Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!
(funnier with the superscript)
I can in general terms (though I have not read this book). He is one of the foremost paremiologists on the planet and while he might be wrong about any particular thing, it will not be due to a fault in his scholarly abilities. (Edit: he’s also really nice, and if you were really interested and had a question I bet he’d answer your email.)
“I require unleaded petroleum distillates for my horseless carriage. And don’t dilly-dally, you whippersnapper!”
“Yes, I’d like to send this letter to the Prussian consulate in Siam by aeromail. Am I too late for the 4:30 autogyro?”
Ouch!Ouch!Ouch!Ouch!
Hmm. Maybe.
Like my friend who was driving in his car when lightning hit him. Not even the same year as when lightning hit his house.
Here’s the QI take on it (not that I’m suggesting it’s authoritative). Invented by Edison: https://youtu.be/fIEzYSz6Iwk?si=t64MYIKZZOD6Sxce
j
(For some reason that link is really making discourse angry - sorry about the bare link. And the double post is because I’m not even going to try to edit this explanation into the first post.)
j
I didn’t watch the whole QI video, but the word itself was certainly not invented by Edison. The OED’s first quotation using “hello” is from 1826 (in the Norwich Conn. Courier), and Thomas Edison was born in 1847.
Yeah, as I said, I’m not suggesting it’s authoritative. As to whether Edison had a role in popularizing it? ::shrug::
j
Was your friend named Rod?
So apparently this is a question you should not ask Jeeves.
Sadly, no. He did have a great sense of humor about it, at least.
So, I was reading a biography of a certain well-known person, and came across this line…
Anyone care to guess who it was? Note that he had a lifelong, and by all accounts happy, faithful, and monogamous, marriage to a woman.
Fred Rogers
If (1) you’re bisexual and (2) inclined to be monogamous, this would be the case 50% of the time. With the intense social (and formally legal) pressure to be monogamous, probably most of the people 3-10 on that scale would have wound up in heterosexual marriages.
Remember when delving into the sexual behavior of famous people was not really done in public? We knew about Charles Nelson Reilly but did not discuss it much, perhaps because it was too obvious.
In those days, we refrained because the subject was taboo. Sometime in the next decade or so, we will refrain on the grounds of WFC – everybody is a pervert one way or another, so this is just boring.
People mostly do not marry everybody they are attracted to.
People mostly do not date everybody they are attracted to.
People mostly do not ever meet everybody they are attracted to.
Using attraction as a metric for sexuality is a fallacy.
Are you saying that a person could be straight and still find people of their sex attractive, or that people can be bisexual and not find people of one or the other sex attractive?
However, probably all people are not attracted to every person they meet/see.
I argue that who you find attractive is a better indicator of your sexuality than who you date or marry
Considerably more than that, even in a completely accepting society, because a bisexual man’s potential partners are straight or bisexual women, and gay or bisexual men, and of that group, the women outnumber the men.
By this standard, it would be impossible for a person to be both monogamous and bisexual, and someone who keeps seeking dates (with whomever) but keeps getting turned down wouldn’t have any sexuality at all.
Besides which, it wasn’t just someone saying “I’m attracted to both men and women”. It was someone saying “My sexuality is right smack in the middle”. If you can’t take a person’s statements about their sexuality as evidence of their sexuality, then what can you go by?