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. 🙂
Oooh, this. I do flinch at some of these things that are just wrong. ‘Of’ is not a verb. You cannot “could of” something. I also detest the misuse of to/too/two and there/their/they’re, though I have been guilty of many of these lately due to lazy spell check/complete, seeing them wrong so many times I’ve started to absorb it, and the occasional brain fart in certain contexts of their/they’re. But never there/their or there/they’re. I mean, come on. That’s just stupid.
As for affect vs. effect, I’ve been burned by the verb vs noun thing itself. If you dig into the exceptions on that one it becomes a real misery of WTFWB (WTF, Why Bother).
And this, foooooking this. F*** those people. Hard. This hasn’t happened to me lately but when I was younger and had not yet heard so many of the more erudite being so damn erudidicle in their erudidicaleness, well…there are scars. Some similar people have now paid for them. Especially in the last four years or so.
Ooh…and another Brit vs US battle, ‘jaguar’. jag-U-are vs JAG-wire. Heh. Dig into the history of the (supposed) pronunciation of that one, then the philosophical question as to who the word’s pronunciation belongs to once it becomes a brand and…well…it could be galleon launching stuff.
@WTP, who said:
I think the “Brits”, being remote from where that word came from, likely only ever encountered it in the written form, applied the rules of phonetics, and came up with those utterly bizarre pronunciations, because BOTH of them are wrong, wrong, wrong… It’s not jag-u-are, it’s not JAG-wire, either one. It’s yagwhar, when you hear a Central American say it, and usually JAGwar when an American tries saying it.
The word itself comes from Tupi and Guarani, and started out as something like “yaguareté’,” which got badly chewed up in translation.
I grew up with the idea that you pronounced loanwords into English the way they were pronounced in the language you stole them from.
@Kirk
Well, I find JAG-wire more extreme and cringy. Thus, I like it. Though I suppose JAG-war or JAG-wahr is more American-common but more importantly, closer to yagwhar. Don’t get me started on YHWH. Not that I would know…
I go hot and cold on that one. On the one hand, sure. But on the other, English would start to sound ridiculous after a while. Do you say that the Eiffel Tower is in Pah-REE or in PAIR-ass?
@WTP,
My operating theory is that it’s their word, they know how to say it…
It’s always bothered me that we call Deutschland Germany; along with a whole host of other “We can’t be bothered to learn what they call themselves…” things in English. It seems… Disrespectful. Not to mention, the sheer ‘effing confusion you run into when you first encounter it: “Whaddya mean it’s Deutschland? They told me it was ‘Germany’ since I was a little kid…”
I mean, if they’re going to pull crap like that on kids, there really ought to be a punctuation mark of some sort signifying “Yeah, we made this up ourselves, and that’s not what it really is…”
As a tool for thought, English is incredibly inconsistent and entirely lacking in accuracy. Also, veracity…
Blame the Romans:
And did you know that there are other languages where the word for “Germany” is some local invention, not derived from “Deutschland” but also not derived from Latin? Shrug. Every language has oddities like this. There doesn’t seem any point in getting upset about it, it’s just a consequence of how languages develop or, if you will, a consequence of what people are. And consider that if you were to become God Emperor of Earth and impose a single rationalized language upon the whole world, it would quickly fragment into regional dialects and then mutually incomprehensible languages.
@pst314, who argued thusly:
Oh, I’m aware of the provenance. What I rail against is the amount of confusion and bafflement that we set children up for, when they try to “learn the world”. Is it any wonder, do you think, that so many say “Sod this for a game of soldiers…”, and give up on learning?
