So uhh JECE, where did YOU go to scholars where the required reading list was Star Wars Ep1, rather than Hamlet?

"Methinks it is like a weasel," Hamlet, Act III, Scene 2.

What are you on about, JECE?

Sorry, philcore, I hadn't refreshed in awhile.

Fuck my Autocorrect! Scholars = school

No prob semck, glad you had another reference for JECE.

Mine is also act 3, scene 2 when the Queen is watching the play that Hamlet arranged to out her and his stepdad and he asked her what she thought of the portrayal of her by the actress in the play. and she said the line I quoted above.

philcore:
First: The thread is on the first page of locked threads and you were talking to me directly in the comments I was referring to.
Second: The sentence structure I used should have tipped you off. The double-'e' in "Meethinks" should have tipped you off too, as the stress in 'methinks' is on hte latter syllable. Picking the first quote that pops up on Google Search when you type 'methinks' as your quote doesn't prove anything to anybody. ;-)
Third: Congratulations.
Fourth: Picking the only substantive content of Wikipedia's article on Jar Jar to comment on doesn't prove much either. ;-)

as your quote --> as your example

So you're just now getting around to answering a Sidenote question on a thread from 3 weeks ago?

Ok, I'll buy that. But coming up with Shakespeare back then and now being accused of googling the word, doesn't really jive. We weren't discussing Shakespeare at the time and I was trying to impress anyone with my knowledge of it. I was having a laugh at gf Autocorrecting Nigee to Niger and implying that he meant nigger. The fact that I associated "methinks" to Shakespeare regardless of how you spelled it (i'm not so good at spelling, even when my phone cooperates) means that I clearly had some frame of reference, doesn't it?

But then to say that I looked up on Wikipedia about jar jar? Whatever the hell Wikipedia has to say about that, if it sounded like I was just repeating it, it just validates my opinion on the topic. Does it really call Lucas a senile old man? I'll have to look that up sometime.

There are many people who try to pretend they know shit that they don't. I assure you I'm not one of them. I know too much shit to try to pretend that I know even more than I do. It would just be obnoxious.

I'm not sure I ever remember Jar Jar Binks saying meethinks... He says meesa thinks, doesn't he?

I might be wrong here - haven't watched that film in a while.

"I know too much shit to try to pretend that I know even more than I do. It would just be obnoxious."
Ha ha. That's one of the best juxaposition quotes I've ever seen.

captainmeme: I can't find a clip. I actually looked before posting in the other thread, ha ha. Draugnar took interest in this thread and started looking too, but couldn't find anything except a quote on IMDB:
http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0000061/quotes

philcore: My point was that quote comes up as a Wikipedia article as the third result when you type 'methinks' into Google. The previous two results are just Urban Dictionary and Merriam-Webster. So no, you did not need a frame of reference.

captainmeme:
Interestingly enough, that Urban Dictionary article I stumbled into gives me proof that I am not alone in getting that reference. Two of the six definitions reference The Phantom Menace.

Menace:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=methinks

Good grief, JECE, what's wrong with you?

I guess it was naive of me to think that silencing Draugnar would signal the end of categorically absurd pedantry on webDiplomacy.

Methinks is just a word, isn't it? I'm certainly not referring to Shakespeare when I use it. It's a slightly more playful way of saying 'I think' and is no more Shakespearean than the word 'I'.

^Well, it would have been more common in Shakespeare's day than ours to hear it used...

It's not as if most writers today write "methinks," and we don't often say it.

That being said, yeah, pretty sure it's just a word...

And while the Bard did invent hundreds of words and phrases, that isn't one of them--

Merriam-Webster says there's a Middle English variant ("me thinketh"...dunno if that pops up in Chaucer anywhere, but that'd fit the time) and an Old English variant ("mē thincth") so yeah...

Unlike eyeball, puppy dog, and, appropriately enough, bloodstained (he WOULD be the one to invent that word, lol) methinks isn't a Shakespeare original and really not a Shakespeare reference so much as an "archaic English words" reference.

