[Adjective] [noun] - film titles in the 1980s

Her Indoors was watching Basic Instinct as I drifted off to sleep yesterday, and it reminded me of something that has been bugging me for the last thirty years.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, a lot of film titles were just an adjective and a noun, it was a fashion that came and went. The cleverer ones were where you didn't know what the phrase referred to until somebody told you, or you watched the film.

Here's a list of The 68 Best '80s Movies Ever Made, according to Marie Claire. I have no idea why they chose the number 68, or why they caveat it with "... Ever Made" (clearly, they're not making "'80s movies" any more, but hey.

Their list includes:

Short Circuit
Lost Boys
Steel Magnolias
Evil Dead
Raging Bull
Full Metal Jacket (OK, that's two adjectives)
Blue Velvet
Working Girl
Weird Science
Mystic Pizza
Risky Business
Top Gun
Foot Loose (OK, that's noun-adjective, but it's my list)
Dirty Dancing

That's one fifth of the list.

Other noteables (maybe they are on the above list and I overlooked them) are:

Rude Boy (the Clash film)
Mad Max
Blue Lagoon
Red Dawn
Black Widow (the one with Debra Winger)
Fatal Attraction
Dangerous Liaisons
Legal Weapon

UK television joined in the fun too:
Cold Feet
Silent Witness

The trend continued into the 1990s and then fizzled out again:
Hot Shots
Basic Instinct
Cool Runnings
Broken Arrow
Indecent Proposal
American Beauty

Nowadays, most films are sequels or prequels or part of a series, so they end up with very long and  punctuation heavy film titles like The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2 or Deadpool: The Musical 2, or just about any Avengers film, which are all called Avengers: [brief description of plot].

A word doesn't rhyme with itself (2)

Opinions are sharply divided over whether a word rhymes with itself (it's as futile as arguing whether 1 is a prime number or not).

IMHO it does not, it is the height of laziness and defeats the whole object of poetry/rhymes. A really crass example of this is The Gambler by Kenny Rogers. OK, OK, it's taken me forty years to notice.

From azlyrics.com:

Verse one
On a warm summer's evening, on a train bound for nowhere
I met up with a gambler, we were both too tired to sleep

Verse five (or is it a chorus? There's barely a difference):
'Cause every hand's a winner, and every hand's a loser,
And the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep.

Verse six
And when he finished speakin', he turned back toward the window
Crushed out his cigarette and faded off to sleep

President Erdogan does glorious mixed metaphors.

He's the gift that keeps on giving.

From the BBC:

Mr Erdogan told a news conference in the Turkish capital, Ankara: "You [the USA] act on one side as a strategic partner, but on the other, you fire bullets into the foot of your strategic partner. We are together in Nato and then you seek to stab your strategic partner in the back."

You shoot yourself in the foot, not the other person. And clearly Trump hasn't stabbed them in the back, he has stabbed them quite openly in the face.

Buying weapons off the Russians, like Turkey has started doing is pretty sneaky, that is more akin to a stab in the back. And if he thinks he can defend the Turkish currency against a determined onslaught, he's got another think coming.

Strange words to use in the context

Via @MisanthropeGirl, from North West Georgia News:

A Floyd County farmer was killed Wednesday morning when a cow he was trying to move knocked him up against a fence, resulting in massive chest trauma. Floyd County Coroner Gene Proctor said Nathan William Parris, 72, of 2056 Cunningham Road was pronounced dead at 11:04 a.m. after reaching the Redmond Regional Medical Center emergency room.

Doesn't "knocked him up" suggest "got him "pregnant"?

Readers' Letters Of The Day

From The Metro:

Fun Online Polls: Rhymes; Bank Holidays

The results to last week-and-a-half's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

The word "seam" rhymes with... (choose all that apply)
"Beam" - 43 votes
"Seem" - 29 votes
"Seam" (the word itself) - 27 votes

Total - 46 voters

I am deeply, deeply troubled by that. Clearly "seam" rhymes with "beam" and also "seem". For example:

"Things aren't always what they seem,
It's not a joist; it is a beam"

Is surely a perfectly acceptable rhyme? Three out of 46 think it isn't.

