Comments by "Digital Nomad" (@digitalnomad9985) on "RobWords" channel.

  1. My paternal grandmother, when troubled with flies would have me fetch the "flashwater". And her favorite soft drink was "Sprike", which she spelled "Spork" on the shopping list.
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  2. I was musically precocious, and enthusiastically sang hymns at church before I started school and learned to read. When the chorus for "When the Roll is Called Up Yonder" I was singing, "When the roll is called a pyonder" even though I had no idea what a pyonder was or what it had to do with heaven.
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  3. Saves two syllables per character, as well, that's a wyn wyn situation.
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  4. We might have read about a few in Reader's Digest.
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  5.  @DataLal  Yea, that one bothers me, too. I'm fairly certain that one comes from mishearing the contractions "would've", "could've", "should've"; contraction of "- have". That bothers me so much that I want to resolve never to use those contractions, but at my age I know my limitations. Actually, when speaking informal Midwestern among friends, I am more likely to say "would'a' ", etc. Probably a moot point at my age. I write a lot more than I talk, and I always write "would have", "could have", "should have"; and that's what I'm THINKING when I speak the contractions. It seems I read a lot more of that, and things like there/their/they're, to/two/too and the like. I think it is two things: One, educational decline in the US, and another texting causing young folk to think of writing as a less formal and more colloquial medium than we oldtimers used to thing of it as (speaking for myself, rather than present company, of course).
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  6. A malapropism that folk try to defend as an eggcorn is the phrase "HONE in". The correct phrase for the meaning Mrs Malaprop is trying to get across is "HOME in". The correct phrase was originally used for weapons that automatically closed with a target, like homing torpedoes and homing missiles, by analogy from "homing pigeons". This is a hard one to figure, because the correct word fits the meaning so much better, and is even used correctly as a participial adjective: infrared homing, radar homing, sonar homing. Also "home" is a much more common word in modern usage than "hone". Yet I hear it and read it all the time from folk you would expect to know better, like science influencers, history bloggers, and the like.
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  7. First was the homing pidgeon, then by analogy the homing torpedo, introduced at the end of WW2, then a homing missile. Hence "home in on" a target. Homing weapons could be categorized by the sensor used, sonar homing, radar homing, infared homing. Horn in is a legitimate phrase, but it means something entirely different and unrelated. To home is is to pursue to contact, impact or proximity, to get progressively closer to. To horn in is to intrude.
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  8.  @tracik1277  'But deliver us from weevils' (preserve our stored food from infestation). Perhaps we should collaborate on a translation. (Or not, it's warm enough here)
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  9.  @gnarthdarkanen7464  "We been putting earl in the crankcase" I'm pretty sure that's illegal in most states.
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  10. Besides, doesn't Oxford have a sample from Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address in stone on one if it's buildings with a caption something to the effect of "The only known perfect use of the English language."? I certainly agree to the point of rating it as Lincoln's finest speech. The Gettysburg Address always gets the praise, but I prefer the 2nd Inaug.
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  11. Teddy Roosevelt before he became president had a ranch near Helena, Montana. He named his wagon "Handbasket".
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  12.  @pinkajou656  " it probably wasn’t on a typewriter of course." On an IBM Selectric, it was a key on the keyboard like today and in the same place. The print bar moved across the paper carriage which did not move left to right. On the old manual typewriters it was a lever mounted on the paper carriage. When one pressed a key, a reverse image of the character on the end of a hammer would strike the ribbon on the paper, then the springloaded carriage would move left to line up the next characer position. Hitting the spacebar would just move the springloaded carriage a space. When one got to the end of the line one would reach up and pull a lever to the right which would first feed a line of paper up, then you used it to push the carriage right to line up the right margin for a new line, reloading the spring. Thus "carriage return".
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  13. Before I went to school I used to sing "When the Roll is called a Pyonder" in church.
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  14. Some of these remind me of a phrase in a movie from a German/American cook who was fed up with the antics of the other characters and quit. She exclaimed "Up with this shit I will no longer put!" Perfectly grammatical. In English you CAN put the verb at the end of the sentence, and, especially in context you can figure out what she means, but "put up with" is an IDIOM in American English and scrambling it and splitting it up so widely sounds odd and comical to American ears. It somewhat sounds like something Yoda (character from Star Wars) would say if Star Wars characters used familiar expletives.
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  15. I often wonder if Asperger's Syndrome wasn't removed from the clinical lexicon to avoid "Ass Burgers"
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  16.  @pwolkowicki  "makes sense" Particularly since "hippopotamus" is literally "river horse" (with the adjective after) in Latin.
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  17. Yes, that is the advantage of the autodidact, but we have the disadvantage of mispronouncing many words we encountered in books or articles and never heard in lecture (while spelling them correctly and knowing their meaning).
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  18. Folk etymology "Naked as a male deer."
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  19.  @cynthiawadeson8843  Grandma was so cool, and I was her favorite.
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