Home Messages Index
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Author IndexDate IndexThread Index

Re: [News] Novell Pulls Cheeky/Dirty Tricks in Red Hat's Summit

Verily I say unto thee, that The Ghost In The Machine spake thusly:
> In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Andrew Halliwell <spike1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
> wrote on Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:00:48 +0100 
> <g847j5-sr2.ln1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

>> Well over 'ere, it's quit likely to be prononced sod off. :)
> 
> Are we talking adjective or imperative here? ;-)

The latter.

Without doing any research, my guess (and what I've always assumed) is
that sod is meant as a contraction of sodomise, as in "sodomise off",
which TBH doesn't actually make any more linguistic sense than "f*ck
off". The implication is, of course, "go away", but quite what the
correlation between having sex and going away is, I'm not too sure.

Another odd phrase whose etymology is shrouded in mystery is "taking the
piss" (ridiculing; exaggerating or exploiting, depending on context),
which may or may not be cockney rhyming slang pertaining to one Michael
Bliss (unknown). See also "taking the Mickey", or the even more
confusing protraction "extracting the Michael". Wiki-P further suggests
that this phrase may originate from the concept of stand-up comedians
"taking the mike" to subsequently tell jokes that mainly ridicule
others. Perhaps the aforementioned Mr. Bliss was one such comedian.

If only we'd had the benefit of Wiki-P back in the 30s, perhaps the
provenance of such phrases wouldn't be so mysterious.

-- 
K.
http://slated.org

.----
| "Stallman has frequently pointed out, Free Software is by no means
| antithetical to making money: it's just a question of how you make
| money." ~ Glyn Moody: http://tinyurl.com/4wn2l2 (ComputerworldUK)
`----

Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.23.8-63.fc8
 23:16:19 up 186 days, 19:51,  3 users,  load average: 0.17, 0.16, 0.13

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Author IndexDate IndexThread Index