Also--

While I haven't watched the movies in years and I've tried to wipe that stain of a character from my mind, pretty sure Jar Jar Binks always said (to my everlasting annoyance) "meesa," so in proper, erm, "Gungan English" it'd be "Meesa thinks JECE isa being a Grammar Nazi...and failing worse than did the movie meesa starred in!"

Did most writers in Shakespeare's day use methinks? I genuinely have no idea when it peaked. It's not an uncommon word in my part of the world and certainly wouldn't raise any eyebrows if i used it in regular office conversation.

Still, words that are normal here can often be rare over the pond. I heard the other day that the phrase 'see you anon', which is one of the most common ways of saying goodbye here, is seen as rather pretentious in the States.

Yeah...if I said "see you anon," I'd get a response of "What?" or something about IT being Shakespearean...and of course it's not exclusively Shakespearean, but I think that's about as far back as most Americans read or know of in terms of English.

Hence why I have to stop myself punching the blackboard when explaining to clients that Shakespeare is not "Old English"...even though that's as "old" of a form of English as most Americans know, because Jamestown was founded in 1607, and OF COURSE, there was no meaningful history in terms of language, literature, or anything else before the first English settlement in Eventually-To-Be-America. ;)

That being said, I am now totally using "see you anon" for just that effect.

(And I'd again argue, as I have in other threads, a lot of this is due to exceedingly-poor education when it comes to how literature is taught and what literature is taught...literature, among other things, is supposed to help shape your worldview, and if your worldview extends no further back than Shakespeare, Jamestown, and the King James Bible, you're not only going to have a very Anglo-centric/Euro-centric view of history...I honestly think schools try too hard to get kids interested in very recent books while ignoring the classics--recent works can be great, but you can't appreciate them fully without the classics, and you're going to have a headache in college if you're an English major and DON'T know the classics...because sooner or later some professor's going to spring an author like my good buddy T.S. Eliot on you, and THEN you're going to be completely lost because you have no idea who Chaucer, Dante, or any of these other pre-Shakespeare authors are that he's referencing in "The Waste Land.")

But I digress.

As for other writers in Shakespeare's day--

"Methinks" isn't too special a word, I'd probably guess a lot of writers did use it as well...I can see Marlowe or Ben Jonson or Thomases Kyd, Dekker and Middleton (Thomas was apparently quite the name for playwrights in that era!) and so on all using it...no reason why they wouldn't, and it's a nice two-syllable word that would fit nicely into an iambic meter, meTHINKS, unstressed-stressed, so yeah, it probably saw some decent usage.

I can imagine it being used in Milton and the 1600s as well...and those sort of things don't go away overnight...

If I were to guess offhand I'd say that Austen's period--Late Enlightenment/Early Romantic--was around the time it started to become less commonplace in literature...I can't picture an Austen character really using that term, so either it became less widely used then or it was no longer a term that'd fit in "heightened speech" or literature dealing with the gentry and upper classes, since that's what Austen writes about (that and gossipy romance plots that end in marriage and simultaneously intrigue and irritate me--marriage does NOT equal happily ever after every single time, hell, Shakespeare and even Chaucer's Wife of Bath were more cynical and frankly realistic about that!--but I, again, digress.) :)

Wow....can we just get back to the porn links?

Threads like this are why I come to webDip.

By "threads like this" abge is, of course, referring to the aforementioned porn links...

Octavious and obiwanobiwan: You're basically repeating what bugged me about philcore's comments. I didn't see why methinks = pretenciousness/Shakespeare. I was using the word in quite the opposite manner.

I was wondering when Obi was going to jump into this thread.

methinks/meethinks

Methinks this is weird thread. Most people say methinks when they are pretending to talk like Shakespeare. I had no idea that Jar Jar Binks says it too. (Is that what this thread is about? Who do you think of when you hear the word "methinks "?)

“Threads like this are why I come to webDip"

Lol. Likewise. Only on webdip.

spyman: Yes, that's just about it. Or more specifically whether the specific sentences in which I used "Meethinks" [sic] in the linked thread were more reminiscent of Jar Jar Binks or Shakespeare.

