Messages

1

English & Linguistics / Re: Strange Proununciations

« on: January 30, 2025, 09:55:23 AM »

There's was a story on NPR about President Jimmy Carter's malaise speech and the NPR reporter pronounced it ma-lez, which I guess is close to the French pronounciation, but not the way I've ever heard it pronounced in English.

I heard that! It completely pulled my attention away from the content of the piece. I thought maybe she'd just kind of stumbled over the pronunciation, but then she did it again.

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English & Linguistics / Re: Funny English and Linguistics stuff...

« on: January 30, 2025, 09:53:16 AM »

I have been using captions on Netflix and Prime a lot lately. And have noted when they do (or do not) indicate in the caption when speakers elide letters. (As in the example, do the captions say "gonna" or "going to" when what was said was definitely the former, etc. Do the captions reflect accents, real (either of the actor or the character) or temporary (like funny voices when a parent is reading a book to a child), and so on.) It's quite interesting.

Do you have opinions about spelling those out in, say, a novel or short story?

Personally, I find it very hard to read dialog that is attempting to reflect the accent.

In Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld books who spoke with a lisp. Farmer insisted in writing all of his dialogue with the lisp preserved. He was a fairly major character. It was maddening to me when I read the books in late grade school/early junior high.

I loved those books, but recognized that they were pretty badly written even at the time. I had a lot more patience for bad writing back then, apparently.

Eesh, you can tell I wrote that on a phone. Sorry!

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English & Linguistics / Re: Funny English and Linguistics stuff...

« on: January 11, 2025, 07:04:17 AM »

I have been using captions on Netflix and Prime a lot lately. And have noted when they do (or do not) indicate in the caption when speakers elide letters. (As in the example, do the captions say "gonna" or "going to" when what was said was definitely the former, etc. Do the captions reflect accents, real (either of the actor or the character) or temporary (like funny voices when a parent is reading a book to a child), and so on.) It's quite interesting.

Do you have opinions about spelling those out in, say, a novel or short story?

Personally, I find it very hard to read dialog that is attempting to reflect the accent.

In Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld books who spoke with a lisp. Farmer insisted in writing all of his dialogue with the lisp preserved. He was a fairly major character. It was maddening to me when I read the books in late grade school/early junior high.

I loved those books, but recognized that they were pretty badly written even at the time. I had a lot more patience for bad writing back then, apparently.

4

English & Linguistics / Re: I hate journalistic writing

« on: March 02, 2023, 02:23:24 PM »

But yeah, my money is on some kind of AI. Maybe one trained on Perd Hapley quotes.

And hello to both of you!

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English & Linguistics / Re: I hate journalistic writing

« on: March 01, 2023, 07:19:32 PM »

For your reading pleasure:
https://www.whio.com/news/local/cdc-issues-public-health-alert-superbug-spreads-across-country/CRKCAUK2DBGWXBVWVE2B3VTTQI/#amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&aoh=16777174795560&csi=0&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.whio.com%2Fnews%2Flocal%2Fcdc-issues-public-health-alert-superbug-spreads-across-country%2FCRKCAUK2DBGWXBVWVE2B3VTTQI%2F

6

English & Linguistics / Re: The random etymology of the day

« on: February 11, 2020, 06:21:25 PM »

Jonathon, I asked you this on twitter, but I'm not entirely sure that people get notified when I do that in the way that I did with you, so I thought I'd ask here as well. Do you have any insight into the etymology of the term "horaltic"? Another person in the twitter thread is asserting that it "almost certainly a misspelling of 'heraldic'", which, I mean, maybe? But also maybe not?

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English & Linguistics / Re: The random etymology of the day

« on: June 19, 2019, 09:38:54 PM »

I could kind of see wheat being the original conception of the forbidden fruit. It would fit with God's rejection of Cain's sacrifice, and the general bias against farming and preference for nomadic herding that you see in the Hebrew scriptures.

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English & Linguistics / Re: What do you call this?

« on: June 19, 2019, 09:32:21 PM »

 

9

English & Linguistics / Re: Regionalisms

« on: June 19, 2019, 09:31:48 PM »

I don't think we really have a thread that this fits into perfectly, but since it's a regional dialect thing I thought that this one would do.

When I was in grade school, there was a girl in my class that used the phrase "has done did", as in "June has done did her homework". At the time, being a judgmental little kid, I just took this as proof that the girl in question was dumb. As an adult, I realize that she'd just internalized the grammar of the English spoken in her home, the same as I had, and that I'd just gotten lucky in terms of having parents who spoke Standard English.

