Battle Viscosity sounds like a phrase that the unix console would output while compiling

[cimorene]

1. personality so big it seemed impossible for it to be snubbed out,



2. The school had gratuitously allowed the Metalhead to graduate,



3. the singer whaling into the microphone,



4. he had free reign to annoy his friends all day,



5. Steve’s viscous battle

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

No. 1 might almost be a play on words.

[cimorene]

Right? It should be part of a poem!

[redthedragon]

wait, what's 4? i thought the expression was free reign, like, free rule/no rule of law on them. is it free rein?

[cimorene]

Yup, it's about horseriding: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/usage-free-rein-vs-free-reign

[redthedragon]

Neat, fun to learn something from one of these posts XD

> "Free reign" might sound impressive to you but not to your editor or teacher.
this line from the Merriam-Webster page is cracking me up because if memory serves I used to get corrected from "free rein" to "free reign" by my high school english teachers, actually XD i'm inheriting errors from my education, how terrible

[stranger]

I could actually see both 1. and 2. as deliberate comments, one about a personality not susceptible to snubs, and one about how remarkably, um, unexpected Meathead's gratuitous graduation is. "Free reign" however, makes for a long-standing mental sigh, since it's so *almost* reasonable, but not quite; a free rein, and the consequences thereof, is much more concretely understandable, even if one has only a vague idea what a horse is.

There's perhaps more inaccurate-substitute-word comedy now, since spellcheck weeds out the not-a-word strings. Well, sometimes. By the time I've told spellcheck to skip proper names, SF terms, British idioms, non-English phrases, regionalisms and broken-word speech fragments, I'm surprised it bothers to catch any actual mis-spellings.

Then I think about how irregular and generally ridiculous English is, especially about spelling, and wonder why I'm attached to traditionally correct usage instead of progressively welcoming logical re-visioning of the language.

[cimorene]

Well, I don't think our attitudes to eggcorns make that much difference to them! They arise naturally from the way people's brains work, and in some cases the language evolves naturally. Apparently the first examples of "free reign" go all the way back to the 19th century; perhaps it will rise to equal popularity in time and the usage advice will change.

Language is a tool for communication and in plenty of contexts the only important thing is getting one's message across, so errors are irrelevant. And in plenty of other contexts - like, dialects and registers - the rules of so-called standard usage are pointless pedantry. It's not just that the written medium is more standardized than the spoken, though; it's also that even when it actually doesn't matter at all from context, sometimes unintentional eggcorns (and misplaced modifiers and simple homophone and near-homophone confusions and spoonerisms...) are just funny - in fact sometimes ambiguous grammar makes phrases accidentally funny even when they're not incorrect, and there's nothing wrong with any of that.

[krait]

I'm with you on "free reign." The point of reigning is that you're already free. :D Whereas a horse on a rein is restrained, unless one specifies that the rein is not being applied.

[krait]

#3 immediately made me imagine some kind of concert that involves someone enthusiastically mimicking whalesong into a microphone. No idea what genre that'd be, but I'd probably attend! :D

[cimorene]

Same. I pictured Dory in Finding Nemo (with sad overtones about a once-favorite movie being ruined by Ellen Degeneres doubling down on being 'friends' with GWB and Pixar by the endemic sexual harrassment and misogyny revelations).

[ealgylden]

I see #5 and other viscous variations constantly; in a canon that has large amounts of viscosity vis-a-vis tentacles and things, it's frustrating but probably not surprising. The one that grinds my gears is "interdenominational monsters." Repeatedly! If it were one author's tic, okay, but no! I have sometimes chuckled at the "no beta we die like [x]" tags, but seriously, kids, maybe get a beta.

[cimorene]

Yeah, I see viscous in a lot of fandoms tbh. It's a losing battle. At least it's funny?

As for the beta issue... it's infuriating to me, but I can't deny that the cultural norms have changed. Looking at a broad cross section of the pairings and fandoms I've read lately, anyone would correctly conclude that no beta is simply standard procedure there. You'd definitely have to read for more than a few weeks before you encountered the slightest hint that beta reading was more than a rare and unnecessary accessory.