Tag: Language

The Swedes are the Greatest People on the Face of the Earth

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Swedish passenger operator MTR Express opened up a new line between Stockholm and Gothenburg, and they held an online contest to name it, the obvious happened, but unlike the killjoys at the Natural Environment Research Council, they decided to name the line Trainy McTrainface:

A Swedish rail operator has vowed to name one of its trains Trainy McTrainface after a public vote, saying it would bring joy to people disappointed when Britain rejected the name Boaty McBoatface for a polar research ship following a similar poll.

Trainy McTrainface won 49% of the votes in the naming competition, conducted online by train operator MTR Express and Swedish newspaper Metro, beating choices such as Hakan, Miriam and Poseidon.

“[This is] news that will be received with joy by many, not just in Sweden,” MTR wrote in a statement.

The train will run between the Swedish capital Stockholm and Gothenburg, the country’s second-biggest city.
………

MTR said another train had been voted to be named “Glenn”, an apparent tribute to an IFK Gothenburg soccer team of the 1980s that featured four players of that name – uncommon in Sweden – including Glenn Hysen, who later captained Liverpool.

This is so cool.

Adding to Your Vocabulary

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I was in kitchen, and the radio show Wait Wait ……… Don’t Tell Me was on, and they were talking about the Canadian sex toy manufacturer who has been sued for collecting data from their internet enabled vibrator.

I casually commented to Charlie, who was drinking a Coke at the time, “They caught them coming and going.”

Charlie was caught mid drink, started to laugh, and proceeded to spew Coke from his nose, thankfully he made it to the trash can before he started to completely lose it.

This raises the obvious question, what is the term for spewing a drink from your nose caused by laughter?

According to the Urban Dictionary, there are two words, snork, and schnarf.

I should note that it was not my intention to get Charlie to schnarf his drink, but I might have chuckled.

I am a bad, bad man.

The Oxford Comma, Bitches, It Just Works

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on the one hand I love the #oxfordcomma, on the other hand these sentences truly are SO GOOD pic.twitter.com/Gst0OSY0Wo

— Jules (@scuttling) March 6, 2017

There is a dispute in linguistic circles as to whether or not you should the Oxford comma, which is the comma used by some before the,”And,” of the last item of a list.

If you use the Oxford comma, you write, “I love my parents, Lady Gaga, and Humpty Dumpty” and if you eschew this convention, “I love my parents, Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty.”

To my mind, the latter form strongly states that your parents are Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty, so I am, and likely always will be, a strong supporter of the Oxford (aka serial) comma.

Well, it appears that a judge in Maine agrees with me, ruling that an employer is liable for overtime pay for their truckers because of a missing comma:

Never let it be said that punctuation doesn’t matter.

 In Maine, the much-disputed Oxford comma has helped a group of dairy drivers in a dispute with a company about overtime pay.

 The Oxford comma is used before the words “and” or “or” in a list of three or more things. Also known as the serial comma, its aficionados say it clarifies sentences in which things are listed.

………

 In a judgment that will delight Oxford comma enthusiasts everywhere, a US court of appeals sided with delivery drivers for Oakhurst Dairy because the lack of a comma made part of Maine’s overtime laws too ambiguous.

 The state’s law says the following activities do not count for overtime pay:

The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of:

 (1) Agricultural produce;
(2) Meat and fish products; and
(3) Perishable foods.

The drivers argued, due to a lack of a comma between “packing for shipment” and “or distribution”, the law refers to the single activity of “packing”, not to “packing” and “distribution” as two separate activities. As the drivers distribute – but do not pack – the goods, this would make them eligible for overtime pay.

 Previously, a district court had ruled in the dairy company’s favour, who argued that the legislation “unambiguously” identified the two as separate activities exempt from overtime pay. But the appeals judge sided with the drivers.

 Circuit judge David J. Barron wrote:

We conclude that the exemption’s scope is actually not so clear in this regard. And because, under Maine law, ambiguities in the state’s wage and hour laws must be construed liberally in order to accomplish their remedial purpose, we adopt the drivers’ narrower reading of the exemption.

