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Pedantry
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
Apparently I never understood this saying until today.
I still don't think I fully understand, even as the unabomber put it. Can't eat it and have it? Like, I can't consume and expect the thing to remain, that it?
Side note: only in English, one can "understand", but nobody can "overstand" and anybody that "stand" is doing a wholly different thing.
It comes down to "You can't have the best of two situations. Pick one."
Ah, that's much more helpful, thanks!
Yeah, I think that's it?
Yes it means for you to get one cake. Then eat the cake and yet still have the one cake you got.
What a coincidence - I just finished the Manhunt: Unabomber TV series. It’s well made, reminded me of Mindhunter. And very sympathetic towards Ted Kaczynski actually. Highly recommend it if you haven’t seen it.
I am staunchly against randomly murdering people with package bombs. But they put that poor man through hell with the MK Ultra stuff.
The big monsters that run our world turned a brilliant mind into a little monster. A massive tragedy from every angle
Do you know what they actually did with Ted in MKULTRA? It wasn't drugs in his case.
He was the isolation subject, no? Pretty much made the guy a patsy to get him socially exiled from his college campus while they ran him through the program?
No they set him up with a prosecutor out of Boston that Ted thought was another student. The prosecutor's job was to argue against any position that kaczynski took... Completely undermining his internal Tom Tom
Debating
Right! Thank you, frankly that era of Cold War adjacent shit makes me feel like I need to give my computer a bath just thinking about it. Appreciate the reminder!
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That’s going to be me and my peeve regarding the malapropism “assless chaps”.
Chaps with asses are PANTS!
(Turns back to manual typewriter and resumes typing furiously.)
To me when someone says assless chaps it refers to the configuration of wearing chaps without anything underneath. Similar to "going commando" being a configuration of clothing meaning pants with no underwear.
In that case, I feel like the correct phrasing should be pantsless chaps.
Yeah, but I’m still gonna be salty about it.
Indeed, chaps by definition have no ass.
They’re assless pants, really.
Tangentially, I hate it that pulling someone’s pants down became popular and was called “pantsing.” You’re not putting pants ON the person…
My (completely un-researched, straight from my ass) hypothesis is that the term comes from British English and not American English. In the UK "pants" are your underwear, so "pansting" somebody is exposing their underwear.
Weird, I thought they were called bloomers or knickers.
Those are girl's pants.
I hate it that pulling someone’s pants down became popular and was called “pantsing.” You’re not putting pants ON the person…
Do you feel similarly about shelling peanuts?
Oh excellent point, I hadn’t thought about it.
I think it’s different for parts of living things.
Shelling is removing the entire shell. “Peeling” something doesn’t mean adding peel, and “pitting” means removing the pit.
However, for bodies, removing skin in general is “skinning,” but if you lose the skin of just your hand it’s called de-gloving. Removing the bowels isn’t called “boweling,” but “disembowling.”
If I said someone did a “shirting,” maybe I’m weird but I’d think of getting hit with a shirt before removing someone’s shirt. And in hockey, a “jerseying” is more about pulling the jersey over the head than removing it.
Removing the bowels isn’t called “boweling,” but “disembowling.”
But the synonymous process of removing the guts is called gutting.
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The difference between pants and chaps is more than just the presence or absence of an ass. There's the whole area between the legs. You can have chaps with an ass in the same way you can have a shirt with sleeves.
Counterpoint, saying "assless" is fun, and saying "assless pants" would probably make most people confused
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Is it really pedantry if the phrase makes no sense with the incorrect order
Its like "I could care less" - so you do care? Start making sense and I'll understand you. Words have meaning god damn it.
I see this one a lot, and it always says to me that people just use these phrases because other people use them, without ever thinking about what they mean.
Idioms don't have to make literal sense. How do you feel about being "head over heels" about someone?
It should be heels over head, obviously. It probably was that way.
In my language, we say "neck over head"
I dont like it
It’s only pedantry if you force others to do it your way.
If a phrase conveys the opposite of their literal meaning, and the speaker and the audience both know it, then it is pedantic. Choosing to derail whatever the topic is in favor of criticizing someone's understandability when everyone did understand them is pedantic.
I get it, I hate the way people use "literally". It's terrible, it's usually unneeded, and it just makes any actual correct use of literally have less impact. But I'm not gonna correct people who say it wrong, because I do know what they meant.
If they said "I could care less" and you're comfortable enough in your understanding of the conversation to know for a fact they actually mean they do not care about it, then they did make sense and you did understand them.
It's a problem, because I'm never quite sure if they're saying they care a little bit, and are using the phrase literally, or don't care, and are a moron.
That's quite a problem. You tend to get those by dividing things into black and white like that. I've known quite a few smart people that just still don't care about English being imperfect, and I've met a few dumb ones that care greatly about details like word choice and ignore the conversation to focus on errors.
Splitting the world between "people who do a thing you agree with" and "morons" is a choice, but its one I try to avoid as a rule.
And of course literally has been used in both sense for hundreds of years.
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It’s not like that at all. “I could care less” is just wrong. The phrase is “I couldn’t care less.” “I could care less” is more like “one and the same” or “for all intensive purposes.”
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yes it really is
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There was a reverse of that scenario in our neck of the wood where the murderer phoned the cops with details only he would know (from a payphone close to where he worked), and although his voice was recognized by a relative, his (somewhat successful) defence was that he never pronounced "creek" as "crick."
The phrase makes no sense to me at first glance because if I say "I'm going to have some cake" what I mean is I am going to eat it.
Weirdo. The rest of us mean that we are going to posses some amount of cake for a period of time.
Don't speak on my behalf. That's not what I mean when I say I'm having some food. "Yes waiter I'll have the steak. Not for eating. Just for possessing ike a psychopath."
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You can't eat your cake and eat it too!
Pfft hold my milk
that brother is a fucking snitch
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this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
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