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I think the record for reuses of a modern composition is probably John Murphy's Sunshine Adagio in D Minor; check out the list. You'd think they'd just hire Rank 1 and get it over with.

Wikipedia gives four citations for the 'whip-cracker' etymology : Smitherman, Dr. Geneva (2000), Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner, Houghton Mifflin Books, 100 pp. Herbst, Philip H (1997), The Color of Words: An Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Ethnic Bias in the United State...

Also worth adding to the list: Edward Shearmur's K-PAX soundtrack. Somehow a movie about a guy who goes crazy and thinks he's from another world and has worked out the orbital mechanics for it seems fitting for conworlding.

Apes saní veshekhíes, venes dútessos, mí atshovifa íé asitha alzessoníha vizé kai. Imralú... dí? apes s-a-ní vesh-ekhí-es, venes dút-ess-os, mí atshov-if-a íé a-sith-a alzess-o-ní-ha v-izé kai. Imral-ú... dí? within 1-SG.F.LOC-ADJ being-process-LOC.N.SG under sorrow-echo-LOC.M.SG a day-ARCHAIC_NOM-...

Well, the phylogeny still holds true for a few very well-conserved genes—well enough at least to build the taxonomic tree—but not all of the core genes agree with each other on some details. Most of the diversity doesn't result in appreciable structural similarities, though—many bacteria are just ro...

A lot of people don't realise that 'cracker' comes from 'whip-cracker', so it loses some strength by that alone. It's easy to misread it as meaning 'saltine' because of the long-standing white-bread stereotype: maximally bland (and starchy.)

I'm not mixing Linnaean and cladistic systems—I'm comparing them. As someone who works primarily with prokaryotes I'm naturally inclined to regard Carl Linnaeus a non-Avian member of Dinosauria , as it were, due to the hilariously high amount of horizontal gene transfer that's made most phylogenetic...

Nesescosac wrote:

KathAveara wrote:

Rhetorica wrote:Favourite game: Uru

Yay! There are others around!

Meh, I prefer Chipaya.

Cheeky. Seriously, though, the later Myst games are glorious and impossible to overrate.

Writing English essays is dull, and not at all enjoyable at 22:00, but, if you have to, do it while listening to the Inception soundtrack. (And finish it off with the Chariots of Fire theme.) Hmmm, the Inception soundtrack... Me takes note of it. It was something new (usually I listen to the Moon s...

Interestingly, 'English' and 'British' are generally not interchangeable, and you can probably guess with a high degree of accuracy which a person living in England would pick. Someone whose family has lived in England for numerous generations will likely identify as 'English', whereas a person who...

Imralu wrote:Na i sehenu hu cem na zeua si ka olaz.
I'm really sad and I don't know who to tell.

Trúhinzé, sei olíes viteia.
see-3.SG.PRES.IMP, 1-N.PL.NOM be-1.PL.PRES
Well, we're here.

All-time favourite (I'm sure it's already been posted, but still): Foot Heads Arms Body, after Michael Foot got involved in nuclear disarmament.

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Lilitika: shúkhristíu, /ʃuːxɹɪstiːʌ/, wind-hair-pen. (Yes, I know, the phonology is boring. I'm working on a new one.)

Next: prescriptivism.

This is what I get for reading history of science papers for too damn long. ("paraphiletic with" doesn't mean anything; a group is just "paraphiletic", or it isn't) Not quite—a parent group is paraphyletic with respect to the monophyletic groups that have been removed from it. Try Googling the phras...

What Legion said. You don't stop being part of your grandmother's family because you have a family of your own. A taxon is not a lineage, nor is it a family. Birds aren't dinosaurs, even though they evolved from them, and you are not a fish, even though you evolved from an aquatic vertebrate genera...

Drydic wrote:You're saying birds aren't dinosaurs even though birds are dinosaurs.

Birds are paraphyletic with dinosaurs Dinosaurs are paraphyletic with birds; birds are not actually dinosaurs. According to your logic, humans are a kind of fish.

I've been able to get up to 850 or so, but I think that was mostly dumb luck. Damn you, Hausa.

hwhatting wrote:

Rhetorica wrote:merde de vachê is

Merde de quoi?

I could've sworn there was a circumflex there... sigh. I guess my third-grade French teacher was Belgian or something.

ol bofosh wrote:Right, bullshit. Which isn't French.

No, in French you say foutaise or connerie, although merde de vachê is gaining some traction (unlike merde de taureau, which remains the sole purview of fancy-talkin' Americans.)

http://records.l5.ca/misc/alphabet-difficulty.png Ilú noví litshai il aporafebektíe, saraví títina tshentúekhíenú ílizé kai. like other element-PL-S.N.NOM of alien_language-make-RESULT-S.N.Ø, refined letter-set-S.F.NOM postwork-ACTION_OF-S.N want-3S.PRES GNO. Like other aspects of language creation...