Is that little snippet of grammar enough to identify what her dialect was? If it helps, this was in rural NE Kansas, and I know that her parents (and probably her grandparents) grew up within about 5 miles of where she did.

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English & Linguistics / Re: What do you call this?

« on: June 19, 2019, 02:18:45 PM »

I've been aware of "churchkey" as a term for that all my life (or at least as far back as I can remember), but it has always seemed like a weird name to me. It wasn't what leapt to mind when I saw the original post (bottle opener was what did).

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English & Linguistics / Re: Interesting language stuff

« on: June 19, 2019, 02:15:50 PM »

That is just *incredibly* cool.

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English & Linguistics / Re: The random etymology of the day

« on: December 31, 2018, 11:01:14 AM »

Interesting. Thanks for looking into it.

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English & Linguistics / Re: The random etymology of the day

« on: December 29, 2018, 12:58:04 PM »

The other day I was talking to my mom, and she made reference to a piece of grazing land being so poor that it would only be able to support, as she put it, "one head of cattle". My response to that was "So...a cow, then?"

It got me thinking about that use of the word "head", though. How long has it been used as a term meaning "unit of herd animals", and how did it come to mean that etymologically?

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English & Linguistics / Re: Funny English and Linguistics stuff...

« on: November 09, 2018, 01:41:01 AM »

15

English & Linguistics / Re: Quotes from work

« on: July 05, 2018, 06:45:57 PM »

The nursing college here has robotic mannikins that can simulate childbirth. I really want to know how those work.

My hospital has something like that. They use it for annual competencies (practicum for dealing with emergency situations) for the maternity stuff. It's really kind of freaky. She talks and blinks her eyes and all. In addition to simulating actually emergent conditions that can happen perinatally.

Wow, that's interesting. I'd love to see that thing in action.

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English & Linguistics / Re: Quotes from work

« on: June 05, 2018, 01:28:26 PM »

Coworker 1, his screen shared: types "the system's requirements"
Coworker 2: "Take out the apostrophy"
Me: "What? No, it's possessive"
Coworker 2: "The system is requirements? That is nonsense!"
Me: "It isn't a contraction. The apostrophy is being used to indicate possession"
Coworker 2: googles, is flabbergasted.

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English & Linguistics / Re: Funny English and Linguistics stuff...

« on: March 22, 2018, 09:03:51 AM »

Yep!

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English & Linguistics / Re: Funny English and Linguistics stuff...

« on: March 20, 2018, 01:37:33 PM »

The admin in our department sent out an email the other day detailing when we would be receiving our new Voight phones.

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English & Linguistics / Re: You keep on using that word

« on: March 05, 2018, 05:45:10 PM »

Unfortunately, I was just CC:ed on the email.

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English & Linguistics / Re: You keep on using that word

« on: March 05, 2018, 03:42:20 PM »

"We are in a time crunch, so if you could expiate the work it would be helpful."

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English & Linguistics / Re: I hate journalistic writing

« on: April 10, 2015, 08:30:20 PM »

I see it once in a while here; I generally assume the writers are Utah transplants.

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English & Linguistics / Re: I hate journalistic writing

« on: April 10, 2015, 05:35:49 PM »

Seriously?

23

English & Linguistics / Re: The random etymology of the day

« on: November 14, 2014, 06:06:30 PM »

Interesting, thanks. I wonder why Etymology Online stopped with Old French.

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English & Linguistics / Re: The random etymology of the day

« on: November 14, 2014, 04:29:16 PM »

I'm interested in the etymology of the word "barrel". Etymology Online says that it comes from the 12th century Old French word "baril", and notes that the word has cognates in all Romance languages. This, to me, implies one of two things. Either the barrel was invented in the 12th century in a region where Old French was spoken, and the the technology spread from there to all other Romance language-speaking cultures, or there is an older word, probably in Latin, from which all of the languages got their word for barrel. Since barrel technology existed at least the better part of a millennia before the Old French word came into being, I'm guessing the latter. Can you shed any light on it?

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English & Linguistics / Re: Dear Expert

« on: November 10, 2014, 08:33:29 PM »

I was listening to something this morning on Morning Edition in which the person being interviewed was talking about the centrality of bread in human culture, and the way all sorts of words are entwined with bread. He gave the example of "companion" literally being someone you had bread with. He said in the piece that he had literally written the book on the subject, but I can't remember his name or the name of the book, and I'm not finding any references to the piece when I look on the Morning Edition website. Are you by any chance familiar with it?