Wednesday, May 26, 2021

Fun and Important Words: Highfalutin


Highfalutin is a word with mysterious origins.  Typically, the word means pompous, arrogant, haughty, pretentious or excessively ornate or bombastic, often in reference to a manner of speech.[1](1)  However, how such a word came to mean such things is not known definitively.  The alternative spelling of "hifalutin" doesn't offer any clues, either.

It's common for dictionaries to claim it highfalutin is derived from the words "high" and "fluting".  Although this may make sense, it is actually not likely according to other sources.  Long before highfalutin was first recorded, another term meaning something similar already existed, "high flown".  It seems more likely that highfalutin is a corruption of high flown.

I've used highfalutin from time to time.  However, my use of the work tends to carry an ironic tone.  

Between the spellings, ngram shows that highfalutin is a lot more common than hifalutin, these days. The rise in use of highfalutin also seems to roughly coincide with the reduction of usage for the term high flown.
Fussbudget
Gobbledygook
Highfalutin
Malarkey
Newfangled
Roust
Twitterpated
Whatchamacallit
Whopperjawed

Tuesday, May 25, 2021

Elite Dangerous Odyssey: Trying to start a bar fight, and figuring out free camera


CMDR FCSUPER and DE CYPHER try to start a bar fight, and then figure out how to use free camera while walking around on the concourse. 

Intro/outro music Orbit Dance is original music, © 2021 by Matthew Lorono, All rights reserved.

Monday, May 24, 2021

The Balance Pin Incident: First CMDR in Elite Dangerous to Destroy His Own Ship from Another commander's Ship


This is the story of how the CMDR FCSUPER became the first CMDR in Elite history to target, attack and destroy his own ship by firing upon it from another CMDR's ship.  Special thanks to CMDR DE CYPHER and CMDR FOLEY10 for their help!  

On May 23, 3307 (2021), while on board CMDR DE CYPHER's Imperial Cutter named Big Bad Wolf, CMDR FCSUPER targeted, attacked and destroyed his Sidewinder, called Balance Pin.  This is the first time in Elite that a CMDR fired upon and destroyed his own ship from another commander's ship.  That part didn't actually take that long.  Once he successfully destroyed the Balance Pin, the journey really started as they all try to figure out what's supposed to happen next to recover from the self-inflicted loss.

Intro/outro music Orbit Dance is original music, © 2020 by Matthew Lorono, All rights reserved.