Thistle, bleep, come to, cotton, cotton on, misread

The King and Queen of Pop were bleeped by CBS censors.

Watch Beyonce and Jay Z Get Too Filthy For the Grammys

entertainment.time.com

The superstars opened the show with a performance of “Drunk in Love.”

Small should have been beautiful; how Toyota misread China market
Reuters
T) blames its China underperformance on the widespread anti-Japan protests triggered by a territorial row. Some company insiders and dealers, though, say the world's biggest car maker misread the world's largest market. They say Toyota's launch of the ...

misréad[mis・réad

[動]（-read 〔-réd〕, 〜・ing）(他)…を（…と）読み違える；…を（…と）誤解する((as ...))；…の解釈を誤る.

cotton

intr.v. Informal., -toned, -ton·ing, -tons.

1. To take a liking; attempt to be friendly: a dog that didn't cotton to strangers; an administration that will cotton up to the most repressive of regimes.
2. To come to understand. Often used with to or onto: “The German bosses . . . never cottoned to such changes” (N.R. Kleinfield).

中文

n. - 棉花, 棉線
v. intr. - 和諧, 理解, 有好感

idioms:

• cotton on 理解
• cotton to 交好

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 綿, 木綿, 木綿で作った, 綿の木, 綿糸
v. - 好きになる

idioms:

• cotton on 好きになる, 理解する
• cotton to と仲よくなる

Why Wikipedia works

From the outside, Wikipedia may look like chaos barely contained. "When people look at these sorts of phenomenon at Wikipedia, they misread the anarchy," Lakhani says. "All these people, thousands of people, there must be no rules! But there is a very ornate and well-defined structure of participation. One of our big learnings was to actually dive into the structure: What is the structure that enables these guys to produce this great resource?"
One element instilled by founder Wales is an ethic of self-governance and treating others with respect. In many online communities, personal insults fly freely, often fueled by youth and anonymity. Wikipedians, however, do not cotton to personal attacks. "The elbows are sharp on Wikipedia. It's not cuddly. But at the same time, I'm not entitled to call someone a bleep," says McAfee.

bleep

Syllabification: bleep

Pronunciation: /blēp

 

/

noun

• 1a short high-pitched sound made by an electronic device as a signal or to attract attention: the autopilot sent back an acknowledgment bleep
  

  
  
• 1.1a short high-pitched electronic sound used in broadcasting as a substitute for a censored word or phrase.
  

  
  

verb

[no object] Back to top  

• 1(of an electronic device) make a short high-pitched sound or repeated sequence of sounds: the screen flickered for a few moments and bleeped
  

  
  
• 1.1 [with object] substitute a bleep or bleeps for (a censored word or phrase): cable operators have bleeped out the accuser’s name
  

  
  
• 1.2used in place of an expletive: “what the bleep are we going to do?” he asked
  

  
  

Origin

1950s: imitative.

The adjective cuddly has one meaning:
Meaning #1: inviting cuddling or hugging
Synonym: cuddlesome

come to
1. Recover consciousness, as in She fainted but quickly came to. [Second half of 1500s]
2. Arrive at, learn, as in I came to see that Tom had been right all along. [c. 1700]
3. See amount to, def. 2.
4. See when it comes to.
5. Stop a sailboat or other vessel by bringing the bow into the wind or dropping anchor, as in "The gale having gone over, we came to" (Richard Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, 1840). [Early 1700s] Also see the subsequent entries beginning with come to.

cotton

n.

1. 1. Any of various shrubby plants of the genus Gossypium, having showy flowers and grown for the soft white downy fibers surrounding oil-rich seeds.
   2. The fiber of any of these plants, used in making textiles and other products.
   3. Thread or cloth manufactured from the fiber of these plants.
2. The crop of these plants.
3. Any of various soft downy substances produced by other plants, as on the seeds of a cottonwood.

intr.v. Informal, -toned, -ton·ing, -tons.

1. To take a liking; attempt to be friendly: a dog that didn't cotton to strangers; an administration that will cotton up to the most repressive of regimes.
2. To come to understand. Often used with to or onto: "The German bosses . . . never cottoned to such changes" (N.R. Kleinfield).

[Middle English cotoun, from Old French coton, from Old Italian cotone, from Arabic quṭn, quṭun.]

Cotton on

Meaning
To get to know or understand something.
Origin
As early as 1648, in a pamphlet titled Mercurius Elencticus, mocking the English parliament, the royalist soldier and poet Sir George Wharton used 'cotton', or as it was spelled then 'cotten', as a verb meaning 'to make friendly advances'. 'Cotten up to' and 'cotten on to' were both used to mean 'become friendly with'. Whether this was as a reference to the rather annoying predisposition of moist raw cotton to stick to things or whether it alluded to moving of cotton garments closer together during a romantic advance isn't clear. John Camden Hotten, in his Slang Dictionary, 1869, opted for the former derivation:

Cotton, to like, adhere to, or agree with any person; "to COTTON on to a man," to attach yourself to him, or fancy him, literally, to stick to him as cotton would.

The number of citations that use 'cottening' in a courtship context and the use of the 'cottening up' variant would suggest the latter is more likely. For example, William Congreave's comic play Love for Love, 1695:

I love to see 'em hug and cotten together, like Down upon a Thistle.

The attaching of cotton strands to the bobbins of weaving looms is sometimes also cited as a source of 'cottoning on', but there appears to be no basis for that notion. None of the early citations of the phrase mention that context.
The 'getting to know someone' meaning is now archaic and has been surplanted by the 'beginning to understand' meaning. 'Cottoning on' as we now use it derives from the meaning of 'attaching oneself to something', specifically an attachment to an idea that we haven't encountered before. This was coined independently from the previous meaning and two centuries later. It would seem to be a reasonable bet that at least one of these two meanings would have been coined in one of the major English-speaking cotton producing regions of the world, for example India or the USA. Not so; the 'become friendly' meaning was established in the UK and the first uses of the 'understand' meaning were in New Zealand and Australia. These do derive from the allusion to sticky cotton bolls. The earliest example that I can find of this is from the New Zealand newspaper The Wanganui Herald, June 1893:

The Kaierau forwards are just beginnng to cotton on to the passing game.

See also: the meaning and origin of 'cotton-picking'.


Thistle 薊 English

• Art of the Day: Van Gogh, Thistles, August 1888. Oil on canvas, 59 x 49 cm. Private collection.