly\wrong.
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We will notify your significant other and\or parents if you are lost at sea.
When someone uses the backslash in that way, it really throws me off. I have to stop reading and go back to the beginning of the paragraph, and then try to ignore the mistake on the second reading.
Yours is the first such usage I have ever read. I agree it’s odd, but not as disorienting as all that. Then again from my time in software development I’ve gotten used to all sorts of weird delimiters. Inlcuding a few situations where / and \ are equivalent and indeed interchangeably intermixable.
Like this
213 Things Skippy is No Longer Allowed to Do in the U. S. Army:
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Not allowed to chew gum at formation, unless I brought enough for everybody.
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(Next day) Not allowed to chew gum at formation even if I did bring enough for everybody.
Enlisting marsupials now, are they?
“I was mistaken”. By whom? YOU mistook is what happened. Own it and try to do better next time.
That’s not how that word works.
Some people just don’t like the passive voice.
“I was mistaken” is not passive voice in its most common usage. It is a simple subject-linking verb (past tense)-adjective structure.
It could be passive construction for “(Someone) mistook me” but I doubt that anyone encounters this usage very often.
Yeah, all the dictionaries I checked gave “mistaken” as an adjective meaning “wrong.”
It can also be a verb—the past participle of “mistake”—but that’s less common.
Going/moving forward - I quit my job because of this term being used 10 times a day
A “mistaken decision” of mine is one that I mistook (e.g., took wrongly). So yes, “mistaken” there, referring to the decision, means “wrong”. I myself was not mistaken; I was the mistaker.
I know this usage is well ingrained; that’s why it bothers me. It’s a blame-deflector.
No it’s not. A person who is “mistaken” is a person who has made a mistake. It means exactly the same thing. It’s the same as saying “I was in error.”
In other words, you are mistaken.
“a high rate of speed”
Speed is already a rate. It’s the rate of change of location over time. Rate of change of speed (well, velocity, but that’s another topic) over time is acceleration. I understand that when people say “rate of speed” they really mean speed and not acceleration. But why add extra words to make it more ambiguous and less correct?
An opportunity was missed in your post.