It wouldn’t be so bad if people framed things from the beginning as “Yeah, don’t expect consistency or reliable narration… You’re gonna have to learn to pick and choose which facts you take as being correct and true…”
But, adults do not. It’s all “Hey, I’m an infallible source of information, and you may rely on me to tell you everything that is true… And, everything I tell you is true, as well…”
The reason Germany “triggers” my ass after all these years? Precocious little snot that I was, I learned and believed that “Germany” was the correct name for that nation, and it was an extremely embarrassing experience to encounter an adult German who insisted that the name for their country wasn’t actually “Germany”, and that my insistence that they were incorrect (because I got out the English-language atlas to prove my point; I’d never heard of this “Deutschland” bullshit before that, BTW…) was, itself, incorrect. They were quite emphatic on that point. So was I… My rebuttal was “Well, if it is this Deutschland thing, why the hell are all these products marked ‘Made in West Germany’, then…? Huh? Huh?”
I was a very annoying nine-year-old when things like this came up. I mean, I’m trying to establish how the hell things work, and where I fit in, and you lot (adults…) keep changing shit on me? WTF?
@Kirk: Sorry about your unpleasant experiences as a 9-year-old. But I had no such traumatic experiences, although I don’t recall that my grade school teachers were particularly good at teaching world geography (many were, in fact, ed school grad students and thus of limited competence.) But somehow I picked up this information piecemeal over the years and it was no big deal. In fact, it was kind of amusing learning about these differences. I don’t see any possible general solution to the problem you relate, outside the particularities of your special circumstance.
@pst314,
Not really the fault of any teacher in particular… Mine were nearly all lousy to begin with. The problem was, I was actually that most felonious of scholars, an auto-didact from very early on.
Like, according to my Mom (always an unreliable narrator about her own offspring…) I was the one who taught myself to read at about age 4-5 when she noticed I was reading ahead of her at bedtime.
After that, it was pretty much “read to learn the world”, and my initial take was that everything I read was true, otherwise, how’d it get into print, then?
Well, that turned out to be an ever-lengthening series of “Well, but…” corrections when I started asking questions about the noted discrepancies I kept finding.
I don’t mind that people tell me lies… So long as they tell me they’re lying, or at least, cop to being unreliable. Claim reliability, and then deliver actual malicious falsehood? Get bent, the lot of you.
In public even! That’s almost as bad as being a “known thespian”, to steal an old joke.
But as you tell the tale, I wonder if the teachers actually lied to you or simply failed to tell you about complexities that they weren’t ready to cover in class or assumed all kids your age were not ready for. Shrug.
I know from personal experience that it can be very embarrassing to be exposed as ignorant of something, which is why, when I do correct someone, I try to do it in as disarming and respectful a way as possible–privately and often by confessing one of my own lapses.
@pst314, who said:
The way it went down was more “I don’t have time to explain that, why don’t you go look it up…?”, and off I’d go to the library. With no idea, in my innocent mind, that anything I found there might be, shall we say, inaccurate or biased?
I had to work out on my own that the majority of the authority figures in my little world were either lying liars who lied, or ignorant. Traumatic, that was…
I don’t think it was until I was around early/late teens that I began to internalize that fact, and it didn’t really take hold until well into my twenties or so that you can’t rely on a damn thing, especially the “conventional wisdom”. Hell, some things I truly believed in as recently as my forties…
Which explains the volunteering for two tours in Iraq after my retirement eligibility date… <sigh>
Ouch.
Been there done that. Though not to the degree nor intensity that you did. I kept trying to find fall-back lines. OK, this guy/(usually woman) teacher is wrong but some of this is correct. But wait, that means this other very, very sure and confident adult teacher/professor/mentor/whatnot corrected some of that so he must be right about the other stuff. Buuuuut, no. It didn’t bother me that adults got things wrong, nor that they even taught us things wrong, but that they were so bloody confident about stuff that you simply cannot be that confident about. It was a wonder to me how these knowledgeable, but conflicting adults were never in the same room together, gave zero indication that adults, experts even, with other perspectives existed. Not to go all nihilism or such because some, a few actually did. But it was rare.
One that really gets me is the Tongue Map experiment from biology class. A complete fraud. But teachers repeatedly presented it and all my classmates went along with it. We gave the answers that we knew we were supposed to give. Just like in religion class from the parochial school that I had attended two years before only with God/Jesus. Except biology teacher had not-so-easily-hidden disdain for kids who came from that religious fundamentalist school.
