Things people do that make no sense

[dgp11776]

Wow, schill, that is a really bizarre list of allergies.  I would pull out my hair it that were the case with me.  You seem to handle it well, though - I seriously think you would be a great person to talk to for hours over coffee and just laugh at the stupid things of life.

Fortunately, I have yet to find anything that I'm allergic to, with the minor exception of water.  I kid.  Truthfully, I am thankful that I'm only allergic to one thing that I've discovered - one type of antibiotic.

[Vlad!]

Laughing at the stupid things of life is dangerous--you might hyperventilate or pull something.

[dgp11776]

They make glowing comments about an album, then never bother to update their 2007 Music Journal with a grade.  And, no, I'm not talking about Steven Delopoulos any particular artist or Josh any particular person.

[murlough23]

I definitely feel your pain in terms of being paranoid about unknown/unlabeled foods. External swelling/rashes probably won't kill you, but it's not exactly a pleasant effect, either, so I don't blame you for digging your heels in and insisting on not trying something.

Truth be told, even if I'm allergic to the things I suspect I am, it probably wouldn't be enough to kill me, but it could likely send me to the hospital and cause a scene where one of my friends has to stick a big needle in my leg while waiting for the paramedics to get there. Not exactly an experience I want to go through. I like breathing. I prefer to keep doing it continuously.

Allergies are definitely on my Top 10 list of "Seriously, God, what was the point of this?" questions to ask after I die.

[who me?]

Wow, brainfreeze! All this talk of left turns confused me for a long time. I forgot that us confused southerners drive on the wrong side of the road

The Australian give way laws make no sense. When turning right here you have to give way to those turning left, which means you end up stuck in the middle of the road for ages, whereas in New Zealand people turning right go first and everybody's happy.   

[Vlad!]

In the US, right turn takes precedence over left turn (same as in Australia when your goofy road-direction issues are worked out). This is because the person turning right is more likely to be able to make the turn--when turning left, you have to watch out for oncoming traffic as well as parallel traffic, so it makes little sense to prevent someone who could easily make a right turn from going just because someone who is trying to make a left turn is blocked elsewhere.

That said, just because right turn takes precedence doesn't always mean right turn gets precedence in practice. If I'm turning left and I have a chance to go, I'll generally start going, and then hit the brakes if it looks like right turn guy is going as well.

[Vlad!]

I get a lot of packages in the mails, and of course none of them fit in the 2mm x 4mm x 2mm box that we get to hold our letters. There are about eight lockers in the mail area, though. The way it's supposed to work is that they put your package in the locker and give you the key in your box. You then unlock the locker with the key and get your package. The key has, printed on it, "your package is in locker #n", where n is 1 through 8.

I had to go into the office to pick up my packages. So I asked them "isn't this what the lockers are for?". They replied that people didn't know what to do with the keys, and would walk into the office and ask (apparently not bothering to read the key tag, not comprehending the key tag, or being unable to read English). So because of my retarded neighbors, I now have to go into the office to pick up my packages.

Which would be OK, since the office people are all nice, except that the office is open from 9am to 6pm. I leave for work before 9am and arrive home after 6pm, so I have to make a special trip (or wait til Saturday) to pick up my packages.

This Makes No Sense.

[murlough23]

This Makes No Sense.

I think that one can be filed under "Red Tape" (or one of my personal favorite vocabulary words, "rigamarole"). Feel free to file a complaint.

[Vlad!]

That said, just because right turn takes precedence doesn't always mean right turn gets precedence in practice. If I'm turning left and I have a chance to go, I'll generally start going, and then hit the brakes if it looks like right turn guy is going as well.

I was on my way home from church and ready to make a left turn, and there was an oncoming car with the right blinker on. I (uncharacteristically) yielded...and the freaking woman just kept on driving. I guess she just left her signal on by mistake. That would have caused an awkward situation had I just gone ahead and barged through that turn like I normally do.

[Vlad!]

