For Newsnight: should we end universal benefits for better off pensioners?

Yes indeed, Bags!

Thanks, jeni - I had in fact Googled the wrong word, but at least I can't be accused of Knowitallism!

I don't think any of us do that !

Not regular Gransnetters, jeni - I was thinking more of the occasional provocative poster!

It has its moments of sanity, Bags, but is currently into textual and stylistic analysis, with particular reference to the vagaries of grammar and parsing in flyting.

The Scottish Chaucerians could do it and still have their syntax and meaning intact. Their versions has lasted 900 years or so, too.

I still want to know if there is a word that means ............
to elevate and demean all in the same sentence ....or have I gone off the rails completely with this thread? Not that it would matter .......
Does anyone know??

Have not has - it is infectious.

I think deserving was being flippant, Butter!
Of course, I could be wrong....(hedging my bets here )

Butter, Pope said it but not in a single word:
To 'damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer.'

Bathos is almost what you are looking for, butter but not quite.

That is more "She returned home in a towering rage and a number 12 bus"

Things are beginning to make sense to me now, but there are some posts which, on first reading, made me just think "Eh?" or, in Lancs parlance: "Yer wot, luv?"

I will be interested to hear if anyone comes up with that word butty wants. 'Patronise' comes quite close, don't you think? I've never felt that I understood patronise properly though.

That's because you aren't a patronising kind of person, Bags.

You are kind, anno

I am so glad I am thick because I cannot understand one b----y word of what you are all saying.

If I had to try and sort this rubbish out it would take me a length of sundays.

Can someone please in very, very simple terms explain what this all means.

Which bit, exactly? There is a lot of it.

*Bags Those could be the posts which everyone would like clarified, but the elaborations just get more labyrinthine.

Just so, Elegran.

Just so, elegran.

Pogs, dinnae fash yersel! Tain't worth all the stooshie and stramash

Bags.

I think I will take that advice. If anybody could have told me in simplistic terms I think they would have done so by now..

Got it in one, Bags!

Ah, but. If the question could trammel up the consequences and catch with its surcease success?

Not very likely, though, is it?

Oh! I don't know? If you take maxwells demon and oppose with the probability theory of whether the cat is alive or not?
Could this actually answer the big band theory?

Terribly sorry folks. Meant big bang!

And of course it is Schrodingers cat I'm talking about! Does anybody agree with me that these two theories are diametrically opposed? And where do we place the String Theory within this conceptual concept?

I have a theory about string, at least it might be several theories covering that bit you've kept in your knapsack for emergencies which disappears when you finally need it, and the bits that tie themselves in knots.....

but I digress

Just off to check up on that pussycat.