Wofano Wotanto
Hero
Nuts to it, I'll just use the other option.
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The "I Didn't Comment in Another Thread" Thread
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Ryujin
Legend
One of the old sayings that has come to mean something it was never really intended to. Now it means "help yourself." It originally meant "do an impossible thing." So many old expressions have come to mean the opposite of what they originally did, frequently by leaving out half of the quote.
Wofano Wotanto
Hero
I must be old, I still use it as "accomplish something nigh-impossible" - although I suppose with the implication of "using just your own resources" as well, so kind of the same meaning. The fact that "bootstrapping" has become a verb is some real linguistic drift though, and reflects that truncation effect nicely.
Ryujin
Legend
I recently stumbled across a show I had forgotten about that made me wonder if it was the source of that song. "One Step Beyond" was an early '60s show, similar to "The Twilight Zone", that was supposed to feature horror stories based on true events.
One Step Beyond
As an extension of the tradition of radio horror dramas, this program sought out and re-created real stories of the supernatural for each episode.
Wofano Wotanto
Hero
I can vouch for the radio show version. Pretty decent listen, and (like most OTR stuff) easily found on youtube and other places online.I recently stumbled across a show I had forgotten about that made me wonder if it was the source of that song. "One Step Beyond" was an early '60s show, similar to "The Twilight Zone", that was supposed to feature horror stories based on true events.
One Step Beyond
As an extension of the tradition of radio horror dramas, this program sought out and re-created real stories of the supernatural for each episode.tubitv.com
I'm guessing the biggest use of "bootstrap" for the past 35 years or so has been in statistics where it has been one of the two big modern tools (the other being Markov chain Monte Carlo). It gets its name for an analogy to pulling oneself up by their bootstraps (reusing the sample data).
en.m.wikipedia.org
Bootstrapping (statistics) - Wikipedia
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RealAlHazred
Frumious Flumph (Your Grace/Your Eminence)
That term gets used a lot in software testing.I'm guessing the biggest use of "bootstrap" for the past 35 years or so has been in statistics where it has been one of the two big modern tools (the other being Markov chain Monte Carlo). It gets its name for an analogy to pulling oneself up by their bootstraps (reusing the sample data).
Bootstrapping (statistics) - Wikipedia
For new words, I love reading Jack Vance stories. He'll throw a term on a story, and you try to gutta its meaning from context, then check the dictionary to see if it's a real word and if you got the meaning close. If it's a term he made up out of while cloth, He'll include a footnote on the page with his definition.
We fans used to joke he was going to have a footnote in the first line of his autobiography, then he went ahead and put one in the title!
Many of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe book entries on Wikipedia have a spot for the "unfamiliar word", although sometimes it is the usage that is unfamiliar and not the word.
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I feel kind of silly for not having looked at all the other uses earlier... holy cow.
Bootstrapping - Wikipedia
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