Well let’s try it ... when I was a child we hadn’t heard of cupcakes. We had fairy cakes at our tea parties.

Well, there you are.

When I was a little girl we made fairy nests of mosses and blossoms. We had a gay time doing that!

Kate there is an automated censor, but I wonder if a human follow-up okayed the tooth fairy here for the replies. I've been dealing with virtual assistants (i.e., idiots) which are incapable of assessing context. So...remember when white meat chicken parts in CF were flagged for review? Were you making fairy cakes?

I bought some p willow at the grocery store yesterday, now that word I understand!

I was texting a friend about it and had to type the word in, voice wouldn't do it.

Show me your dink.

Dink is another name for a small boat like a tender or rowboat.

The boy wanted to be the fairy in the school play.

Try again, it seems to work!

Moms Mabley would use that word in her jokes, and it was very offensive when she did, but she meant it to be derogatory. This was on her vinyl records but not on TV.

Wee folk, Fae, Fairies, Fatina dei denti, Tinkerbell, sprites, sylphs.... Ok, there is just a lot of various names for the object in question there. Just tossing out a few to see what happens.

Anyone try it in a new topic yet?

I did, and I saw you did, Carol. Mine was really slow, like it might have been reviewed.

Kate, it's definitely frustrating!

This is different but your post made me think of it. I recently heard someone say she was once issued a personalized license plate by the DMV with "SCRUBBY"...a pet's name. She had the plate for some time when she was notified by the DMV she had to change it. Their explanation was it could be considered "offensive to good taste and decency." She figured out what they meant but was pretty frustrated!

One way in which people misuse the word fairy is when they call folk tales "fairy tales." This is an error in the literary sense, as folk tales do not have a known author and are handed down anonymously over the years (becoming part of a culture), whereas fairy tales (such as Cinderella and The Ugly Duckling) have known authors.

The Grimm Brothers did not write fairy tales - they collected folk tales from around Germany in the 19th Century, and this was a byproduct of the German dictionary that they were compiling. The stories (tales) were collected while documenting the etymology of words, and this was what they were primarily interested in. This made the German dictionary extremely long, but also a lot more interesting - at least to me. The university where I studied German had a 32 volume edition of the dictionary that they started.

"This dictionary is not an immoral book, but a scientific undertaking. Even the Bible does not lack for words that are frowned upon in fine society." - Jacob Grimm, Vorwort 1. Band, S. XXXIV , Leipzig 1854

@Bumblebeez SC Zone 7, did you mean pussy willows?

It worked this time. I still think we've gone too far with being "politically correct", and words have new meanings that don't mean anything at all like the original.

Lars, there will always be people like Moms Mobley. Let there be few.

Lars - thanks for that info. In spite of never studied German, I fell into a rabbit hole with some delight. =)

FWIW, I stated this on a similar thread on a different forum:

It seems hard for some to acknowledge that sometimes technology just doesn't work.

One of my favorite boats is the Dyer Dink.

Interestingly, I originally replied to the fairy cake recipe thread and included a link to a butterfly cake recipe using the embedded link button. When I tried to navigate away from the page the reply disappeared. So I redid the reply, but just pasted the link into the body of the message and it went straight through. Maybe it's the linking feature that slows things down.

I rarely use the link button - it's really not necessary, unless you want to name the link, or the URL is extremely long. I just paste the URL into the body of my message. This site automatically formats links.

I also use the embedded link button, and it's always worked for me.

I never open links that are not embedded - especially the ridiculously long ones. It's so simple to embed a link. If the non-embedded links are extremely short and obvious, I might open them, but rarely.

I stopped using the embedded link button most of the time because it's easier for people to see the URL as text in the body of the message rather than a hover, and safety is important.

When I am on gardenweb.com, I cannot paste anything into a message - I can only do that on houzz.com.

How odd! I only use Gardenweb and I paste stuff all the time, both on tablet (in browser) and computer.

Same as pillog, and I do agree that I like to post the URL so people can see where it comes from. I've seen a number of people comment that they won't click on links because they're concerned --- about what exactly, I'm not sure.

It is odd because recently on my desktop (in the last month or so) I became able to paste while using gardenweb.com, but I am still unable to do so on my laptop. If I try to do so, I get a huge error message, and whatever I have typed is lost.

Once upon a once I had a financial firm tell me to use Chrome instead of Safari because I was having trouble accessing their site. I had to download Chrome onto my Mac. Problem solved.

Maybe that's a similar problem you're having. I use Safari and have no trouble, but if you're using something else, that may be the problem.

I wonder if that's how the term "dinking around" came to be. Because boaters spend an awful lot of time dinking around on their boats. I have used the word "dinky" and now I understand it more. I have seen a lot of those little boats, they look so fun! I took a similar boat out once at a lake park where you could rent sailboats. Not much wind, we were actually dinking around most of the afternoon!

I got it again - from FaceBook this time. Apparently you can't use the popular/vernacular word for duck excrement in ones' pool. (Bad thing, by the way.)

(I wonder what they do about the P%pdeck on a sailing ship?)