And Other Bad Words
“The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect ‘domestic security.’ Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent.”
— quotation from a 1972 Supreme Court ruling, and redacted from a US Supreme Court document by the Ashcroft Justice Department in the name of national security.
If ‘alternative medicine’ worked, it would be called ‘medicine.’
There are only two hard problems in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors
If you didn’t want be lied to, why did you ask me a question?
I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.
Your father Werner was a burger server in suburban Santa Barbara, when he spurned your mother Verna for a curly-haired surfer named Roberta.
I take it you already know of tough and bough and cough and dough? Others may stumble, but not you, on hiccough, thorough, laugh and through. Well done! And now you wish, perhaps, to learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word, that looks like beard and sounds like bird. And dead — it’s said like bed not bead — and for goodness’ sake don’t call it deed! Watch out for meat and great and threat (They rhyme with suite and straight and debt)
A moth is not the moth in mother, nor both in bother, broth in brother. And here is not a match for there, nor dear and fear for bear and pear. And then there’s dose and rose and lose — just look them up — and goose and choose, and cork and work and card and ward, and font and front and word and sword, and do and go and thwart and cart — come, come I’ve hardly made a start. A dreadful language? Man alive. I’d mastered it when I was five.
That’s why they call it Windows — because it breaks so much, like glass.
— Alpha, age 10
Chicken Parmesan is the ultimate insult. You beat a piece of chicken to a pulp, then dip it into the guts of it’s unborn young before roasting it. Alpha as fuck.
I have a new drinking game for listening to Percy Jackson. We’ve been listening to the book series (as read by Jessie Bernstein) when we take car trips together.
I now cringe every time I hear some combination of ‘my’, ‘dear’, and ‘boy’, or hear a totally inappropriate (non-serious) verbal response to an emotional situation. Sometimes the enunciation of some words is downright pedantic and rather awkward.
If I weren’t driving I would take shots to make it more tolerable (and certainly get plastered in the process).