Similarly:

"Things aren't always what they seem,
It's not a zip; it is a seam"

Is also a perfectly acceptable rhyme. Why do over a third disagree?

As to words rhyming with themselves, that is an abhorrence. I challenge the 27 out of 46 who think that "seam" rhymes with "seam" to knock up a half way decent stanza.
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Here's someone who agrees with The Stigler on the topic of bank holidays:

I’m not a Gradgrind. I don’t want to stop workers seeing daylight. I just think they should choose their own holidays, instead of politicians choosing for them. Today, all UK workers have a right to 28 days’ paid annual holiday. Nobody has an automatic right to paid leave on public holidays, but in many sectors, it is the norm...

Why can’t we choose our own holidays? Why can’t Jews or Muslims take their own holidays instead of Christian ones they don’t recognise? Why should we be funnelled into traffic jams and overcrowded airports? Why can’t we take holidays when the weather’s likely to be better, rather than when politicians dictate?

Workers of the world dis-unite! Denationalise our holidays!

I can't remember exactly what The Stigler's Killer Argument was, but I have to agree. I know what we like clinging to tradition, even if that tradition is everybody is stuck in the same traffic jam on a rainy Money, but surely common sense/liberty should prevail?

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Polls: NHS charges for queue-jumping; Rhyme and Reason

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Is it acceptable for the NHS to allow patients to pay extra to jump the queue?

Yes - 31%
No - 46%
Depends on how the extra money is spent - 23%

It seems like a fine idea to me. That extra payment (way in excess of actual cost) is "rent" and so to the extent we can't eliminate it, it might as well be the government that collects it.

DP came to exactly the opposite conclusion and thought the rent should only be collected privately. As we know, many NHS surgeons do private operations on the side, if the NHS won't let rich people pay to queue jump, NHS surgeons will just take a day off and do the operation privately. So the normal NHS waiting list stays as long as ever. If the surgeon uses an NHS operating theatre, the NHS could claim a fair chunk of the rent as, er, rent, I suppose.

The last option was a trick answer, it is nigh irrelevant because it is a futile exercise trying to match up sources of government income with particular items of expenditure. It's pretty futile for most people, as a matter of fact.

But clearly I'm in a small minority on this. Thanks to all 71 who took part.
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This week's Fun Online Poll is hair splitting (and I don't know whether there is a right or wrong answer).

"The word "seam" rhymes with...
Beam
Seem
Seam (the word itself)."

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Correct use of the word "like".

Two of these sentences are grammatically correct and are verifiable statements of fact (true/false). One is meaningless to the point of being gibberish:

1. "I am sitting in the garden."

2. "I like sitting in the garden."

3. "I am like sitting in the garden."

"Internet trolls face longer sentences"

From Revealed Tech:

Days after describing online abuse suffered by TV presenter Chloe Madeley as “crude and degrading”, Justice Secretary Chris Grayling told the Mail on Sunday that he was determined to “take a stand against a baying cyber-mob” and would allow magistrates (who can currently impose jail terms of up six months on internet trolls) to pass serious cases up to crown courts, who in turn would be able to impose maximum sentences of two years.

The world in which we live in…*

* As Paul McCartney sang in "Live and let die".

I saw this in an Argos shop window:

Something else which really annoys me...

… is the really poor grammar which the anti-smoking lobby uses.

Exhibit A


Wrong. Smoking is forbidden "on" these premises, not "in".

Exhibit B


Wrong again. "Smoking can" is white and "damage the sperm" is red, then "and" is white again, leading you to assume that this is a list of things which smoking "can" do.

In which case it should end with "decrease fertility", not "decreases fertility". Alternatively, the word "can" should be red.