@WTP,
See, here’s the thing: I can track my disillusionment with “authority” pretty much the same way I can track the outlines of what has gone on in my in-law’s family, vis-a-vis the kids all going Jack Mormon on them.
My paternal grandmother led a bit of a dissolute life, before menopause. Today, I’m pretty sure she’d have been diagnosed as bipolar, but once she got off the hormonal carnival ride, she evened out. Part of her evening out was finding religion, and she picked Mormonism, converting in later life. Only one in the family, before my brother married a then-practicing Mormon…
Since that marriage, I’ve watched all the kids from that family go Jack Mormon, some extremely so. When my brother married in, they were all devout; after a bit, you could observe the doubts creep in, and disillusionment grow until they’d lost their faith. Sad to observe, even as an effective Deist without formal religion, myself.
What strikes me as a congruency is this: Similar to how I was raised by a clan of scholars (Grandmother was Phi Beta Kappa, and there were three teachers in my immediate maternal line, as well as having a father that dabbled in education…), my in-laws were raised up in a family that included a Mormon bishop as an immediate influence. And, we all “lost our faith” in similar fashion, through discovery that our informants and such were, at best, misinformed, and at worst, liars.
Faith rarely survives such revelations, especially when you set yourself up as an infallible authority. One of the flaws of the Mormon Church is, ironically, that it is so effective at proselytization and inculcation. You convert to Mormonism as a thinking adult, you make the choice to do the “willing suspension of disbelief” that such an act requires; if it is forced upon you as a child, you’re going to have difficulty reconciling it all when the cracks in the edifice become apparent to you.
My convert grandmother was stronger in her faith than my born-in in-laws demonstrated. There’s a reason for that, just as I lost my faith in the anointed authorities of our secular world.
I was taught, and I believed. Then I experienced, and I lost my belief. All that crap about amity and kumbaya brotherly love overcoming all? LOL… That was a scam; one intended to supplant normalcy as “white male supremacy”, and thus, illegitimate.
Sorry, not sorry… I no longer believe in your touchingly naive bullshit, ladies and gentlemen. I understand your program, which is basically a “will to power” for the forces desiring destruction of that which was for that which want to be… A brave new world where your sort will reign in power over all, especially the little brown pervert people you are using as an entry wedge to destroy all that came before.
I also recognize what you’re going to do with those poor dupes, when it becomes convenient… Same as it always was. The camps and prisons await.
Somewhat similar. I still try to interpolate/find peace with the faith. WTF knows anything about these big questions? My thing is, I was raised in a moderately religious Methodist family. My mother had been (second generation German) Lutheran. My father’s mother was teetotaling northern Baptist of some sort but my grandfather was apparently not interested. I believe my father’s war experiences led him to his foundation that he liked his politics conservative but his religion liberal. I personally believe that I understood all this claptrap most clearly and earnestly in the fifth grade. It all made some sort of sense that religion only knew so much, that science only knew so much. Being around hyper-religious people was a tad uncomfortable. And then I went to fundamentalist Presbyterian school for three years. They almost had me because the secularism had started to become so bloody absurd itself. I have spent a considerable amount of my adult life trying to get back to that “naive” fifth grader perception.
@WTP, who said:
When you get down to it, that’s probably the thing I resent most: Thanks to their malfeasance/incompetence, I have lost and likely can never regain my faith in much of anything. I cannot bring myself to “believe” any more, in anything.
I miss that. I really, truly do… You have something you can truly believe in, then you can get up in the morning with a sense of purpose. A sense of overwhelming betrayal, on the other hand?
Yeah, that doesn’t work out so well.
Which is why I’d gleefully consign the lot of them to a fiery doom, one at a time, screaming. When the time comes, and they’re being burnt? I’ll sign up happily for that Sonderkommando…