Are you talking to me?

You Talking To Me? - Taxi Driver 1976 in HD

From Bores, Babblers and Buffoons by JMSMITH

We speak for two reasons. One is to convey information, but what we say is often phatic, meaning that what we say is said to affirm that we are on some sort of “speaking terms” with the one we say it to. If I were to meet you on a sultry street, both of us bearing the sheen and stains of ample sweat, and if I (mopping my brow with a sodden handkerchief) were to observe that the day was a mite warm, the remark would be phatic. Insofar as information goes, this would be “needless to say.”
But I would not be talking about the weather. I would be talking about us.
My remark would serve to acknowledge that I knew you, and that our connection was of the sort were meteorological pleasantries are not out of order. They are neither offensively forward, as they might be if offered to a perfect stranger, nor offensively reserved, as they might be if offered, without embellishment, to a dear friend.
Now there is a portion of our race, predominantly male, who do not understand, and are often intensely irritated by, phatic speech. And there is another portion, predominantly female, who seem not know there is any other kind.

He goes on a little more. The whole thing is pretty great.

Phatic is new to me.

Taxi Driver blew me away when I saw it way back then.

P.S. I eventually realized that emphatic is just phatic with an 'em' tacked on the front. Does this mean they are related?

Railroads!

Completing the Transcontinental Railroad

The Orthosphere tells us that today marks the 150th Anniversary of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. Vunderbar! But then he mentions that "While railroads in the sense of wheeled carts rolling on tracks have existed since antiquity . . .", which sends me on a Wiki-wander, which turns up an ancient railroad, or sorts, in ancient Greece.

Diolkos - Ancient road for transporting ships across the Isthmus of Corinth in Greece

Map showing location of the Diolkos railway in Greece

The 5 mile long roadway was a rudimentary form of railway, and operated from c. 600 BC until the middle of the 1st century AD. - Wikipedia

Going from one side of the Isthmus by sea would entail a 500 mile voyage which you might be able to complete in a day but could very easily take a week.

The Ctrl-Alt-Del-Right

The Right, period full stop, is not in fact Right. It is rather the “Right.” So have we seen in the last few years the rise of several other sorts of Right, that distinguish themselves from the “Right” with the same urgent animosity that true Communists display in distinguishing themselves from mere liberals and panty-waist Socialists and Social Democrats.
These sorts fall into four categories: the Alt-Right, the Ctrl-Right, the Del-Right, and the Ctrl-Alt-Del-Right. These sorts are all truly of the Right. But only one of them is right, or therefore Right; so that it integrates, and indeed consolidates, all other sorts of Rightness. - The Orthosphere

I didn't know there were so many kinds of "right". All I know is that they aren't left (left out? left behind?).

Durn Sexist Armies

Eceabat, Turkey - Memorial sculptures of the Gallipoli Campaign

If I am sickened by the movie Gallipoli, it now appears that it should be because the battle was sexist. - JMSMITH

Bromides and Bunkum

Sodium Bromide Molecular Structure
Because words do not always make for good pictures

"The word bromide was at first the name of a sedative that physicians used in the treatment of epilepsy, sea sickness and insomnia; but in the early twentieth century its reference was extended to soporific bores and their stupefying conversation.  The implication was that subjection to the bromides of a bromidic man (or woman) was very much like chemical sedation, since it induced the same feeling of numbness, lassitude, and fuddled mind. 

"As one student of the metaphorically bromidic explained, the essence of bromidic conversation is that it is both trite and predictable, and that it therefore lacks the novelty and surprise that are the soul of sparkling conversation.*  People are excited by novelty, whether in content or style, and they express their excitement in laughter, gesticulation and an eager stance.  But they are stupefied when they hear what everyone already knows expressed in words everyone has already heard, and they express their stupor with a slouch, a grunt and a glassy eye." - The Orthosphere

This is just the introduction. It gets better. You can read it all here.

Via Monday Evening