Language Log

By Allie Brosh: Update — apparently this is a meme derived from Allie Brosh's art, but not created by her. See the comment below.  

In a comment on yesterday's "Software testing day" post, ernie in berkeley offered a nice "QA Engineer walks into a bar" joke, and pointed us to its origin in an old xkcd comic "Exploits of a Mom": …which in turn reminded me of an old problem, discussed in "Excel invents genes", 8/26/2016:

Laura Baisas, “We were very wrong about birds”, Popular Science 4/1/2024: Birds combine genes from a father and a mother into the next generation, but they first mix the genes they inherited from their pirates when creating sperm and eggs. This process is called recombination and it is also something that occurs in humans. Recombination […]

From "Why Does Everyone Hate Nickelback?", Medium 4/15/2021: This was before Netflix, or even taping shows to watch later, so people were being repeatedly told that Nickelback is awful for three years, which boroughed its way into many people’s subconscious.

A 7/29/2023 article by Elaine Mendonça in the online periodical The Best Stocks ("Anticipating Positive Results: Brookfield Renewable Partners to Release Q2 Earnings Data") starts like this: July 28, 2023 – Brookfield Renewable Partners (NYSE:BEP) (TSE:BEP), a leading utilities provider, is set to announce its second-quarter earnings on Friday, August 4th. And after a few […]

In this age of typing on computers and other digital devices, when we daily input thousands upon thousands of words, we are often amazed at the number and types of mistakes we make.  Many of them are simple and straightforward, as when our fingers stumblingly hit the wrong keys by sheer accident.  People who type […]

Trump lost the election FYI. Side note this speech is boring. We can’t win the presidency with this boring, low energy, stream of conscience, weak, has been, choke artist. Just my .02 — Adam Kinzinger (@AdamKinzinger) February 28, 2021

Stephen H writes: I was shuffling French Impressionists in Art Authority on my iPad and came across this:

…in Alta, Utah, where I'm conducting field research into how many words skiers have for snow, evidence of the polysemousness of Twitter: Do you want to know what her Twitter is? [Apparently meaning 'her Twitter handle'] I have a Twitter. [By the same guy, apparently meaning 'a Twitter account'] Extra added bonus: I'm writing this on […]

Jordain Carney, "House will have to vote for tax-cut bill again", TheHill 12/19/2017, originally included this sentence: Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) also seized on the ruling immediately, saying Republicans in a "mad dash to provide tax breaks for their billionaire campaign contributors" had ran a fowl of the chamber's rules. I didn't get a screenshot in […]

When the White House issued a statement that finally condemned white supremacists for the violence in Charlottesville this weekend, the version that was originally released had an unusual typo: "nephew-nazi" for "neo-Nazi": The president said very strongly in his statement yesterday that he condemns all forms of violence, bigotry, and hatred and of course that […]

I must admit to having enjoyed the series of savage similes about quality of computer program code presented in three xkcd comic strips. They show a female character, known to aficionados as Ponytail, reluctantly agreeing to take a critical look at some code that the male character Cueball has written. Almost at first sight, she […]

Barbara Philips Long writes: Apple and other autofill writing software have contributed a lot to eggcorns, I suspect. I enjoyed this comment about supply-siders, which called them "supply spiders": I am now imagining Carl Icahn as a supply spider. I suspect that Barbara is right to attribute this coinage to someone's autocorrect function, in which […]