Too good to Miss

From the BBC:

Calling teachers "Sir" or "Miss" is depressing, sexist and gives women in schools a lower status than their male counterparts, an academic has said.

Prof Jennifer Coates told the Times Educational Supplement "Sir is a knight... but Miss is ridiculous - it doesn't match Sir at all".

She said she had been struck by the disparity while volunteering in a secondary school. But one educationalist said being called "Miss" was a sign of respect...

I went to a boys' grammar school where nearly all the teachers were men, so we had an app for that - we simply addressed them all as "sir".

Mrs Hammond, our English teacher (who was quite lovely, actually) would occasionally rebuke somebody and ask him to address her as "Miss" or "Mrs Hammond", to which the rebukee would usually reply "Yes, Mrs Hammond, sir".

Whether this is all sexist or not I do not know, but it is one heck of a void in the English language here.

For example, if I'm in the supermarket and I want to ask a male employee - regardless of age - where something is, I address him as "sir" and he probably addresses me as "sir" as well and everybody is happy. If I'm asking a particularly young female employee, I don't mind addressing her as "miss" just for a bit of a giggle, but if she is clearly older than twenty or so, there just isn't a word at all.

"Miss" feels clearly wrong, but "madame" seems wildly inappropriate as well, so I end using neither and asking straight out, thus widening the gender gap even further - males get an honorific, females don't.
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I had a similar dilemma with a dustbin man recently. I left the house just as he was wheeling our bin back from the lorry, so I said "Thank you."

He looked baffled, so I explained "I just wanted to show a bit of appreciation for what you..."

[Awkward pause while I desperately try to guess what dustbin men call themselves this week: refuse collectors? waste disposal operatives? public health officers? At which stage I thought sod it.]

"... dustbin men do, taking away all our rubbish every week [waves hand vaguely], keeping the place tidy and all that."

"Your wish is my ,nd"

Damn and blast!

I fell at the final hurdle.

Euphemisms for "cold"

It is alleged that the Eskimos have twenty-seven different words for snow, even though that is dismissed in some quarters as an urban myth. But maybe it's an urban myth that it's an urban myth, who knows?

Either way, I usually pay a bit of attention to the weather forecast and I have the definite impression that weather forecasters are coming up with lots of new words or phrases to express the basic idea of "cold". For example, on today's Channel 4, he described the wind as "nagging" (which I thought was quite poetic). Then there are words like crisp, biting, fresh and so on, which I've heard quite a few times recently.

Another commonly used term is "below average temperature", which seems a bit politically correct, as it implies that the "real" temperature is constantly going up because of something called "global warming", so while it seems cold, that's only because there's a downward blip and actually it's much warmer than you think.

Or maybe they just do it because they get bored stupid just saying "cold" all the time, in the same way as football commentators use dozens of different euphemisms or synomyms for "ball" or "goal".

But as with all these things, I wonder whether I am imagining this or weather everybody else has noticed any cool new euphemisms for "cold" as well?

May, risks, according to, wants, less, more, would, if, could be, too much, can, can, recommended, about, said, around, estimated, could be, if, etc.

From the BBC:

Cutting back on salty foods such as bacon, bread and breakfast cereals may reduce people's risk of developing stomach cancer, according to the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF).

It wants people to eat less salt and for the content of food to be labelled more clearly. In the UK, the WCRF said one-in-seven stomach cancers would be prevented if people kept to daily guidelines. Cancer Research UK said this figure could be even higher.

Too much salt is bad for blood pressure and can lead to heart disease and stroke, but it can also cause cancer. The recommended daily limit is 6g, about a level teaspoonful, but the World Cancer Research Fund said people were eating 8.6g a day. There are around 6,000 cases of stomach cancer every year in the UK. The WCRF estimated that 14% of cases, around 800, could be avoided if everyone stuck to their 6g a day.

Strip out all the conditional and vague words, and there's not much left of that is there?

