#cantankerous

[fluff-and-such]

Kissu

[ethicallysourcedsustainablepolls]

What are everyone’s favorite words?? If you see this please tag some of yours

[fluff-writing]

Every time I so much as have a synapse fire in the direction of Writing Cantankerous it devolves into 'RatMat herping in the woods' and 'Mat would love Sanctuary so much if he could get over himself' and 'Rat is the perfect person to show him all the weird awesome little things in the world' and 'what if Malthael got bit by a turtle that Rathma had pulled out of a pond and told him to stick his finger in its mouth because he's an asshole' and 'Rat would resent that angel so much and be so cranky about that pack of humans following them around but most of all hate himself for being alive but at least theres LIZARDS' and 'what if Malthael got bit on the ass by a fer-de-lance that Rathma was holding' and 'RATMAT HERPING TOGETHER as a way of BONDING over INTERESTING STUFF bcuz Rathma loves his planet and all the little critters and plants on it and has no one but a genocidal maniac angel to share it all with isn't that sad no one else cares about the newts and no one sure as hell cares about him' and 'seriously the Former Angel of Wisdom is in the perfect place with the perfect person to keep him occupied for decades, lifetimes even, there's so much to look at and learn about and so much life to appreciate, this is The Balance at its peak here' and 'they could be such Huge Nerds together' and 'its a little bit tragic that these two people who would otherwise get along great were born in the circumstances that they were' and 'no Rathma can't forget about that whole 'wiping out mortality' thing, who do you take him for' but 'he genuinely enjoys Malthael's company and no one else cares to listen to him' and 'what if Malthael got bit by a yearling crocodile that Rathma pulled out of the swamp'.

...and that's why I haven't updated in a minute.

[fow-doodles]

Day 29 of Worlds Worst Prompt

cantankerous

[dougielombax]

I can’t barely operate printers.

(Not for lack of trying)

There’s so many buttons and they’ve become such ghastly, unpredictable, temperamental machines.

The one in our house is a cantankerous auld bitch of a machine.

[etym-a-day]

cantankerous, adj.

First attested in 1772, the most likely origin for this word is Middle English contakour, meaning "troublemaker", through (possibly) an alteration of the word in the Wiltshire dialect.

Middle English contakour comes from Anglo-French contec, meaning "discord or strife", which in turn is from Old French contechier, comprised of the Latin prefix con- meaning "with" and -teche, meaning "to pierce or sting" (related to Old French attachier, "to attach or hold fast").

Interestingly, the Old French contechier is a blended word, with its affixes (con- and -ier) of Latin origin and its root from Germanic origin (specifically, Proto-Germanic *stikaną through Frankish *stekan, both meaning "to pierce").

--

The information on roots and stems is taken from Wiktionary: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/atachier#Old_French.

[thewordwideweb]

An ornery old cuss

The Word of the Day is “ornery.” I used it to describe my friend, who just underwent knee surgery. I told him he was too ornery to follow doctor’s orders to rest and recuperate.

When I called him ornery, I used it in its common sense of cantankerous, irritable, stubborn and grouchy. But that’s not always what it meant. “Ornery” is just a regional variant of the word “ordinary” that showed up in the American South in the early 1800s. If you were ornery back then, you were ordinary, commonplace, nothing special.

Over time – and it didn’t take a whole lot of time – ornery started to mean not just ordinary, but inferior, of poor quality, even coarse, ugly and lazy. From there it was a short jump to easily annoyed and touchy and a quick hop to cantankerous and irritable.

If he has any sense at all, my buddy won’t be making any short jumps or quick hops any time soon. Just take the good drugs and rest that knee, pal.

[usgsbiml]

The male Bear Andrena.  Andrena obscuripennis.  All bee species have males and females.  Male bees are different from humans in that they are haploid not diploid (it would appear there are other differences, but those are not the interest at hand).  Functionally that means that they are produced sans sexual reproduction and any female (bumble bee workers too!) can just pump out and egg and it will become a male (I presume this means that all that molecular material from said female is basically copied over to the male).  While this is standard Hymenoptera dogma, what I can't seem to find out is why then do males often look so different from females?  Often quite radically so.  How does having only your Mom's chromosomes make you (the boy bee) look like a boy bee?  Having these musings floating around makes me wonder if the world would be a better place if human males were haploid instead of diploid, did no real work to support a family, drank nectar all day, and whose sole purpose was to mate?  Private note to the Bee Lab's dear Techniterns, no one filled out the Bee Picture log so I can't tell who took this picture.