
Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Santibáñez Villegas, by Juan van der Hamen, 17th century (Instituto Valencia de Don Juan)
I learned a new word today: “derp,” meaning “foolishness or stupidity.” Here’s the context:
So that’s why I’m a crypto skeptic. Could I be wrong? Of course. But if you want to argue that I’m wrong, please answer the question, what problem does cryptocurrency solve? Don’t just try to shout down the skeptics with a mixture of technobabble and libertarian derp.
[Paul Krugman, “Transaction Costs and Tethers: Why I’m a Crypto Skeptic,” NYTimes]
Irrelevant Postscript: I wanted to confirm my instinct not to capitalize “with” in my title. (I recalled learning not to capitalize prepositions.) I consulted the World Wide Wind. It passed the following:
“Short” words, those with less than five letters, are lowercase in titles, unless they are the first or last words.
And there we are. I’m taking language advice from a site that says “less than five letters” instead of “fewer than five letters.”
Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.
I’m quite confident you are in the top .01% of English speakers for breadth of vocabulary, in which case it’s rather amusing you didn’t know “Derp”.
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Thanks for the compliment! I don’t know how I missed “derp.” I’m sure if I keep opening my kimono, other lexical deficiencies will pop out willy nilly!
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