Feedburner URLs that have huge accidental traffic
When I tried last month to consolidate my feeds into one, things did not go as planned. I lost about 3000 subscribers, for one thing, mainly due to RSS readers that don't know how to handle the very standard and ordinary htaccess redirect. I did this through Feedburner, which hosts my feeds. Feedburner also put a human-readable "this feed has moved" message in the feed and gave everyone 30 days to switch before closing the feed altogether.
But even more oddly, once the 30 days were up, Facebook, which was automatically importing my old feed and which did not automatically pick up the htaccess redirect to the new feed, redirected to
http://feeds.feedburner.com/index.rdf which is an all-Chinese news feed. My Facebook friends noticed long before I did and I've only just gotten around to resolving the issue.
That feed URL is extraordinary and is the purpose of this post (because, really, technical snafus on the Internet? Also ordinary). That feed likely picks up a HUGE amount of extra feed traffic because anyone who has moved their feed over from another server to Feedburner is highly likely to have that "index.rdf" at the end of their URL. If they don't change their entire feed URL on their pages to the new Feedburner URL they have picked out; that is, if they change only the host name and not the path after it, then, ta-da! a lot of people will accidentally be reading a lot of Chinese news.
(I'm not completely sure about that explanation, but it's all I have for now.)
What's most extraordinary to me is that that URL, http://feeds.feedburner.com/index.rdf, should even be made available to ANYONE. There are some other URLs that are also allotted that it seems to me should be reserved because of the high incidence of their use in standard web-site-building and blog-hosting software. (The suffix apparently doesn't matter: index.rdf, index.xml, index.php, etc., all point to the same place.)
http://feeds.feedburner.com/RSS
http://feeds.feedburner.com/RSS2
http://feeds.feedburner.com/feed
http://feeds.feedburner.com/atom
http://feeds.feedburner.com/rdf
Boohoo, wah, & diddums: words of fake sympathy
Here's my latest column—written for learners of English—from the
Malaysia Star.
...
Sometimes, when you are explaining how someone
done you wrong (a very informal and not altogether grammatical way of saying someone “treated you badly”), a listener will hold up a hand and slowly rub his index finger and thumb together.
If you’ve never seen this before, you’ll likely say, “What’s that?” Of course you will. They’re being rather obvious about it, almost begging you to ask.
Then they say with a
smug look – smug means “self-satisfied” or “excessively proud” – “It’s the world’s tiniest violin. And it’s playing for you!”
In the movies, a violin is the kind of instrument used to play sentimental and weepy solos during scenes in which a hero meets his death or a mother loses a child.
By comparing your
sob story – your tale of woe, your recounting of your misfortunes – to something very dramatic that might require the sorrowful sounds of strings, your listener is saying they do
not agree with you. They think you are melodramatic or wrong. They have no sympathy for you.
(“Playing” the world’s tiniest violin is funny just once, at most. It’s often not funny at all. Play it too often and you’re a
boor – a rude person.)
By the way, in another conversation that two-fingered gesture might mean money, although the thumb and the index finger rub together much faster in a way that resembles counting out banknotes.
There are a wide variety of terms used to treat sympathy, or lack of it.
Boohoo might be the most common one. Outside of books for the very young, boohoo is used mostly to pretend to be crying – it’s
onomatopoeic, meaning that it sounds vaguely like weeping and is an
imitative word – or, as in the case of the tiniest violin, to mock someone else.
If a family member complains about the way you pack their suitcase, you might say, “Well, boohoo. If you don’t like the way I do it, then do it yourself.”
Wah is the same: it sounds like a young baby crying, so much so that when my son was very young, my wife and I would joke that he had read the baby handbook. Many of his cries of frustration sound exactly like
wah. But again, it’s mostly used for imitation or for making fun of someone else.
Decades later, I can just hear my brother and me taunting my little sister (
little is sometimes used to mean “younger”) with a fake baby talk: “Wah, pwoor widdle baby gonna kwy?” (“Wah, poor little baby going to cry?”).
In British English there’s a similar word,
diddums, which began more or less as a nonsense word for soothing a child but now is often used as a way of expressing fake sympathy, which is to say, no sympathy at all.
A: “Watch where you’re going!”
B: “Oh, diddums fall down?”
Too bad! is another one. It means, “You don’t like it? I don’t care.” If someone says, “You’re driving too fast!” you might respond, “Too bad! If you don’t like it, you can get out and walk.”
Be careful with
too bad. Although it can be said if you intend to show genuine sympathy to someone, I believe it is more often used to show false sympathy.
If someone says, “I didn’t get that job I wanted,” you could say “Too bad!” but you had better
punch (say) those words so that the “too” is louder and so there’s real emotion there. You need to
look sorry for them. Otherwise, it might sound like you’re using “too bad” to be unsympathetic and dismissive.
The
go-to source (meaning the one place where you’re sure to find answers) for this kind of language is the work of Iona and Peter Opie. These two folklorists and fieldworkers have a couple of fantastic books about children.
The best one of the bunch is
The Lore And Language Of Schoolchildren. In a section called “Unpopular Children: Jeers And Torments,” the Opies offer long lists of taunting names, epithets, and scornful rhymes gathered from both sides of the Atlantic. A typical rhyme used to taunt a child who is being
picked on (who is being made fun of):
Cry, baby, cry,
Put your finger in your eye,
And tell your mother
It wasn’t I.
Of course, the language changes, so the Opies did not collect evidence for
tough cookies!, which is used the same as “too bad!”
One step up from the unsympathetic
tough cookies is
tough titty, which is mildly rude, and even further up is
tough shit, which is thoroughly rude and not the sort of thing you’d say to anyone except very good friends.
The Opies also have nothing on
sucks to be you, which, like the tiniest violin, shows no sympathy to someone who has told a terrible tale of woe.
You are now sufficiently linguistically equipped to be seven years old on an American playground.
My book is now available at no cost as an e-book download
Since my book
The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English is now available on the
bootleg e-book sites ("pirate" is the wrong term, I think), I've decided to make it available for download at no cost. This is not a big deal. The book never sold more than a few thousand copies, the copyright is mine (even though the publisher, McGraw-Hill, incorrectly printed the copyright as theirs), the book is being remaindered, and all the rights are now reverting to me.
But the main point here is that I'd like to draw people to my site for the free download, not to some shady place on the Internet. So:
Download the The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English at no charge. (PDF 2.7MB)
No fees, registrations, logins, passwords, ad-clicking, or hoop-jumping required.
By the way, the way these books get out there is usually simple. Sometimes the files leak from publishers, sometimes from authors, sometimes they're scanned from paper to pixels, etc., etc., Sometimes people pretend to be blind and contact the publisher to ask for a digital copy of a book so they can use it with their screen readers that translate the digital pages into something they can understand. The publisher sends a digital copy and in a few days it's all over the Internet.
Make no mistake: I'm not angry. Just resigned. I knew it would happen.
