Zompist Bboard Again

Posted: **Thu Nov 12, 2020 11:45 am**

Raphael wrote: ↑Thu Nov 12, 2020 11:13 amBut with what meaning? Judging from Wiktionary, it seems to colloquial for a feature of the Hebrew alphabet that doesn't exist in the Latin/English alphabet.

A placeholder term is a word with no meaning you use it to stand for a thing when you can't remember the name, or just any instance of something of a certain type. Examples would be English thingamobob/watchamacallit, Salvadoran Spanish volado 'watchamacallit' (or the cutesier coso, or the pejorative babosada). They can also be used for imaginary places or people, e.g. German Hintertupfingen 'bumfuck nowhere', English so-and-so.

Since the Hebrew geresh mark (or "chupchik") is even smaller than a yod (to recall that famous quote of Jesus'), presumably this just means 'watchamacallit'.

Posted: **Thu Nov 12, 2020 11:47 am**

Some usage examples: https://neologisms.rice.edu/index.php?a ... =1&t=22531

Posted: **Thu Nov 12, 2020 11:51 am**

Ah. Thank you!

Posted: **Thu Nov 12, 2020 11:55 am**

Now I have to think of all the times someone told me something like, "could you give me a thing?", and I was like, "wut?"

Posted: **Thu Nov 12, 2020 12:44 pm**

Raphael wrote: ↑Thu Nov 12, 2020 11:55 am Now I have to think of all the times someone told me something like, "could you give me a thing?", and I was like, "wut?"

Popular in our household: "Could you give me the thing with the thing? It's over on the thing with the stuff."

Incredibly, this actually works more often than not.

Posted: **Sat Nov 14, 2020 5:18 pm**

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Thu Nov 12, 2020 12:44 pm
Raphael wrote: ↑Thu Nov 12, 2020 11:55 am Now I have to think of all the times someone told me something like, "could you give me a thing?", and I was like, "wut?"
Popular in our household: "Could you give me the thing with the thing? It's over on the thing with the stuff."

Incredibly, this actually works more often than not.

What I am used to is speaking of "a thing of X", where "thing" means some unspecified but discrete quantity of something; e.g. "a thing of milk" means a gallon or half-gallon jug of milk while "a thing of soy sauce" means one of those glass bottles of soy sauce.

Posted: **Wed Dec 02, 2020 9:33 am**

I again heard "in lieu of" to mean "due to" instead of "in place of" (i.e. "In lieu of the pandemic...") and noticed that Wiktionary now lists this as a proscribed usage, which suggests that it's becoming rather commonplace.

Posted: **Wed Dec 02, 2020 10:59 am**

I've been seeing "scares" as a countable plural (singular "a scare") for moments where a videogame tries to spook you.

Kuchigakatai wrote: ↑Fri Nov 06, 2020 12:24 amThe interjection "pog", meaning "that's cool/awesome", seems to continue to gain strength though. And anyone who's paid any attention to the Among Us videogame phenomenon going on right now knows about "sus" (suspect, noun).

I've also been seeing a derived adjective "poggers".

Funny attestation, from a teacher on Twitter:

"pretty poggers" - "poggers is not academic language"

Posted: **Wed Dec 02, 2020 12:18 pm**

"jump scare", at least, goes back to the 1990s, if not older. "sus" (with 1 s) is definitely a new thing, but i've seen the suss spelling at least a few times before, where it can stand for suspicious or stand alone ("suss out"). Funnily enough it seems that poggers is actually from the 1990s as well, just not in its original sense. i remember playing pogs when i was young but i assumed unti now that it was just a coincidence.

Posted: **Wed Dec 02, 2020 2:05 pm**

Pabappa wrote: ↑Wed Dec 02, 2020 12:18 pmFunnily enough it seems that poggers is actually from the 1990s as well, just not in its original sense. i remember playing pogs when i was young but i assumed unti now that it was just a coincidence.

POGs™ go back to the 1930s apparently, originally the bottle caps of a drink company's Passionfruit (or Pineapple? I'm seeing disagreeing commentary) Orange Guava line. The adjective "poggers" seems to be genuinely new though, maybe formed off that colloquial suffix -ers, as in "preggers", "bonkers"?

