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Comments
how to:
1. explain etymology
2. defy twitter's character limit while doing so
FYI this is an entire thread, with 31 tweets.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alligator-in-kitchen-11-foot-gator-breaks-into-house-in-clearwater-florida-middle-night-by-crashing-through-window/
No one was assaulted though, so I guess the beaver wins.
The -e conjugation has the clear advantage of seeming like it could evolve organically from the language, if I had to choose one to become common I'd choose that one. Meanwhile...
This rampant toxic beaverism has got to stop.
Well, yeah. There's this, but I also wonder if this top-down language modification thing works in modern times outside of whatever Nordic country recently introduced a gender-neutral (one could say unisex, but that sure isn't intersectional enough) pronoun recently. Especially with how it's basically English speakers attempting to impose it on a whole other major language.
I mean, remember when second wave feminists tried to make "Ms." into a thing regardless of marital status? I'm guessing no.
Anyways ever since I saw a joke about it I can't stop pronouncing latinx as "La Tinx/La Tinks".
Sure sounds like a rap squad. Or a gay-themed football team.
Also, I guess that kind of stuff happens like every other day in Florida. Same could be said if this beaver stuff happened in Canada. Here it was just weird. Like that time when a black panther was spotted on Parisian rooftop.
One noteworthy thing that that tweet thread mentioned is that "Latinx" was actually invented by people in the culture in question, not by English-speakers who then imposed it. (I have not yet independently verified this claim.)
? "Ms." is considered standard when you don't know a woman's marital status, and this has been the case since at least my childhood, if not earlier.
I end up saying that too and it ends up sounding silly too.
vs
Here's some history. It took a while to find an article without an intense amount of virtue signalling.
If it was people in academic circles (I mean, the whole modern understanding of gender neutrality as rêve idéal is very much an academic concept) it's basically the same. Either way, you can't deny that the majority of people who attempt to introduce it into the language are English speakers (going by how much nobody wants it).
Also, virtrue signalling is not a bad thing, it helps us all identify where we stand and more importantly helps establish acceptable social norms, but that guy has pushed it into territory I dislike.
In fact by stating how much I dislike his virtue signalling, I myself signal that I prefer that people not race head first into theorizing how perfectly fine things are actually exclusionary.
I mean "Once it was fine to say "mankind," but, yeah, screw that.", are we as a species being serious anymore?
dang nabbit if i ever see the word coding in a social context againThis reminds me of how I still think "del dot ico dot yu es" [sic] for the domain name "del.icio.us" or my odd way of saying "Atelier Escha y Logy".
Oh, that distinction.
The Brittanica article unfortunately doesn't go into much detail. I'm guessing the sources that you say contain "an intense amount of virtue signalling" are probably opinion-pieces slathering their aspirational ideals onto the topic, which probably wouldn't be particularly reliable for a historical account anyway...
FWIW I use Ms./Mrs. interchangeably for married women and Ms./Miss interchangeably for unmarried women, generally whichever the person normally uses to refer to herself or whichever seems to be the socially accepted referent. That said, "Miss" definitely feels less formal, and thus "Ms." gets preferred in formal writing, at least for unmarried women.
That said, I really don't see why married status ought to be a thing highlighted by an honorific, even though it is. Given that it can occasionally become awkward (such as if you're referring with a woman who's divorced), I can see how it'd make sense to just use "Ms." for any female adult human until one knows how she'd prefer to be honorific'd. (And generally speaking, if she's in the room, one can just ask.)
Meanwhile I also sometimes use of "Ms." and "Mr." when I want to focus on specific people independent of their background. I've done it sometimes when talking about presidential candidates for example -- "Mr. Biden", "Mr. Buttigieg", "Ms. Clinton", "Mr. Cruz", "Ms. Gabbard", "Ms. Harris", "Ms. Klobuchar", "Mr. O'Rourke", "Mr. Sanders", "Mr. Trump", "Ms. Warren". But this is not so much a standard honorific usage as much as a rhetorical device whose point of doing this is to put them, within the scope of that conversation, on the same level, so that it doesn't look like a Senator is higher than a House member, and also so that I don't have to bother with labels like "former Mayor Buttigieg" vs. "[current?] Mayor de Blasio". Also it sounds a little old-fashioned-ly formal and that's kinda fun to play with.
(I've considered using "M." as a way to isolate a conversation from the question of the candidate's gender, but I don't know how to pronounce that so I don't bother with it.)
Anyhow, as for those two use cases, I'm not sure there is much functional difference unless we're talking about instances of people trying to force others to conform to the usage, as opposed to just changing one's own usage. Besides, it can be a little hard to differentiate "Miss", "Miz", and "Misses" in spoken language, particularly when fast.
Our health system is not in a good shape so that's going to suck, OTOH due to lack of travel maybe it won't spread that much. It's not close to Maracaibo yet but maybe I should take precautions anyways to avoid catching it.
This proves the superiority of the hikikomori lifestyle.
It took me a moment to realize you don't speak about fanfiction.
You guys wished me health, so it's only fair I wish you back.