Why do people capitalize things just because they don't understand them? I cringe every time I see someone write JAVA (as in the programming language). No, Java doesn't stand for anything. Please write it in title caps. I suppose people might get confused because they sometimes see old-school programming languages (COBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC, MATLAB) written in all caps. This is because those names kinda-sorta stand for things (COmmon Business-Oriented Language; FORmula TRANslator; Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code; MATrix LABoritory). It is acceptable nowadays to write Cobol, Fortran, Basic, Matlab.

Also, DELL. Dell Computers is named after Michael Dell, its founder. I realize their logo is written in all caps. That is a ruse to fool the weak-minded. You don't skew your E by about 45 degrees when you write it, do you?

[enemy anemone]

I suspect that the reason people do this is related to the reason people put words in "unnecessary" quotation "marks".

[murlough23]

Sometimes people do it to emphasize a word or phrase when it's easier than boldfacing it (or rich text is unavailable).
 But on the Internet, it can be misconstrued as shouting.

[Vlad!]

Sometimes people do it to emphasize a word or phrase when it's easier than boldfacing it (or rich text is unavailable).
 But on the Internet, it can be misconstrued as shouting.

Sure, I've done that myself. I'm just talking about people who consistently and wrongfully capitalize certain words, probably because (like Schil said) they suffer from terminal confusion about the deeper syntactic significance of the constructs they're abusing.

[Aaron]

What the "hell" are you talking about?   

[murlough23]

Alright, this one's going to be slightly vulgar, so apologies to those who are offended by that sort of thing, but don't say I didn't warn you. (I figured it better to just type it out as is than risk annoying Vlad! by self-censoring.)

Why do people say, "Fuckin' A?" Like, what does the "A" stand for? I used to assume it stood for "Ass" or "Asshole", as if to indicate that somebody was being a bona fide jerk, but then that doesn't make sense, because why would you self-censor the word "ass" if you're going to use the big granddaddy of all swear words, "fuck"? Where did this infantile catch-phrase originate?

[Vlad!]

Haha, that's funny because just today I missed a shot in foosball and said "freakin' a". It doesn't have quite the same ring to it, but I avoid saying 'fucking' because I still struggle with being a good Christian witness, and I don't feel that tossing the f-bomb around at work really helps.

As to what the A means, I always assumed it was a sort of wildcard. Like, when it's used to agree, it can mean "affirmative" (as in "that was a great shot"  "fuckin' a"). The way that my friends used it in college was more like in the situation I described above, where it means "why does something like that have to happen?". Which I realize doesn't start with A, but since when does vulgarity usually make sense in context anyway?

[murlough23]

Haha, that's funny because just today I missed a shot in foosball and said "freakin' a". It doesn't have quite the same ring to it, but I avoid saying 'fucking' because I still struggle with being a good Christian witness, and I don't feel that tossing the f-bomb around at work really helps.

See? There is a use for euphemisms after all! (Or bowdlerisms. Or whatever the hey they're called.)

As to what the A means, I always assumed it was a sort of wildcard. Like, when it's used to agree, it can mean "affirmative" (as in "that was a great shot"  "fuckin' a"). The way that my friends used it in college was more like in the situation I described above, where it means "why does something like that have to happen?". Which I realize doesn't start with A, but since when does vulgarity usually make sense in context anyway?

Interesting analysis. You're probably right as to the intended meaning, even if probably nobody has actually thought through the literal meaning.

As for when vulgarity makes sense in context - haven't you ever told a hermaphrodite to go screw itself?

NP: "Break Me Down", Alter Bridge

[bethany]

I tend to say "freaking a' a lot, too. My husband, when writing it out, writes, "freaking eh" which I find incredibly endearing (and no, he's not Canadian).

[murlough23]

I'm trying to remember if they've ever said "Frakkin' A" on Battlestar Galactica. They've run through many of the other common usages of the word, substituted with "frak", so it's likely.

[Vlad!]

See? There is a use for euphemisms after all! (Or bowdlerisms. Or whatever the hey they're called.)

