(With apologies to Flaubert.)
< ...>: A form of emphasis employed by bloggers who wish to show that they understand HTML. The ellipses are usually replaced by “SARCASM” or “RANT” but anything will serve. Rendered as […][/…] by bloggers who do not understand how to escape characters in HTML.
â„¢: May be appended to anything except an actual trademark.
call your office: A directive not intended to be followed addressed to someone who will never read it.
cool kids: Other people.
crickets chirping: A colorful synonym for “silence.” Often set off in its own paragraph for extra color.
even the: Always succeeded by “liberal,” if you are conservative, or “conservative,” if you are liberal.
fascist: See idiotarian.
heh: The soul of brevity is to use one word where none will do.
idiotarian: A particularly dull-witted commentator, and thus deserving of special attention, who disagrees with you. Thunder against.
indeed: See heh.
literally: Figuratively.
meme: Anything that anyone else has ever referred to on the Internet.
read the whole thing: Always preceded by “As they say,” or “To coin a phrase.”
shocked: Always succeeded by (shocked!).
the “Q” word: Quixotic.
Actually, I use the square brackets because I am too lazy to type out the escape characters. Also, a lot of php blogging and messageboard programs use square brackets for formatting code instead of the pointy brackets. Which have a name that I can’t remember right now, because I am too lazy.
How about:
open thread – I can’t think of anything original to blog, so you guys go ahead and engage in a flamewar with each other.
Not bad, but so far as I can tell it’s Tacitus’ particular specialty.
When you say "thunder against", do you mean against people designated as idiotarians or against the word "idiotarian" itself? Cos I prefer the latter option there.
James: "Thunder against" is Barzun’s translation of Flaubert’s frequent injunction "tonner contre" from The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas. As to your choices, I don’t actually mean either.
Heh.
Daily Kos does the open thread thing, too.
Personally, when I use the word "shocked" it is always *preceded* by the word "shocked."
I thought it was "shocked, simply shocked" –it’s the "simply" that’s always puzzling.