Isn't It Ironic? Why, yes: yes it is.

I’m not as big a fan of Seth Meyers as I am of Stephen Colbert, but I occasionally watch snippets of his monologues on YouTube.  And another thing that Late Night puts up on the web (as a web exclusive, actually) is “Corrections.” This is an absolutely hilarious segment where Seth reads YouTube comments in which people correct him—sometimes reasonably, sometimes pointlessly, sometimes even incorrectly ... but it’s always funny.  Seth has a pet name for people like this: he calls them “jackals.”

Now, here’s the thing: I empathize with the jackals.  Well, mostly: as I say, sometimes they’re are actually wrong in their corrections, and there ain’t no empathy for that bullshit.  But I understand the urge to correct people, because I have it too.  When I’m watching a show, or a video, or a movie, or a streamed D&D game (or listening to a podcast), and they say something totally wrong, I will definitely yell at the screen.  What I won’t do, however, is then post about it on the Internet.  Because then you’re just being a jackass.  Or, as Seth puts it, a jackal.

This post is, somewhat ironically, me posting on the Internet about things that people in streaming shows get wrong.  I’m justifying this to myself by pointing out that what I’m not doing is posting this anywhere where the poeple I’m correcting might read it—for that matter, I’m not even going to call out anyone by name.  These are things that I’ve seen lots of people get wrong, so I think they’re more general corrections.  Hopefully that makes me less of a jackal, though I can understand if you disagree.

Note that I use the word “ironically” somewhat cautiously, because the Alanis Morissette song taught me that people—meaning the jackals—can get pretty touchy about whether you’re using that word properly or not.  Oh, they eviscerated Alanis—positively crucified her.  And she let them beat her down: rather than stand up to them and tell them to go look at a fucking dictionary instead of being all superior, she “admitted” they were right.  Except, you know, they weren’t.

See, the thing about jackals is, they’re in such a hurry to prove their superiority by correcting you that they often get it wrong and “correct” something that was right in the first place.  People wrote articles and comedy sketches and even comic strips without, apparently, even bothering to check the dictionary.  (Well, some people did, obviously, but those were the pieces about how everyone else was wrong about Alanis being wrong.)  Merriam-Webster, for instance, defines “ironic” as “relating to, containing, or constituting irony” or “given to irony.” Fine, then: what’s irony?  Well, M-W offers a whopping 7 definitions for that, but we can throw a few out: both “an ironic expression or utterance” and “a usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony” are pretty useless due to circularity, while defining irony as either dramatic irony or Socratic irony is obviously just a case of people trying to make the whole concept mean just one specific type.  Thus leaving us with:

• the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning
• incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result
• an event or result marked by such incongruity

You know, like rain on your wedding day.  It’s a happy occasion, but rain is sad, thus: incongruity.  Now, granted, rain on your wedding day isn’t particularly ironic ... just a little bit.  10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife, though: that’s pretty ironic.  Finding out that the ride that you just paid for was supposed to be free: also a bit ironic.  And a person who spends their whole life afraid to fly, then finally convinces themself to try it out, and the first flight they get on crashes?  That’s some big, fat, juicy irony to the max right there.  Yeah, the ones in the chorus aren’t as much, but it’s a fucking chorus.  Songwriters take shortcuts to make shit fit: don’t act like Alanis was the first person to ever do that.

So I know perfectly well that I’m opening up myself both to being judged as a jackal and to being judged by the jackals.  So trust me when I tell you: these are things that I just can’t hold inside any longer.  Some of them are things I know because I’m a technogeek.  Some of them are things I know because I’m a D&D nerd.  Some of them I just know because I’m a would-be writer and I’ve studied a lot of grammar, and I even wrote a blog post once on it that was, in hindsight, taking a stand against the jackals before I’d ever even heard that term.  But all of them are things that I assure you are correct, and I invite you—nay, entreat you—to research them for yourself to verify that I’m right.  Just make sure you check multiple sources: it’s easy to find another jackal on the Internet to tell you’re right, no matter which side of any given debate you’re on.

Without further ado, then, here are the ...

Corrections

The word “dais” is pronounced “DAY-iss.” If you have a dictionary that tells you that “DIE-iss” is a valid alternative pronunciation, get a new dictionary.  (However, special dispensation for you if you’re from Australia: that’s just your accent.)

URLs never have backslashes in them.  Never.  They’re always forward slashes—also known as just plain slashes.  Especially if you have your own web site, you should probably know better than to use the word “backslash” in conjunction with its address.

You cannot “run the gambit.” Perhaps you were trying to “run the gamut”?

The singular of “dice” is “die.” There is no such thing as “one dice.” Especially if you roll dice for a living, you should probably know this.

