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September 25

Rail in Sandrail

Where did the name come from, and what does it actually mean? The article doesn't say, and its Talk page has couple of unresolved debates on the matter. HiLo48 (talk) 09:20, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

An answer might be found in the article Front engine dragster: "These early dragsters were nicknamed "rails", due to the frame's longitudinal members (rails) being exposed to view." --Wrongfilter (talk) 09:48, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

Long before the sandrail vehicle came along, in Newspapers.com I found the term "sandrail" in reference to a machine used for dredging. Since the term "drag" in drag racing also seems to refer back to dredging, it could be that these terms are all related. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:20, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

A sandrail is literally a rail designed for driving on sand. A rail is a straight-line racecar. Starting in the 1940s, straight-line (drag) racers began reducing car weight by discarding the body parts and replacing much of the frame with straight steel rails. The result was long straight cars with visible rails, so people referred to the cars as rail cars (or simply rails). A dune buggy is classically a Volkswagen Beetle modified for beaches (and deserts to some degree) with fiberglass bodies. Some racers wanted the straight-line racing feel, so they removed the bodies, replaced the frame with straight rails and ended up with sandrails. ~2026-46630-01 (talk) 12:38, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

That sounds credible, but do you have a reliable source for it? I would like to fix the article. HiLo48 (talk) 23:02, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

Semantic link between urination and anger

What could have possibly given people the idea to start using "p***ed off" to mean angered, and why is that phrase such a popular synonym for it? – MrPersonHumanGuy (talk) 14:18, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

It's easy to find the historical record of the usage of the expression. Why people started using it is unattested. --jpgordon^{𝄢𝄆𝄐𝄇} 14:23, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

www.etymonline.com says:

Pissed off "angry, fed up" is attested by 1946 (Partridge says 1937); said to have been used in the military in World War II; in common use from 1970s.

I suspect it may be connected with an early meaning of "pissed" which is being intoxicated (drunken people are often angry), but that's just my guess.

BTW, the exact origin of "taking the piss" is equally mysterious.

Alansplodge (talk) 14:52, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

Why "off"? Surely the command piss off, meaning go away, must have preceded the state of being pissed off. Or it could be by extension from ticked off, which Etymonline says is from World War 1, and has a sense of being summarily ticked off from a list of names and consigned somewhere.  Card Zero  (talk) ※ 13:39, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

User:Card Zero, perhaps related to the slightly earlier and equally curious "browned off", also meaning fed-up. Alansplodge (talk) 12:53, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

There's a connection in Chaucer: He is as angry as a pissemyre. Pismire is a word for ant, because the formic acid produced by the angrier varieties of ant smells a bit like urine.  Card Zero  (talk) ※ 13:33, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

I don't think that this has something to do with it. The expression for 'ant' is also known in other languages, e. g. Low German: Pissmirr (consists of the same words: piss + mire, Mirr = ant, borrowed from Middle Dutch miere) or Pissamink, Migeemk (migen also means to piss, literally this would be a piss(ing) ant, other derived forms meaning the same, i. e., ant, would be Migimm 'piss(ing) bee', Mighauhn 'piss(ing) chicken', Migworm 'piss(ing) worm') etc. These are nouns, not verbs. The expression does not refer to the urine itself as it does in the expressions for ant but the result of the activity. This is also not unusual in other languages:

In High German "sich verpissen" means 'to bugger off', 'to piss off', the imperative "Verpiss dich!" Piss off! So this is similiar. Another metaphorical use is "sich vor Lachen bepissen", i. e. to laugh out lout in an extreme manner. A quite similar use to pissed off would be "angepisst sein", literally meaning to be pissed. It's a passive construction derived from "anpissen" 'to piss on' or 'to piss against', e. g. "einen Baum anpissen", 'to piss against a tree'. In a metaphorical sense one can "jemanden anpissen", i. e., to make someone angry, literally one pisses on someone. So the passive is the result of that bevaviour - this person "ist angepisst", i. e. pissed off.--~2026-53574-41 (talk) 13:38, 5 October 2026 (UTC)