The AP REALLY needs to rewrite its style guide on this matter.

I’m sure that Merle Haggard’s wives would agree.

Just Call Me Nostra Dumbass

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In late 2003, I observed that the Mirriam Webster Dictionary was dropping the word “Snollygoster” from its dictionary, and that this must not stand: (PDF)

To Revive a Word

The word “snollygoster” has been dropped from the 11th edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.

Harry Truman was among the last public figures to use this word in public, and I mean to use the word, meaning “a shrewd, unprincipled person, especially a politician”, as often as I can.

So, over the past few years, I have engaged in a lonely effort to revive the word on this blog, and now the Merriam Webster Dictionary has brought the word back:

………

And as recently as Tuesday morning, Merriam-Webster staff noted they had re-added the word “snollygoster” to the dictionary. It means “a shrewd and unprincipled person, especially an unprincipled politician.”

It even found use during the contentious Brexit campaign.

I won’t claim to be responsible for this, I think that the various machinations of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have had more influence on this development, but I am feeling remarkably smug about this development.

Tweet of the Day

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Hot on my slight revision to my profanity policy:

Hey @realDonaldTrump I oppose civil asset forfeiture too! Why don’t you try to destroy my career you fascist, loofa-faced, shit-gibbon!

— Daylin Leach (@daylinleach) February 7, 2017

It’s just too good not to post.

I am not completely in favor of this Tweet, I think that the use of “Weasel” is more effective, and more pleasing to the reader, than “Gibbon,” but I want this guy to run for US Congress.

A Clarification on My Posting Profanities to this Blog

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As you are no doubt aware, there are certain profanities that I block out when I am posting to my blog, F%$#, Sh%$, C%$#, C%$#, C%$sucker, Motherf%$#er, etc.

I did use f%$# when quoting Joe Biden’s famous/infamous comment on the passage of the ACA, but generally, I will obscure obscenities in quotes.

However, I have come across the issue that when embedding tweets, I cannot obscure the profanities when preserving the tweet.

Therefore, I shall be embedding those unexpurgated.

That is all.

Quote of the Day

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But, if the global Left is to have any meaning in the future of the world, and I would argue that the global Right will destroy us all if it doesn’t, then it must get beyond post-structural paralysis and go back to the future of fighting not just for social justice issues but for equity based upon class. Empowerment is not just about language, it’s about capital, who’s got it, who hasn’t and what role government plays between them.

 All sex is not rape, but most poverty is.

—David Llewellyn-Smith

(emphasis mine)

H/t naked capitalism

Props to the Associated Press

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They have just updated their definition of “alt-right” to say that it means racist dirtbags:

Recent developments have put the so-called “alt-right” movement in the news. They highlight the need for clarity around use of the term and around some related terms, such as “white nationalism” and “white supremacism.”

………

“Alt-right” (quotation marks, hyphen and lower case) may be used in quotes or modified as in the “self-described” or “so-called alt-right” in stories discussing what the movement says about itself.

Avoid using the term generically and without definition, however, because it is not well known and the term may exist primarily as a public-relations device to make its supporters’ actual beliefs less clear and more acceptable to a broader audience. In the past we have called such beliefs racist, neo-Nazi or white supremacist.

While the AP’s position on copyright is maximalist and counter-productive, (they act as if fair use excerpting does not exist) this is a very worthwhile update to their standards.

Wheels Within Wheels on the Russian Hack of the DNC

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The Headers in Question

If you are following the hack of the DNC and various Clinton campaign staffers, you are aware that the hackers engaged in “Spearfishing“, a targeted email that is intended to trick the user out of their passwords.

The emails come from Yanex, the Russian equivalent of Google and GMail, which would seem to point to a Russian source, only the headers show that the origin is from Yanex.com, not Yanex.ru, using the RUNET proxy which means that they were sent from the English language portion of the site:

On March 22, 2016 William “Billy” Rhinehart, a regional field director at the Democratic National Committee, received an email from Google warning him that someone tried to access his account and that he should immediately change his password. He complied.