The word “ogle,” meaning basically “to leer at,” rhymes with “mogul.” It does not rhyme with “Google,” because it only has one “o.” It also does not rhyme with “boggle,” beacuse it only has one “g.” Check your dictionary if you don’t believe me.

When speaking of computers, “memory” and “storage” are two different things.  When you’re out of space on your hard drive, you did not “run out of memory.” Because of things like swap space (which is a way to pretend that storage is memory), modern computers hardly ever run out of memory.  But you can run out of storage space (or just say you ran out of space: that should be sufficient).

The reason people fight over how to pronounce “GIF” is because of English’s dual nature.  While English is technically a Germanic language, it received a very strong Romance influence via French when the Normans conquered the Anglo-Saxons in 1066.  This is why we have two English words for many concepts, and one of them people may think of as “fancier” than the other: “work” is a good, solid Germanic word, while “labour” is a Romance word; “gift” is Germanic, while “present” is Romance.  And the rules for Gs are different in the Germanic vs the Romance.  In Germanic words, a “G” is always pronounced as the “hard” G: get, gift, gird, begin, lager, burger, target.  In Romance words, a “G” is pronounced hard before “A,” “O”, or “U,” but “soft” (that is, like “J”) before “E” or “I”: gem, giant, giraffe, genius, gesture, germ, ginger, angel, emergency, fugitive.  (Note that this also applies before “Y,” as in gymnastic or energy.)  But of course “GIF” isn’t either a Germanic word or a Romance word ... it isn’t even a word at all, properly speaking.  It’s an acronym, and a pretty new one, as such things go.  So we lack any concept of what the “right” way to pronounce that initial G is, so everyone makes up their own.  Some people claim to believe that it should be a hard G because the G in this case stands for “graphics,” which uses a hard G, but this is nonsense.  Would you pronounce ICE as “eye-kee” because the “C” stands for “customs”? or ACID as “a-kid” because the “C” stands for consistency?  Obviously when the letters become a new word, the old pronounciation is left behind.  So what you’re really left with is, how fancy a word do you think it is?  If you believe it’s a solid working-class word, then you likely think it should be a hard G.  If you think it’s a fancier, technical term, then you probably think it should be a soft G.  But, in the end, the whole debate is silly: stop using GIFs.  Use JPGs (pronounced “jay-pegs”), or PNGs (“pee-en-geez”): they’re better formats, with fewer moronic legal restrictions, and they don’t have this whole stupid pronounciation problem.  And, if you just call any computer image a GIF, then seek professional help.

If you are playing with D&D-style polyhedral dice, and you can’t read the number, just flip it over and read the number on the other side.  The opposite sides of a polyhedral die always add up to the number of sides plus one.  So, on a 20-sided die, the 1 and the 20 are opposite each other, as are the 2 and the 19, the 3 and the 18, and so forth.  They always sum to 21.  So, if you can’t read one side, just flip it over, subtract it from 21, and Bob’s yer uncle.  Also works with 12-sided (subtract from 13), 10-sided (subtract from 11), and so on ... well, okay, not with 4-sided’s (because they’re shaped like pyramids, so they don’t really have an “opposite side”), but with everything else.  Unless your dice are manufactured by people who don’t do things the standard way, at which point I’m not sure I’d trust that die anyhow.  I’m constantly amazed at how often people who throw dice for a living don’t understand this very basic principle.

I am sick and tired of people claiming that “people can’t multitask.” Because, you know, you can’t literally do multiple things at once: what you’re really doing is switching back and forth between them.  Exactly.  That’s what multitasking means.  People (mostly jackals) seem to think that computers are literally doing multiple things at once.  With a few exceptions, that’s not what they do at all.  In fact, when multitasking was first invented, it wasn’t even an option: multi-processor machines doing distrubuted computing would have been decades away.  Wikipedia even explicitly states that “a computer executes segments of multiple tasks in an interleaved manner, while the tasks share common processing resources” (in the case of a person who’s multitasking, that “common processing resource” is their brain, and “interleaved” is just a fancy way to say “switching back and forth”).  Now, I’m not saying that multitasking is a good thing to do—many studies have shown that you’re typically more efficient if you just do things one at a time vs trying to do several things at once.  But that also doesn’t take into account that sometimes a thing won’t get done faster whether or not you devote your full attention to it: that hour-long TV show is going to take you an hour to finish, whether you’re multitasking or not.  But, again, I’m not trying to say whether it’s good, bad, or indifferent.  I’m just telling you to stop claiming it’s not possible.

That’s enough corrections for today.  I hope the jackals are suitably chastened.  Probably not, but one can dream.

I’ll probably think of more corrections later.  Perhaps this can become a recurring series.  Certainly Seth manages to do around 20 minutes every single week, so I don’t see why I couldn’t manage 1500 words every six months or so.  But we’ll just have to see which egregious mistakes start irking me next.  Until then, don’t let the jackals get you down.