Tag Archives: idioms

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Natural Stupidity

A comic strip character recently complained, “Artificial Intelligence isn’t as smart as it thinks it is.”
The blog-site name of one of my regular visitors is INGLANDIO.  My squirrel brain can only look at that for so long, before I just have to know what it means.  Despite a similarity in spelling, I doubted that it had any reference to England.  First I plugged it into Bing, because it’s attached to MSN.CA, my home page.

Here are all the results for inguinal; did you only want results for inglandio?
YES! Click
Here are all the results for inguinal, did you only want results for inglandio?
GAAH!!

People who searched for inglandio also searched for:
ingenio
linguine
duolingo
why is England called Britain  (The other three I understand.  This one bemuses me.)

So I gave it to Google – and got exactly the same page of unhelpful stupidity.  😳  I decided to try Google-Translate.  I thought the word was probably Italian, but I’ve been fooled before, so I clicked on “Detect Language.”  Translating – from English – to English – meaning – inglandio.  There is no English word, “inglandio!”

I clicked Translate Italian to English, and was finally rewarded with, “I am going to swell.” which the same translation program, in reverse, tells me is, ”Mi gonfierò.”  That sure is swell.  Now I’m popping blood-pressure pills from a Pez dispenser.  What a ridiculous, useless, unlikely, definition, there is probably an idiomatic connotation for the word, or name, so, Mister Linguine Inglandio, if you hear someone tapping at your website’s back door, it’s just me, searching for meaning.

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I implored Mr. Inglandio to elucidate, and he was kind enough to put me out of his misery.  First, you just take twice the square root of the split infinitive of a word that does not exist.  You add in some verbiage to simulate action.  Then you divide by the number of nosy inquisitive readers who question it – ONE – unity – just me.  You get a genuine imitation word that not only convinces readers that you can do it, but that you can do it in English.  The biggest reason that both AI and I had trouble was that I managed to misspell it as Inglandio – rather than Ingliando.  Poor old new Artificial Intelligence – it never stood a chance.  I know the feeling.

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’22 A To Z Challenge – K

 

I went looking for sauerkraut, –I don’t know why.  I should be able to smell it – and found a Cabbage-Head instead.

I am sometimes sooo… happy that I am saddled with the simple name of Smith, when I research the meanings of other people’s.

A reader made me aware of surname.com, but it only concentrates on English, Scottish and Irish names.  Bing has become more reliable, offering results from several sites.  One of them often does the job.  I also rely on Google Translate, though it does have its drawbacks.

I recently ran into a new, female blogger, who had married a man by the name of Kohlhepp.  This is a rare German name that I had never run into, here in ex-Berlin, Ontario.  I had to look it up.  The biggest problem with Google Translate, is that it does so literally, word by word, rather than idiomatically, with the meaning of the entire phrase or clause.

When I entered Kohlhepp, I got back cabbage–jerk.  Now, does jerk mean a sharp tug, or is he the guy with the big desk in the corner office?  Another rare, local German name is Dreisinger.  I know that it means Three Singers – but which three?  The Magi??  Larry, Shemp and Moe??  A Christian-based name from a church choir??

I may snicker a bit to find that Kohlhepp is a cabbage harvester, but in Germany, that’s an important job.  Somebody gotta make all that sauerkraut.

Here in Canada, we have an up-and-coming Federal politician named Poilievre.  In French, pois are peas, and lievre is a form of ”lever,” which means to lift or raise.  If Tennessee Ernie Ford were still alive, he would Bless his little pea-pickin’ heart.

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Blog Theme Prompt

Bite the bullet –
decide to do something difficult or unpleasant that one has been putting off or hesitating over.
To “bite the bullet” is to “accept the inevitable impending hardship and endure the resulting pain with fortitude”. The phrase was first recorded by Rudyard Kipling in his 1891 novel The Light that Failed. It has been suggested that it is derived historically from the practice of having a patient clench a bullet in their teeth as a way to cope with the pain of a surgical procedure without anesthetic.

I guess I have to bite the bullet, and accept the challenge to

Bullet point your entire day

1 PM-ish –

1:30 PM –

2 – 4 PM –

4:30 PM –

5 – 7:30 PM –

8 – 9 PM –

9 – 10 PM –

10 – 11:30 PM –

Midnight –

 

 

1 AM –
Tue/Thur/Sat/Sun

12:50 AM
Mon/Wed/Fri.

1 – 3 AM –

3 – 5 AM –

5 AM –

I am number one with a bullet.  Now you know all about me, and realize how little that actually is.  If you promise to stop by again soon, I promise something of a little more truth and substance.

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WOW #53

Hillbilly Couple

Englishman Umbrella

The smartest British archeologist on the Time Team talks like an American redneck. Lost letters, missing punctuation, and strange pronunciations (even for a Brit) litter his speech patterns, which were already set, in up-country Yorkshire, before he got an amazing education.

If he and his trusty trowel happen upon a particularly interesting/significant find, he is apt to burst out with

STONE THE CROWS!

An exclamation of incredulity or annoyance.

There are some words and phrases which dictionaries just cannot prove the origin of, like “rule of thumb.” That problem interests me, because this one is so new. The British OED claims that it is an American culturalism. Merriam-Webster insists that it is a British phrase. When they can’t fault each other, they blame it on the Australians.

There have been a few attempts to explain the origin of this odd phrase. A croze is the groove at the end of a wooden barrel that holds the end plate in place. It has been suggested that the expression was previously stow (or stove) the croze, that is, break open the barrel. I can find no supporting evidence for that idea though and have to consign it to the realms of folk-etymology. The more prosaic suggestion – that it alludes to the practice of throwing stones at crows – is much more likely.

I’ve found mid-20th century references from England that describe it as an Americanism and American newspaper articles that call it ‘an old English phrase’. The dates of those are more or less right but not the locations – the phrase appears to have originated in Australia. Most of the early citations in print come from down under. It has a sort of Australian twang to it and is in common with several other similar phrases, all with the same meaning: starve the bardies [bardies are grubs], stiffen the crows, spare the crow.

Crows were unwelcome guests at sheep farms as, given the chance, they will kill and eat newborn lambs, so the association with annoyance isn’t hard to see. The link in meaning to surprise isn’t obvious, but then there’s no particular reason to expect to find one. Stoning crows was a commonplace enough activity and calling it up into a phrase could have been done for no reason other than that the person who coined it just liked the sound of it. There are other expressions of surprise or annoyance like I’ll go to the foot of our stairs, strike me pink, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle or if that don’t take the rag off the bush. None Most of these don’t have any sensible literal meaning and stone the crows is another to add to that list.

“Take the rag off the bush” actually dates to before households had laundry dryers, or even outdoor lines to hang it on. Large items like bed sheets or blankets were often draped over shrubs or bushes to dry in the sun and breeze. If a strong-enough gust of wind came along, it could blow the ‘rag’ off the bush, and down the street, into the dust or mud, and it would have to be washed (by hand) all over again.