First, I said that about his arguments....but I'm not saying it DOESN'T apply to the person.

Second, those are my informed opinions supported with factual evidence and etymology, not stated flatly as fact, not repeated as facts. You know that....so no, it doesn't apply.

Discussing anything with Bob is never self serving, it's a distasteful public service. Using verifiable fact to contradict nonsense proffered as fact is a civil responsibility, not an enjoyable privilege.

Keep off my pen.
This is my quill, and this is my pen. This one's for writing, and this one's for sin.

"Politically correct language is allegedly designed to solve this bullying problem and its etymological by-product. The practitioners of political correctness adopt the strategy of periodically replacing the words used as insults with new terms in an effort to avoid negative connotations imbued—or allegedly imbued—in existing terms."

I disagree with that. I don't think PC (god, I hate that term) is designed to "solve the bullying problem". It's simply to stop the normalisation of terms like "retarded".

Fry is almost certainly correct that modern ideas of the middle ages are overstating things. Certainly scholars of the time had sources available describing the earth as a sphere.

I was told the confusion stemmed from Isidore of Seville who wrote a book called the Etymologies, in Latin, to summarise the Greek books from classical antiquity. This was becoming important at a time when Greek was studied much less, and the originals were therefore inaccessible to most scholars. Anyway, in one passage of his Etymologies he described the shape of the earth as being round, like a wheel.

This probably didn't cause nearly as much confusion as people think.

Actually I think it is "Al-Jabr".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebra#Etymology

<Skip if you're not interested in semantics.>
Stating your annoyance about how people use a word and arguing the semantics of the word only contributes towards clogging up the discussion with waffle and painfully detailed point-counterpoint text-walls that everyone loses interest in immediately. I'm going to do the sensible thing and take the meaning of socialism from what the majority of socialists in the world argue for; things like state control being used to counteract the inherent ruthlessness of the free market (i.e. minimum wage, working conditions, rent controls, holidays and working hours), free education, free healthcare (both paid for by contributions from those with means), social housing or money to assist those who cannot work or find themselves out of work... without spending too much time on the close up detail of it, that's roughly what i'll take it to mean and assume you know what i mean (because that's how the word IS used now, like it or not).
<Stop skipping now>

So without getting upset about etymology, I think a reasonable argument could be made for Jesus being a socialist:
- he believed in good will to your neighbour
- he spent time helping and caring for those who were shunned by society and encouraged others to do so too
- he considered greed to be a hindrance to spiritual enlightenment and/or a corrupting influence (easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle and all that)
- he healed and tended the sick for free
- he fed the multitude rather than send them to buy food for themselves
- he argued against worshiping false gods (money for example)

If we believe the stories.

I also think that a good argument could be made for Jesus not being a socialist. You haven't made one, but one could be made.

Marx is open to interpretation, so you're going to have to make your point about his quote clearer. I could take it to mean 4 or 5 different and opposing things.

I dislike this woman and I hope she impales her face on a set of golden antlers.

The etymology of racial slurs can be an amusing topic. Jigaboo, for example, comes from a bantu word for keeping your head bowed, implying servility. Nignog, a british classic, was originally nigmenog, which had no racial connotation and just meant a foolish person until some racists came along and said, 'hello, I know what that word sounds like', and appropriated it for their silly purposes.

There is something innately fascinating in finding technical, biological and economical explanations of historical developments, and it's definitely so much more satisfying than having to resort to nationalism, racism, or religion to explain one region or another's successes.

The risk, I guess, in treating human history as a set of engineering problems, is that the human mind is so attuned to finding cause and effect that it might make us a little blind to situations where the answer is actually more blind chance than anything else.

One of my favorite of these explanations is when China's 'failure' to colonize the world is attributed to the success of porcelain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0OhXxx7cQg

It seems almost too neat to be true - like the false etymology of Marie est malade - so does anyone know if there are scholars who poke holes in the Porcelain vs Glass explanation?

Edit: Improving my googling shows that this explanation remains reasonable but still also involves a bit of blind historical chance. Colored glass was available in ancient Greece, and the Romans and Egyptians used manganese oxide to decolor it, which led to transparent glass and the basis for lens-grinding... that decolorization process apparently didn't pass on to China or wasn't valued by their culture, perhaps due to the clear competitive advantages of porcelain.

I was surprised to hear John Oliver discussing the "Get Rid of the Penny" topic in the USA, not because the subject is uninteresting, but because he failed to point out the glaring anachronism that Americans still call their one cent coin a "penny".

Do they not realise that they started a revolution in 1765, declared independence in 1776, and started making one cent coins in 1793?

Why do they still call cents pennies? After more than 200 years, I would have thought that even the most parochial or remote American would have heard the news.

The Canadians aren't much better. The penny finally dropped there in 2012, when they stopped minting one cent coins. The first Canadian one cent coin was struck in 1858. One strange quirk is that the word penny in Canada used to refer to a two-cent coin, even though they never issued any 2 cent coins! It is possible they were referring to US 2-cent coins, which were issued from 1864 to 1873, but more likely because a French sous was worth approximately half a (British) penny, therefore a two sous coin was the near equivalent of a penny.

In Euroland, the Irish recently started to phase out the use of one and two cent coins, but most of their discussions were also about dropping the penny!

One solution could be to emulate Zimbabwe, where high inflation means that one US dollar is worth about 360 Zimbabwe dollars, or about 520 to a British pound. This neatly avoids the need for any fractional denominations.

Talking about fractional coins:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/lawrence_chard/7145393421/

...which also reveals a surprising etymological link between coins and anatomy, as does this:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/lawrence_chard/6390568191/

Perhaps the guy he mentioned getting a cent stuck in his anus was going for the closest alternative.

The river dance joke is eerily close to the etymology of "Sabotage"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabotage#Etymology

I thought I knew the etymology behind the word, but I guess not.
I call everyone dude, including my romantic partners of the opposite sex.

I spend a not inconsiderable amount of time trying to convince people to pronounce my name "Raif" instead of "Ralf" (Spelt Ralph...). It's made worse because I have never been able to find an explanation as to why there is an old English tradition of pronouncing it this way. The etymology of the name is no help, I can only assume that somebody mistook an l for i at some point and it stuck. Which is stupid. Not as stupid as "Ralf" sounds to me though, even if it makes more sense.

Oh yeah, English is a total mongrel language. It happily steals words from other languages all the time. It's one of the reasons it's so versatile (and complex).

Arkansas, for example, is not an English word; it's a French pronunciation of a Sioux word!

The Krankenwagen takes you to the Krankenhaus because you are krank. Simple and logical.
"The ambulance takes you to the hospital because you are sick" on the other hand... now that you should not like the sound of. With a little etymological magic this becomes:
The walker takes you to the guesthouse because you are sick.
That's just silly.

@ChaosEngine There are even more words for fluffy, but I heard the english language doesn't have a word for the happyness you feel when a person you dislike encounters a little misfortune or the place you send your kids to before they are old enough for school.

Far from being a "non-word", orientate is common usage in British English. Orient/orientate is one of those words where users of each form tend to regard their own as correct, and grumble about users of the "incorrect" form, but like so many such terms, both are correct. Orientate has been in use since the mid-19th century, according to Etymology Online.

As for aesthetic appeal, that doesn't really have any bearing on whether or not something is a word. You may not like it, but that's just a question of taste and context. It only sounds clumsy to those who don't live in places where it's commonly used; I'd be pretty confident in saying that "I oriented myself" sounds just as odd to a BE speaker as "I orientated myself" does to an AE speaker.