September 28

Scottish Gaelic sentence

I’ll admit I only know about enough Gaelic to get by in basic conversations, but I encountered this sentence on gd-wiki: 'S e An Eala Bhàn òran gaoil le Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna, and it doesn’t look correct to me. Should that be ’S e òran gaoil le Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna a ‘th ann An Eala Bhàn? I’m pretty sure that’s correct, but I want to fact check it before I change it and I’m not sure where to ask on gd-wiki. Thanks! Cheers, 𝔰𝔥𝔞𝔡𝔢𝔰𝔱𝔞𝔯 ^{(𝔱𝔞𝔩𝔨)} (any/all) 09:06, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

I don't know a word of Irish, but I can confirm that other articles on the Scottish Gaelic Wikipedia (Dàin do Eimhir, Hallaig (dàn), Òran na Cloiche) follow the "’S e definition ann topic" pattern. So this appears to be a more common way. But the opening sentence has had this challenged form since 22 September 2014 after an edit by a gd-3 user who is an administrator with 2,350 live edits, and the article has been viewed over 700 times since then. It has, furthermore, been edited since then by three other users, including a gd-2 user with 982 edits and a user who is a bureaucrat and administrator with 12,600 live edits. If the opening sentence is seriously wrong, one would expect at least some of these to have spotted it.  ​‑‑Lambiam 06:24, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

That’s a good point. Thanks, just checking! Cheers, 𝔰𝔥𝔞𝔡𝔢𝔰𝔱𝔞𝔯 ^{(𝔱𝔞𝔩𝔨)} (any/all) 08:26, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

September 29

Irish - Was Dev your unscrupulous friend?

On the website "Documents on Irish Foreign Policy" is the letter of 30 September 1921 from Eamon de Valera to David Lloyd George accepting the latter's invitation to a conference in London. The Irish text is signed "Mise, do chara gan cháim", the official translation gives "Faithfully yours". Google translate, on the other hand, translates "Mise, do chara gan cháim" as "I, your unscrupulous friend". A moment of humour from Dev? Or a cock up by Google? I think we should be told! DuncanHill (talk) 22:42, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

I'm taking a wild guess here that "Dev" is a nickname for de Valera? If that's true you might say so; not all of us recognize it. --Trovatore (talk) 22:49, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Yes, "Dev" is a nickname for "de Valera". DuncanHill (talk) 23:02, 29 September 2026 (UTC) I suspect that anyone who speaks Irish would recognise it. DuncanHill (talk) 23:11, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

I speak not a word of Irish, but I understood it instantly from context. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} ~2026-41275-62 (talk) 03:44, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

I don't speak any Irish at all and I'm going at this piecemeal without any claim to complete accuracy.

Mise is just the emphatic form of "I" or "me".

Wiktionary's definition of do, under etymology 3, explicitly lists do chara as meaning "to/for a friend" (do means "to/for" and gets combined with a lenited dative, chara is the lenited form of cara which is such a dative and means "friend".)

Gan cháim appears to be the phrase causing issue. Google pointed me to a couple of examples of this phrase, one in a blog about a hymn composed by Father Peadar Ua Laoghaire and another in an Irish language forum discussion of a book entitled An Mám ó Dheas. The definitions given in these posts are "flawless" and "guileless". It seems that gan triggers lenition, and the unlenited caim derives from cam meaning "crooked", so the meanings naturally derive from idea of something being without crookedness.

