Humor will not be tolerated!! -Portia

Hear hear! The editors definitely put a lot of work into this, and deserve major props.

It's very exciting for current writers, too. I love getting to see all these answers from writers I used to know! (And from even further back, too, from the writers I got to read when I first started reading the Board.) Uffish, you are more than welcome to share all the opinions you like. You have e...

Yarjka wrote:My wife's family has a German pancake recipe that has been used for several generations with the name 'hootenanny'. It's fun to tell people that we will be having a hootenanny with lots of syrup!

My mom made us hootenanny growing up, too, though I'm not sure where she got it from.

Katya wrote:erg - An area of shifting dunes in the Sahara.

I always think of Dune when I see erg used in the desert sense. (Actually, that may be the only time I've seen it used in the desert sense...)

luthier - someone who makes lutes

Weird. I was on Amazon looking for some khaki iron-on patches and among the used listings for one set of two 5"x5" patches, which mostly ranged from $1.07 + $4.50 S&H to $3.68 + $0.00 S&H, there's this one merchant called "Stuff4" selling the two-pack of 5"x5" ...

I just finished The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. Really, really liked it. It was slow and steady but still interesting, and I liked the pacing and the themes and the style. Looking on Goodreads, many of my friends and other reviewers really hated it. That surprised me. Anyone else read it? What did...

Oh, one other thing that was kind of ridiculous about the 4-person apartments (besides storage space): at least when I was there, they still had 2 refrigerators (just like the 6-person apartments). Some of my friends just unplugged one to save a little on electricity. We never got around to that, wh...

So my work computer got a Trojan. Totally freaked the heck out of me, because it's this one and I was like, BUT I'M INNOCENT!!!!! And then I was like, wait... Glad you realized that. :) From what I hear, that scam has been getting more and more common lately, and it's just such a scummy thing for t...

Does anyone know if the 6 person apartments are the same size as the 4 person apt at campus plaza? Yes, they are. You're three to a bedroom in the 6-person apartments. I was very happy to be in a 4-person apartment when I was there. :) Though, since the 4-person apartments were still designed with ...

It's probably good for freshmen to encounter those stairs as early as possible. Survival of the fittest and all that. (Even better if they have to dash up them between classes to get from the Smith Fieldhouse to, say, the law building.) Because BYU has so many freshman weightlifting law students? ;...

Related: I was listening to NPR the other day and the segment from the BBC came on, and I noticed that one of the (obviously British) journalists used the word "issue" several times, but pronounced it /s/ instead of /ʃ/ ("sh"). I didn't realize that they said that differently tha...

It's probably good for freshmen to encounter those stairs as early as possible. Survival of the fittest and all that. (Even better if they have to dash up them between classes to get from the Smith Fieldhouse to, say, the law building.)

The whole colored jeans trend has really not caught on in the (Midwestern) city where I live. I've heard about how they're such a hot trend everywhere else, and my sisters-in-law almost convinced me to buy a pair over Christmas, but...it's just not a thing here. Everyone wears skinnies, but even th...

It really bugs me when people who have taken a physics class once or maybe watched a PBS special about thermodynamics go on and on about what they think entropy is (and they are completely wrong) and then talk about how "the atonement overcomes entropy." Really? Wow. I've never heard that...

The book that decisively converted me to descriptivism was David Crystal's "The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left" (originally recommended to me by Katya). It's a funny, informative book.

http://theboard.byu.edu/questions/70936/ The Baby Name Wizard's NameVoyager has another great way to visualize the data presented by LJ. The graphs change as you start typing in the name, so you can just type in the first letter to see how the popularity of that letter for names has changed over ti...

Does it make me a horrible person if someone's facebook status about their wife's birth complications only makes me think "They named their kid Cumorah? Haha. Well, for what it's worth, Cumorah doesn't show up even once in the baby name data I downloaded, so that means there's never been a yea...

So, going way back to before the polygamy discussion... All through my 20s and into my early 30s, I would have assumed that I would quit my job and stay home if I ever got married, but recently I realized that I really enjoy working and I don't want to give that up. So, I guess I'm looking for a sta...

Thanks guys! Sorry for raining on your parade...