For the record, it's not the word substitution I have much of a problem with. Butt, crap, heck, geez, whatever, I'm not going to get on your case about that (well, I make no promises, but I'll try my best). It's the "clever" use of typographical symbols (f***, @$$, sh!t, etc) that annoys me.

I tend to say "freaking a' a lot, too. My husband, when writing it out, writes, "freaking eh" which I find incredibly endearing (and no, he's not Canadian).

I thought about suggesting the possibility of "fucking eh" in my previous post, but I've seen little support for that rendition in the popular media, such as it is. Not saying it's wrong, but most people seem to agree that it's the letter a.

For the record, The Straight Dope (one of my favorite sites for addressing pressing questions of our modern times like this one) tackled the fuckin a issue, and, IMO, came up with bupkus. You can't win 'em all.

[murlough23]

For the record, it's not the word substitution I have much of a problem with. Butt, crap, heck, geez, whatever, I'm not going to get on your case about that (well, I make no promises, but I'll try my best). It's the "clever" use of typographical symbols (f***, @$$, sh!t, etc) that annoys me.

Then why did we have that whole argument about "frak", then?

(I still like "sh!t", for the record. Obviously it's not any more polite than typing "shit", but it amuses the part of me that likes to hack my way around the filters on sites like Epinions. Plus, it's like the word is being exclaimed.)

For the record, The Straight Dope (one of my favorite sites for addressing pressing questions of our modern times like this one) tackled the fuckin a issue, and, IMO, came up with bupkus. You can't win 'em all.

I was gonna do my own Google search on the subject, but my better judgment told me that many of the results returned would likely fall into the "NSFW" category.

[Vlad!]

Then why did we have that whole argument about "frak", then?

Because in my opinion the word sounds stupid, and so it spoils the effect of a scene when I'm snorting in laughter at their word usage instead of feeling whatever tense moment is going on. My argument was that if you wanted to say the word, you should just say it. However, I admitted in that thread and will admit in this one as well to hypocrisy--I like the word "freaking".

As a pragmatist, I also realize that many of the tamer versions of vulgarity have entered our lexicon in and of themselves. Someone saying crap might just plain want to say crap, and the word shit might not even be entering that person's mind. This is why I don't have much of a problem with using these words. My problem in that thread was with the coining of a new word. And to (hopefully) avoid the rehashing of that argument, I will say again that I don't expect everyone else to share or even respect my neuroses, and I won't use my mod power to do anything to the posts of people who do that, but I do feel that I have a right to complain about things that annoy me, no matter how trivial

I was gonna do my own Google search on the subject, but my better judgment told me that many of the results returned would likely fall into the "NSFW" category.

Actually, I was at work when this thread first started and I did Google the phrase "origins of fuckin a" to see if anything interesting came up (nothing except the SDSR which I already knew about and linked previously), and I retroactively thought if maybe I was tripping a filter somewhere and the IT guys would go have a talk with my manager. But right about then a guy a few cubes over got mad about something and started on a minute-long stream of expletives at the top of his lungs, and I realized I was probably OK.

[murlough23]

Because in my opinion the word sounds stupid, and so it spoils the effect of a scene when I'm snorting in laughter at their word usage instead of feeling whatever tense moment is going on. My argument was that if you wanted to say the word, you should just say it. However, I admitted in that thread and will admit in this one as well to hypocrisy--I like the word "freaking".

I suppose we can't do much to change the aesthetic value of words to different people. But I will say that it's generally used more out of frustration, bewilderment, machismo, etc. on the show, not so much as a serious indicator that it's a tense situation, so I think it fits. It's more of a source of humor for viewers - not so much, "tee hee, I know that's supposed to be a dirty word", but more to point out the widespread and illogical uses that people have come up with for the word, than often don't make sense when taken literally ("motherfrakker", "frak me", etc.)

But even if it was an issue, the issue would be with the original show from the 70's, and its assumed need to self-censor. Keeping that trait in the remake of the show was meant as more of a homage to one of the more absurd aspects of the original series.