 Unfortunately for Mr. Rhinehart, it wasn’t Google who sent him that email. He, along with many others, were a victim of Threat Group 4127 — the SecureWorks designation for Fancy Bear (CrowdStrike), APT28 (FireEye), and Sofacy (Kaspersky Lab). Secureworks assesses that TG 4127 “is operating from the Russian Federation and is gathering intelligence on behalf of the Russian government.”

 Thanks to a bizarre twist involving Guccifer 2.0’s solicitation of a journalist at The Smoking Gun (TSG) to write about the DCLeaks emails in exchange for giving TSG an early look at some of the stolen documents, TSG was able to obtain the original spear phishing email directly from Billy Rhinehart and shared it with ThreatConnect, who posted this screenshot of the email’s headers and identified the actual sender of the email: hi.mymail@yandex.com.

 ………

 How Do I Get A Yandex.com Email Address on RUNET?

 Now let’s say that you don’t want a @yandex.ru email. You want a @yandex.com email. So you type https://yandex.com into your browser and …, no joy. It resolves back to https://yandex.ru/

 For some reason, RUNET is set up to send you to the .ru domain of whatever website you type into your address bar. Besides Yandex, I tried going to Google.com and was sent to Google.ru. I typed Intel.com and was sent to Intel.ru.

 So how does our presumed Russian intelligence operative get his Yandex.com email address? He has to click on the Yandex.com link from the Yandex.ru homepage (highlighted below).

………

The point that I’m trying to make is that if anyone in Russia wanted to spear phish employees of the DNC, then creating a @yandex.com email address instead of a @yandex.ru email address is not only unnecessary extra effort but it makes absolutely no sense. You don’t gain anything operationally. You’ve used Yandex. You might as well paint a big red R on your forehead.

However, you know what does make sense?

That the person who opened the account DOESN’T SPEAK RUSSIAN!

He went with Yandex.com because all analysis stops with merely the name of a Russian company, a Russian IP address, or a Russian-made piece of malware. To even argue that a Russian intelligence officer let alone a paranoid Russian mercenary hacker would prefer a Yandex.com email to a Yandex.ru email is mind-numbingly batsh%$ insane.

(emphasis original, %$ mine)

This does not prove that the Russians, or that SOME Russians weren’t behind this, but it does imply that whoever did this might not have been a Russian speaker.

Or it could be an attempt to create the illusion that the sender of the emails was trying to frame the Russians, or maybe the Russians were employing some non-Russian speakers, or maybe ………

I’ll stop here. I’m getting a headache.

I was Hoping for Stealthy McStealthface

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The USAF has named its new bomber, the B-21, the “Raider” as an homage to the Jimmy Doolittle raids on Japan:

Almost seven months after designating Northrop Grumman’s next-generation stealth aircraft the B-21, U.S. Air Force Secretary Deborah James announced on Sept. 19 that it will be called the Raider, in honor of the Doolittle Raiders who took on the Japanese during World War II.

The name came about through a poll of airmen that ran from March to May, with the winnowing down of potential names to a handful of top submissions. From more than 4,600 entries, the winning name “Raider” was revealed by Lt. Col. (ret.) Richard Cole at the opening of the Air Force Association’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference at National Harbor, Maryland. Cole is one of the last surviving Doolittle Raiders; he was co-pilot in aircraft No. 1.

………

There had been speculation that the Air Force’s B-21 name would honor a World War II aerial bombardment type, such as the B-17 Flying Fortress, B-29 Superfortress, Consolidated B-24 Liberator, North American B-25 Mitchell or Martin B-26 Marauder.
In choosing Raider, the air branch has rejected ghoulish suggestions like “Wraith” or “Spectre” as well as tongue-in-cheek nods to the aircraft’s low-observable profile such as “Stealthy McSteathface” and “Dr. Stealthlove.”

It should have been “Stealthy McStealthface”.

Also, why the B-21?  What are the 18 aircraft between the B-2 and this?