Content-Type: text/shitpost

Benjamin Franklin says, in his Autobiography:

I was acquainted with one of the sect's founders, Michael Welfare, soon after it appear'd. He complain'd to me that they were grievously calumniated by the zealots of other persuasions, and charg'd with abominable principles and practices to which they were utter strangers. I told him this had always been the case with new sects, and that, to put a stop to such abuse, I imagin'd it might be well to publish the articles of their belief, and the rules of their discipline. He said that it had been propos'd among them, but not agreed to…

He then quotes M. Welfare as having given this reason:

When we were first drawn together as a society, it had pleased God to enlighten our minds so far as to see that some doctrines, which we once esteemed truths, were errors; and that others, which we had esteemed errors, were real truths. From time to time He has been pleased to afford us farther light, and our principles have been improving, and our errors diminishing. Now we are not sure that we are arrived at the end of this progression, and at the perfection of spiritual or theological knowledge; and we fear that, if we should once print our confession of faith, we should feel ourselves as if bound and confin'd by it, and perhaps be unwilling to receive further improvement, and our successors still more so, as conceiving what we their elders and founders had done, to be something sacred, never to be departed from.

Well, I had this all written and ready to go, but then I decided it wasn't suitable for Content-Type: text/shitpost and I was going to post it over on the real blog. So in emacs I selected the whole file and cut it into the cut buffer, quit the editor, intending to open a new post on th new blog and paste back the cut text.

But the Emacs cut buffer (called the “kill ring”) does not persist when you quit the editor, so the whole post is gone. Oooooops. I am struggling to maintain my peaceful aplomb.

Maybe I'll regain the energy to tell you about the lipograms tomorrow.

[ I did bang it out again, and with orthographic modifications that substantially — no, surpassingly — outstrip my prior draft's quality. My aplomb is intact! WIN!!1! ]

Q: How do phagocytes communicate with one another?

A: They use cell phones.

…from Math Stackexchange!

A user wrote (in part):

I am not usually a reductionist, but if this site-idea, for instance, ends up fagocitating the standard (calculus) and (algebra-precalculus) questions-to-be, I am all for it, and I think it would be better for everyone.

Wow, “fagocitating”! What's that? My first thought was that it was some sort of cellphone spelling mishap. But no, it's even English, and it perfectly captures the writer's meaning here.

The standard English spelling is phagocytating and it means to engulf and absorb, in the manner of a phagocyte. English also uses “phagocytosing” here, which I like less for some reason.

(The writer's variant spelling is apparently inspired by Portuguese, in which the word is spelled fagocitar. Is this word in more common use in Brazil than it is here?)

I hope to phagocytize this word into my own vocabulary, immediately and with peaceful aplomb.