I wrote a little about variant spellings of “by the by” a while back, but at the time I was thinking the phrase in terms of its use as an alternative to “by the way” in the sense of being a sort of clarifying interjection.

And I’m at least familiar with a similar-but-different usage, “[in the [sweet]] by-and-by” for the (sometimes concurrent) passage of time.

What I don’t think I’ve noticed before is “[is] by the by” as an alternative to “beside the point” or maybe “neither here nor there”, as in this metafilter comment de-emphasizing the role of scammers in the purported collapse of eBay:

“It happens all the time and will keep on happening. The fact that Nigerian scammers helped speed up that decline is by the by.”

A google search for “is by the by” turns up about 14K raw hits. 

That includes some noise, such as comma-offset uses of the by-the-way meaning (”Which is, by the by, the way in which the Jesus story is different than…”, “Wynad is, by the by, remarkably full of antiquities”) or weird hyphen-boundary collisions (”…and is by the by-laws considered…”, “‘If the election has not been held on the date so designated (that is, by the by-laws)”).

But the noise seems to be a minority; most of the results are genuine hits. 

There are a lot of sentence-terminal hits, with some sort of unesettled question (”Whether or not it’s merely engendered…is by the by.”, “this may or may not actually be so, but that is by the by.”, “Whether you agree or not is by the by.”) or an assertion (”The fact these alleged incidents took place at an Embassy, is by the by.), or some sort of pronominal representation of same with “this”, “that”, “all this” (Hi, languagehat!), etc standing in before the final “is by and by”.

I’m also finding people using it in non-terminal positions in sentences/clauses (”If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if…”) and in some cases using the phrase not as a noun itself but a modifier of some other noun (”All of which is by the by ramble on my part I suspect…”).

None of which strikes me as surprising, to be clear.  But it’s something that jumped out at me this morning; I’ve managed to just plain not notice whatever occurances of this I might have encountered in the past.  Have I in the past heard or read it and gotten the context but dismissed the specific usage?  Been puzzled but let it go?  Misanalyzed it as taking the by-the-way meaning and just shrugged off any oddities produced thereby?  Heck if I know!

Is this a regionalism to some extent, more common in English-speaking cultures outside of the US or the Pacific Northwest of same?  I happen to know that the commenter from mefi, above, is Australian, and a fair share of the hits include .au or .co.uk urls, but that’s pretty thin stuff on which to base such a speculation.

From an ask metafilter question about Southern idioms, this: 

“Shinola’s a shoe polish? Wow. That expression makes a lot more sense now.”

Heh.  Been there.

From the Seattle Times, on a 12-year-old austic artist:

In the past, Wil would have been called a “savant,” a term now considered insensitive. Dager calls him extraordinarily talented.

“Savant” is insensitive?  The more precise term I think of, and one that I can understand the dislike for, is “idiot savant“, where the juxtaposition of mental incapacities and shocking (savantish) talent is expressed explicitly. 

But savant by itself?  I’m wondering if this is me being out of touch with usage preferences and taboos in the autistic/special-needs/mental-health sector (possible), or there was some editing damage done to this article that reduced “idiot savant” to “savant” out of the same sensitivity that was then still being vestigially addressed in the paragraph.

Sounds like a research project.

Metafilter is a website, but it’s also, judging by usage both on MeFi and off, a verb. But what does it mean?

Searching for “to metafilter” is asking for trouble; uses of ‘metafilter’ as a noun referring to the site itself dwarf verb-form uses, and “to metafilter” turns up lots of hits for, likewise, noun forms with to as prepositional glue (”subscribe to metafilter”, “strong connections to metafilter”, “POSTING ASCII ART TO METAFILTER”), dwarfing whatever infinitive “to Metafilter” cites might be out there.

Alternate tack, then: search for “metafiltering”. And this works pretty darned well, dishing up in total a few dozen uses of the phrase on mefi itself as well as some off-site usage (some related to the site, some not). It turns out that metafiltering can mean a few different things.

(Note: there are at least a couple other obvious suffix-based tactics which I have ignored for this writeup: “metafiltered” and “metafilterer”. Both turn up some interesting results, but I’ve found “metafiltering” to be the most engaging of the three; +ed and +er will have to wait for a separate writeup.)

So what sorts of things does “metafiltering” mean?

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a little thing, but it makes me smile.

From Ian Ayres posting over at Freakonomics, a collection of reasons given for source anonymity by various news publications following a 2004 change to NYT’s confidentiality policy.

A few of the cited reasons:

• (Spoke on condition of anonymity because) …of the delicacy of the negotiations.
• …he did not want to be seen as speaking for the president.
• …he was not authorized to divulge results.
• …many people do not know she smokes.

