NaNoing

[farla]

OpenOffice and Firefox do not recognize the word "sniggering".

I'm now curious if you could do some sort of long term rearrangement of vocabulary use simply by slowly removing terms from various spellchecks, encouraging people to retry with a supported synonym until the word falls out of use entirely, and if someone's already trying this out.

Comments

[actonthat.livejournal.com]

...that's a word? Isn't it just some bastardization of "snickering?"

[negrek.livejournal.com]

It's legit, though perhaps less respected than "snickering" itself.

I'm not really surprised that it's not included in either of the dictionaries mentioned; I've encountered loads of words that Firefox fails to recognize... not that I can remember any of them off the top of my head.

[farla.livejournal.com]

It's a variant, but in usage, there is a slight difference.

In terms of not being a jackass, it's giggle > snicker > snigger.

So if you snicker at something, you may be laughing at a joke at someone else's expense. If you snigger, you're laughing because the joke is at someone else's expense.

(Plus, you just can't use a long word like snickering twice in close proximity, so having a synonym is helpful.)

[actonthat.livejournal.com]

It must be a dialectical thing... I've never heard anyone say that out loud, and when I saw it in fic, I always assumed it was a function of people trying to sound out "snicker" and coming up with "snigger" due to some kind of accent.

Hm. I wonder if Lip has heard of it (he's from the same area as I am).

[farla.livejournal.com]

It's mostly a point of view sort of word. If you were recounting a story, and wanted to explain why you were justifying in, say, smacking someone, you'd say sniggered. As in, "I told them to knock it off, and they sniggered." There might be debate on if they actually were sniggering, but not that sniggering is obviously a slap-worthy action. Snickered is a bit judgmental, but allows for the possibility of non-malicious origin.

Which all may admittedly be a dialect thing from half the population mispronouncing a word and the other half picking it up and using both, but my point is, it's really useful if you want a firm condemnation of the other party with no pretense whatsoever of neutrality.

[wintersheir]

I think I let "snigger" fall out of my vocabulary since part of it would end up censored on all the forums I frequented back in the day.

[farla.livejournal.com]

But niggardly is still recognized! In both Firefox AND OpenOffice.

Is it just that no one ever used niggardly in the first place, so it never came up? Does the a rather than e make the Internet Overlords not care, because their computer brains don't have any idea how it sounds out loud?

[bay115.livejournal.com]

I heard snigger a couple times here and there, but yeah I too am not surprised it's not included in dictionaries and such. Maybe it's featured in Windows 7? :P

[farla.livejournal.com]

With luck, I will never know!

(I don't care it's "better than Vista". Everything is better than Vista. This is not impressive.)

[bay115.livejournal.com]

I never tried Vista nor Windows 7, so I don't know too much about those yet. Also, I actually think anything is better than Windows ME, heh. *whistles*

[farla.livejournal.com]

I have not used Windows ME, but at least it didn't require two gigs of memory just to (crappily) run. XP ran great on a half gig, Vista fails to run on four times as much. (And eats any extra you give it.) I'd hate it marginally less if it sucked but did that sucking on a relatively small budget, since at least I could pretend it was sucking do to innate limitations and not the designers deliberately fucking me over.

(And then adds insult to injury by doing everything in its power to keep me away from actually modifying how the computer works. Because clearly the programmers know more than me.)

[kddreams.livejournal.com]

On a completely unrelated note, in Microsoft Word a synonym for "picturesque" is "chocolate box."

[farla.livejournal.com]

...This landscape is so chocolate box?