DIALECT AND WORD MEANINGS

[Stanley]

I am not going to dig a hole in the front garden!

[Tripps]

A good day with words today.

i've manged, with little effort, to get 'extant' and 'tergiversation' into the same post.

Also a very subtle pun on the word 'stroke' So subtle it's almost unnoticeable, and needs pointing out.

[Tizer]

i've manged, with little effort, to get 'extant' and 'tergiversation' into the same post.

The Cambridge Online dictionary defines tergiversation as: the act of making statements that are different from each other, so that they cannot both be true. That sounds like Trump to me - the world's biggest `tergiversator'. He'd be proud to hear that!

[Tripps]

We've mentioned it several times on this board. Usually we use it in the sense of

1. to change sides or loyalties; apostatize

Perhaps the mosty famous tergiversator was the MP for Oldham in 1901 Winston Churchill who was both a Liberal and a Conservative during his career.

[Stanley]

And it was a quote from him that alerted me to the fact that the word tergiversation existed.
I went looking for the quote but when I asked Google AI about it it said he never used the word. Next to that response was a quotation from his book 'My Early Life' in which he uses the word but in connection with mathematics. Once again we find an instance where AI is wrong.

[Tripps]

And it was a quote from him that alerted me to the fact that the word tergiversation existed.

I read a quote from Churchill putting down Islam. It all seemed a bit too good to be true, and convenient for the person posting. Since I believe many of the quotes ascribed to him (and Einstein) are apochryphal I bought the book from which it is said to have originated. It is over 300 pages and has no index!

The River War

I haven't found the quote, but it may be in there. It's not an easy read, and I would not recommend it. How on earth did he write such a quantity of text without a word processor?

The (half hearted) quest continues.

[Stanley]

I did a similar thing at one time David. I forget what I was looking for but I never found it. Here's the proof Churchill used the word....
“I had a feeling once about Mathematics, that I saw it all—Depth beyond depth was revealed to me—the Byss and the Abyss. I saw, as one might see the transit of Venus—or even the Lord Mayor’s Show, a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly how it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable: and how the one step involved all the others. It was like politics. But it was after dinner and I let it go! The practical point is that if this aged, weary-souled Civil Service Commissioner had not asked this particular question about these Cosines or Tangents in their squared or even cubed condition, which I happened to have learned scarcely a week before, not one of the subsequent chapters of this book would ever have been written. I might have gone into the Church and preached orthodox sermons in a spirit of audacious contradiction to the age. I might have gone into the City and made a fortune.”
—WSC, My Early Life, 1930
As to his output. As I remember it the key elements were a stand-up desk and an iron routine of a set number of hours per day spent writing.

[Tripps]

I think this is the first time (yesterday) that I ever heard this
-
"They couldn't organise a bun fight in a bakery"

I like it more than the usual "booze up in a brewery".

[Stanley]

I think I prefer piss up over both of them! (But then I am a nasty old bugger!)