>>What's the age of criminal responsibility in Indiana? -9 months?
No - that's the age when you can legally marry your cousin.
248 publicly visible posts • joined 17 May 2007
I think you will be very pleasantly surprised when you get a chance to see the TV version. Martins style of writing it in chapters from the viewpoint of a single character makes it particularly easy to translate to the screen. Series 2 started transmission last Sunday, so they'll be on a torrent near you soon.
You might think that directions to a hospital might be a bit over the top for a simple "stomach ache" but I can understand why Siri thinks it appropriate.
You are an intelligent human being. You can tell the difference between a touch of indigestion and something potentially more serious. Siri cannot. A stomach ache could be the result of an acid attack due to over indulgence, appendicitus or god knows what. Given the propensity of Joe Public to believe whatever a computer tells them despite evidence to the contrary (see the idiots who drive into fields because their sat-nav told them to) you can see that anything that hints of a medical matter should be directed to the nearest health professional, if only to cut down on lawsuits.
“What we’re really looking for is the velocity of trending topics – what’s boiling to the surface,” Visse says. “The goal is to catch trends as they are accelerating and capture them before they hit the mainstream, in a way that is captivating,”
What does that *actually* mean in English?.
Sorry - Lionel Blair was the master of "Give us a Clue". It was ISIHAC that gave us such gems as
"OK, let's try something else...anything else. The next game is a quickie round giving ample time for the teams to give vent to their full acting range. It's called Sound Charades, and it's played in tribute to that great TV show Give Us A Clue, where the players conveyed a film title without speaking and within a strict time limit. The undisputed mime maestro was, of course, Lionel Blair, & who can forget the look of relish on his face when he was given two minutes on The African Queen?!"
According to Merriam-Webster on-line so "that particular word" as you put it has been around since the 14th century. Since it has survived in more or less common parlance since then I don't think an attention-seeking MP and a few linguistically anal moralists are going to have much of an effect.