(urth) posting conventions (was GW and CP)

Maru Dubshinki marudubshinki at gmail.com
Tue Jun 21 15:03:03 PDT 2005


On 6/21/05, David Kirby <dbkirby at pressroom.com> wrote:
...
> Maru (and Jeff Wilson) called me on the top- vs. bottom-posting claim
> I made, and they are both absolutely correct. *PLEASE* bottom post
> rather than top post! ("Interleaving" is better than either -- the one
> thing I got correct in my rant!) I don't know how my brain's synapses
> managed to flip top- and bottom-, but they did. As authors say in
> their "thanks to others" acknowledgments, I take full responsibility
> for the mistakes made by my synapses.
> 
> I used to be an anime fan, some 20 years ago when I knew others who
> were anime fans. I obviously haven't seen much recently. My loss.
> 
> On an unrelated but Wolfeian note: Do "chastise" and "chaste" share a
> common root? I can think of a number of jokes if they do. The only hint
> of such a connection that my _Random House Unabridged Dictionary_
> (2d ed.) provides is this under "chastise": "3. _Archaic._ to restrain;
> chasten. 4. _Archaic._ to refine, purify." Otherwise, the dictionary
> traces "chastise" to Middle English and "chaste" to Middle English by
> way of Old French by way of Latin. I haven't a clue.
> 
> Thanks for letting my abase myself!
> 
>        -- David

I would never interfere in someone's posessions abasing themselves.
But fortunately, I, for my graduation, received a copy of the OED, and
I find that the chaste/chastise is apparently a fairly interesting bit
of philology; chaste, it is fairly sure, comes from the Old French (no
mention of Latin tho'), but chastise is completely different:
"An equivalent of the earlier CHASTE and CHASTY, the formation of
which is not easily accounted for. There is no recorded medieval Latin
"castizare", French "chastiser", and no Old French "chastir",
"chastiss-", the usual source of "-ise" and "-ize" in English verbs;
the word is too early to have been a simple English formation from
CHASTE a. + "-ise". The stress was originally alwyas on the first
syllable, is generally so with Shakespeare (7 times vs. 2)"....

~Maru
All your abase are belong to us



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