Not knowing is one thing and fair enough. Knowing perfectly well and deciding to use it to mean something else anyway is cause for the trout to start swinging :-)

I make it 102 :-)

Would have been quite clever if I'd intended to do that and succeeded, but as it happens I was just burbling on as usual :-)

I give use of Drabble a pass if it is a couple of words either side of it.

Well if they've aimed for a drabble and missed, without realising, that's fair enough. But I get really fed up with folk who insist on using it for stories of several hundred words. Bah!

Not fifty either, except that they must pass it to reach one hundred. One hundred is the number they must count to.

[giggle] Set the Killer Rabbit on 'em! That'll larn 'em!

mainly because the first time I read it it was as a verb and meant "kept on talking" or something along those lines.

It is a verb, but a rather archaic one, with the following meanings :-

"# To draggle; make dirty, as by dragging in mud and water; wet and befoul: as, to drabble a gown or a cloak.
# To fish for barbels with a rod and a long line passed through a piece of lead." (a barbel is a type of fish in this case, not a weight lifting thing!)

It might be good to have a better word for that than a pure slang word,

Why do you consider it a pure slang word? It was made up of course, but then so were all words at one time. It seems perfectly cromulent to me, if only people wouldn't keep messing about with it.

I wonder how people got from fishing and dirt to 100 word short stories. o_O

Apparently the origin was in a Monty Python book. which might explain a bit :-)

Of course every word was slang once.

I think you and I are using "slang" to mean different things. To me, slang is words used by a small group of people, often intended to exclude outsiders. The web definitions I've found tend to support that. The fact that a word is newly coined wouldn't necessarily make it slang.

I think people who "misuse" it just don't know what it is supposed to mean, is all I was aiming at.

Many of them do (I've seen many discussions on the subject) but insist like Humpty Dumpty that it means whatever they say it means.

My objection is that it's like using "mouse" to mean "rodent". Because, while a mouse is indeed a rodent, so is a Capybara (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capybara) and using "mouse" to mean both erodes clarity.

Me miss? I dint do nuffink, miss!

I've obviously not explained this very well - "drabble" isn't insulting, it's a term with an exact meaning which I object to being used wrongly.

"Drabble" means a storry of exactly 100 words. There are a growing number of people who are using to refer to any short work of fiction. My objection to this is that it's like using "mouse" to mean "rodent" - while a mouse is indeed a rodent, how do you then distinguish an actual mouse from a shrew or a coypu? It erodes clarity and deserves a good mackerelling.

I shall be sure never to use it to describe anything you've written, ever :)

I have actually written a drabble (carefully counted) so you don't need to worry about that :-)

And now that I've drabbled on [trying out the word]

I'm afraid that's wrong too - as a verb, it means to get muddy or to fish for barbels :-)

Oh I don't suppose I shall convince the Humpty Dumpty people that they're as wrong as a very wrong thing, but sometimes I just have to blow off a bit of steam. And it's no use doing it on fanficrants, because it's been done to death there.

But I agree, that's the other thing that annoys me - writing drabbles is a discipline and quite difficult (and fun) and these folk are undermining that.

Apparently the fish I should beat them with are barbels, since "drabble" as a verb can mean to fish for those :-)