This reminded me. I used to watch a show about a guy doing garden makeovers for people. His name was Ahmed. Once, he was in the South, and he was talking to a guy he was trying to recruit for the show. The guy said his name, and Ahmed answered with “Ahmed.” The other guy said “Hi, Ed!” Cracked me up.
Very likely to be true.
(I think part of the source of confusion over Qater may be our tendency to want to see a U in there after that Q. After all, it’s not as though western English speakers have particular difficulties with middle-Eastern or African words; lots of the geographical names of the area receive what seem to be ‘standard’ pronunciations. An exception might be Niger, which gets pronounced several ways–but there are other issues with that one. (Such as French!))
Having grown up in Dixie, I can readily see that happening! You wouldn’t happen to know what show it was, would you? I’d love to get a youtube clip of that interaction.
It was called Yard Crashers. He did a few seasons but left when the HGTV (or DIY?) insisted on a set format for each show – something that aggravates me, too. He was the best host, and I missed him in later seasons and stopped watching, but I appreciate his sticking to his principles.
I hear you, but to me these expressions are just Internet banter, or perhaps we should simply call them memes by this point.
I’ve had it said to me and I’ve heard it said to others, and it was absolutely clear that it meant “I miss you” or “I’m lonely with you not being around”.
Besides, if you’re telling someone to stay the fuck away, why would you come up with such a backward somersault turn of phrase to say it?
I think with expressions like miss…not and prevent X from not the underlying concept to the person talking is that “miss” and “prevent” are perceived as quasi-negatory words, so that an actual negation is, somehow, also needed. I haven’t looked into it very far yet, but I believe this phenomenon may be related to how we use words like any, which are typically used only in questions and phrases of uncertainty or negation.
It seems like another instance of the phenomenon of “I could care less” being used to mean “I could not care less.”
Maybe at some point people can’t keep track of words in a negative sentence and what would seem to be sentences with opposite meanings get jumbled up.
I have friends that live in Moscow, I should ask them about the pronunciation.
BTW, that dreadful news about the students in Moscow, I saw a tv report from the local station up ther. It’s station KREM. Kind of amusing.
Idaho? Been there. It is like a nursery business: MOSS Co.
Additionally, y’all has the advantage of being absolutely gender neutral. I know, one could easily make the case that “you guys” is, in many contexts, likewise gender neutral, but I don’t think it’s possible for it ever to become completely so.
Never mind.
I’ve used as a gender neutral term all my life. I don’t think it’s an issue. Y’all is too region specific for me. I don’t think I’d ever use it.
One rather old one has started to annoy me. I think it was in an ad where they were trying to sell some kind of container, which was good for storing “veggies”. That is baby talk that does not really belong in normal speech.
I beg to differ! I use it all the time, and I am not THAT childish.
That reminds me of another thing. I hate when you hear grown adults using baby talk to another adult. I had a friend in college who would use the term, “pee-pee whacking” as in, “Yeah, he screwed up bad. His boss gave him a real pee-pee whacking over it.”
There’s so much wrong with using that term.
The difference that used to exist between backslash and forward slash no longer exists. Browsers are intelligent enough now to distinguish and correct the wrong ones. So even though I understand the derivation and distinction, I only use “slash” since anything else would be needlessly pedantic and confusing to the average person.
Semantically, there really is a big difference, though. Browsers might make a correction, but compilers generally do not. If you are writing a program, you really do need to make sure you use the right one. But, IME, “slash” is exactly the same as “forward slash”, and “backslash” is the specific term for the other one (which is sometimes also called the “escape” character, but never say that to a non-programmer, and in urls, escape is “%”). Also, I have to be careful interpreting British, because when they say “stroke” my reflex is to think slash when what they actually mean is hyphen.
Totally agree.
It’s better than veegees, which has appeared on this very board.
Granted that most browsers will make the correction. And for a lot of younger amatuer users, browsers are the only place they encounter any form of slash.
Ultimately, for techies you want to be precise though you may not need to be, for programs other than browsers and for programming / scripting you need to be precise, for clueless people you want to be simple, and it’s the “I have some clue” folks in the middle who are all the trouble doing the right or wrong thing for the wrong or right reason and mistakenly believing they understand something they don’t. Those people are the tough problem.