dustintrex

Seems to be un-deaded now, praise the mods! And on closer inspection there was one naughty word in there, although technically it's a homonym that happens to have the same spelling. (And "homonym" itself is probably best avoided.)

Yes, but this appears to be the origin of the pejorative: bundle of sticks -> an old woman collecting sticks -> a man who acts like an old woman -> homosexual.

> The English word outrage is a loanword from French, where it was formed by combining the adverb outre (meaning "beyond") with the suffix -age; thus, the original literal meaning is "beyondness" – that is, beyond what is acceptable. The rebracketing as a compound of out- with the noun or verb rage has led to both a different pronunciation than the one to be expected for such a loanword (compare umbrage) and an additional meaning of "angry reaction" not present in French.

Brilliant. I'll need to make a point of pronouncing "outrage" to rhyme with "garage" from now on. "It is an oot-RAAZH!"

I posted a comment noting that some words can no longer be used because they resemble offensive words, even though they are etymologically unrelated.

I am ironically amused to note that the comment appears to have offended somebody or something sufficiently to make it disappear, even though it did not contain any actual offensive words.

An unmentioned subcategory is words that that sound or look like taboo words, but are actually unrelated: "niggardly", "Gaylord", "fag" as in cigarette (from "fag end", unrelated to "faggot"), etc.

Yup, as long as the tin pot dictator is attacking some country we don't really care about.

Whenever I join a new team and need to inhale a new architecture or complex process, I take a stab at documenting what currently exists, and then share my notes with the team. Corrections immediately pour in, and this "wrong answer" inevitably produces a much better end result than asking any single person to tell me the "right answer".

Sure, the orchestra can fire or not fire the guy, and they can also do so on the basis of whether they think this will fill seats. What really rubs me the wrong way here is the performative "you're with us or you're against us" demand for a written denouncement: AFAICT he has not said a peep either way about the Ukraine invasion, he is just being required to publicly renounce his past beliefs to keep his job.

For what it's worth, you're also doing some pretty selective reading of the link: he's Ossetian himself, claims he never actually signed the Crimea annexation statement, and the Pussy Riot/LGBT stuff is really an irrelevant tangent here.

Finally, no, McCarthyism was not (just) about government persecution, things like the MPAA blacklist on "Communist" actors and directors were private initiatives, and artists bore much of the brunt of that particular witchhunt.

Yes, he appeared for a TV ad for Putin in 2012. Why is this suddenly a firing offence in 2022? Does he bear personal responsibility for what Putin's doing today?

Denouncing McCarthyism in 1950, Truman said, "In a free country, we punish men for the crimes they commit, but never for the opinions they have."

My email is [email protected]. The ".name" domain is oddly underused and often throws people for a loop.

The Economist is old school liberal: let companies do what they want (US "right-wing"), let people do what they want (US "left-wing"), but unlike US libertarians, also have some regulation and support in place to prevent the worst abuses.

Psst: co-sleeping won't stop babies from crying, but it makes it way easier for everybody involved to get back to sleep much faster.