[me] the beer or the virus
[someone online] Yes
[someone online] [picture of Corona beer in refrigerator]
[me] i've been on the internet too long; you can tell this by the fact that i ask these questions
Come to think of it, I'm gradually noticing that, even without participating directly in snarking about stuff, my behavior has changed thanks to my being on the internet. Specifically, in this example, being generally more skeptical of information and asking questions before concluding things.
If I actually asked "the beer or the virus?" to someone who says they have "corona", and they actually had the virus, and this were offline -- or, particularly, if this were someone who isn't used to online interactions, being online, and thus unable to hear tone or see body language/facial expressions -- this question could come across as very impolite/hurtful based on its flippancy.
But, on the internet, it's basically expected that a significant portion of such statements involve jokes, so it's far less of an oddity to ask a question indicating cautious skepticism, which serves both as a confirmation question and as an invitation to the other party to go on and elaborate.
'Course, there's the possibility the Illuminati control the media and I bought their manipulations at face value, but for now I consider this hypothesis less probable than the other one.
@Bluesy_Cowgirl do you know her?
wait, this is in Florida, right? I ain't no Florida Cow
damn straight Sheila Boobson
Warning: spiders. Many spiders. Many, many spiders.
TL;DR a sewage treatment plant had a treatment facility that grew midges, which are small flies, some of which can grow easily in sewage. The facility used to treat this sewage (let's not forget that what we flush does not disappear, and is some very nutrient-rich shit), produced a regular and generous supply of these midges, and spiders moved in to eat them up, taking advantage of the basically limitless buffet underneath the conveniently-placed roof. Eventually the spiders grew more and more numerous and ended up building basically what amounted to one giant, thick mass of spiderweb spanning the entire interior ceiling of the facility.
The actual published paper that came out of this can be viewed here: www.entsoc.org/PDF/2010/Orb-weaving-spiders.pdf
Technically SFW since the spiders involved are harmless to humans and they are also helping to eat the shitton of bugs coming off the plant. But still creepy.
Anyhow this was back in 2009; they cleaned it up after that.
Which reminds me how, in spite of my best efforts, I never managed to find that "Dark Forest of the SS Spiders" fake black metal album by fake black metal band Spidermord. You know, after my hard drive with a copy of the picture died, and the website it was posted on went down, the picture was lost along with a few other fake band samples. WebArchive can't help here; the site only showed a link to some hosting service, which probably cleared its servers of that picture long before the site was archived. I think I still have that drive, just in case, but I'm resigned to the fact that I will never see it again. You know, if memes die when they're forgotten for good, then perhaps I'm the last who still remembers this one, like some refugee from a lost civilization. It's quite a curious feeling. But on a more upbeat note, it's also pretty funny when you think how so inane things may get stuck in your mind for like forever when you barely recall supposedly important stuff from like a while ago.
I can't find this joke, nor do I know what issue of RD it was in. It was one of those jokes that fill up the page at the ends of articles.
And that's all I remember of it.
That said, the fact that I remember it means I can write it down and share it for others. And the fact that you remember that album and that band means and you've posted about it means that there is now a record of it here on the internet.
Since I've been looking these up so much online, they now seem to stalk me on every online retailer I use. Mainly though I see Saige's Balloon Festival over and over everywhere. I'm not sure I'm a fan of the set as a whole, but I might get it someday.
The more I look into MCAG, the more I notice how clearly LEGO Friends has been "inspired" by it lately. From things that are as basic as just like... literally ripping off the whole set, to the more subtle things like including more and more fabric pieces.
Another thing about MCAG is the American Girls themselves. They are... very different from what I remember American Girl books being when I was a kid but boy do they all have a lot of intense backstory. For example, Kanani only got a small set but she was a Girl of the Year once so we get to find out her entire genealogy.
Since I'm already doing this allow me to complain about how Luciana's profile art is part of the newer uh...
BeForever? AmeriForever? Just Unique? GOTY?whatever it is line in the main dolls and so it's basically terrible compared to everybody else's photorealistic art.2. Florida Man writes report describing the above incident, and referring to taking off clothes as "stripping naked from the waste down" [sic]
3. someone posts this to the Florida Man subreddit
4. Florida Man comments with claim that he browses this subreddit "for ideas"
5. Florida Man replies to above comment with following comment:
Well, you'd need a steady supplier of snakes considering how often animal services would take it away.
I read a surprisingly good argument for the libertarian treatment of prices from a retailer's perspective.
I've always taken for granted that the libertarian treatment for prices should only apply to the secondary market, because it can't be helped. However, this piece makes some good arguments for allowing market signals to set prices for items as a social good! Very novel. I'm not sure how well it would work in real life.
I know some retailer systems are automated in terms of surge pricing and that leads to lots of errors so at the very least that'd need to be fixed.
In this arrangement, you're basically allowing price to correlate to how badly someone wants a thing. It's not exactly like this -- because price points and expectations are still a thing -- but this is close enough.
It works well for nonessential goods/services, which people can voluntarily save up then blow their leisure and recreational funds on.
But if applied to essentials, this becomes a lot more ethically questionable. Because the demand itself is not voluntary.