Tag: English

We Suck

Have you ever noticed how sports fans refer to their favorite teams differently depending on how well the team is playing? When the team is good they say things like, “we’re good” or “we won” but when the team is utter shit garbage it’s more like, “they lost” or “they suck donkey balls” or things like that?

I find that to be an incorrect language policy. In that spirit allow me to say this about the Boston Bruins, my favorite hockey team: We fucking suck. We dropped out of a playoff spot this week and now after getting trounced by New Jersey last night we have dropped even further out.

Given the state of the world right now I really could have used a long and decisive Bruins winning streak. Nope. Not this year.

Happy Boxing Day

Hello and welcome to the annual December 26th edition of the “What the hell is Boxing Day, anyway?” post.

That’s rhetorical, of course. As someone from Massachusetts I have no experience of knowledge of what Boxing Day may or may not be and I do not really want to know, I just like speculating. The rest of the English speaking world (well… the UK and Canada… anyone else?) celebrates Boxing Day on the day after xmas. Why? Who? What? This year I chose to assume that it has something to do with Guy Fawkes (another English story that I have no clue about) and maybe boxing up little pieces of whatever he was going to use to blow up Parliament. Yeah, that works for clueless old Robbie.

I took today off from work, which is nice given that I still have a cold. I am a little bit better over the last two days, but it’s still pretty bad. Boo, and stuff. It’s cold. I overslept (and I really, really needed it). Now I have nothing on my agenda outside of hitting the grocery store.

Well… that and buying a new guitar. HA!

Happy Boxing Day to the world that celebrates and to those of us in the former US happy nothing special day that happens to be the day after xmas.

What is the Past Tense of Troubleshoot?

We’re about to have a quick little English language session. Bet you never thought you’d get something like that here, right? Ready for some knowledge? Ready to get your learn on for the day?

Here it comes.

I had an email come through my inbox this morning where the writer used the word “troubleshoot” in the past tense. They wrote something along the lines of, “we troubleshooted the issue.”

That both looked and sounded super wrong to me. Like, if the past tense of shoot is shot, then shouldn’t the past tense of a compound word ending in shoot end in shot as well? Troubleshot? That’s what I would have written, but is that correct? Off to The Google!

I searched for What is the Past Tense of Troubleshoot and it returned a bunch of hits. Most of the summaries said that both options were correct. Troubleshot is correct (thank you, I love being right), but troubleshooted is also correct (booooooo!!!).

There was one post from Quora that gave the best option. Shouldn’t the past tense of troubleshoot be…. wait for it…. Fixed?