Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

Sharkboy wrote:
"4. "Excellant"- I had never seen anybody misspell this word this way until ebay, and now it seems like this is how it is spelled half of the time on the internet(s).
5. "Definately" is definitely incorrect. "

At least with those words they have nine or ten letters to get messed up. What really irks me on Ebay are the vast number of people talking about the "ware" and "tare" on an item. I cringe every time I see it. It's four letters, people!

BTW, we can't eliminate "irregardless", otherwise we'd have to get rid of "inflammable", also.

...and I was shocked and irritated to see "nukular" given as an alternate pronunciation for the other "n" word, when I looked it up online last year.

Is our languages not sacred anymore?

Or are we being misunderestimated?

(I can hardly wait to see THAT one in the Oxford!)

Make my jelly cherry.

How many people confies "to" with "too"? That's only three letters too misremember.

U meen 'disremember" ?

Yeah, that's it. Sometimes I unremember stuff.

OTOH, maybe I really meant "disorder". As in, "that's only three letters to disorder..."

It really bothers me to see how simple phrases are misused until the original meanings are lost. A few examples I've read or heard lately:

"tough road to hoe" - From the original "tough row to hoe". I'm not a farmer, but I know that a hoe is used to create a planting row. Nobody hoes a road. I must ask that everyone refrain from the inevitable hoe jokes...

"jury-rigged" - From the original "jerry-rigged". It was originally used to describe items of shoddy quality or design and dates back to WWII when we fought the Germans and commonly referred to them as "jerrys".

"stick and carrot" - Although this used to describe a method of encouraging movement (i.e. riding a mule while dangling a carrot from a stick), it now refers to either rewarding someone (i.e. giving them a carrot) or punishing them (i.e. striking them with a stick) to get their cooperation.

How about for all "intensive purposes" for "intents and purposes"?

All intensive purposes??

I love/hate it!

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/211600.html

Seems like "jerry-rigged" goes back much further.

This site explores the origins of a huge amount of these old phrases like "rule of thumb" and "three sheets to the wind." I love this stuff.

It's all Mick Jagger's fault for singing "I Can't Get No Satisfaction".

Notice it's a UK site?

Ever since reading James Hilton's "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" in 1962 (it was written around '36 or so), I had held onto the notion that the Brits were the keepers of All Things Bright and Beautiful when it came to the English language. The Sunday Times' Letters column, with its regular contributions from Country Squires bemoaning the decline of the Mother Tongue, besides being enlightening and entertaining reading, reinforced my notions in this regard.

Silly of me in light of the recent evolution of the Web...now I can read posts from the UK in real time and see the average UK citizen struggling with the tongue just as we do, and failing almost as often.

Could this be, I wonder from our own pollution of the language with our misteaks?

My old company, which dealt in toy ideas, had a CEO who wrote about "consepts", and a VP who spoke of "idiot secrecies" when she meant to say, "idiosyncracies".

She also philosophized that "knowledge is information".

"Jerry-rigged"? I allus thought it was "jury-rigged", as in "OJ".

Mark: Thanks. Very cool website. I somewhat disagree with their take on "jerry-rigged". I've discussed this with my father who was a teenager during WWII. Although there may have been an earlier incarnation of this phrase in 19th century England, the American use clearly referred to Germans as in the popular nickname "jerry cans" for fuel containers.

I worked with a fellow who confused perimeter and parameter. All his pc's were "confined"!

"Jerry" was a WWII Brit term for "Germans". Hence "Jerry-can". You'll find it in many films and books of the WWII era.

WWI saw Germans called stuff like "Filthy Bosch"...

Wikipedia, if you can trust it, says:

Jerry

Jerry was a nickname given to World War II German soldiers, the German armed forces, or collectively the entirety of Nazi Germany. Although the nickname was originally created during World War I, it didn't find common use until WWII. Other nicknames used for the German soldiers in WWI and WWII were Fritz, Hun, Kraut, and Boche.

I wonder why they came up with "Jerry" in the first place?

Jerry=Gerry=German