[Vlad!]

Things people say that make no sense, part 2 (continuing the vulgarity trend):
"I don't give two shits about that"
So I can sort of understand "I don't give a shit". I mean, it sounds funny when you have to translate it into another language ("I have a shit here and I'm keeping it for myself"), but ignoring that issue, why two? Is the implication that the speaker does in fact give a single shit, but two shits is right out? When did we switch to this shit-based economy? Is having two shits better or worse than having a single shit? Or is this just evidence of inflation? Maybe fifty years from now, kids will be informing us that they don't give four shits about that.

Bonus material: why do people say "easy as pie"? It usually takes me between an hour fifteen and an hour and a half to create and bake a pie, and then cleanup adds even more time on that (the duration of which depends greatly on how spastic I was when making the crust and the filling).

[enemy anemone]

pie is not easy! unless you're the girl Billy Boy found.

"she can make a cherry pie, Billy Boy, Billy Boy
she can make a cherry pie, darling Billy
she can make a cherry pie quick's the cat can wink an eye
she's a young thing and cannot leave her mother"

my music teacher at a Baptist school made us sing that song. I think it's creepy and makes no sense.

[murlough23]

Things people say that make no sense, part 2 (continuing the vulgarity trend):
"I don't give two shits about that"
So I can sort of understand "I don't give a shit". I mean, it sounds funny when you have to translate it into another language ("I have a shit here and I'm keeping it for myself"), but ignoring that issue, why two? Is the implication that the speaker does in fact give a single shit, but two shits is right out? When did we switch to this shit-based economy? Is having two shits better or worse than having a single shit? Or is this just evidence of inflation? Maybe fifty years from now, kids will be informing us that they don't give four shits about that.

This probably arises when people need increasingly exaggerated ways to top the standard crude expression for not caring. Sometimes it can be inherently funny exactly because it's an exaggeration and it doesn't really make sense when you stop to think about it - the absurdity of the statement indicates how emphatic the person's indifference is, I guess.

It's kind of like "that sucks", which a college friend expanded into "That sucks me sideways", and when that wasn't quite enough to express her profound distaste for something, it became, "That sucks me sideways with a bag of chips, two radishes, and a Diet Coke."

Giving a shit seems to have evolved from giving a damn. And I'm not sure what it means, in the literal sense to give a damn about something. Are you doling out condemnation? Isn't it good for you not give something a damn if you like it, then? More than likely, it used to be "I don't give a damned (noun)", and the noun got dropped for the sake of simplicity/bluntness.

Taking a shit is an even weirder expression, because you're leaving something behind, not taking anything. My standard response to someone saying they had to take a shit used to be, "Don't take one of mine!"

The inherent oddity of the phrases "Give a shit" and "Take a shit" have given rise to the humorous declaration: "I don't give a shit. I don't take any shit. I'm not in the shit market."

Bonus material: why do people say "easy as pie"? It usually takes me between an hour fifteen and an hour and a half to create and bake a pie, and then cleanup adds even more time on that (the duration of which depends greatly on how spastic I was when making the crust and the filling).

It's easy to eat...

[Vlad!]

It's easy to eat...

Comparatively, actually, I disagree. Pie tends to have an oozy center and can be messy. Compare to cake which is generally a solid hunk, cookies which are finger foods, and brownies.

[murlough23]

Comparatively, actually, I disagree. Pie tends to have an oozy center and can be messy. Compare to cake which is generally a solid hunk, cookies which are finger foods, and brownies.

Do the words "anal retentive" mean anything to you?

Just kidding. I'm thinking the word "easy" here is meant to refer to relaxation, like something you do that is easygoing (even if it's not easy to do, it's an enjoyable pastime), rather than difficulty level.

[who me?]

Do the words "anal retentive" mean anything to you?

Just kidding. I'm thinking the word "easy" here is meant to refer to relaxation, like something you do that is easygoing (even if it's not easy to do, it's an enjoyable pastime), rather than difficulty level.