As to how this could become translated as "unscrupulous" is unclear; there might be a term similar in spelling to caim which has the complete opposite meaning of scrupulousness, or it might just be that Google Translate does was not trained on a large enough Irish corpus. GalacticShoe (talk) 12:30, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

September 30

English tenses

Does English ever say: ”Yesterday, I drove on a road that leads from Boston to New York.”? Or should it be: ”Yesterday, I drove on a road that led from Boston to New York.”? --40bus (talk) 06:00, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

You could use either one. The one with "leads" sounds a little more natural to me (because presumably the road still leads there) but the one with "led" sounds slightly more "technically correct". See sequence of tenses for a more in-depth discussion. --Trovatore (talk) 06:07, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

I concur with Il Trovatore. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:29, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

Arguably "...leading from Boston to New York" would sound more natural, but I'm not a native speaker, anyway, and the sentence feels a bit strained to begin with. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 13:15, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

Given the choice between the two, the first sounds more natural. But a native speaker would probably say just "I drove from Boston to New York". The "on a road" part seems superfluous. Like, what else I drive on? The sidewalk? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:31, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

You could have entered the road at Framingham and driven as far as Sturbridge. You might choose to describe it as "a road that leads from Boston to New York" if the point you were making was about how distances along that journey are signposted.

As to the tense usage, in statements like this you should use the past tense if the fact you're citing might have changed, but if you don't believe it would have, then it's common to use the present tense. "Yesterday I was told that Boston is (or was) the capital of Massachusetts", but "Yesterday I was told that it was raining in Boston." --~2026-52517-31 (talk) 16:18, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

I sometimes get irritated when, for example, science fiction contains a phrase like The Galaxy was a very big place. —Antonissimo (talk) 22:02, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

If the entire work is narrated in the past tense from the point of view of one of the characters (as is common), then it would be more natural to phrase it so. Using 'is' would transform the narrator into a timeless omniscient observer, which is also a possible mode, but the two cannot usually be mixed, unless the participant's narration is embedded within a framework of that of the omniscient observer. However, if the observation about the galaxy is made in some character's quoted direct speech, 'is' would be fine in all circumstances.

In the context of science fiction, 'the Galaxy' could, of course, refer to one that no longer exists. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} ~2026-41275-62 (talk) 23:14, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

If the Galaxy has ceased to be a very big place within the lifetime of the narrator, I want to know why. [The poster formerly known as a minor irritant] —Antonissimo (talk) 00:40, 3 October 2026 (UTC)

When I was young, the village I grew up in was a very big place. Now, having travelling the world, I see it is among the humblest of humble hamlets.  ​‑‑Lambiam 06:06, 1 October 2026 (UTC)

The only other (theoretical) possible way to drive between Boston and NY without the road is the train. However, I don't think people can drive trains for recreational purposes and that there are limits on how long train drivers can work without a pause (similar to HGV/bus drivers). Its why train drivers don't drive between London and Glasgow/Edinburgh, but rather Preston/Newcastle, at least not without a pause. JuniperChill (talk) 10:58, 3 October 2026 (UTC)

Yes. If you had driven a train, you would say you drove a train, unless driving trains in general was already a subject under discussion. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:48, 3 October 2026 (UTC)

October 6

Can women be pederasts?

Is the word "pederast" gender-neutral or does it only ever apply to men? Germaine Greer was quoted as having said in response to her book The Beautiful Boy that "a woman of taste is a pederast—boys rather than men", but was her application of the word "pederast" to women unusual, or have other people also called women pederasts if they are attracted to and/or have sex with pubescent boys? ~2026-53159-81 (talk) 21:23, 6 October 2026 (UTC)

The "pederast" Wikipedia article says that the term can be used to describe same-sex relations between adults and pubescent minors, but what about opposite-sex relations of this nature? ~2026-53159-81 (talk) 21:26, 6 October 2026 (UTC)

The term derives from the Ancient Greek term παιδερᾰστής (paiderăstḗs), and originally described a specific type of Ancient Greek social relationship between an adolescent boy and an older man (see Pederasty in ancient Greece). The specific implication is that it is a relationship between a man and a boy, not just love of an adolescent boy in general. Wiktionary lists the coordinate term korephile for a women attracted to adolescent girls, and ephebophile as (at least originally) referring to attraction to young males in general. (fugues) (talk) 22:37, 6 October 2026 (UTC)