BBO Discussion Forums: pet peeve thread - BBO Discussion Forums

Cyberyeti, on 2014-October-09, 15:48, said:

OK, I'll bite. What are the two usages? My idea of standard usage goes like this:
An argument is knocked down, but no one is making that argument. The speaker created the argument himself, and then refuted it. He built a figure out of straw and then demolished it. This was a standard rhetorical practice with Richard Nixon. Before he announced what he was going to do, he would announce other options that no one in sight was actually advocating and explain what was wrong with these options.

We need to have a tinman argument. A creaky argument, I guess.

kenberg, on 2014-October-09, 16:33, said:

Well, there are several other meanings here. I guess one of them is the traditional UK usage.

Vampyr, on 2014-October-09, 17:00, said:

Yup, it's the one that's on that list as straw man proposal which originates from the straw man that was used for jousting practice, you put it up and have a go at it.

I dunno. which is worse, the straw man or the wicker man?

Yeah, at work we use "straw man" to mean an initial proposal through which you can understand a matter more in depth to get to a more refined suggestion. Knowing only the rhetoric technique, I was quite confused the first time I saw a email where someone called his own work a "straw man".

blackshoe, on 2014-October-09, 21:32, said:

I wasn't aware that the renown of that old cult film reached so far afield, but give me the straw man every day!

Vampyr, on 2014-October-10, 02:09, said:

Well there was a relatively recent remake

Antrax, on 2014-October-09, 23:31, said:

An interesting usage. I am trying to recall if I have ever heard it used in this way. I rather like it.

The top listed usage in vamp's link is the rhetorical one, and that site gives a link to the Wikionary which first explains that it can refer to a doll and then gives the rhetorical usage. This latter site makes an attempt at etymology. All in all, it seems fair to say that the usage of referring to rebutting a sham argument, one that was created only to be rebutted, is the standard usage. But this other meaning is a far more positive image for strawmen and would no doubt make them feel better about themselves.

I have both a straw farmer and a straw rooster out in the garden, celebrating autumn, and I am sure that they will appreciate this expanded view of their role.

...and a great Iron Maiden song...

Sept. vs. Oct.: Of course it's so easy, because they're the 9th and 10th months of the year!

Relevant pet peeve: Febuary. Wow does that one wind me up, far beyond [Edit: its] expectation.

[Edit: Thanks Vampyr. It also annoys me, and I check every time. Well, I guess *almost* every time.]

Cyberyeti, on 2014-October-10, 02:24, said:

Was It as creepy?

mycroft, on 2014-October-10, 12:21, said:

That " it's" is one that really drives me up a wall. Probably more than anything except for "lead" instead of "led" on these forums.

Vampyr, on 2014-October-10, 17:25, said:

Didn't see it, I just remember its existence

Vampyr, on 2014-October-10, 17:25, said:

It features gratuitous Nicholas Cage acting and falls into "so bad it's bad again" territory.

Vampyr, on 2014-October-10, 02:09, said:

Cyberyeti, on 2014-October-10, 02:24, said:

The original was better.

blackshoe, on 2014-October-11, 21:30, said:

Isn't it almost always ?

Cyberyeti, on 2014-October-13, 02:53, said:

Only when you can remember the original. I prefer the late King Kong since I cannot remember the first.

I prefer Metallica's Whiskey in the JAr because I heard it before Thin Lizzy's


The fact that you have a model of the one you fist saw making oyu able to predict what is going to happen probably has something to do with it. Reading a book and then seeing a movie is gotta get you annoyed, that is, unless you read the book so long ago that you only remember the main story.

Fluffy, on 2014-October-13, 06:04, said:

This has not been my experience.

Fluffy, on 2014-October-13, 06:04, said:

In music it's not always true, there are a few songs where the definitive version is not the original.

In movies I'd say it's rarer for the remake to be better.

Fluffy, on 2014-October-13, 06:04, said:

This is highly variable for me. I read the three novels beginning with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and then I saw the saw rhe Swedish films (with sub-titles of course). I liked the books a lot and I liked the films a lot. Becky (my wife) felt that the films were so good that she had no interest in seeing the American film that was due out later but I saw it on tv (and I think Becky did also) and I thought that it was a fine job.

With John Grisham, I think that without exception I prefer the movies to the books. I'm not a fast reader, Grisham's stories are not all that deep, and blasting through in two hours while drinking some wine is just about right.

In a different direction, I mentioned elsewhere that I recently read and liked, much more than I expected to, Gone Girl. I was thinking that it would be interesting to see how the movie handled what was largely a novel of interior psychology. From reading reviews of the film, I gather they decided to replace the inner trauma by a lot of screaming and blood. I have not yet seen it and probably won't. I suppose it isn't fair to criticize a movie I haven't seen, simply by the reviews, but I think I will let this one go by.

A few nights ago I watched Girl, Interrupted. I am pretty sure that I read the book, a memoir about an eighteen year old girl's confinement in a mental ward, when it came out twenty years or so ago. Winona Rider, the interrupted girl, gave a very moving performance and Angelina Jolie won an Academy Award for best supporting (!) actress. Well deserved, imo. But there is some Hollywood type stuff that seemed implausible and was not part of the memoir. It didn't ruin it, at least not totally, but restraint is a useful quality, rare in Hollywood.

A very early version, for me, of the book/film issue was The Third Man. I can remember when the movie came out (I was 10) but somehow I never saw it then. I gather that Graham Greene wrote the screenplay and the novel more or less simultaneously. Anyway, I read the novel, one of the first "adult novels" I had ever read. I was both fascinated and confused by the chase in the sewers of Vienna, I had no idea such a thing was possible. I guess I figured that you had to be a rat to be able to run around in sewers. But it has become one of my favorite films.

As to remakes, I like the Freaky Friday remake more than I liked the original, but then I just like Jamie Lee Curtis in practically anything. On the other hand, no one should even try (many have) to remake Miracle on 34th Street.

Saturday we go to see the musical version of Little Women, put on by the local high school. Maybe there will be a future Elizabeth Taylor in it.

Don't know about the whole series, but I'm told reliably that the movie version of the first Twilight book was better than the book by orders of magnitude, because the book had lots of rambling inner-life passages that the film, perforce, skipped to focus on plot. Internal dialogue can make or break a novel, and in this case it broke it.