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ONLY NICE THINGS

21:37 / 24.02.04

I think QUICK-SOTE is an acceptable variation.

In Hell.

23:17 / 24.02.04

Haus, Dictionary.com gives me both. And the OED offers only kwiksote - or rather kwiks[schwa]t.

Am I going wrong, or are these the very reference sources of the damned?

00:23 / 25.02.04

why defer to better knowledge when the ignorant are here to blurt first?

The Don wuz wrut by a spanish dude, about this spanish dude the Don. In spanish, they say stuff different... like H instead of X and j insted of Y etc. English doesn't, so we say QuiCKSotic instead of QuiHottic - the word being an adjective to describe persons/actions of a similar idealistic bent to the Don hizzelf.

Oh yeah... and to continue the ignorance...

Why bother reading when you can watch the movie, or even the MADE FOR TV version?

01:45 / 25.02.04

gingerbop, if may ask, what are these incredibly effective upper-abdominal exercises you're doing?

15:11 / 25.02.04

Am I going wrong, or are these the very reference sources of the damned?

I'm looking at the Oxford Universal Dictionary, 3rd ed, 1955, and getting only (kwi.ks(*)t). Is it possible that it's only more recently that speakers of English have begun to take particular care to pronounce more like they are pronounced in the original language?

Well, this is one of the cases where the linguistic equivalent of civil disobedience is called for. (For example, I don't care if 'normalcy' makes it into the dictionary, I will never acknowledge it as a legitimate word.) Kwiksotic is one thing as it's an English adjective, but I stand by Key-ho-tay.

*can't reproduce the character, rhymes with a in what

23:20 / 25.02.04

fred, The American Heritage® Guide to Contemporary English (1996) suggests that you stand firmly shoulder to shoulder with your compatriots on this matter. As an Englander, it seems I'm 'generally' supposed to say it differently.

I get a funny feeling that absolute correctness is an unachievable ambition here.

13:08 / 03.03.04

1. Why does my new iron smell of piss? Whenever it achieves full heat it fills the kitchen with the acrid smell of wee-wee. It's been in regular use for about a month now, so I would have thought that any factory coating or what-not would have burned off by now. Is this normal?

2. Stupid economics/history question: Has the making of profit ever been illegal, anywhere? I know that the charging of interest used to be a big naughty (usuary, 'The Merchant of Venice' and all that). Going with the idea that profit suggests exploitation of either buyer (selling for more than a thing cost to make) or employee (not fully rewarding them for their output), has it ever been made illegal to make a profit by any means?

13:14 / 03.03.04

I think QUICK-SOTE is an acceptable variation.

In Hell.

Quick-sot-ee!!! I be the reincarnation of Quick-sottteeeeee!!!!!!!

14:47 / 03.03.04

gingerbop, it may be that you are only working yr upper abs. or it may be that you are working them all, but only the upper ones are showing, for this reason: you are a lady. it's not that you have "flab," per se, but even i-eat-macrobiotically-and-do-six-hours-of-aerobic-yoga-per-day madonna has a little roundness below her bellybutton, and even before she had kids, too. we have a little extra flesh there to protect our reproductive organs. so that may be yr "problem," which is not actually a problem at all. sorry if i sound soapboxy. i mean, do yr lower ab exercises, cool. but if they don't work, that could be why, is what i'm saying.

15:02 / 03.03.04

Saveloy: do you or do any OTHER ironers in your house use 1. vinegar, 2. ammonia, 3. spray-on starch or any other liquidy stuff while ironing? Vinegar's good for eliminating sweat odors, by the way.

15:47 / 03.03.04

grant>

Hmm, I don't, and I'm pretty certain my wife doesn't either - it's as much a mystery to her as it is to me. Ammonia would certainly explain it, though, as that is what it whiffs of. Would it have been tested with ammonia in the factory, I wonder? Hmm again...

16:58 / 03.03.04

I've never heard of using ammonia for anything with clothes (although maybe it has some use) but I have heard of using it to get rid of hard water grime. So maybe if the iron was a floor model in an area where they have a lot of minerals in the water and it started clogging from that, then they might have used ammonia to unclog it.
That's sheer speculation.

