Hunting the Great White Snark
Posted on January 4, 2004 @ 7:56 am
The Snark Hunt is back at Electric Venom, and this post in which I describe one of my blogging pet peeves made the cut. Be sure to check out the rest of the list for more snarky fun.
Also, I wanted to let everyone know about BlogMadness 2003, described by its hosts as “a contest where bloggers enter their best or favorite entries of 2003, and those entries are tossed into a tournament bracket (a la ‘March Madness’) and everyone votes on the matches until a winning entry is crowned.” Just for kicks, I’ve entered my Masked Fisherman entry into the running. We’ll see how well it fares against the competition when voting starts later in the month. I believe the deadline is January 21 if you want to add your own entry into the fray.
Posted by Jess | Filed Under Web Slinging |
4 comments so far...
Leave a Comment
If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.
I believe “suped-up” is the correct way to spell it, since you’re relating to something super or superior in likeness. Just thought I’d throw that at there since you’re submitting an official entry. I can’t believe I started regularly checking your weblog…I think that makes me even more pathetic than you and your weblogging friends.
Welcome to Patheticville, population us.
Anyway, when I wrote the entry, I checked Dictionary.com, and they seem to suggest that it’s actually “souped-up” (which Google also confirms as being more common than “suped-up”). It seemed odd to me, too, but I guess it’s right. Perhaps the phrase didn’t emerge as a way to describe something super or superior in likeness, but rather to describe something that’s laden with soup.
I guess that puts me in my place. Serves me right for relying on my sketchy English background from community college and party-school Radford U. It makes more sense to me now that I think about it; it probably came from creative cooking ideas for making soups: “Let’s soup-up those vegetables!”, or, “Let’s soup-up those tomatoes!” How about, “I think that cream of celery needs some souping-up.” You get the idea. I don’t know what I was thinking with the idea of super being the root or whatever. I’ll try to stick with things I have a clue about from now on. Anyway, thanks for berating me.
I found this interesting that this is the only discussion of the “souped up” vs. “suped up” usage I could find on Google.
For years I had assumed a “souped-up” car was one that was modified to go fast, and thus should probably actually be “suped-up” as to suggest the car is super-fied.
However, I’ve never seen “suped-up” used in credible writing, so I was curious as to how such a obvious error could go about being used for so long.
An entry on urbandictionary.com suggests that “souped-up” was coined in the 50s to describe a car that was modified from racing, constructed from a myriad of parts, much as my famous noodle soup contains just about every leftover I can find in my fridge.
This makes enough sense to me, you know how you gotta trust the credibility of wiki projects afterall, and I’m going to stop calling rice boys are idiots for claiming their cars are more chowder-y than mine.