Ian’s writeup touches on some of the variations in both phrasing and the nature of the justification in various citations.  He also mentions that “…by 2005 there were 9,451 articles using the phrase.”  Which is the sort of thing that makes me drool a little.

I was surprised by the end of this sentence, from user drpynchon in a comment on Ask Metafilter:

It’s not entirely crap — there are some kernels of corn too in there, but…

The autocomplete function of my brain expected the kernals to be of truth; the persistence of the cliche in action, I suppose.  The use of “corn” instead both is more literal a metaphor and evokes a much more visceral reading of the preceding “crap” than I would have had with the “truth” version.

The phrase “HURF DURF BUTTER EATER” was introduced to Metafilter on February 16th, 2005, in the text of an Ask Metafilter question relating in part to weight issues.  Later that year, the phrase gained visibility on the site thanks to a discussion of the original use, and Metafilter users began repeating and modifying the phrase in a variety of ways on the site.

From the original phrase, variations have developed on Metafilter, including but not limited to:

• rhyming and non-rhyming adaptations of the original “HURF DURF [object] [verb taking object +er]” form (e.g. “HURF DURF DRAGON-READER”, “HURF DURF BOTTLE BREAKER”)
• syntactically incongruous puns and rhymes (”HURF DURF BUTTER VADER”, “HURF DURF DEATH EATER”)
• characterization of dismissive attitudes toward a topic (”hurf durf chauvinism!”, “HURF DURF TAROT”)
• mocking paraphrases of argumentation (”hurf durf why can’t I tell all my awesome black jokes”, “Hay guyz I hrd DAILY KOS is 2 drs dwn on da left hurf durf”)
• self-contained utterances (”Hurf durf.”)
• explicit references to weight (”hurf durf” as synonym for fat; “hurf durfer” as fat person)
• snowclone integration in fixed phrases (”To hurf durf or not to hurf durf”, “hurf minds durf alike”)

While the use of “hurf durf” or variants thereof certainly predates Metafilter’s use of it (citations have been made back to 2001 at least, and one user speculated that the fixed phrase HURF DURF BUTTER EATER itself dated to mid-90s USENET), the 2/16/05 use of “hurf durf” pre-dates any other on-site use of the rhyming-pair phrase or any variant I could find.

(There are two uses of stand-alone “derf”, however: 1/30/05, 5/17/01.  Both are notes of apology/self-deprecation.  There is also a stand-alone “durf”, 7/11/01, which I cannot make out the meaning of.  There are no earlier standalone references to “hurf”; and while a site search returns more than a dozen earlier hits for “herf”, these appear all to be either botched html [href gone bad] or references to HERF guns.)

I have used Metafilter’s on-site search functionality to examine all comments and posts between 2/16/05 and 4/15/08 in which both the strings “hurf” and “durf” appear.  I have created below an exhaustive chronological index of those posts and comments, grouping replies together and noting context, variations in the form, and other details as they struck me.

Read the rest of this entry »

In Soviet Russia, abyss looks into you!

There have been a fair handful of references by Metafilter users over the years to this Orwell quote, from his novel 1984:

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face — forever.”

Some of those references have been direct quotes, with or without irony; others have been less faithful to George. For example: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a dachsund loading a tennis ball launcher — forever.”

It has been quoted straight by mefites in reference to:

- the US gov’t spidering the web
- torture by US soldiers
- Raytheon’s pain-ray gun
- Iraq vet mistreatment
- The television show Big Brother
- Habeas Corpus
- Facebook.com
- Blackwater

The more creative reinterpretations of the phrase include, aside from the dachsund line above, these:

- imagine a clown kicking you in the nuts — forever.
- imagine a taser being used on anyone who makes a fuss — forever.
- imagine a shoe tapping on a bathroom floor - forever
- imagine a llama spitting on a human face—forever!
- imagine innovative marketing stamping on a human face—forever.
- “imagine a Cole Haan stamping on a human face - forever.” –Young Republican Intern.
- imagine a biodegradable, vegan, pleather stilletto boot stomping on a human face forever

There are also more allusive bits here and there, bringing out one bit or another of the phrase without bothering with the whole quote:

- “There’s that saying about a boot repeatedly stomping on a face, forever”
- “Talk about a boot stomping on a human face, forever.”
- “ Boot stomping on human face forever, etc. etc.”
- “(a boot stomping a face)”
- “a nice picture of a boot stomping a human face?”
- “Metafilter: a boot stomping on a human face — forever.”

And even, like some rug tying this Orwello-canine room together, “Imagine a little dachshund going around in circles in a wading pool forever”.

These are what I could glean from some searching on metafilter alone; I’m sure there’s a lot more that could be culled from some general googling, but this is proof at least of some of the snowclone-ish flexibility of Orwell’s stark caricature.