Incidentally, I once saw an interview with the Mexican businessman who popularized "tazos" (as they're known in Latin America, Eastern Europe and the Arab world) from the mid-1990s onward, in which he said his company started including them in chips products and such after seeing the accumulating upsurge in popularity that was going on for pogs™ in the early 1990s in the US.

Posted: **Thu Dec 03, 2020 1:20 pm**

Pabappa wrote: ↑Wed Dec 02, 2020 12:18 pm "jump scare", at least, goes back to the 1990s, if not older.

Countable scare itself is attested as early as 1548. It's commonplace in expressions like "That gave me a real bad scare." The OED's first citation for "jump scare" is 1986. There's also the expression "cat scare" for that particular trope where a jump scare is caused by something which turns out just to be a cat (or something equally harmless).

Posted: **Thu Dec 03, 2020 3:57 pm**

Oh great, well, then it isn't new at all! I guess that, funnily, so far in the spaces I move around, its usage for videogame scenes/moments is the only one I've come across of it...

Posted: **Fri Dec 04, 2020 5:24 am**

The owner of Four Seasons Total Landscaping wrote:We’re a Wikipedia now!

Posted: **Wed Dec 09, 2020 8:22 pm**

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Wed Dec 02, 2020 9:33 am I again heard "in lieu of" to mean "due to" instead of "in place of" (i.e. "In lieu of the pandemic...") and noticed that Wiktionary now lists this as a proscribed usage, which suggests that it's becoming rather commonplace.

Malapropism, maybe? They might be going for "in light of."

Posted: **Fri Dec 11, 2020 1:09 pm**

I've been noticing "be/get copyrighted" with the meaning "struck down due to copyright claims". As in, "that YouTube video got copyrighted."

I feel it has a similar connotation to "to be disappeared"...

Posted: **Sun Jan 03, 2021 3:05 pm**

Just heard this very strange sentence in a youtube video. For context, this was a scripted video, not natural speech. The narrator was discussing this "iceberg" meme format, and said the following: "It's this image full of different hoaxes, theories, secrets, trivia, anything of the sort for a certain series, with the deeper you going being a bit more obscure, not known, or just a bit plain weird."

This video is from the broader sphere of gaming youtube, and based on my experience, this sort of... just, vaguely odd sentence construction seems to be pretty common in that arena. Like, this definitely tracks as ungrammatical for me, but there seems to be a whole group of people that just (in a non-precise, qualitative sense) consistently talk this way, at least in their youtube videos. I'm not sure if I can give a good overall description, rather than just vaguely gesturing at what I mean from this example, but... this is something I've been noticing for years.

Posted: **Sun Jan 03, 2021 3:37 pm**

Why did you highlight "just a bit plain weird" too? There's nothing off with that, is there?

Posted: **Sun Jan 03, 2021 3:45 pm**

KathTheDragon wrote: ↑Sun Jan 03, 2021 3:37 pm Why did you highlight "just a bit plain weird" too? There's nothing off with that, is there?

The form I'm used to is "just a plain bit weird" myself.

Posted: **Sun Jan 03, 2021 11:30 pm**

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sun Jan 03, 2021 3:45 pm
KathTheDragon wrote: ↑Sun Jan 03, 2021 3:37 pm Why did you highlight "just a bit plain weird" too? There's nothing off with that, is there?
The form I'm used to is "just a plain bit weird" myself.

And I feel like the most natural order for me might be "a bit just plain weird"... but I think sounds a little odd to use "a bit" and "just plain" together in any order.

Posted: **Tue Jan 05, 2021 11:51 am**

dɮ the phoneme wrote: ↑Sun Jan 03, 2021 3:05 pm"It's this image full of different hoaxes, theories, secrets, trivia, anything of the sort for a certain series, with the deeper you going being a bit more obscure, not known, or just a bit plain weird."

Was it a non-rhotic accent? Even if rhotic, maybe it was a badly pronounced "with the deeper you're going", which is a slight bit more acceptable.

I often see weird grammar in Spanish in very informal writing on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and I often wonder if that is how they actually speak, or whether some of the weirdness comes from typos + cellphones' autocorrection...

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