h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Think Gandalf with a teenage daughter.

jwf, the word you are skirting around, the homophobic word which starts in poo and ends in oof, is frequently rendered plural in the UK by conversion to -ooves. I've never figured out whether there is an element of sarcasm in this particular construction.

So The Sopranos rather than* The Godfather then? Still, you saying 'He is lej'! Oh dear..






*(should that be 'instead of'?. What's the difference?)

>>...frequently rendered plural in the UK by conversion to -ooves. <<


Aha! That explains the filther's refusal to post it.
And there's me thinking it was an impossible construction.
Thinking it was original and I never suspected it existed.

What a nightmare trying to out-think a profanity filter
by deleting this and that when the one word I thought I
had 'invented' was already on its hit list.

>> I've never figured out whether there is an element of
sarcasm in this particular construction. <<

Now ya know! My sarcastic wit was balked by a system
already programmed to spot it. Sheesh!


~jwf~

This post has been removed.

>What a nightmare trying to out-think a profanity filter<


Well, take the serviceman's view of security - If it was logical you could break it.

Aha! Taff!
nn in profanity might be ok but leaving out prot obviously isn't!

Oh what a wonderful place this is

ok try again

who put the fani in profanity

Fanny Bryce?

Fanny Hill?

~jwf~

In reference to post 16221 that must be one UK-centric filter
I had to go to bing and look up definition to see what the hub-bub was about.
In the US that term is never used.
Someone west of the Atlantic might think of David Coperfield making the statue of Liberty disappear : Po** it's gone.

The one that blew my mind (and kept me agonising with
deleting one word after another in a long post) is also
peculiar to the UK - a prison slang term from the acronym
Not On Normal Community Exercise, which was explained to
me by Taff as being scrawled in chalk on the floor outside
the cells of certain inmates who are not allowed to accompany
the main company of prisoners in the exercise yard.

To me it is a perfectly good British English term for Now
or the duration of the present moment into some conditional
future moment - as in 'for the time being'.

Now who woulda known that other than someone familiar with
the insides of Her Majesty's Prison System?


~jwf~

"Now who woulda known that other than someone familiar with
the insides of Her Majesty's Prison System?"

Good question jwf - maybe both of us are on the wrong continent to know an answer.
Look at statistics...for quite a few decades it looked like you couldn´t become leader of an African nation if you hadn´t spent a longish holiday in Hoteli Kingi Georgi.



Pit

"" you couldn´t become leader of an African nation if you hadn´t spent a longish holiday in Hoteli Kingi Georgi.""

or quite a few months in the royal mitiary academy, sandhurst

GB, providing the world with despots since 1866

So 'n­once' is not allowable? It is a word meaning a number of things, one of which is 'a newly made-up word for an occasion'. It also means a sexual deviant but is not listed in the dictionary as offensive.

By the way, your derivation of the word based on initials is a myth.

Myth, eh?

I'll have to refer you to Taff on that one.
He claimed to have first hand knowledge of it.

I recall he provided a link to an online dictionary that said
it was 'UK prison slang' so I was inclined to believe him but
I didn't actually see any residual chalk dust on his fingers.


~jwf~

In many cases where a word is supposed to come from an acronym, the derivation is false. 'Golf' being derived from 'Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden' is one such (as is a certain word starting with F that would trigger the filter). Rule of thumb - if the word pre-dates about 1920s, it's definitely not an acronym.

N0nce is a strange one. The OED says origin unknown, but possibly related to nance. Nance appears in print in 1910, but the first recorded occurrence of n0nce is 1971. Who knows what happened in-between?

I had to use '0' instead of 'o' in my previous post, otherwise it wouldn't let me post 'n0nce'. Yet I notice that Gnomon had no trouble posting it. Evidently, he *is* Gandalf with a laptop!

Yes, I used my gnomagic on that one.

Can you teach us your gnomagic O master? Is there a way to insert an invisible space? That would solve all our problems . . .

I seem to remember reading that the origin of the relevant word is collapsing the phrase 'for then once', in the same way the co-worker became cow orker in 90s conversation sites (thinking of alt.folklore.urban).

I expect he entered the word in ASCII. Should work, but I haven't found out the method on a Mac (Alt+110 doesn't produce an n for me, either from keyboard or numberpad). A helpful web discussion tells me to set up Unicode entry in my International menu, but I haven't got such a menu in my System Preferences list