Via AskMe:

Drama penguin of the day: I am infatuating a work colleague of mine badly and I am looking for resources to understand the nature of my infatuation to get over it.

Emphasis mine. Now what the hell is a drama penguin? I’m pretty sure it’s not this or this; nearly all the hits for “drama penguin” on google are actually related to dramas published by Penguin in some way.

And the way folks introduce questions on AskMe makes it unclear even what role “drama penguin” is supposed to play here: is the penguin the poster? Is the penguin the question? Is it perhaps a general characterization of the overall arc of a relationship-advice thread? Does “penguin” have something to do with the anonymity of the question? Is it some odd misspelling of something more plausible?

I am boggled. And very curious.

People ask a lot of questions over at Ask Metafilter. And some of those questions are about the bathroom: about why people talk in there, why they flush things, how to not die of bathroom poisoning, and so on.

Really, there are a whole dang lot of these questions. I’ve rounded a few of them up, with a general focus on the intersection between restrooms and etiquette and grouped roughly by topic. Links after the dump jump.

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Got a nice note in the mail from a fellow mefite this morning:

Hi Josh,
You wrote this last night, “tim, the folks who are pointing out that posting a metatalk thread to tell us we can email you is weird are right. ” and I just thought it was a supercool example of a deeply embedded clause construction (esp. with verbs, modals and even a quasi-modal I think).
-K

Yep. Neat, and utterly accidental on my part; I wasn’t trying to be structurally clever at the time at all. Language is awesome.

Inspired by this Language Log post discussing what Mark Liberman describes as “a nice negative specimen of the phrasal template ‘What happens in X stays in X‘” [see also this 2004 roundup from Tenser, said the Tensor], I’ve spent a little time searching the Metafilter archives for applications on the site of what I’ve found myself thinking of as “the Vegas snowclone”.

I came up with a healthy crop of results spanning from very late 2003 on up to the present, most of which fall roughly into one (or more, but I’m keeping it simple) of a few loose semantic and structural categories as seen below.

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One photograph a day for eighteen years.

Via metafilter.

Quick pointer to another language question on Ask Metafilter, this one from use whatzit.  The meat:

For example, “Yes, I am” is okay. “Yes, I’m” is not. I haven’t been able to find any good logic for this case or that works for the different contractions in general (”don’t” can also stand alone, “I’d” and “I’ve” cannot).

Interesting question about grandpaternal nicknames on Ask Metafilter today, from user 23skidoo:

Do you call your grandfather Bumpy?

How common is the title “Bumpy” for a grandfather? Like “Grampa Joe” or “Peepaw Frank”… do you say/understand the usage “Bumpy Jackson” for a grandfather? If so, where did you grow up?

Responses so far have folks who’ve never heard of it (I’m in that camp), folks who have, and folks who know some similar variation.  I’ve done a little googling that suggests that (1) it’s not something restricted to some chance acquaintences of 23skidoo, and (2) there are probably a lot of other variations on this theme, e.g. “bumpa”.

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.

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?

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