Category Archives: Language

foregone » far gone
Chiefly in: far-gone conclusion
Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

Therefore, as far as Fox News is concerned, the guilt of these first to be court-martialed is a far-gone conclusion, in order for their ‘fair and balanced’ agenda to be successful. (ThatColoredFellasWeblog, May 19, 2004)

Whenever someone starts comparing the President to Hitler, it is a far-gone conclusion that reason has flown out the window. (Romantic Times forum, January 27, 2005)

As a resident, and knowing Illinois politics as I do, it has been a far gone conclusion that this is a very safe Kerry Blue State. (Watchblog, comment, June 10, 2004)

I am sure now, that if this were on the general ballot in November, the vote would’ve been much closer, and not a far-gone conclusion. (Watchblog, August 04, 2004)

What is only inferred in the article is that the study was based upon the assumption that global warming is a far-gone conclusion. (Slings and Arrows, April 08, 2003)

Analyzed or reported by:

* Ken Lakritz (on this site)

from the Eggcorn Database

Eggcorns, the contributers say, “tell us something about how ordinary speakers and writers make sense of the language they use.” They “arise when a writer knows an expression well enough to employ it in an appropriate context, but is mistaken about the term’s or its constituents’ meanings, origins or the underlying metaphors.” The Database now includes just under 600 examples.

Conservapedia is an online resource and meeting place where we give full credit to Christianity and America. Conservapedia is student-friendly. You will much prefer using Conservapedia compared to Wikipedia if you want concise, clean answers free of “political correctness”.

Contributions that comply with simple commandments are respected (and improved) to the maximum extent possible. Please improve this website as you use it, and please cite your sources. With your help, Conservapedia will continue to be an online encyclopedia you can trust. This is also a meeting place, and appropriate questions may be posted at Ask questions.

from the Conservapedia

File this under the “poor poor pitiful Conservative Christians.” We live in a country that is overwhelmingly Christian by almost any measure, and yet these bozos are constantly complaining about the so-called anti-Christian bias they see behind every tree.

(Granted, by one measure we have gone from 86% to 77% self-identified Christian in the last decade or so. Something must be leaving a bad taste in folks’ mouths.)

Still, that is a pretty high concentration of Christians and it seems unlikely that the the 23% who do not identify as Christians just happen to be the most influential and powerful voices. It seems obvious that a small proportion of well organized and well funded right-wing Christian groups have created effective media campaigns to serve their needs.

One need, apparently, is to propagate this wacky sense of persecution. Our media is freakishly concentrated in just a few corporate conglomerates and yet these same groups also see liberal bias all over the media. Katie Couric is, apparently, some sort of communist. Now, apparently, they have found these same problems in Wikipedia, of all places, and in response created their own wiki-encyclopedia, which they call Conservapedia.

Just what we need: a ‘public encyclopedia’ in which racism is over, immigrants are swamping our public health and educational resources, and global warming is just Al Gore’s public relations stunt. Of course, they are too chicken to allow full open editing: you have to create an account, and I imagine they will vet participants carefully.

They certainly don’t want to encourage that (sometimes) contentious debate nonsense. That’s a little too democratic, too Wikipedia. I wonder if they do some sort of political litmus test on you, like Gonzales with his Prosecutors.

Here’s another interesting search engine that represents language visually, called Grok, or Grok It Better. This is just the start of the links and connections you can generate as you click on each word. You can also type an URL and get a visual map of a website. A Wiki map is under development too.

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, Wallace Stevens

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (a work in progress), by Edward Picot, from the poem by Wallace Stevens