Cato's Grammar Grumble

[Karl Henning]

Ouch!  On a hotel invoice, no less!

Deposit Recieved

[Karl Henning]

Winter Storm Cato Has Been Named!

[North Star]

Winter Storm Cato Has Been Named!

And note the use of 'impact' there. 

[Karl Henning]

Aye!   

[Karl Henning]

Epic!  I win Buzzword Bingo!

Epic Lake Effect Snow Timelapse

[Karl Henning]

"One of the coolest (hah, hah!) videos I've ever seen."

[Cato]

Winter Storm Cato Has Been Named!

WOW!

And I love snow and cold!  How appropriate!   

Epic!  I win Buzzword Bingo!

Epic Lake Effect Snow Timelapse

"Epic" has become a slang term: "absolutely tragic." 

[North Star]

"Epic" has become a slang term: "absolutely tragic." 

Tragic?

[Karl Henning]

Everything has tragedy in it, but not everyone sees it.      0:)   

[North Star]

Everything has tragedy in it, but not everyone sees it.      0:)   

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer  and die.

[Karl Henning]

That was Mel Brooks and not Abe Lincoln? 

[North Star]

That was Mel Brooks and not Abe Lincoln? 

I think Brooks stole it from the Gettysburg Address. 

[Cato]

I think Brooks stole it from the Gettysburg Address. 

More likely stolen from the Spagettysburg Address!  With Parmesan cheese!  And a knish on the side!   

[Ken B]

<Insert blowhard joke here>

[Cato]

Another ridiculous name for a drug:

Myrbetriq (Sic!)  A drug for the bladder, so to speak!

And how the they pronounce it?  "MEER-Buh-trik" !   

So why not spell it Meerbutrik?

Or why not something sensible, like "Bob" or "Uri" ?   0:)

Soon the next drug for diabetes or whatever will be named Mxysptlk!

[ibanezmonster]

Wow!  I am reminded that the Romans hired servants, who whispered into the ears of triumphant Roman generals marching in parades through the city: "Remember that you are only a man!" 

Many thanks!

Or past your tongue, native or otherwise!       0:)

My brother - who visits China semi-regularly - often tells of seeing bizarre translations on signs posted to help English-speaking tourists.  Instead, the tourists end up being puzzled or greatly amused, but not necessarily helped!

I recall seeing a pamphlet in Chinese-spiced English for a tea that was "varified to stop falling of hairs and boiling on skin!"   0:)

Have you seen this site?
http://engrish.com/

[North Star]

http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/view?id=7520941318

Many children, adolescents and young adults, now use cell phones as their only phone line and they begin using wireless phones at much younger ages.

Adolescents and young adults are part of a group called 'children'? Of course all people are somebody's children, but that's probably not what they meant. 

[Mookalafalas]

stumbled on a book purported to be all "bloopers" taken from students' writing. It is hard to know if such things are real or not, but this one really has stuff that makes me laugh so hard my chest hurts. A few samples from the history section:.

The Greeks were a highly sculptured people, and without them we wouldn't have history. The Greeks invented three kinds of columns - corinthian, ironic, and dorc - and built the Apocalypse. They also had myths. A myth is a female moth. One myth says that the mother of Achilles dipped him in the River Stynx until he became intollerable. Achilles appears in The Iliad, by Homer. Homer also wrote The Oddity, in which Penelope was the last hardship that Ulysses endured on his journey. Actually, Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that name.

Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who wentaround giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock. After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline. In the Olympic Games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled the biscuits, and threw the Java. The reward to the victor was a coral wreath.

The government of Athens was democratic because people took the law into their own hands. There were no wars in Greece, as the mountains were so high that they couldn't climb over to see what their neighbors were doing. When they fought with the Persians, the Greeks were outnumbered because the Persians had more men.

Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March murdered him because they thought he was going to be made king. Dying, he gasped out the words "Tee hee, Brutus." Nero was a cruel tyranny who would torture his poor subjects by playing the fiddle to them. Rome came to have too many luxuries and baths. At Roman banquets, the guests wore garlics in their hair. They took two baths in two days, and that's the cause of the fall of Rome. Today Rome is full of fallen arches.

Then came the Middle Ages, when everyone was middle aged. King Alfred conquered the Dames. King Arthur lived in the Age of Shivery with brave knights on prancing horses and beautiful women. King Harold mustarded his troops before the Battle of Hastings. Joan of Arc was cannonized by Bernard Shaw. And victims of the blue-bonnet plague grew boobs on their necks. Finally, Magna Carta provided that no free man should be hanged twice for the same offense.

[The Six]

The greatest animated show has truly impacted our embiggening. http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2014/12/simpsons-doh-meh-english-language/

[ibanezmonster]

It finally happened. Something I knew I'd eventually see.

A fb exchange:

Person 1: "There just going over big stories unlike the page of you don't like it"

Person 2: "The word you meant to use was Their * ."