What do those even mean? I’ve never heard “chirping.” I’ve heard “throwing shade” but never knew what it meant.
/old
Yeah, that one would bug me, too. If you’re going to be pedantic, at least be right. (The acronym one is perfectly fine by me. Our language brains don’t process what the letters mean individually, so it makes sense to build some redundancy into the phrase, in my opinion.)
Yeah, that one would bug me, too. If you’re going to be pedantic, at least be right. (The acronym one is perfectly fine by me. Our language brains don’t process what the letters mean individually, so it makes sense to build some redundancy into the phrase, in my opinion. Once again, something like “the La Brea Tar Pits” comes to mind where, if you were parsing it, says “the The Tar Tar Pits.” Obviously, our brains don’t translate “La Brea” any more than they parse the individual words in “PIN” or “ATM” or “VIN.” It’s just a single syntactic unit, divorced from its literal derivation.)
“Junk” for male genitalia. No, junk is something you don’t treasure.
“99% won’t repost this”. How the hell do you know that in advance? Oh, that’s right, you just hit the share button for something someone else wrote.
“This post needs to get across the USA!” Then fucking send it to one guy in Maine and another in California. Done.
“I checked on Snopes, and it’s true” No, you didn’t. You just hit the share button, because I checked on Snopes and it isn’t true.
“Anything-gate”. Because Watergate wasn’t a scandal about water.
“Coercion”. To me it says Holy Christ, I’m talking to a libertarian.
“The X claimed Y victims, including Z Americans.” Like only American lives are important enough to call out separately. Ditto women and children.
“Islamofascism” If you want to be a first class bigot, just wear some fucking sheets, okay?
“Blood and treasure”. If you’re a pirate talking, maybe. Otherwise, no.
“Borders, language, culture”. See Islamofascism above.
People have written “sammich” many times on this board and I go into a near homicidal rage every time. I don’t know why even.
I hate “closure” as well, and I particularly hate it when it is used to justify the death penalty.
First, someone invents the word “closure,” even though there are already plenty of perfectly good words like “resolution.” Then the idea gets reified, and then somehow venerated, so that people must have it no matter what the cost, after a traumatic experience. If you don’t have it, you can’t go on. It’s like having your emotional parking validated, or something. Proceed ad absurdum, and there are actually people arguing for the death of one person, because it will bring other people that precious “closure.”
They both pretty much just mean to talk shit although throwing shade usually implies that it’s cleverer and subtler than just “You’re ugly.”
AFAIK, it references McDonalds and Douglas Coupland’s book Generation X where a low level service industry work became a “Mcjob”. It grew as a meme from there.
I would guess a different derivation, as the “Mc” there is taken from “McDonalds” and used to indicate some sort of corporate soullessness to the word that follows. McMansion, for instance, dates back to at least 1985, from a quick search. To me, the “Righty McRighterson” construction feels like it comes from a separate, unrelated lineage. Something like “Righty O’Righterson” would work just as well, but “O’Mansion” and “O’job” wouldn’t. Heck, even “Righty Righterson” would convey the idea.
I doubt it’s any more deep than the Mc prefix being common and a strong indicator that it’s a last name.
I actually logged on to say that one was mine, and I’ve been beaten to it, not once, but twice. Any variation of “gay” as an insult just sends me through the roof. Proud to say I broke my SO’s son of that one. 
I agree this one is overused, but isn’t it just a misspelled bastardization of the word “cloture?”
“We’re a republic, not a democracy”.
“Saul Alinsky-style radical”.
“The Civil War wasn’t about slavery”.
“My true friends will share this, but 98% of you won’t”.
“Like this if you hate cancer”.
“A baby duck sneezed, and what happened next will astonish you”.
I think someone just made a noun out of the verb “close.” The suffix may have been chosen because it sounded like cloture, but I think someone wanted something beyond just “closing.” “Closing” already had wide application, and whoever coined “closure” wanted a word specific to the resolution of emotional trauma. Maybe it’s a portmanteau of “closing” and “cloture.” I have no idea what the first use was. I sure wish I’d bought stock in it, though.
Yeah, that’s exactly what I think.
Hmm. OK. Apparently “closure” was a medical term before it became a psychological term. “Closure” was used to refer to the closing of literal wounds, with stitches, epoxy, butterfly strips, or whatever. So whoever first applied it to emotional trauma probably borrowed it from the medical term. “Closure” for emotional wounds, just like closure for physical wounds.
Looks to me like 15th century, if you accept the meaning as “act of closing, bringing to a close” according to etymonline. There doesn’t seem to be a specific separate entry for emotional closure, but the meaning is related, I’d think. The earliest I could find for the specific phrase “emotional closure” is 1967. It’s been around awhile. The phrase “sense of closure” I could find in 1959.
The 19th century references I could find for “sense of closure” are in medical journals, so you may be on to something there.
There’s a local investment firm for “high net worth individuals” that advertises on the radio. Their commercials usually consist of a current client recommending the investment company. One of them has some high net worth guy saying, “They handle my wife’s and I’s investments”.
Seriously. I had to turn up the volume to make sure that guy said “wife’s and I’s”.
“Use your words.” Okay: fuck off.
“Children never lie.” Boy, have I got some bad news for you.
“Hone in” for home in. Goddammit, I know that it’s
…so common that many dictionaries now list it—and there are arguments in its favor. Hone means to sharpen or to perfect, and we can think of homing in as a sharpening of focus or a perfecting of one’s trajectory toward a target.
^^^Pure unadulterated bullshit. I know, language evolves and all that, fair enough. But sometimes it just decomposes.
I had to do that at my old job with a technician who was just out of high school, and usually responded to anything people said to her by grunting and shrugging her shoulders. I also had to say “(first, middle, last name), you look at me when I’m talking to you!” with yet another very young tech who suddenly decided to cop a major attitude with us.
Those behaviors were extinguished rapidly!
However, “cop a major attitude” is a hated phrase by some people, too.