17:00 / 03.03.04

Conversely, maybe somebody got wee-wee on the ironing board and never fessed up to it. And now you're just liberating more wee-wee from the wee-wee stain everytime you spark up the ol' Wrinkle Killer.

ONLY NICE THINGS

21:38 / 03.03.04

I confess to a degree of bewilderment. An English dictionary shoudl not have Don Quixote, becasue it is the name of a book. the Merriam-Webster probably will, because of its function as a dictionary-cum-reference text.

However. Quixotic and quixcotism are English words, and as such follow English pronunciation. Quixote is a Spanish word, meaning "greave", and as such presumably should follow Spanish pronunciation, by the same logic that means D'Artagnan is pronounced Dart-an-yan and not Dart-agg-nan.

Now, this gets a bit blurred in the US, where European words have been absorbed into the language and repurposed, then reexported - so, one might speak of the Hunchback of Nohter Daym. Oddly, M-W's English usage says that Americans aspirate and the English don't, but I'm not at all sure I buy that. If I heard somebody say Don Quick-sote, unless they followed up with a discussion of arla rehchurch, I'd think they were being self-consciously archaic. On the other hand, one *could* possibly describe somebody as "a veritable quicksote", in which case one would be being very deliberately archaic...

23:50 / 03.03.04

This is starting to remind me of classes in which we (in fairly Hispanic South Florida) were told to pronounce the Byron poem "Don Joo-an" and, with few exceptions, could never quite do it.

The British don't aspirate? Good Lord, that sounds like a Bushism. "The problem with the British, see, is that the British do not aspirate to anything higher." Either that or else you all have little membrane boxes attached to your bodies to get oxygen into your bloodstream.

10:05 / 04.03.04

God, my dentist is *always* picking his assistant up on her enunciation.

Well, as well as 'quixotic' and 'quixotism' (and 'quixotry' and 'quixotically'), the OED has 'Quixote' as a headword (with -ot, -iot and -otte as alternative spellings). The pronunciation guide won't have it any other way but kwiks[schwa]t, and it means 'An enthusiastic visionary person like Don Quixote, inspired by lofty and chivalrous but false or unrealizable ideals'. It doesn't suggest it's archaic, at least it wasn't in 1989.

I'm no word-smith and am labouring this purely out of mounting curiosty rather than gun-sticking. Appropriately enough, according to one of the illustrative quotations (Bonnycastle's Astronomy) tells me that "There are Quixotes and pedants in every profession". I hope I'm coming across as falling into the first camp, regardless of how you'd pronounce it. To be honest, I'm more worried that I don't know how to use a dictionary properly, than anything else.

10:55 / 04.03.04

if you don't say joo-an, sadly, the poem won't rhyme. fat mad pisstaking bastard with a club foot you know.

nik kershaw sang key-hoe-tay (what do you say?) and that's good enough for me

ONLY NICE THINGS

11:02 / 04.03.04

Well, Bonnycastle's astronomy is 18th century, which might support the contention that quixote (prn. quicksote) is an old-fashioned form. As I say, I'd be quite surprised to hear somebody still pronouncing the title of the book "Don Quicksote", and faintly surprised to hear somebody describe somebody else as a "quicksote".

23:54 / 04.03.04

Hi All

Sorry to cut in like that.

But I just like to know where can I download virus. I don't want the full blown version but I just like the innoculation immunization version. Antivirus is good but it cures and prevent rather than immunize. Now the chicken flu is rampant I need to download a immuno download. Istead of my Doom I need my Bloom. I've tried vitamin B complex but I'm still mentally retard.......

17:19 / 05.03.04

How much food to buy for 20 people? How many pounds of what?

I always overdo it. Is there some kind of standard or trick for determining how much 20 people will eat?

17:32 / 05.03.04

Half a pound of food per person.

