A few things I've had time to notice while offline, in alphabetical order:
(1) "Honey"
What you need to know: "Honey" is a hateword. Some other things couples call each other on television are still endearments or just private pet names when used between couples, but it's very rude to use them as substitutes for "Miss," "Ma'am," or "Madame" as general ways to "call" women.
Here's a tip: "calling" people anything, including their own names, is annoying when the people are already present and talking to you. It makes the person doing it sound hysterical; it makes the person hearing it want to snap "I'm right over here. What's the matter with you?" In a social conversation, you can replace "calling" with eye contact. If you're being paid by the hour and the customer is politely excusing you from any felt need to chatter by withholding eye contact, you can replace it with "Thank you, Sir/Ma'am." You're welcome.
Here's another tip: If you're being paid by the hour, don't say "honey." Not at all. Not ever. If you work in a restaurant that serves it with pancakes, say "bee product." It's so toxic these days that I don't know anyone who actually eats bee digest, but just as you'd say "female dog" or "mother cat" because you wouldn't want to say "bitch" or "pussy" in front of women in public, you say "bee product" if you have to mention that.
"Honey" means a lot of things, most of them bad. As a term of non-endearment it traces back to slave usage, and is still considered lower-class Southern, which is enough of a reason not to use it. (In slave and lower-class Southern dialect, because it already had mixed connotations, the word basically meant "child, as it might be the boss's child, or family member, to whom I don't want to say anything worse but who is annoying the daylights out of me at this moment.")
"Honey" is one word that seems always to have looked and sounded pretty much the same. Anglo-Saxon sources contain hunig in its most literal sense of the syrupy semiliquid bees regurgitate after ingesting flower nectar. Before glyphosate it was possible to consider bee digest as food for humans; today, because bees get so much nectar from sprayed wildflowers, bee digest should be regarded as toxic waste.
Because it literally means a body secretion, "honey" has a long tradition of being used as euphemistic slang for other body secretions. Someone challenged me on saying that it's used as a synonym for the S-word. I've not found a source that specified that. It's used to mean the contents of an outhouse generally. It's used to mean, specifically, the ones that don't have more common vulgar names of their own, the ones also called "juices" and sometimes various four-letter words derived from "juices," the ones that smell "f***y" (I'm pretty sure that word is specifically programmed into this site's contract).
This is what makes "honey" one of those endearingly raunchy things bedmates are supposed to think it's so exciting to call each other, like "poopsie" and "stinker." I never thought raunchy things were very endearing. As far as I'm concerned, Honey's bedmate's pet name is "Ex" or "Dumpee."
I've found several sources for "honey-dipper" meaning "outhouse cleaner," but others, like Jack Douglas, didn't go into the details. Douglas often used rude words but he had some comedic sense of how to use them sparingly so they retained their rhetorical value, which too many current comedians don't have.
I've found abundant evidence that some parents do terrible things to their children. Names actually given to people include not only Honey, but Bitsy, Pussy, Puppie, Whoopie, Hussy, Hoyden, Caress, Desire, and worse. (I'm not sure about "Chick"; as a man's name it's considered a short form of Charles, and I've only ever heard it as slang for "any girl or young woman," with no specifically offensive meaning, but from the way some women react to it it may have an offensive meaning somewhere.) "Anal" and "Shitsu" are found in countries where English is not an official language, so they probably don't count. UrbanDictionary.com lists "Honey" as a given name for a girl and tries to give it a connotation of goodheartedness, but this listing gets a lot of "dislike" votes, probably indicating that nobody in any city has heard it actually used that way. I certainly have not. I've heard "a honey" or "a honeypot" used to mean "a good-looking slut" or "a garment or outfit that will look flattering but slutty if worn."
I have found a more recent source for "honey" as a term of hate for women as such: Laura Schlessinger uses "Honey" with a capital H, in quoted sentences, to indicate something half of a couple would say to the other half, but she uses "the honey," with a small H, to indicate a married man's other woman. Laura Schlessinger addresses a very low reading level and uses only widely understood slang so I'd guess that this usage is recognized around the English-speaking world, although when people I know talk about "other women" they say either "the other woman" or an unambiguously unacceptable word.
Grandma Bonnie Peters used to use "honey" to mean bee digest, and she used to enjoy and recommend it as a food. She was allergic to beets and to generic white sugar, much of which is extracted from beets; she was not allergic to pure cane sugar, but since people in our town used to keep bees, she used to cook with bee digest. This was probably the biggest correction she made in her active career.
Employers may need to stand over their lower-class employees to force them to practice: If you are an employee and you "call" a customer at all, you say "Ma'am" or "Sir." I have heard of an exercise where people who needed help with proper terms of address were led around "The Quad" and shoved into things by people who would say "I beg your pardon, Mr. Tree" or "Mrs. Bench," to which the trainee would reply "I beg your pardon, Sir" or "Ma'am," or be shoved again, harder. Some local employees may need that, too.
(2) Links
For no obvious reason owners of skanky-looking sites, often involving gambling, have been buying up web addresses that were linked in older blog posts, including mine. I will be monitoring for misleading links as time permits.
(3) Measles
How many related virus are there that produce varying levels of fever, eye inflammation, mild skin rashes, general weariness and malaise, and occasionally positive pain or nausea? When I was growing up I heard that there were "three kinds of measles." Elsewhere, later, I've heard that there were four or five. The names I learned were three-day measles, one-week measles, and three-week measles. My understanding is that three-week measles is the one still called "measles" in the name of "measles, mumps, and rubella shots" and one of the milder virus is the one called "rubella."
A few years ago, I mentioned that something measly was going around in Gate City. It was not a cold; it was not conjunctivitis. It featured fevers and reddish patches on the face as well as eye inflammation. People were calling it measles. It was definitely not three-week measles, though for one child to whom I'm partial it led into some sort of chronic fatigue syndrome. Either everyone else who had it was already immune, or it was the three-day kind.
Anyway, someone bustled up to me and said "It was not measles." Well, it was and it wasn't, depending on what you understand "measles" to mean. Which brings us to
(4) Vaccines
The coronavirus vaccines that came out last spring were new and experimental. Some batches were harmful. Those batches were removed from the market and reports of bad reactions are slowing down. If you have a COVID vaccine today it'll be something that's been tested and proven effective against the original COVID-19.
Neither the vaccine nor natural immunity obtained by exposure to the coronavirus that raged across Virginia last year is effective against the coronavirus that's circulating in Virginia now. Informants who are nurses continue to say that young people (in this case "young" includes up to age 75, if previously healthy) who are hospitalized with Delta COVID are the ones who've had two or more "shots" of vaccine. So which vaccines, I asked, and is there any correlation with the batches that were blamed for the bad reactions? There's no observed pattern. Very few "young" people are hospitalized with Delta COVID. Probably most of the people, including active seniors, who have it don't notice it. People who do notice it describe it as a mild chest cold.
This web site stands by its position that people living on the East Coast, exposed to Delta COVID, should avoid travelling inland. There is some chance that vaccines against the original virus, which is still raging over the Great Plains, will protect some vulnerable people from that. Let's keep this Delta stuff to ourselves. Only in the coastal States is it true that people who are going to die from coronavirus have already died.
Masks are not required by law, but are back in style. Wal-Mart sold off its original supply at half price. They'd do well to order a fresh batch. Those who want to keep laundering and reusing old ones are reminded that masks are small enough to get entangled in the works of a washing machine, like nylons. I pin mine into a pillowcase.
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