Innovative Usage Thread

[Linguoboy]

I've been exchanging messages with an eBay seller from Germany, and he always capitalizes "You". Certainly a weird transfer from his native language, when the formal second person pronoun "Sie" is always capitalized.

You could say this is as much a throwback as an innovation, since it was a common practice in earlier forms of English.

[Vlürch]

i hope this is the right thread: once i was doing a school assigment really quickly and the person next to me asked if i was just "copy and pasting." i had no electronics near me, all i had was a textbook. i had absolutely no idea what she was asking, but then she added "from the book" to her question. has anyone else heard someone use the phrase "copy and paste" outside of the electronic environment?

Yeah, I've definitely heard it in reference to (borderline) plagiarism and/or (excessive) repetition in music more than once and probably even used it myself. More commonly as an adjective, though, eg. "a copy-pasted riff" for the former sense and "a copy-pasted chorus" for the latter sense. I could definitely imagine saying "the riff in X is just copied and pasted from Y" in reference to plagiarism or a band/artist doing something blatantly rehashed. There'd generally be a negative implication, but at least for me personally that wouldn't be strictly necessary if it was in reference to a band/artist doing something that sounds a lot like something they've done before that was good; I'd feel like having to specify that it wasn't meant negatively, though.

[missals]

The other day on Reddit I saw someone use "sept" as the past tense of "seep" - not as a joke, just in a big block of non-whimsical running text

[Salmoneus]

Politico has a headline with the follow-up sentence: "The failures have made Palm Beach County to once again be the crown jewel in a fresh round of the state’s nationally watched election gaffes." (my emphases).

Never heard that construction before...

[mèþru]

Heard someone say that their computer is "all the way dead"

[Linguoboy]

Heard someone say that their computer is "all the way dead"

What's the innovation here?

[alynnidalar]

As opposed to your computer being mostly dead, a la Princess Bride, I expect.

[mèþru]

The expression "all the way dead" to refer to anything is pretty unusual. "Dead", "completely dead", yeah but "all the way dead"?

[Linguoboy]

The expression "all the way dead" to refer to anything is pretty unusual. "Dead", "completely dead", yeah but "all the way dead"?

This use of "all the way" with adjectives is characteristic of some Southern American varieties. I haven't seen "all the way dead" before but I have seen "all the way crazy", "all the way mad", etc.

[mèþru]

but this person is an NJ native

[Vijay]

I just found this YouTube clip from India (an excerpt of a (probably pretty sexist) Garhwali pop song called "Puri Tu Pataka"). There's one comment to it and then the uploader's response, in which he writes upcourse to mean 'of course'.

[Linguoboy]

Heard two twentysomethings describe someone as the "latchiest tail" ever. They were referring to a guy who had latched on to one of them at a conference and dogged him most of the day.

[zompist]

A headline from the Onion:

Bored Iowa Town Trying To Convince Kirsten Gillibrand It Local Tradition To Eat Live Tarantula

Granted that it's Headlinese, but that It sounds wrong to me. I don't think it'd work even with full nouns: *Strange Tries to Convince City Bruce Wayne Batman"

[Travis B.]

A headline from the Onion:

Bored Iowa Town Trying To Convince Kirsten Gillibrand It Local Tradition To Eat Live Tarantula

Granted that it's Headlinese, but that It sounds wrong to me. I don't think it'd work even with full nouns: *Strange Tries to Convince City Bruce Wayne Batman"

That headline looks like someone replaced It's with It rather than It Is because it is a headline and that extraneous Is would not be headlinese enough.

[Whimemsz]

A headline from the Onion:

Bored Iowa Town Trying To Convince Kirsten Gillibrand It Local Tradition To Eat Live Tarantula

Granted that it's Headlinese, but that It sounds wrong to me. I don't think it'd work even with full nouns: *Strange Tries to Convince City Bruce Wayne Batman"

Hmm, your second example actually sounds reasonable to me in the context of a headline, although I agree that the Onion one sounds odd. Though it's worth noting that The Onion, I've noticed, has a tradition of headlines like this, presumably satirizing Headlinese, so I don't know to what degree it actually counts as true "innovative usage."

[Linguoboy]

How long before "crime" goes from being a humourous slang for "commit a crime or crimes" to an unmarked synonym?

[alynnidalar]

Do you have a sample sentence? I'm having a hard time figuring out what context you mean. Do you mean something like "She crimed" for "She committed a crime"? I've never seen that usage.

[Linguoboy]

Do you have a sample sentence? I'm having a hard time figuring out what context you mean. Do you mean something like "She crimed" for "She committed a crime"? I've never seen that usage.

Wonkette uses it on a regular basis:

"Michael Cohen is expected to tell the House Oversight Committee that Trump is a big, fat liar who is poor, and crimed while in office." (27 Feb 19)
"Ryan Zinke might have crimed one too many times." (2 Nov 18)
"Usually they're annoying and smell like badger sweat, but these folks were so tight they crimed together!" (8 Aug 18)
"Russell and his fellow dipwads showed up ready to "arrest" Khan for a variety of crimes they'd made up,...insisting Khan somehow crimed by calling for Donald Trump to cancel his trip to the UK[.]" (16 Jan 2018)

I've seen it multiple times in reference to the current college admissions bribery scandal. For instance, this tweet by Alexis Nedd:

The elite college admittance system is predicated on the completely legal ways rich people advantage their children via tutors, test prep, activities, sports, legacy, donations, time, and more so it's extra funny to me when they fumble all that and say "fuck it, let's crime"

[alynnidalar]

Huh, interesting. I've definitely seen the phrasing "do a crime" in place of "commit a crime" (e.g. https://twitter.com/bobvulfov/status/11 ... 2524475392, for another college admissions scandal reference), but this one is new to me!

[Vijay]

Not too long ago, we had this packaged Indian snack made out of deep-fried split peas (specifically, deep-fried mung dal) and salt. The ingredient list on the package called the split peas "green gram splits," which strikes me as an attempt to use a term that non-Indians would hopefully be familiar with but that in reality is not used in any variety of English, including Indian English. In Indian English, gram seems to refer to split peas much more often than it refers to anything else (including mass or weight), and there are several terms like red gram, green gram, black gram, Bengal gram, etc. I can never quite remember what each of these terms actually means, and I'm not even entirely sure they all refer to different types of split peas, but I'm pretty sure green gram means mung dal. Green gram splits seems like some sort of compromise between green gram and split peas...or could it have been that they wanted to specify that they didn't include the skins?

(And then the way they tried to translate this into French was splits de gramme vert, which I'm sure makes perfect sense. I think the company selling these fried products must have had font problems with their ingredient lists in Arabic for all of their products because all the characters are separate and written in the wrong direction. I think their attempted translation into Arabic was also something like al-sblits al-jram al-jrin).