As reported on a thai visa group, there are groups of immigration police visiting building sites and arresting foreigners involved in the building process that do not have work permits. This could get very very scarry and now that the king celebration is winding down.a step up of investigations into foreign developers will take place. It is suggested that thai developers are behind this enfocement of law.
That would indicate the building projects are finished--And it's time the 'developers' pay them their hard-earned wages.Originally Posted by luvthai
Is this thread somewhat jejune? I don't believe any of us work on Thai building sites
How long have you been waiting for the chance to use the word jejune?Is this thread somewhat jejune? I don't believe any of us work on Thai building sites
I love it.
I also love it, but i am not sure that the correct sense is being used here. Just because it was word of the day on 2nd November 2004 does not automatically give it the credence thus claimed.How long have you been waiting for the chance to use the word jejune?Is this thread somewhat jejune? I don't believe any of us work on Thai building sites
I love it.
To quote Michael Quinton:
Jejune derives from the Latin word jejunus, тАЬempty stomach; fastingтАЭ, that has also given us jejunum as the anatomical name for the small intestine (so called because it was said to be always empty at death, which IтАЩll leave you to think about). Via French intermediaries itтАЩs also the origin of dinner, it seems from an unrecorded Vulgar Latin verb disjunare (from jejunus plus the negative prefix dis-) hence the meal at which one breaks oneтАЩs fast. The fact that etymologically dinner therefore means тАЬbreakfastтАЭ is just one of those oddities that happen as language evolves.
When jejune first appeared in English, in the seventeenth century, it had at first this literal meaning of fasting, though it became obsolete within a century. But almost immediately it took on a figurative sense of something meagre or unsatisfying, or of land that was poor or barren. (Such figurative senses had long before been attached to its Latin original.) It was also soon applied to stuff that was equally unsatisfying to the mind or soul: тАЬdull, flat, insipid, bald, dry, uninteresting; meagre, scanty, thin, poor; wanting in substance or solidityтАЭ as the Oxford English Dictionary has it, trying to turn itself into a thesaurus.
However, at about the end of last century, the figurative sense was taken a step further by adding the idea of something immature or callow, so causing dictionaries to begin to add a subsidiary sense of тАЬpuerile; childish; naiveтАЭ. The first recorded instance in the OED is in George Bernard ShawтАЩs play Arms and the Man of 1898: тАЬHis jejune credulity as to the absolute value of his conceptsтАЭ. Some writers have attempted to justify this shift through a confusion with the unrelated French word jeune, тАЬyouthтАЭ, though it might also have been a move from тАЬinsipidтАЭ towards тАЬpuerileтАЭ. For whatever reason this sense came into being, it is now firmly attached to the word. The evidence from sources such as the British National Corpus is that in recent years it has become the dominant one, mistaken or not. Collins is merely among the first to show this, but other dictionaries will no doubt follow as revised editions are prepared.
Despite the implied stamp of approval by such as Shaw, writers have been railing against what they see as this ignorant misuse of the word for many years. Kingsley Amis famously did a hatchet-job on it in an essay in The State of the Language in 1980, describing it as his тАЬfavourite solecism of all timeтАЭ. But such counterblasts are Canute-like in their lack of effect. As Diana Treffry, the Editorial Director of Collins English Dictionaries, wrote to the paper in response to Simon HoggartтАЩs comments: тАЬAs much as we may regret the passing of particular meanings, none of us can hold back the changes in language, not even lexicographersтАЭ.
Kind of a gay word.
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