Posted on 12/10/2018 6:57:32 PM PST by Rummyfan
A few thoughts on the passing scene:
~I hardly ever read The Washington Post these days, mainly because everything in it is either wrong or, alternatively, right too late. As an example of the latter, consider this plaintive story:
KALPAKI, Greece Another school year was starting, with students arriving for their first day and lining up by grade, but when one mother dropped off her first-grader and watched him take his place, she wondered: Where are all the children?
"There were so few of them," said Vasso Harisiadi, who had attended school in the same town. "I thought the yard would be full of kids."
Greece's intensifying demographic troubles.
It's over twelve years since I published America Alone. You don't even have to get as far as page one, chapter one: The first mention of Greek demography, of Greek fertility rates, the first My Big Fat Greek Wedding gag, all crop up in the prologue on page xvii or whatever it is. Back in 2006, all the smart guys at The Economist and elsewhere pronounced me "alarmist".
Five years later in After America:
You can't borrow against the future because, in the crudest sense, you don't have one. Greeks in the public sector retire at 58, which sounds great. But, when ten grandparents have four grandchildren, who pays for you to spend the last third of your adult life loafing around?
Welcome to My Big Fat Greek Funeral.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
Right: Womble; Left: Cockwomble
Twas feminism killed the beast.
I give it three or four more replies until Freepers start explaining the reason and logic behind the avoidance of reproduction, along with indignation over busybody straw men casting aspersions upon the willfully barren.
Don’t forget “losers who can’t get a date” and the ever-popular “misogynist”...
I read the whole article and still don’t know what a cockwomble is.
Pretentious b**t**ds.
If they really wanted you to understand what they were talking about they wouldn't have used an obscure British slang term like "cockwomble".
Cockwombles) (Britain, slang, derogatory) A foolish or obnoxious person."
I don't see how that applies.
Sorry, posted to wrong thread!
Wait, no I didn’t ... Fleshing out your post 5 about the indignation towards those who cast aspersions upon the willfully barren.
I wasn’t trying to cast aspersions, I was just predicting the posts based upon the normal course of events.
"https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cockwomble"
(Those online dictionaries are handy tools to use whenever you encounter a word you're not familiar with. I've found that Mark Steyn's writings can often be a treasure-trove of new words for me, and I think that's terrific, because it's great to learn new words.)
(For "cockwomble", I at least knew right away that it wasn't the same thing as a "pink-headed warbler".) :-)
“If they really wanted you to understand what they were talking about they wouldn’t have used an obscure British slang term like “cockwomble”.”
When it comes to reading a Mark Steyn column, it’s a feature, not a bug, IMO. His writing is not for the linguistically-incurious nor those who managed to arrive in 2018 without an effective search engine. Sorry it’s so unnerving for you...
Everybody knows what a cockwomble is.
I suppose there are folks here who don't know what a Wimhurst generator is.
What is this country coming to?
In most cases, you would probably be correct.
However, this is from the German, "Universal Motor Gerat", or "Unimog".
Mercedes Benz Unimogs.
I have 2, a U1300L and a U404 Funkwagen.
We go "Mogging" with them, thus are "Moggers".
* speeds forward, 4 speeds reverse, 46 inch Michelin 15.50-20 tires, 4 feet of suspension travel, 2 feet of clearance at the diffs, portal axles, locking diffs, 4 wheel drive. ;-)
That would be 8 speeds forward.
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