Idioms don’t have to (and often don’t) make sense. How do you feel about “head over heels”?
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Cake day: August 20th, 2023
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Civilians can’t just come in and start stealing jargon words and apply their own non-jargon meanings.
This is (literally) one of the more insane takes I’ve ever seen about language. You want jargon to apply only as jargon meaning in all contexts? Lay usage aside, what about when two fields of study use the same word? Battle royale to see who gets to keep it?
There’s that old line that if my aunt had wheels she’d be a bicycle. Maybe the command form is muddling the topic here, but using the be-verb with an adjective like that attaches a subject complement, essentially describing the subject. But “I am fast” describing a person doesn’t mean that saying “I drive fast” is describing a drive as a noun.
Some flat adverbs sound perfectly natural to most speakers, like “play nice” or “drive safe”. Others have less acceptability among people in general, like “That tastes real good.”
How do you feel about other words with their own opposite meanings, like dust or sanction? If the meaning isn’t clear it’s almost always because the speaker constructed a sentence poorly, which of course can lead to misunderstandings even when not using contronyms.
Looks like aks was the original pronunciation
Fuckin Logan Airport won’t sell you a beer before noon. Goddamn bullshit puritan laws
111·1 month agoWhen I was new to anime I watched Naruto. Made it about 150 eps before everything felt like it was repeating itself, and that was the last “endless” anime I ever watched.
Still maintain that an anime over about 100 eps can’t be good–maybe ok, maybe amusing enough that you’ll watch it, but not good good. There’s simply no way to sustain a decent story for that long.
Maybe you should try “medium talk” so you don’t get bored and other randos don’t get weirded out. After a comment about the weather you can say that bc of the nice weather you were hiking/sportsing/otherwise hobbying in [location], and wondered if they’ve been there recently. Or if the weather was shit that you were indoors doing whatever hobby and ask what they tend to do in their free time.
Hobby talk can basically be as superficial or deep as you need it to be, so the conversation can progress from there as needed.
Interesting what languages go with, as Japanese keeps the save part but drops the protect in favor of hurry/emergency, so it’s the “hurry up and save you car” 救急車
Even ambulance itself comes from the French phrase walking hospital, and then the hospital part got dropped. We still retain the word ambulant to mean moving in English
Even more than the compound words I really like the kanji that have basically pure pictograph meanings, like mountain pass being “mountain up down” 峠.
Side note my favorite mnemonic is for the word (hospital) patient, where a person (者) ate too much meat on a stick, and now the problem is in their heart 串 + 心 --> 患者
Valerian had a lot of interesting stuff going on visually but they did the classic thing of trying to cram the extensive story of the book (from what I saw about it, i haven’t read it) into a movie run time, so it ended up being a bit of a shallow jumbled mess.
Yeah but if you drop your can on a random rock it won’t fling metal shards around everywhere
Bubbler is mostly only used in parts of New England and WI
https://brilliantmaps.com/linguistic-maps-that-divide-americans/
Frivolous lawsuits are mostly a fake thing McDonald’s convinced the public of so they wouldn’t have to pay medical bill for someone after serving coffee that was way too hot. The reason for most big payouts for injuries is because the medical system is broken.
Eh, Death of the Author is a thing for a reason–we don’t have to take authors’ thoughts as the end of discussion about a thing. Richard Adams is quoted as saying he didn’t put any meaning into Watership Down, and they were just tales for his daughters. Bradbury said that Fahrenheit 451 was mostly about people becoming isolated in society and watching too much TV rather than censorship.
I mean, the main point is that language doesn’t have to make “logical” sense. It’s not a math problem. Just look at all the inconsistencies in pretty much every aspect of a language. It’s all there simply because of history and people agreeing on meanings for words and phrases. For example, you’ve got something like prepositions. There’s literally zero logical reason why we talk or speak to someone, but we don’t tell or converse to someone.
And people who are more rigid in thinking about language always seem to think the language they learned growing up is the most “correct” version, whether that has a basis in history or not. Like even though literally has been used as an intensifier for (literally) hundreds of years, that seems to be a sticking point, whereas something like very, which has a similar root (veracis meaning truth), any sentence using very doesn’t have to have an exact truthful meaning.
Hell, once we go back to “original” meanings of words, where do we stop? The singular use of “they” is older than that of singular “you”, but I somehow never see the “singular they is confusing” crowd advocating for a return to thee/thou.