Discussion Groups / English Usage / May 2008

Me.

Like Omrud, when I use it, or its siblings "frankly" and "to tell the
truth", it means that I'm going to give a completely honest answer, as
opposed to a socially-conventional half-truth or "white lie." I expect it
to serve as a warning that the answer may not be complimentary or pleasant
to the asker.

"What do you think of my new haircut?"
"Frankly, it isn't *bad*, but it isn't particularly *good*, either."
or
"To tell you the truth, it looks like a poodle."
or
"Honestly? I don't like it."

That's a very good question that we've had some threads on in the
past.  Last weekend there were several fatal stabbings
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article4011723.ece
and the total for London stands at 14 so far this year according to
the article.  In my almost 69 years I've only met one person who has
been stabbed when "having a go" during a mugging in Paris.  I've never
knowingly met anyone who carried a serious knife (as opposed to a
small penknife) as a matter of course, but if they didn't use it I
wouldn't have known. I can't remember, from my youth, the fear that
people have today about going out at night, and I come from a tough
working-class housing estate in a fairly tough city.  Nottingham was
the first British city in which policemen doing routine patrols
started carrying firearms.

They've changed the shape of the door-locking sticky-uppers so, to
appearances at any rate, you can't get a grip. The last car I did that
with was one of those Grandpa-ish big Rovers.

Amazing.  Amazing that you feel that Americans would not know this
trick, that is.  Someone asking for a coat hanger because their car
has the keys locked inside is a fairly common thing in my experience.
The last time I came across it was a little old lady in a shopping
mall parking lot who had a bent coat hanger, but was asking passers-by
if they could help her juggle it.

No, because newer cars don't have that thingy that is pulled up by the
coat hanger.  It takes a "slim jim" to open them, but many of the
newer cars have those special key systems that prevent the use of a
slim jim.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slim_Jim_

Katy Jennison:

Cars don't pass the Turing test yet.  You mean "rented (or, as we'd
have said if we'd been at home, hired)".

I have also locked myself out of a rental car by locking the keys
(or key; I forget how many this one had) in the trunk.  This was
in the parking lot of a craft show in Albuquerque.  It was in some
sort of temporary structure and there were no pay phones, but one of
the staff lent me a cell phone so I could call the rental company,
which apparently put me on hold for 10-15 minutes, to the annoyance
of the phone's owner.  Eventually I decided the call might have been
dropped and tried again.  I got a human at once, and a locksmith
was dispatched.

What he did next impressed me -- he obtained the *specifications*
for the key (use blank JK34; notch 1 is 3 units deep, notch 2 is 1;
that sort of thing) and proceeded to cut a new one.

What was less impressive was that it didn't work.

He then did the practical thing that he wasn't supposed to do: he
broke into the car using a slim-jim or some such device, and pressed
the trunk-release button to retrieve the original key.  This did work.

I have also had it happen that I had to leave a rental car in a
parking lot with the key *in the ignition lock*, because it seemed
to be stuck in there.  This one was in Ann Arbor, in 1982; perhaps
I should start avoid cities starting with A when renting cars, like
people using London Underground stations as bomb shelters in WW2
needed to avoid ones starting with B(*). As I recall, on this car
the door and ignition keys were different, so I was at least able to
detach them and leave the doors locked.

Anyway, when I called the rental company for help, they informed me
that on this model of car there was a release button near the ignition
switch, which I had to press to withdraw the key.  Apparently this
was intended as protection against a malicious front-seat passenger
removing the key while the car was in motion.  I'd never encountered
such a thing before, and I never have since.

(*) Bomb hits penetrated the shelters at Balham, Bank, and Bounds Green
stations with considerable loss of life each time, and a crowd-crush
disaster at the unfinished Bethnal Green station killed more shelterers
than all three bombs put together(**).

(**) ObAUE: I don't mean that the bombs put together any number of people.

My wife found herself out-gelocked similarly, perhaps in the Waitrose
car park in Wallingford (if not there, somewhere of comparable social
standing).  Not having been trained in the Wood Avens school of
resource, she turned (for spiritual comfort, no doubt) to our vicar, who
just happened to be passing (as vicars do).  He had the same criminal
skills, and a pretty weak excuse for them too.

Sure they are.  In the late 1940s my father got into his rental car, a
Chevrolet, started the engine, then noticed that the car had a clock.  Rental
cars in those days didn't have clocks.  His similar car was elsewhere in the
parking lot.

Mike Barnes wrote, in <fJzhgN2Z+INIFwwt@34klh41lk4h1lk34h3lk4h1k4.invalid>
on Wed, 21 May 2008 22:09:45 +0100:

I worked my way through all the Cortinas over a period of twenty-some
years and the MkIII was my favourite.  I have fond memories of taking it
to France in about 1980 with wife and four children on board and a 15ft
caravan behind and grinding up the long hill southbound out of Limosges on
the N20 with everyone in the car gazing at the instrument panel to watch
the mileage roll round from 99999 to 100000.  It's no fun now, the
autoroute goes straight across the valley.

In alt.usage.english, Skitt wrote:

AAMOI how did you *both* manage to do it? Or is that a question that
simply shouldn't be asked?

Same here.  There was a time when my wife and I arrived home and, pulling
into the garage, we saw a guy in the process of removing the hinge pins from
the door to the kitchen.  After confronting the guy (he claimed he had found
the door with its hinge pins removed and was putting them back for us), I
explained to him that now he had become a guardian of our house, as the next
time something went missing, we would know whom to look for first.  Anyway,
I recognized the guy as a fairly regular patron at one of the local watering
holes, so I ran him back into town and bought him a beer.  I never saw him
again after that.

Oh, yeah -- they guy had gotten into the garage by busting a flimsy side
door to it.

In alt.usage.english, Default User wrote:

A couple of hinge bolts would easily thwart that attack, but might lead
to more damaging attacks.

Robin  wrote  on Tue, 27 May 2008 22:32:41 +0100:

No dog and I think my neighbor's dog is almost too small to
carry a fake rock. So far, so good!

.

About 7 or 8 years ago, I bought a thermometer that could be opened to
store or retrieve a key. It sort of slid open like an old-style
child's pencil box. Once I moved to Saskatchewan, I found I no longer
needed it.

[...in Brenda's handbag...]>

Is it a PR myth then, that she's been a non-smoker, if not all her life,
then at the very least since her father died of it? If she does smoke, I
hope they're Turks, not stinkers.

Smoke?  I'm not aware that she ever smoked.

Prince Philip took a novel approach to giving up - he walked into a room
full of journalists and told them that he'd quit, which left him with no
choice but to go through with it.