I see. I guess you might pick that up if you really knew your Star Wars references. It's been a long time since I have seen those films. I really only enjoyed the original trilogy. Phantom Menace was just okay (but still a disappointment), but the second prequel I found so boring I turned it off. I have never seen the third prequel.

@jece in the other old thread you posted about draug's previous threat to leave and even asking ghost to ban him, there was a Sidenote I noticed where you asked if "my 2 cents" was an idiom?

Are you not from an English speaking country? Because that would make sense not only with the "my 2 cents" comment but also not knowing the hamlet reference. It is a very common quote, although usually backwards "methinks the lady doth protest too much". It's one of maybe 3 Shakespeare quotes that everyone in the English speaking world has heard from pop references, along with "a rose by any other name ... " and "to be or not to be". 20 years ago when I read hamlet, I already knew the quote so well backwards, that when I read it the right way, it sounded odd to me. Jar jar and SWep1 on the other hand, was such an embarrassment that it would only register in peoples' minds if they had just watched it.

diplomacy a game of binksmanship

I think JECE is from Argentina.

Yes Philcore is right about "methinks". English speakers say it, usually in a joking way.

That would explain it. @jece if you are from Argentina, I tale back all the condescending thoughts I had about you and offer this:

Santa Santa Evita, Madre de todos los ninos, De los tiranizados, de los descamisados De los trabajadores, de la Argentina

@JECE,

If you're from Argentina, it's probably best not to mock native speakers for their English usage and ask them where they went to school, in future.

I think JECE was joking. I think he might have been making fun of philcore's lack of Star Wars knowledge (nobody studies "Star Wars" at school). This is known also as "nerd humour" which is okay because this is a pretty nerdy site.

Spyman who are you calling a nerd, you're asking for a right old punch up the crumpet

Not you NigeeBaby, of course, you are the "Joe Cool" of this website.

... please don't punch me up the crumpet.

Doesn't "punch me in the crumpet" belong on the pens thread? Sure sounds like a double entendre (pardon my French) to me.

I must say I do love a good thread about pens, don't care what colour they are ......

You love you some big black pens!

They're the only ones acceptable for legal docs, after all.

Don't you have a pitch to sod? (Speaking of triple entendres)

I do love a big black pen in my hand, and when I squeeze the top with my thumb I make it slightly bigger and I can use it until it has shot its last bit of ink all over my pages

Ooh how I wish I had a pitch to sod right now ...... I'd give it a good drenching !!

philcore/spyman/semck83: I am half Spanish and half Argentine. I was born in Madrid. Spanish is technically my first language.

Yet I am also a dual-Spanish–U. S. citizen. I have studied in the U. S. education system since 2nd Grade, and before that was in the British system. I lived in Cincinnati 9 out of the first 18 years of my life and am now in my fourth year at a Connecticut university without having studied abroad. I'm certainly a native speaker of English.

But pop references don't tend to catch my eye. And the fact that I have switched schools so much means that I easily could have missed Hamlet even if it was part of several of my school's standard curriculums. I have studied other works from the overrated man (or non-entity, as some prefer to consider the author,) in school. As for idioms, I just haven't been around people who use very many of them, even if those people themselves are familiar with the meanings. It has always seemed to me that idioms are far less common than they used to be. And yes, I know what '2 cents' means now and use a few other idioms on a regular basis (e. g., 'out of the blue').


tendmote: Ha ha, it took me a while to catch that. Nice one!


spyman: I was joking too when I wrote "Meethinks", ha ha. philcore didn't get that, so that's why I had reason to post this thread. And yes, I'm definitely kidding around by posting and replying to this thread. ;-)


philcore: I didn't realize how old the Phantom Menace already was. So maybe the reference just went over your lower-case head.

Or it was a mistaken reference. I believe its been pointed out that jar jar never even said "meethinks". He said "messa thinks"

And why is my head lower case? I don't understand that idiom.

No, as I mentioned, I'm clearly not alone in getting that reference:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=methinks

"And why is my head lower case?"
My response: philcore

"See you anon" is an old Jawa saying.