Courtesy and Respect

Better mind your "P"s and "Q"s.

Looks like we need the opinion of a pro.  Where's Mr. Ed?

Given a choice, I'd take my chances with Q rather than the Borg, BorgQueen! 

Resistance is futile . . . 

A plot device could defeat the borg? I call shenanigans.....

lol

Q in 007 is the guy that makes the gadgets darn u lot make me feel old

Mr. Ed is hardly a random horse.... 

I suppose not.  But if we just pick a random horse and ask his/her opinion, I'm not sure we're going to get very far.  Maybe we should pick a random horse, and then have Mr. Ed do the questioning.  But then how would we know if what he told us was really the other horse's opinion or his?

I say we dispense with the random horse and instead just kidnap Mr. Ed to get his opinions until someone pays us to return him.  It may be that the closest we'll realistically be able to get is defintions from a ransom horse. 

Yes, but Mr. Ed is too partial to his Knights.

Hmph.  All I keep getting is $1000 from Wal-Mart every 2 minutes.  And the side panel ad that makes it so you can't view your games from your summary page because the hover pop-up board views somehow still end up underneath the ad.  Come on, ad guys, how about serving up some ad babes for me?

'Chafing at the bit' makes no sense to me. It's like someone saying they are chafing at the underpants . It sounds like poorly-translated French. But if enough people say it, then it becomes acceptable simply through usage. It's like Americans saying, "I could care less", when they really mean they couldn't care less. However that came about, it's not logical yet it's widely used. Every language has its idiosyncrasies I suppose.

As for the original point, If I made an unsolicited approach then I wouldn't expect a response. If I get a polite, 'thanks, but no thanks' then that's nice, but I wouldn't consider it rude if I got no response at all. I think if you're that sensitive then you should probably stop making unwelcome approaches.

was just readin' thru an' feelin' pedantic - chafe an' chaff is two totally different words - I know English ain't everybody's mother tongue, but if u doesn't know the bloody language it kinda unbecoming to pontificate about it

Well, depending on what the horse has been eating he may also be chaffing at the bit.

And I've always understood the original idiom to be "champing at the bit"

That's what it is. Read my earlier post. It's a lot of red writing, so it's easy to find. 

 I know. lol.

Yes.  You didn't think there was room for regional variation or opinion, did you?  Woodshover has spoken.  In red, no less, in case you didn't get the idea that he is the final arbiter on issues.

Next topic of discussion: "You've got another think coming," or "You've got another thing coming?"

I believe the usual translation for that one is "your nose is about to get all big and bloody".  

But aside from the nose threat, I think this one is an example of many people hearing one thing when another was what was spoken.  For instance, when writing, lots of people will incorrectly write something like "I should of done that" because when they hear someone say "should've" or "could've" they don't correctly translate it as "should have" , and they don't see the contraction written frequently enough to make the connection with their error.  I used to run into "should of", "might of", etc. quite often in college-level papers, exercises, etc. when I graded.  The error is almost as common as not knowing how many o's are in loooooooose.