11:36 / 08.03.04

A big moan, this, but there is a question in it somewhere:

Libraries: is it normal for the classical CD section of a library to be in no flipping order whatsoever? I was amazed to discover that this is the case at the Big Main Central Library of Portsmouth. Seven or eight racks full, collected under group headings such as 'Opera' and 'Orchestral', but in no order at all within each group, so that a Beethoven disc appears sandwiched in between Vaughan Williams and 'The Classical Chill-Out Album' - totally f---ing random, and of no use to anyone looking for something specific, unless they've got three hours to spare and are prepared to use them looking at every disc in every rack and not be bothered if it turns out they don't have it anyway. I was so exasperrated that I let out a few 'cyuh's and 'tut's that would have been audible if it weren't for the covering noise of 500 people banging away on computer keyboards and answering mobile phones.

So, yeah, is this common and to be expected? Is this the case in your local library, dear reader? I know that CDs aren't their main concern, but I thought that putting things in order was a big part of what libraries do. I can't imagine going through all the training to be a librarian and then saying "ach, f--k it, just bung 'em where you like..."

12:59 / 08.03.04

In my old library, the classical CDs were organised like that. They were organised really, with dewey decimal numbers in order and all that, but it still resulted in a jumbled mess. Maybe the call numbers don't allow simple filing by composer...

14:12 / 08.03.04

Isn't browsing part of the pleasure?

The records were like that in my old library. I haven't gone back since I found out they pulped 2/3rds of the old science fiction section.

Pulped.

A library.

Those books were treasures, man.

Cheap. Easy. Cruel.

14:16 / 08.03.04

Yeah grant, that is how it goes. On a similar subject, if you have never read The Island of Lost Maps, it is kind of an intersting read about map thievery.

18:05 / 08.03.04

Thank you gridley!

Another question: I have rather crumbly plaster walls and the studs are not placed where I need them to be for me to hang framed items, some heavy. I've been using plastic anchors but still, the holes I drill just crumble terribly at the edges when I'm installing the anchor. Anything else I can use to fill in around the edges -- maybe some kind of putty or something?

18:16 / 08.03.04

what does 1+1 equal

18:25 / 08.03.04

what does 1+1 equal

Go find a maths forum if your gonna get all quantum on us.

16:51 / 09.03.04

Jack Frost, I know you didn't ask, and I'm not saying this in a hostile way but only mentioning it because I've seen you do it so many times that I suspect it might not be a typo, and possibly it is just a typo or maybe you don't really care which is also fine, but in case you do care and it's like having spinach on your teeth and nobody's mentioned it, the contraction of 'you are' is 'you're'. Doubtless I've made a typo myself while writing this.

Another question: Is there a catchall thread somewhere for posting links which may be somewhat humorous or interesting but don't deserve a whole separate thread of their own?

16:58 / 09.03.04

Also, what is the proper usage of the expression 'taking the piss'? Could I please have a few example sentences of variations on it, also, if there are any? ('took the piss', 'piss-take' or 'pisstake', 'piss-took'?)

Thanks.

17:12 / 09.03.04

There's always this thread, fred.
And you seem to have a pretty good handle on the piss-taking thing. It's worth mentioning that one takes the piss out of someone or something. I just say that because I've seen someone talk about taking the piss *of* something here before. Otherwise, I take the piss out of things, they have the piss taken out of them, and when I do so it's a piss-take. In the past tense, 'I took the piss' rather than 'piss-took'.
I'm sure someone better qualified could decline the verb fully for you. Shortly after telling me that verbs 'conjugate'. Or something.

19:47 / 09.03.04

Fred: anything else I can use to fill in around the edges -- maybe some kind of putty or something?

See, now I knew I knew the answer to this but I just couldn't remember it. Then I was packing today and I found a packet of this:

What you do is, you wrap it around your wall plug and then insert said plug into the hole/abortion you have made. Available from most good DIY shops now. On the back of my packet it says there is a website, but it doesn't appear to be working at the moment. But there's a little summary of what to do here.

This proves that packing is good for something. Other than inducing severe panic.

19:52 / 09.03.04

Oh my God.

Can I just point out that a/it is not my hands in the picture, and b/it is not me doing a little demonstration of what to do.

20:35 / 09.03.04

Conversely, you can just do it the lazy way and use spackle to disguise the hole, if there's enough wall left for the anchor to grab onto.

Probably not wise for anything weight-bearing.

06:40 / 10.03.04

Thank you everybody, very helpful.

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