Sunday, August 23, 2026

Wishing Someone Dead

There's a lot of anger out there.  We've got a leader who likes to stoke up rage.  But it doesn't end with him, even if it often starts there.  A lot of people probably look around and wish whole swathes of others would just drop dead.

I'm not pretending I never do it either.  I've got my own list of people who sure seem to be wasting oxygen.

Only…there's a couple of problems with that.  One is the old chestnut about if wishes were horses, we'd be swimming in horse poop.  (Or something like that.)  Wishing is a waste of time.  Since you need to use oxygen while you're going about it, maybe don't go about it in the first place.  Do something constructive.

The second is that, look, there are terrible people out there.  Some will probably never change course.

And yet, once they die…that's it.  They're done.  Too late.  Finished.

No chance at redemption.  No possibility of ever stopping the harming they've done and starting to help instead.  Never again.

That's a worse waste than any oxygen.

And it's not a fate I'd wish on anyone.

Saturday, August 1, 2026

An English Slang Word since the 1700s


I found the term in Eric Partridge's A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 1984, p. 1268.  My own native language, a slang usage that's been in it for up to 300 years, and I hadn't known it.

Lo and behold, Wiktionary has it, too, the second definition:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/trump#Verb_2

Dictionary.com also has it, buried down in the results; search/find in page for "slang":

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/trump

Amazing, isn't it?