Author: William Lise

Long-term (49-plus years) resident of Japan. Former electrical engineer and have been translating and interpreting for over four decades.

Diddlysquat

Some words mean nothing, others can mean anything, and some can mean either.

Comments I saw somewhere yesterday about double negatives—it was evidently aimed at people who don’t know nothing—made me think of some convenient words that can mean and replace both anything and nothing.

Some people might not know diddlysquat about such words, in which case they would also know diddlysquat about such words.

The function of diddlysquat or jackshit can, of course, be performed by things such as jackshit (or just shit, without the jacking) and bubkis, both of which also being able to replace both anything and nothing, depending upon whether the sense of the expression is negative or positive, respectively.

Care is required in the extended application of such expressions, as knowing your ass from a hole in the ground is not the same as not knowing your ass from a hole in the ground.

And now back to our regular programming.

No holds barred, no assholes tolerated.

Here are some people who should be hit over the head 17 times with a heavy metal instrument and then locked in a porta potty and dropped into a polluted river.

  • Those trendy motherfuckers who post multicolor, absolutely text-packed AI-generated infographics several times each week. These typically have five to eight boxes with extremely tiny difficult-to-read text. Oh, and many of these infographics promote absolute nonsense.
  • The brain-dead turds who think it’s artistic to create webpages with gray font. They get extra credit (and extra strikes over the head) if each line of their text has more than 90 characters.

And last, but certainly not least:

  • The misguided assholes who think they’re being kind to visitors to their website by sniffing the language setting or IP address of a visitor and forcing the website into a language that might not be the one the visitor wants to read. They deserve extra hits over the head if they also don’t allow the visitor to change the language after it has been kindly changed for them, and special punishment is also needed for people who pretend that they’re giving their visitors a choice of language, but force them to make that choice on every single page they access, with each page causing a language setting or IP address sniff to cancel out the setting that was just made by the visitor on a previous page.