anise

Mark Mandel thnidu at GMAIL.COM
Wed Aug 20 21:34:03 UTC 2008


In other words, from a friend of a friend of a friend... a FOAF.

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OED:
A friend of a friend, esp. a person not personally known to the
speaker who is cited as the source or subject of an urban myth.

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Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF>:

Friend of a friend (FOAF) is a phrase used to refer to someone that
one does not know well — literally, a friend of a friend.

In some social sciences, the phrase is used as a half-joking shorthand
for the fact that much of the information on which people act comes
from distant sources (as in "It happened to a friend of a friend of
mine") and cannot be confirmed. It is probably best known from urban
legend studies. The term was popularized by Jan Harold Brunvand, the
best-known writer of that field. It was apparently first published by
Rodney Dale in his 1978 book The Tumour in the Whale - WH Allen ISBN
0-426-18710-5, in which he discussed the "FOAFtale".

The rise of social network services has led to increased use of this term.

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"Lemongello" is a real Italian surname. The "g" is soft and the stress
is on the penult, so it would naturally sound like "lemon Jell-O" in
English; whence, no doubt, the tale that Charlie reports.

m a m

On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 4:55 PM, Doug Harris <cats22 at frontiernet.net> wrote:
> I heard of this supposedly-young Shithead from my wife, who supposedly
> heard it from someone who 'knew' the kid.

> Poster:       Charles Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: anise
> ---
>
> Accounts of the unfortunate naming of young Shithead abound in (and from)
> countless locales (all of them also "absolutely true")--along with the
> naming of the twin girls Lemonjello [l@ 'man j@ lo] and Orangejello, and the
> lad Nosmo King (from a sign glimpsed in the hospital maternity ward). The
> jokes often have a racist component--perhaps an unintended tribute the
> greater freedom in African American naming practices.
>
> --Charlie

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