Comments on The New Language

Brilliant, both of them. Who says there's nothing new under the sun? These are SO going to be incorporated into my vocabulary, like, now.

I think you mean "The fact that Iraq had no connection to al Qaeada is fistable".

Is this a fancy ... preschool?

Oh crap, never mind! Irony.

knocking 'em out of the park on ye olde slog today. thanks.

okay, i'm all in favour of these new words. i just don't think i understand firstable well enough to use it properly in a sentence. could someone please provide another example. because, if firstable is a noun, then first would be a verb, right? so in the above example, it shows that the firstable clause should have come before the first sentence, no? am i getting this?

also, Suffered through a histrionic acquaintance’s latest trauma recently? would technically still be a type of post traumatic stress then, wouldn't it? it'd have to be: Suffered through a histrionic acquaintance’s latest drama recently?

Absolutely. Post dramatic stress describes perfectly what I felt after watching Chris Crocker's recent histrionic video. (Sorry to bring that up again.)

Are these invented new expressions brilliant only because they come from the golden pens (or silver lap tops) of fancy private high school kids? What if these kids were in an unfancy urban high school? Just wondering and not trying to create drama or any post drama.

ha! post drama! i guess this new term has more meaning online...

Friend at UW had lots of nice ones from student essays. One particularly memorable one was "escape goats." I'll never stop getting on a boat and looking for lined-up, life-preserver clad goats.

Holy shit! *Post* drama is brilliant!

To be fair, I totally missed the bit about it being a fancy private school. I just genuinely find post dramatic stress really funny.

As in, "I still have post dramatic stress disorder after reading the comments on the 'Making Biking Safer' thread yesterday".

These are great examples of eggcorns (refer to LanguageLog blog here: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/moveabletype/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=2&search=eggcorn). An eggcorn is basically a malapropism that in fact makes sense in context.

@13 For real.

A student in my seventh grade English class wrote in a quiz that an author had won the "Pullet Surprise". Priceless. Although this was at a regular boring old public school, so I guess it's not as impressive.

My peeve: "For all intensive purposes"

some purposes are more intense than others.

firstable = predicate adjective

Totally mindbottling!

You know, in public school, your grade would get docked for mispelled words. Maybe my public school wasn't so bad after all....

firstable - that's what first post is.

Languaging is galiant!

I had a student who wrote "pre-good" when he meant "pretty good." (Grading his paper, I had to say it out loud a few times before I got the point.)

I like "pre-good" -- good, but maybe not quite good. It's not as brilliant as "pre-Madonna," but I've adopted it all the same.

At the UW English Department faculty office, somebody posted a student essay discussing Shakespeare's view of "this doggy-dog world." (The student was trying to say "dog-eat-dog.")