09.04.08
Brow-beaten at my own game
I had agreed to have dinner with friends the other night, but Doc begged off because of family commitments, Jim begged off because the voices told him to, and I begged off because Jim’s voices told me to. Or, rather, I found myself irrationally busy. All this despite the fact that the dinner had been planned for months, with the obligatory stern instruction, “Mark your calendar.”
Fellow snarker JohnnyB—just about the only one of the group able to honor the commitment—chastised us thusly:
Just read this in Everything You Know About English Is Wrong:
The phrase “mark your calendar” does not mean “write this event in on your calendar so you won’t schedule something else in that same time period.”
“Mark your calendar” is a bastardization, by bastards, of a Latin term “mar curcalen dare” meaning “I challenge you to swirl around in the sea,” which means nothing.
As does my commitment to dinner engagements, apparently. And as does today’s post, here just for the fun of it.
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and 
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