Wednesday, March 25, 2009

englishspeakersquizzz?... or wordconfusion part 1

As the reading-spell took hold of me a couple of days ago, there is no time for blogactivities. Sorry. I have some word confusion though, hope for relief, with a little help from my English speaking readers, or if there are other fellow jerks out there of course, who might have a better knowledge than I have about these nasty little expressions.
?? as follows:
What is a geek?
What does fink on somebody mean?
A doozy??
Total gridlock ... (is total confusion)
If you´re a skinny puppy you´re not a little dog, are you ...?

.... o yes, current literature is Little Brother by Cory Doctorov, hence these tricky words that are not in any dictionary. See to it that you have plenty of free time if you get the idea of reading this book, since it´s really hard to stop once you start. :-)
.... and, the headline is long becauce I feel the page needs a little more colour to it.

3 comments:

  1. geek can be a number of things depending on the time period of the book, but in current usage it is semi-synonymous with nerd... geeks/nerds are stereotypically smart, socially inept people, oftentimes off in their own weird obsessive worlds... a computer geek would be obsessed with computers and have little real interaction with other people. There is a shift now (at least where I live) where geeks/nerds are actually semi-appreciated (they certainly make more money than the rest of us) and many of them are acquiring social skills... I sometimes get called a nerd, but more often get called a nerd-chaser (by one of my friends, who is a nerd) because I tend to be attracted to these people (mostly because I like their sense of humor, it matches my own)...

    But, I have a friend who read a book called "Geek Love" that was a little different usage of geek. I guess the geeks were still the outcasts of society, but in a different way. I think, if I recall correctly, they were circus freaks (or something similar).

    "A doozy," what's the context? Usually it's something really big. "That was a doozy of a storm" was a big, overwhelming storm. "That was a doozy of a screw-up" was a big mistake. Something like that probably?

    Gridlock: I generally hear that in reference to bad traffic.

    Skinny Puppy is a band. lol. I'm not sure about that reference though. Context would really help. What's the sentence, paragraph, whatever surrounding that phrase?

    Fink on somebody? Hell if I know. What's the context? My guess would be that it is either something bad, or it is having a crush... but I would really need context to give a better guess.

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  2. You gave me a quick answer.. of course you need a context to explain properly, but words need to be used in various contexts, so I thought maybe I would get a wider explanation here.

    Well skinny puppies were used to refer to what young people are not, "we´re not jerks and skinnny puppies" it said. (I know about the band too :-))

    Doozy I got right, it probably means overwhelming, Thanx, Gridlock i can understand too, some total confusion on the internet chat-forums were created, to conceal secret messages.

    Geek though is this word I´ve seen
    examples from, here Trent Reznors twitter:

    "Spending the day twiddling around with a new /old synthesizer with no particular goal in mind. Enjoying it more than I should. Geek."

    Thanx JMM. :-)

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  3. Still not sure about skinny puppy. Sorry. :(

    Yeah, Trent kinda is a Geek. :)

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