Doesn’t matter. “Mark ##” refers to any change in band membership, whether it significantly changes their sound or not. Of course, the most well-known usage is with Deep Purple, where MkI, II & III did sound drastically different, due to the change in lead singers; but Mark III & IV (in which Tommy Bolin replaced Ritchie Blackmore) sounded more or less the same.
On the other hand, this is Spinal Tap we’re talking about…
Says who?
Uh…says everyone?
The Deep Purple FAQ says: “The ‘Marks’ refer to certain specific lineups.” Note that every substantive personnel change gets a separate “Mark”, including the 1994 tour-only lineup of Gillan/Glover/Lord/Paice with Joe Satriani, who never recorded an album. (Minor, temporary changes, such as filling in for a sick band member, don’t get separate “marks.”)
In general parlance, “Mark II” refers to a change in design, not necessarily a change in function.
OK, so that’s what it means for Deep Purple.
I’m in the middle of Season 3 of Orange Is The New Black, and there are several things that have driven me up the wall. And I say this as a person who has never set foot in prison, but these things are just blatantly obvious to me as a casual observer. (Open spoilers to follow)
When the corporation bought the prison, they sent a few suits in there, toured it, and bought it within a few weeks. Um, no. Something like that would take years. Politicians in the district would have vowed tooth-and-nail to fight it, there would have been a period of public comment, etc. Federal property doesn’t just get sold with the stroke of a pen.
Similarly, when the guards all thought they were going to lose their jobs. They’re federal employees - the would have been given the chance to bid on other federal jobs, and they’d have likely gotten pretty generous* severance packages if they couldn’t/wouldn’t find other federal jobs. *Maybe not “generous,” but definitely better than “thrown out onto the street.”
A character, I forget her name, gets accused of possessing drugs and gets sent “down the hill” to maximum security immediately. Again: um, no. In the real world she’d have been sent to Segregation for a period of time, and be given a trial, before being sent to max. I’m not saying she’d have been given a fair trial, but she’d have been given a trial all the same.
As someone who has worked in a system that closed a few prisons,I don’t find this far-fetched at all. It was a state prison system, so I don’t know if the Feds work the same way but
A) Lots of people were worried that they were going to lose their jobs- in the prisons that were closing and others. Because if prison A closes, it might be employees of prison B and C that lose their jobs after seniority is taken into account.
B)People did lose their jobs. They could fill vacancies in other prisons and even other state agencies, but there weren’t enough openings in close proximity to the closing prisons for everyone to get a position - people who worked at a prison in NYC were not always able to up and move to say , Buffalo if that was where the opening was.
C) The only “severance” laid off employees got was their accumulated leave time- which could have been only a few days and which they would have gotten no matter why they left.
Well, I really enjoyed the album Catfish Rising by Jethro Tull Mark CCCLXVII (or whatever).
On the other hand, The Final Cut and A Moment Lapse of Reason were not by any reasonable standard Pink Floyd albums. The former was a Roger Waters project and the latter was some bit of pap by David Gilmour & Friends.
schizophrenia is not the same as multiple personality disorder
I have posted a number of times on The Dope about my frustration with the use of Latin in movies, TV and even video games. Most often when they need Latin, they just run the English through an automatic translator, and they generate pure gibberish. Then, there’s often somebody on the show who understands the gibberish without having to look anything up. It’s not just TV, though. My local gaming shop has a game called Lux Aeternum. It should be Lux Aeterna, because Lux is feminine. The fact that this is an actual Latin expression used in reference to a part of the Catholic mass makes the decision to render the adjective neuter quite mysterious.
It’s gotten worse since the last time I groused about this in this board, because now there is a company that is selling computer-generated translations:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1514326132
Ah yes. The born-again descriptivists are always the descriptiviest. It’s true that there is a long history of people guiltily taking as authoritative the pompous Jeremiads of language cranks. That is, a lot of what people think of as language rules chiseled in stone tablets was actually some debatable opinion an irascible nut just wrote down one day that somehow metastasized. But… there are good reasons to maintain the meanings of words. We shouldn’t necessarily stamp out the use of ‘unique’ with comparatives or superlatives, but we should provide that people are aware that we are engaging in a kind of word play when we do so, because uniqueness does not, strictly speaking, admit of degree.
In Latin, *anus *means ‘old lady’, ānus (with a long-a) means ‘asshole’, and *annus *means ‘year’. This triad makes for an excellent case-in-point why you should make sure to study your vowel lengths, and be sure to geminate your double consonants.
My understanding has been that the technique is that you fire your pistols at a distance first, then just drop them hoping to live long enough to retrieve them, so that you thin your enemies out before engaging in the exhausting and dangerous work of close-quarters fighting.
As someone who never uses “u” for “you” when texting, I still think the obvious pronunciation of “Ucon” is “U-con” or “Yukon”, though thinking about it, “Ucken” would be plausible if unlikely.
