I’d seen these kicking around the web for some years but this is an expanded list, up to 100 and I think they’re just great. Things like hackers being able to crack passwords in a few seconds (as if!) or chase scenes on foot in the road where a car screeches to a halt as people run in front and the driver leans out the window and shouts at them.
Film and TV cliches occur because Directors generally like to avoid the minutiae of real life. If the hero can’t park his car straight away (#17 in the list) it will detract from the plot or make it less action filled. It’s hard to avoid doing things the same way which is why we the film viewing public are starting to notice them.
Popularity: 9% [?]
Occasionally in my travels across the 987 corners of the web I encounter something a bit different and this one comes under the title of sustainable cliches. Old cliches are overused, hackneyed, weary and just deserve their final moment in an electric box or car crusher.
The people at the defectiveyeti website decided to get new versions of old well loved cliches. So instead of “Made a mountain out of a molehill” they suggest “Saw a duck and shouted “dragon!”‘ (there is something ineffably lame about that I’m afraid… It sounds a bit newage to me). Whereas “Wore his heart on his sleeve” has been taken out and left in the wood and replaced by “Flew his feelings from a flagpole”. That’s much better.
So here’s one I just thought up “Out on a limb” now replaced by “No seat at Stalin’s table.” Well ok, its rubbish albeit true. If you were out of favour with Russia’s favourite man of steel then they’d arrange a meeting early and when you got there there was no seat for you. However the nice soldiers would take you out the back, stand you up against a wall and …
Popularity: 8% [?]
This is a word guessing game. You enter the word in the box on the left and if you get one of the words, it appears on the map.
Some words are on the edge of the screen and open up into other maps. The white square in the centre of the pink rectangle in the top left represents this map. There are lots of others so i guess it will take quite a while to guess them all. You can share your game with someone else as well for a collaborative effort. It’s simple, but well done but might take a few weeks to solve.
Popularity: 8% [?]
The most commonly occurring letter in English is the letter e, followed I think by a and t or possibly t then a. Writing anything major, i.e. a novel of some 50,000 words without using the letter e is I imagine an arduous (see below!) but not impossible task as the author, one Ernest Vincent Wright has demonstrated.
Strictly you’d describe this as an exercise in lipogramy. According to Wikipedia Every word in Gadsby was properly spelled and all narration was grammatically correct. However, the stress of writing such a novel was apparently too much for Wright, who died at the age of 66 on the day Gadsby was published.
Popularity: 6% [?]
These aren’t the medical terms you’d hear on ER, St Elsewhere, Scrubs, House, Kingdom Hospital, Angels, Holby City, Casualty, Marcus Welby MD, Dr. Kildare (maybe - it was a long time ago!) or Grays Anatomy. “Oh no, he’s got Chronic Flux! Look at her Ramollissement!!!”. Still, it might liven things up. “You have got Rising of the Lights…”.
This is a wonderful site for the sheer volume of terms and their modern equivalents and in several languages as well. Miners seemed to have suffered a variety of complaints “Egyptian Chlorosis anyone?”. Just hope never to get Allantiasis (from eating very dodgy sausages!). I just know I’ll return here to dabble!
Popularity: 4% [?]
This site consists of several thousand techy quotes, mainly i guess taken from Internet Relay chat so they’re shown as dialogues. As examples of idiocy and meanness but often very funny (and sometimes bad language) . For example, this is typical of programmers.
<k2xl> in 1998, i made a C++ program to calculate pi to a billion digits.
<k2xl> i coded it on my laptop (pentium 2 i think) and then ran the program.
<k2xl> the next day i got a new laptop but decided to keep the program running.
<k2xl> it’s been over seven years now since i ran it. and this morning it finished calculating.
<k2xl> the output:
<k2xl> “THE VALUE OF PI TO THE BILLIONTH DIGIT IS = ”
<k2xl> mindblowing eh?
<k2xl> i looked in the code of my program, and i found out that i forgot to output the value :(.
Comment: true story, i fixed the code and am running it again
Popularity: 10% [?]
This does what is says it does. It looks up the meanings of word very quickly. It also includes synonyms where relevant and keeps a history list of words you’ve looked up on the right of the screen.
Calling it Ninja (ie for speed) is a bit of a misnomer. Maybe they see it as a killer of other dictionary lookup sites! But it is fast and easy to use. If you use words, worth a look…
Popularity: 4% [?]
The best description of this site is by its author Stephen Chrisomalis. It contains the International House of Logorrhea(an online dictionary of obscure and rare words), the Compendium of Lost Words (a compilation of ultra-rare forgotten words), and many other glossaries, word lists, essays, and other language and etymology resources.
This qualifies I think as a labour of love, not just for its 11 year old longevity- a year on the web is 9 human years but for all the effort put into compiling the word lists etc.
Link
Popularity: 5% [?]