Unless you live in the Boston area. They take all those "r"s they’ve saved up by not pronouncing them at the end of words and stick them where most people would think them not needed – like at the end of “pizza” and “saw” (“I had a slice of pizzer.” And a “saw” is something you cut wood with. The past tense of “see” is “sawr”, except when it’s “seen”., as in “I seen him.”)
Is “smeg” really in common use in the U.K.? It’s non-existent in the U.S.
In fact, I searched the Dope and except for the poster named Smeghead there aren’t even a handful of threads that use the term.
I’m curious if other British Dopers have seen or heard the term used in everyday talk.
“Camelot” meant a specific imaginery place until the Kenndey family came along.
Don’t let it forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment that was known as
Camelot.
It’s not an everyday term, no. But it’s widely-understood, probably by a decent chunk of the population who have no idea of its origins and who have never watched Red Dwarf.
Just going from memory – I think the phrase in Asimov’s short story was “pocket computer”, although the concept is certainly equivalent to our pocket calculator.
I don’t think I can give that to Lucas. “Droid” was slang for “android” which — according to Wikipedia — was first used by the French author Mathias Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838-1889) in his work Tomorrow’s Eve, featuring an artificial human-like robot named Hadaly.
Two from musical theatre lyricist Tim Rice:
“Superstar” was coined by Andy Warhol and came to promanence as “Jesus Christ Superstar.”
“Evita” is beginning to mean a woman in power. A recent bio of Hilary is titled “American Evita.”
A bit o’ history here.
as noted above, Karel Czapek gave us “Robot” with his work R.U.R. (“Rossum’s Universal Robots”), where the name was derived from the Slavik word for “workers” (I never heard it rendered as “drudges”, but , for all I know, that might be accurate). The “robots” in his story weren’t mechanical beings, but biological constructs. Science fiction convention has been to call such creatures “androids”, at least since the 1930s (I don’t know if l’Isle-adam used the term that way or not). “Robots” quickly came to mean “mechanical people”, generally metal ones.
In the 1971 film Silent Running they called the diminutive robots “Drones”, I suspect to get away from the “robot” terminology. When Lucas made Star wars, he called R2D2 and C3PO “Droids”. I strongly suspect his reasoning was the same, and influenced by the SR terminology (and the robots. Huey, Dewey, and Louie were diminutive, sawed-off robots that spoke in machine noises, as R2D2 would.) at only one point in Star Wars was the term “robots” used – when Luke says to Obi-Wan tyhat the Storm Troopers who killed the Jawas might follow the trail to “the robots”, and from them to Uncle Owen and Aunt Beroo. Every other time in the Star Wars movies, robots are called “droids”. the term is used as if it’s not a shortened form of “android” (although that’s clearly where it derives from in our universe, if not in R2D2’s), but a “translation” of whatever language they speak A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far away. L:ucas is definitely responsible for the term – I never heard it used before SW.
So now you have the interesting case where the original meanings have become changed – “robots” are now mechanical things (if not always metal – Ash in alien and Bishop in Aliens seem to be more plastic than metal), while “droids” are also mechanical, not like the old “androids” at all.
Here it is on Amazon.com:
The way I’ve seen the term used, “android” refers to any human-shaped robot, regardless of composition, or more narrowly, one which can be mistaken for a human. By this standard, Bishop is definitely an android, Data probably is, and even C3PO might be. But even by this looser standard, R2D2 is unambiguously not an android, despite being a “droid”. So I think it’s safe to call “droid” a new coinage, with an etymology from “android”, rather than just an abbreviation with the same meaning.
Originally popularized by Blackadder III, though.
I’ve heard “quark” rhyming with “park”, and rhyming with “pork”, both by physicists.
Me neither.
Does it really mean that generally, or is the author drawing specific parallels between the life of Hillary Clinton and Eva Peron?
Plato isn’t remembered as a fiction writer, but Atlantis is probably the grandmother of all fictitious place names.
Muggle, a slang term for marijuana, mostly used in the 1920s and 1930s and associated with the United States jazz scene.
* To muggle or to muggle up was to smoke marijuana, and to experience the "high" from marijuana was to be all muggled up.
Muggles is the title of a recording by Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra, recorded in Chicago on December 7, 1928. The title refers to Muggles as a slang term for marijuana…
CMC fnord!
Pronounce “walk” Britishly: “wohk”. Now pronounce “quark” to rhyme with it, then put the “r” back in: kwoark, to rhyme (for rhotic dialects) with “stork.”
“Lurgi”, for flu or other generic winter-time ailment, comes from the Goon Show.
mm
How about Peyton Place? Is that still used to mean a community with scandalous secrets? Has the term been kept alive by the song Harper Valley PTA?
This beggers the question of the origin of the word “goon”. All I do know is that it was around before the radio show. I have found one explanation which seems to fit the bill (from the Word Detective):-
“Goon” first appeared around 1921 meaning “a dull or stupid person, an oaf,” most likely derived from the English dialect word “gooney,” meaning “simpleton.”
Now, of course, the word now also means a hired thug or strong-arm man.
‘Muggle’ meaning marijuana is obsolete - nobody calls it that anymore.
‘Muggle’ meaning non-magical person, or general skilless person in whatever context.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/uk/newsid_2882000/2882895.stm
I think the usage is changing again. When I was growing up in the 1960s (and reading things going back two decades), in books and comics “androids” seemed to refer to biological constructs. Asimov never called his human-looking robots “androids” – thyey were invariably called “robots”. The human-shaped robots in Twilight Zone episodes were “robots”. The movie Metropolis never used the term “android”. Philip K. Dick’s novel on which Bladerunner is based was caled “Do androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”, and the things in it are biological constructs.
The current Wikipedia article on “Androids” seems accurate, but draws almost all of its examples from recent works, and says many times that creations from earlier fiction “could be called” “androids” when the original work calls them “robots”.