The etymology is unclear. Some people say that, others say it’s the actual spit, as in God made Adam out of his spit and dirt, or “Poor child! he’s as like his own dadda as if he were spit out of his mouth.” Circa 1689.
Strictly speaking, “unique” not only may but must admit of degree, because the word is meaningless if it doesn’t.
One of my fiercest gripes is really bad Elizabethan/Jacobean. There was a recent Donald Duck comic book where the writers just glued “eth” on the end of any old verb (and not a few nouns!) Absolutely illiterate!
Um… Huh? How do you figure? The standard viewpoint is exactly the opposite of this. (“Exactly” is like “unique” in that it makes no sense to modify it.)
(Exception: is “almost” a modifier? Lots of things are “almost unique.”)
It drives me batty when a Western Catholic or Protestant is shown doing the sign of the cross backwards in movies. No examples off the top of my head, it’s just jarringly apparent (the Netflix Daredevil does it correctly). Given western Christianity’s higher familiarity in Hollywood, I’d forgive it if a Orthodox or Eastern Catholic did it the western way in a movie, but instead they go for the unfamiliar.
And yes, I understand that in the early church it may have been the opposite.
If one takes the word as absolute, then all macroscopic objects are unique. The tree outside my window is unique, because it’s the only one in the world with that exact pattern of branches. Your car is unique, because it’s the only one in the world with that particular serial number engraved in the frame. A mass-produced piece of plastic is unique, because it’s the only one with that particular set of cross-links between the polymer strands, and so on. What’s the use of an adjective that applies to every noun?
But in practice, we don’t say that every mass-produced bit of plastic is unique, because even though there are differences between them, those differences aren’t significant compared to the similarities. They’re unique in some sense, but not unique enough.
If you’re referring to the logical problems that arise from examining any absolute notion, then sure. A circle is made up of an infinite number of points, so is a bigger circle made up of an infiniter number of points? But that doesn’t mean there isn’t something kind of silly about making an absolute relative. We recognize immediately how odd it is to say “you’re the onliest girl for me.” It just happens that ‘unique’ and even ‘singular’ have somehow become relatively less absolute.
One of my favorite old groups The Moonglows starts their beautiful ballad The Ten Commandments of Love with…
Thy shall never love another
Decades later, I still haven’t forgiven them.
At some point, I think people making ridiculous attempts at Elizabethan English knew exactly how silly they were being. But it was later picked up by people who didn’t know better.
The fact that no less a lynchpin Catholic concept as the Immaculate Conception is misunderstood as being synonymous with the virgin birth bugs me. It was Mary who was immaculately conceived, that is, without the stain of original sin, so that she could be a fit vessel for the son of God. Also, the Pope is not regarded as infallible except in specially noted pronouncements given ex cathēdrā (from the big chair) and modern popes don’t do that much.
I think we Catholics have only ourselves to blame for that one, though. If you go to Mass on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, guess which Gospel passage will be read? That’s right, the one about the conception of Jesus. Yes, yes, that’s because there isn’t any Gospel passage about Mary’s conception directly, and Mary being without sin was important because it made her a fit vessel for the conception of Jesus, and so on… but if you have a feast day talking about a conception, and on that day you read a reading about a conception, what do you expect people to conclude?
I’ve mentioned it before, and I’ll staunchly stick with this:
Learn the difference between, and correct usage of, staunch and stanch !
Especially if you’re a journalist. I see these two words mixed up in print and on-line all too often. It’s always one-way too: Staunch being used where stanch should be used; rarely if ever the other way around.
Yes, yes, I know that some fictionaries – of descriptivist editorial slant of course – tell us that they may be used more-or-less interchangeably. But that’s just because so many people do mix up these words, that’s what a descriptivist fictionary would say, of course.
Stanch: v.t. Stop the flow of a fluid; used literally (“stanch the bleeding”) or figuratively (“stanch the spending on the over-budget project”).
Staunch: adj. Loyal; steadfast; dependable. A staunch friend; a staunch ally. Staunchly, adv.
We posited they might have actually have been trying for “light of the Eternal” rather than “eternal Light”, but in any case yeah, pig-any-language.
I’m currently playing Marvel Heroes, Spanish-speaking guild, and the first thing we tell people is “if you’re playing in Spanish, switch the game to English”. People aren’t bothering write guides in Spanish (when there actually were some floating around before the game got translated) with reference to the translated version, because the translation is so bad. According to the devs they actually used an agency: it must have been one of those Chinese farms where someone copy-pastes the text into Google Translator and sends the bill. I saw the results of that in one of my jobs…
That happens irl when using the left hand (right is otherwise unavailable), but yeah, it’s kind of like how so often the nuns wear the most convoluted possible headgear. If it’s just “nun who will scream when something happens”, she’s likely to wear a normal veil; if it’s a movie about nuns, God help us.
To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, illiteracy has many defenders but no defense. 
In my neck of the woods, there is no discernible difference in the pronunciation of those words, so I could understand how the former might get written as the latter. At least “flaunt” and “flout” sound different.