Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/11/18/the-worlds-shortest-train.html
…
7 Likes
Technically this is not the world’s shortest train. It only has one car and is self-propelled, so it is a railcar. To be a train it requires at least two units.
Yes,my grandfather was a railwayman.
That said it is certainly very short indeed.
29 Likes
It doesn’t take a railwayman in the family, only a casual interest in etymology.
Americans generally lack that, it seems
3 Likes
That is a generalisation with which I would not wish to associate myself. People are careless with words all over the Earth.
18 Likes
Yeah, but come on. Americans keep breaking their language with abbreviations like thru, chucking Zs in everywhere, and seemingly forgetting how terms originate; for instance, every scandal is a something-gate since Watergate.
3 Likes
The uploader is Japanese though.
4 Likes
Nice, can we get back to the end of the world now?
[note: morning crankiness]
5 Likes
That’s not a bug, its a feature, and it’s not just English. It’s also exactly how Roman Latin became French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc… over a thousand years.
20 Likes
The generalization with Americans is your personal opinion, I would veer away from presenting it as a factual statement. I’m sure someone familiar with regional linguistics in other English speaking countries could come up with a trove of examples of people changing the use of words or making new ones up. Language and its rules are meant to evolve, change and be broken otherwise we’d still be talking in one of the old root languages.
The issue here is an innocent misuse of the word Train, we understand what the author meant. It’s not that big of a deal, hopefully someone learned not to make that mistake in the future.
8 Likes
…Not entirely sure if anyone in this thread is being serious, including the OP…
13 Likes
If memory serves, you’re from Australia, right? The country where it’s illegal to use a noun that hasn’t been reduced to it’s diminutive form.
12 Likes
The man walking up the sidewalk, who made a magnificent leap forward as the train passed, is the only serious(-ly awesome) one here.
8 Likes
This is what Amtrak is going to look like under the Trump/GOP budget. I guess less damage to be caused, when they derail.
2 Likes
Look! Americans are fine with the study of insects.
20 Likes
Bonus upon clickthrough - world’s shortest escalator and elevator rides.
3 Likes
That would be a self-balancing railcar (aka result of a Segway married to a train), because that thing in the video has only a single axle …
6 Likes
It’s actually how Indo-European became Sanskrit, Latin, Greek and Slavonic and doubtless others in the first place.
I know I like to post about ungrammatical use of foreign words, but in fact I’m a language realist.
2 Likes
The ashes of my grandfather say otherwise. As MacAulay rightly asks, what man would not die bravely against such mighty odds for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods?
You know this is a joke thread about a joke video, right?
Remind me again what a stubbie is in Strine?
(Incidentally those Zs are Oxford English, though pronounced Zed.)
1 Like
Just because we’d finally gotten tired of the (scandal)-dome formulation. I’m thinking that we’re due for another change, and Trump is just the man to give us a new (scandal)-xxx clone.
5 Likes
I am fully aware, but the person i responded to flippantly railing against colloquial language and making a blanket statement about Americans rubbed me the wrong way. If that’s a joke then its a poor one, and i don’t think it was. The video itself and all the other comments? Very amusing.
1 Like
