Also, Robert E. Lee’s horse was named Traveler, so it just seems obvious.
If it wasn’t for his horse, he wouldn’t have spent that year in college!
Okay, at the risk of looking really stupid, I’m finally going to ask. What the heck is this, and where is it from? I’ve never seen it anywhere but here.
It’s from a Lewis Black routine in which he describes one of the dumbest things he’s ever heard. (Beautifully described as a moment “where the left half of your brain looks at the right half and says, ‘It’s dark in here, and we may die!’” :D)
It wasn’t all that long ago I discovered the word detritus wasn’t pronounced de-tre-us. It’s not a word that gets said a lot, least of all by me. Though I’m perfectly willing to accept it and pronounce it the right way should the need occur, it sounds made up and goofy that way to me. Though no more goofy, I suppose, than dropping the second t and pronouncing it the way I’ve done all these years.
I agree that detritus sounds wrong. I always read it in my head pronounced differently (DEE-trih-dis), and it sounds more correct, though I know that it is wrong.
Whew! I’m glad I’m not the only one. Maybe it doesn’t get spoken much because many others feel the same way.
I don’t know. I’ve always liked the word detritus. But I also like the word flotsam. It’s fun to say. I went to the beach, and there was some cool flotsam in the middle of all of that detritus.
It’s more fun to look at the detritus on the beach and try to determine which is flotsam and which is jetsam. 
I think it’s more used in Britain than the article suggests; Potter once used it completely unselfconsciously when chatting (online) with me about something unrelated; he casually said that he could “go to gaol” if he didn’t accomplish something or other.
Ever see a B-grade science fiction movie where to show how long the derilict spaceship has been abandoned (with hard vacuum inside), they depict it festooned with cobwebs? :smack:
Then how come I have a phobia of cobs? You mean they don’t even exist?
Heh heh. I’ve been married to Zeldar for over twenty years. Have you ever seen the shell of a mad person turned inside out?
This I just learned while looking up the ingredients for another cocktail:
I had always thought that a “nightcap” was any cocktail that you offered someone at the end of a date or at the end of a day – especially in movies in the Forties, Fifties and early Sixties. No so. A “nightcap” is a specific cocktail made with rum, warm milk, a standard syrup, cinnamon and/or nutmeg.
Damn! That’s essentially what Mummy was putting in my milk when I was five!
Of course they do. They’re what corn comes on.
Huh? Merriam Webster defines it as your first description. I’ve never ever heard of anyone describing it as the latter. I see that a certain mixed drink recipe book describes such a drink, but I’d say the former definition is most certainly more common than the latter, as a quick perusal of various online dictionaries indicates (none of which mentions your specific drink).
[huge sigh of relief, hugs GargoyleWB]
It’s not just me!
Thanks for owning up Zeldar, you could have had me going for quite a while there.
I get Dean Martin, but not Victoria Principal.
On a quick Wikipedia check, it looks like the problem is that I didn’t watch Dallas, not that I don’t watch South Park.
There is no such thing as a bad heroin trip. Heroin is not a psychedelic, and, IME, not even vaguely introspective like cannabis can be. Getting through a bad addiction, maybe–there are certainly plenty of those–but a bad heroin trip? Ain’t no such thing. Trust me.
Actually, IIRC it was about the most mind-boggling thing he ever heard, not one of the dumbest things. He described a vivid fear that he would suffer an anuerysm while trying to figure it out. (It’s much funnier when he says it.)
Nope. He calls it the dumbest thing he’d heard until Dan Quayle became VP. (And it is one of his best routines. “I was drinking the boysenberry. . .”)
Thanks, Darryl. I just assumed that I had been wrong all of these years about what a nightcap is when I saw this recipe. But I will gladly accept Webster’s as the authority.
“Cob” is an archaic English word for spider:
Lazy Lob and crazy Cob
are weaving webs to wind me"
The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien.
Bilbo also taunts the spiders with “attercop”, which is cognate - rather than derived from; the word is probably Anglo-Saxon in origin - with the Norwegian “etterkopp”, or spider.
Also, in the book, the Lion is really pretty brave. He fends off some of the Witch’s guards (who really are cowards) and later he attacks and kills a giant spider that’s terrorizing the forest.
My own moment concerns the logo for Tempurpedic products. They’ve been around for a long time, but I’ve never paid any attention to them. It wasn’t until about a month ago, at my chiropractor’s office, that I got a good look at their logo, and I realized that the sleeping woman is naked.