Ahaha. You completely just made me snort.

You guys are missing out though, Apple pie is good but steak pie rocks.

[Vlad!]

Just kidding. I'm thinking the word "easy" here is meant to refer to relaxation, like something you do that is easygoing (even if it's not easy to do, it's an enjoyable pastime), rather than difficulty level.

Quite possibly. However, in contemporary usage, 'easy as pie' generally refers to difficulty level ("just click here, fill out the form, then click send. see? easy as pie"). Even so, you're probably correct: something that is "as easy as pie" is something enjoyable or simple, not overly complicated in concept or execution.

It may also be related to who me?'s comment above; savory pies, though they have fallen out of favor in the US of late, are generally pretty easy to eat.

[Vlad!]

Something I do that makes no sense:

Sometimes I will send an e-mail to myself as a reminder (if it's not in my inbox or on my calendar, it won't happen). When I send these e-mails, I will usually type something useful in the body to help me remember what precisely I am supposed to do about it. Then I sign the e-mail. I guess it's just habit, but it just feels wrong to send an e-mail without my name at the bottom, even if it's to myself.

[murlough23]

Sometimes I will send an e-mail to myself as a reminder (if it's not in my inbox or on my calendar, it won't happen). When I send these e-mails, I will usually type something useful in the body to help me remember what precisely I am supposed to do about it. Then I sign the e-mail. I guess it's just habit, but it just feels wrong to send an e-mail without my name at the bottom, even if it's to myself.

Remember to wind your watch.

[Vlad!]

Remember to wind your watch.

I'm not sure what you mean by that. On the off chance you actually meant it at face value, my watch is digital and doesn't require winding

[murlough23]

I'm not sure what you mean by that. On the off chance you actually meant it at face value, my watch is digital and doesn't require winding

Bill & Ted reference. Ted reminds his past self to wind his watch. It was just what came to mind when you talked about how you talk to yourself via Email. Not that I don't do that, too, but I've never actually signed it (though I'm usually too lazy to delete the signature that automatically gets tacked on).

[Vlad!]

Bill & Ted reference. Ted reminds his past self to wind his watch. It was just what came to mind when you talked about how you talk to yourself via Email. Not that I don't do that, too, but I've never actually signed it (though I'm usually too lazy to delete the signature that automatically gets tacked on).

Ah, I see.

I don't let my mail client automatically append a signature. I type my name at the bottom of every e-mail (this is probably another thing that makes no sense, but I find autogenerated e-mail signatures generally pretty worthless).

[dgp11776]

I don't have a signature on my personal email, but I do at work.

[enemy anemone]

earlier today I heard a very loud chirruping noise that I figured was a frog. every time I heard it I would peer out the window, as if it would be as visible as a bird hopping in the yard or something, I don't know. later I started going outside to glance around even though I had little hope of actually spotting it--I knew it could be very small and well-hidden. but I had to keep looking for it. it surprised me to actually find it wedged in the window frame. 


(it looks to be a toad, not a frog.)

I didn't want to bother it; I just wanted to know where it was. I don't know why.

[murlough23]

I didn't want to bother it; I just wanted to know where it was. I don't know why.

What, you didn't want to squish it in the palm of your hand just to be evil?

There's a mockingbird that likes to chirp loudly outside my window at all hours of the night. There's a light on the exterior of my apartment building that is apparently bright enough to fool the bird into thinking it's always daytime. It doesn't make me want to go out there and find the bird and kill it, but I bet it makes the cat want to do that.

[enemy anemone]

nah, I'm all protective and caring this season.

there's a lone male mockingbird around here too. (the males without mates sing at night.) I hadn't heard him for a while so I thought he found a mate, but he just let out a chirp just now.

[murlough23]

there's a lone male mockingbird around here too. (the males without mates sing at night.) I hadn't heard him for a while so I thought he found a mate, but he just let out a chirp just now.

It's funny how we hear birds sing and think, "Oh, pretty!", but then it turns out they're just horny.