Thetownend.com

Is a word I have definitely said during my 30 years on this planet, but until I wrote an email to a friend of mine a minute ago, I don't think I had ever written it in all of my days.

2008, the year of discovery.....

and it means?

aficionado
noun [C] plural aficionados FORMAL
someone who is very interested in and enthusiastic about a particular subject:


interesting word

I have a friend who started watching the Mighty Boosh about two weeks ago and now he acts like he's some kind of expert on the series, banging on about it.  So aficionado was a very apt word to use.  I've now used aficionado 8 times in my life.

Brilliant.  Still haven't handwritten it yet, saving that for a special occasion.

how do you pronounce it?

i'm going to try and put that into a conversation today to sound cleverish, sort of!!!!!!  :soapy tit wank:

 If you follow JA's advice and use it as an adjective, you wont sound at all clever.

Ah-fish-on-ah-doh

 :oops:

I do wish I had a better knowledge of the English language, verb, noun, adjective wise.  Can't remember any of that kind of thing from school.

 8)

 I've a  GCE "O" Level in Latin....although uncertain at the time why the fuck I was doing it, it does give a later insight into the structure of language.

 Although I still have the odd nightmare aboiut the future pluperfect and dative and ablative case,

I too have a Latin GCSE Reg, I still regularly have nightmares about present past participles.

Ahh but what you have to remember is that when Reg was at school latin was still the official spoken tongue of this septic Isle.

See all that past this and future that is like a foreign language to (no pun intended), which is a bit embarrassing to say the least.

It probably was of the Catholic church.  They used to do Mass in latin until a few years ago didn't they (1970's?).

When Reg was at school they probably taught him grammar and sentence construction, something that was missing entirely from my English education. I learnt more from reading books than I did from English teachers.

   What is known as "parsing"  Defined thus:

   Parsing involves the procedure of bringing basic morphosyntactic categories into high-level syntactic relationships with one another.

AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

 In cyber space, no-one can hear you scream.

in my living room i can hear me scream.

 Are you sure its not you feel yourself scream, as the vibrations in your larynx, must be resonating internally at the same time as vibrations are being received on your ear drum....

I think you do pretty well really Jock, considering it's not your first language.

But the sound waves hit the walls and furniture and bounce back and then i hear them.

 Are you sure this isn't  an example of Huygens/ Fresnel interference principle?
 
   Go on scream....lets get empirical.  Where do you hear it?

Good question, but isn't Huygen's principle based on light wave - or does it work for sound too?

  Acoustic diffraction modelling .... :shrug:

i assume wave interference occurs with all types of waves. In this case it would depend on the specifics and whether the waves cause constructive or destructive interference once reflected.

meh, where's the wine gone.

this thread is boring as heck  :)

i can't hear you.

 Nor can I......ear wax blockage.

 Some years ago I read an anthropology book, that argued a bona fide way of distinguishing separate homo sapiens groups, was on the basis of different ear wax....this theory suggested there were 6 separate groups of homo sapiens ....viz   (a) Australoid; (b) Caucasoid; (c) Mongoloid; (d) Negroid  (e) New Guinean pygmies (f) African pygmies.

 This now appears to be a wholly outdated and racist view, although thisis seeems to provide some evidence for (c)

I don't think it's racist to say there are differences between people - you're not saying one is inferior to the other - just very slightly different.

  I think anti racist would suggest that the idea of trying to find differences where none exist was racist.

i'm sure they would - and i'm not sure why anyone would search for one but that doesn't make the fact itself racist - only the people that would seek to use it in a derogatory form (if it existed etc)

   Its an interesting argument, and I haven't  read extensively on anthropology for some time....but I do know the Zamzubu of Madagascar have distinctive low hanging fruit.

not those old chestnuts again.

   More like gnarled pickled chillis.