Friday Ephemera (741)
How the pyramids were constructed. || Overstepping. || Incoming. Or down-going. || Because it can be done. || Big woman, six-five. || Oh delicate Rose. || I’m guessing the dog is the brains of the outfit. || “A week after the boys’ detention, their families vanished.” || Sea view of note. || About this high. || Smoke, some shouting. || Sharp look, 1983. || Roadside baby parking, 1973. || It’s a miracle substance. || All-male semi-final in women’s pool tournament. || Problem solved. || Parenting scenes. || Parenting scenes 2. || Hiring based on competence? Can’t have that. || The progressive retail experience, parts 586, 587, and 588. || Pedro is trusted with children. || Docteur Qui. || Marital woes. || Fire helmet, safe word not included. || And finally, the return of the Ogmios School of Zen Motoring.
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Slavery: let’s not forget that the coastal Africans enslaved and sold interior africans.
Language: as a written language, Chinese seems to me to be a nightmare. English may be irregular, but it has an alphabet so you can order words and look them up. Chinese? No alphabet. Many parts of English words give you a clue about the word if it is new to you. “Dis, Un, pre, post, ing” all give information. “DisJoint” for example
It should be legal to hit him as hard as possible without warning.
I’m thinking “in the back of the neck with an iron bar”.
I served as a reserve deputy (something like a special constable for you furiners) in my county until I had to move for a job. Legally a knife is considered deadly force and thus the knife wielder could be stopped via deadly force. I could shoot them if possible but up close we were taught we could literally gouge eyes if it came to that. This is a fight for your life and nothing is off the table at that point. In any event the shooting is legally justified as trying to disarm someone with a knife is beyond the capability of the average police officer. I train in a Filipino martial art that deals with knives and I still wouldn’t try it except as a last resort. I once was in the house of a family whose drug addicted adult daughter had broken in. She was really messed up and I was talking to her in the kitchen and realized the kitchen knives were within her reach and if she grabbed one I might have to shoot her in front of her family. I decided there that I’d overpower her if it came to that. I couldn’t bring myself to shoot under the circumstances. Fortunately she calmed down and we could safely transport her to jail which really was the safest place for her sadly. Anyway, my point is that these situations can sideways in the blink of an eye and life and death decisions have to be made. Between the military and law enforcement I’ve made a few and you always second guess yourself. It’s hard to explain to people who don’t deal with this stuff. I hope I’ve succeeded a bit. Sadly my new location doesn’t have reserves so I joined the volunteer fire brigade. That’s a whole different story.
As I remember from Wodehouse, the “P” is silent.
A “fragrant offence” must be using the wrong perfume, and my favourite, someone is is “going rouge”, which I always imagine as them turning a bright red.
I’ve read Don Quijote in the original Spanish, and it’s a fair sight easier than Shakespeare, because Spanish hasn’t changed as much. Shakespeare has too many words with changed meanings to make it easy for us to read without abundant glossing and annotation.
@pst314
Hanson, too? <sigh> What word(s)?
Instapundit’s wife, a forensic psychologist, had a blog for a while. Once she wrote she wrote “Wala!” instead of “Voilà!”
In JBP’s lectures I noticed that he always called the Dostoevsky novel “The Brothers KaRAmazov”. Google Translate pronounces that name from the Russian title as “KaraMAzov”.
A while back JBP spoke of seeing the Wagner opera “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” earlier that day. He pronounced the first word as if it was the English word.
Thank you, good landlord. [opens tin, placed on bar] If anyone wants one, please help yourselves.
Cannot recall. I only remember noticing this a few times when listening to his weekly podcasts.
It was somewhat comforting to notice, since I get so embarrassed by my own mispronunciations.
As I said… Why the hell worry about it?
The whole thing is a game of clowns; they can’t come up with a usable spelling system, and they then use the “system” against outsiders who’re not exposed to their “elite skooling”. Then, instead of addressing the thoughts brought up by the hoi polloi who’ve never heard those words used in daily life, they mock them and ignore the actual content.
It’s gatekeeping, pure and simple. And, frankly, having been abused by this crap since early childhood, I’m about f*cking done with the “intellectual” types who do these things. They’re all utter morons, in my experience: They never, ever attempt to refute the things expressed by those words, or even address them: It’s all gatekeeping mockery.
I’ve a bunch of the “educated” in my family, many of whom were/are actually about as smart as a bag of rocks. Stupid twats can’t work their way out of wet paper bags without hiring a paper-bag tradesman, but they’re ohsoverysmart and sophisticated, donchaknow… They have all the proper credentials and pronunciations to hand to prove said virtue.
Much of the crap in English so far as rules and spellings go is precisely that: Mechanisms of gatekeeping. You don’t know how to say the word, because you’ve only ever read it, trying to improve yourself? Too bad; without the proper received pronunciation, we’ll always know you’re an outsider, a member of a lesser class.
This is why I have nothing but contempt for those that “correct” these things. I am so very ‘effing tired of hearing them criticize the pronunciations, but never address the thoughts beneath… Which, sadly, they mostly can’t; because while they know the words, the pronunciations, the meanings… They’re entirely unable to “use those words in a sentence” and express a coherent set of thoughts with them.
Whenever I hear someone who uses a word properly, and does not pronounce it “correctly”, yet still using the so-called “phonetic rules”, I cut them some slack, listen to what they’re actually saying, and try to get the benefit of their thought process. Then, I’ll politely mention that the “received pronunciation” of their word is generally accepted to be the actual proper way to “say that word”.
I find the mockery of people who exhibit this sort of thing to be vile, and indicative of an intellectual arrogance that I’ve rarely found to be at all justified. The usual run of “correctors” are assholes, and generally moronic ones, to boot.
That’s a hopeless endeavor in any phonetic language, as languages will change.
The status games are another matter, though.
. . .
By the way how should I pronounce “vase” to be accepted around here? 😁
Cue the theme song from Rawhide.
And listen to the urban woman worrying that the men will hurt the poor creature. 🙂