Life Copies Satire

The Onion, 19 August 1997:

At the group's annual convention Sunday, members of the National Education Association called for the formation of a nationwide coalition of parents, teachers and political leaders to address a rapidly growing problem: the alarmingly low quality of teenage suicide notes across the U.S.

In the convention's keynote address, U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley said America must renew its commitment to grammar, spelling and writing skills, calling the marked improvement of teen suicide prose "the nation's number one educational priority."

"Not three days ago I met with the parents of a young man who chose to take his own life," Riley said. "I was shocked by what I saw: a note that read simply, 'Im gonna blo my head of.' This sort of syntax is understandable coming from a first- or second-grader, but from a 17-year-old it is downright appalling," Riley said. "What do you tell the parents in a situation like that? By all outward appearances, this seemed like a normal child. The poor parents had no idea their son's writing skills were that poor."

Daily Mail, 21 June 2012:

A school has apologised after a teenage boy was asked to produce a handwritten note in a writing class which his parents thought was a suicide letter.

Wesley Walker, 14, was told by teachers to imagine he only had a few days to live through terminal illness, and to write a letter which he should then take home to his parents.

But when the schoolboy produced the handwritten note which said he wanted to 'say goodbye' before disappearing to his bedroom, his mother thought he had become suicidal.

Awesome use of mixed metaphors, platitudes, empty phrases etc

From a Guardian editorial:

Voting blue to go green was always going to require a leap of faith, and six years on from David Cameron coining that slogan it sounds a hollow ring. His government has a few worthwhile initiatives on energy saving and green investment, but these are not being pursued with any oomph.

As soon as green building regulations got branded a conservatory tax, they were meekly dropped. Another rethink is under way on airport expansion, binning the principled stance briefly taken in opposition. The chancellor has taken to cynically rousing the Tory party against "burdensome" green tape...

This is one area where the Liberal Democrats are putting up something of a fight – witness Nick Clegg's robust speech which answered George Osborne's tendency to treat green growth as an oxymoron, by pointing to the vibrancy of a green economy that's expanding at 4% a year.

The Conservative mainstream, however, is making a crude calculation – that in hard times like these, voters are little interested in the future of the planet, and will smile on politicians who downgrade such lofty matters in favour of the here and now. Labour's quietude on matters environmental suggests that it, too, believes there are few votes here.

The oddity, however, is that a steadily growing band of the voters themselves are pushing the planet centre-stage. It is still a smallish band, to be sure, but in this month's local elections the Green party advanced a little on every measure. It put forward 943 candidates, and the indications are that they chalked up a respectable average of approaching 10% in these contests.

In wards that they had fought previously, they inched forward 0.7 percentage points compared with last year, and by 1.4 points against the baseline of May 2008, the pre-recessionary moment when most of the same seats were last contested. The party picked up a handful of extra councillors to add to its total of over 130 across England and Wales, and its sister party in Scotland made parallel advances.

Cows go hi-tech

Spotted by View From The Solent at Russia Today:

A US family has been arrested with the help of a Predator drone, after a search for a missing cow did not go to plan. By “drone” we do mean military reconnaissance and assault flying machine used by the US Army and the CIA, mostly abroad...

The drone was called to the rescue when… six cows went missing in North Dakota.

Nelson County Sheriff Kelly Janke went searching for them on the Brossart family farm, armed with a warrant. Next thing he knew, he was chased off by three armed men – Alex, Thomas and Jacob Brossart. Next thing they knew – a mini army and a Predator B drone have been* called in... Once the suspects had been spotted and it was confirmed that they were not armed, police moved in and arrests were made. A property search turned up two rifles, two shotguns, assorted bows and a samurai sword, reports the Los Angeles Times.

The missing cows have been found too.

OMG, the Americans are abusing this form of the past tense as well, that should of course read "had been".

"up with"?

From The Soaraway Sun:

DOCTOR Who star Matt Smith has split up with model Daisy Lowe...

Call me old fashioned, but hasn't he split 'from' and not 'up with', in the same way as you get 'divorced from' somebody and not 'divorced up with' somebody?