Personally I love oranges but cant stand orange juice.
Decimate means 1/10th destroyed, lost, whatever. I don’t care that the dictionary says that meaning is obsolete. I get that the meaning of words changes over time, but it has the prefix deci. 1/10th. You don’t get to decide something that starts with 1/10th means near total even if it’s a scary sounding word.
This is my anthill and I’m dying here.
I read a Matt Helm spy thriller where the hero knows that his boss has been replaced by a double because the real guy would never use ‘decimate’ to mean ‘eradicate.’
You only get to decide one tenth of what other people do.
I always interpreted it as “break into ten pieces”
Does English have sufficiently scary words that are also etymologically correct?
A population being halvsied just doesn’t hit the same, you know?
Penultimate must send you into spasms as well
I didn’t even know it had an alternate or wrong meaning
Meanwhile I hear it used correctly maybe 5% of the time
Seems like we all have different experiences with this word
I’m going to guess, based on the pattern of other misuses, they use it like “ultimate”, but with emphasis?
…how are people using penultimate incorrectly? Am I using it incorrectly? Does it not mean second to last?
Do we have any other words where adding the prefix “pen” to it means “next to”?
Pen is more like “almost”, like in peninsula, almost an island.
Penis
😔
My personal gripe in this area is people misusing “objectively”.
Such as declaring that a certain movie or game is objectively good.
If an art work has been popular for years, has won dozens of awards, is used by experts as an example of excellence, isn’t it ‘objectively’ good?
I understand your point, that a person might not like a particular movie or game and therefore think it’s ‘not good.’
I’m saying that even when you’re talking about a subjective experience there are criteria that a disinterested party can rate and successful or unsuccessful.
If an art work has been popular for years, has won dozens of awards, is used by experts as an example of excellence, isn’t it ‘objectively’ good?
If I don’t like that piece of art, am I wrong? Am I objectively incorrect of the opinions inside my own head?
Lots of people dislike award winning movies, songs, and games. Are those people measurably wrong? No. The plural of subjective opinions is not an objective one.
You can dislike something, and still appreciate its merits.
Say I get a bowl of broccoli soup. Is the bowl clean? Is the soup the right temperature? Was it made with wholesome ingredients? I may not want it because I don’t like broccoli, but I wouldn’t tell someone else not to try it.
Objectively, it’s a good bowl of soup.
See?
If a piece of art was created 100 years ago and every professional critic of the time thought it was trash without any merit, and then 100 years later the critical reception of that same piece had changed and it was considered a piece of high art, is that piece of art objectively good? Objectively bad? Was it objectively bad 100 years ago and then somehow became good?
Good point.
But, unless you’re talking about a hypothetical situation where the art was hidden away and rediscovered, the work must have had some merit or it wouldn’t have lasted 100 years.
If an art work has been popular for years, has won dozens of awards, is used by experts as an example of excellence, isn’t it ‘objectively’ good?
In this earlier definition looking for objective merit, it leans heavily on professional opinion. If a small number of individuals not thinking a work that is “objectively good” is good doesn’t change that, then the opposite must also be true. Therefore, if we have a situation where the critical consensus is that a work is bad, and only a small number of people think it is good, then we have a piece of art that is “objectively bad” by using the critical standards, but which is held onto by a small number of people who disagree.
At the top of this discussion I didn’t define “art” merely as visual pieces (I actually used examples of movie and games). So that art could be anything expressive- music, books, plays, movies, games, and beyond. I can think of art and artists not appreciated in their time, and then over time critical perception turned around.
This is all a long way of saying critical opinions are at the end of the day still opinions. That’s why even critics disagree with each other.
I feel like when it comes to judging an artwork, saying that something is objectively good does actually mean “for the majority”, because there is no singular point of absolute goodness to compare it to.
So even if there’s a little leeway in the definition of “objectively” that doesn’t necessarily mean that the statement is wrong.
I have so many like that one. At some point in English one billion dropped its value three orders of magnitude and it is spreading to other languages. What now is called a billion it was one thousand million or a milliard.
More recently, one dude used the word hallucination for what AI do and everyone ran with it, there was already a word to describe that phenomenon, fabulation. Hallucination means something completely different.
Yeah, but the AI bros don’t want to imply that the LLMs are lying to you.
So we get to hundred, then thousand up to hundred thousand, why would we use a thousand thousand for a million, or ten hundred thousand, or a hundred thousand thousand? A new word at each separator just makes easy parsing.
One hundred seventy three thousand million four hundred sixty two thousand four hundred twenty just sounds so much worse and harder to parser when hearing it.
There should be more mature games.
I don’t mean like sex games, I mean like games intended for adults that can have mature content and mature stories without it being heavily watered down.
Games should have as much leeway as the film or book industry when it comes to mature content - Though I guess that’s getting murky too lately.
Press a to fuck this wench
Press b to kill this wench
Press x to do both
Press y to do both in the opposite order
A great example of this is Halo.
The Flood is a horrible body horror parasite that transforms your body and invades and consumes your mind, your thoughts and your memories. It’s corruption based on revenge of the Precursors for the Forerunner’s war against them out of petty anger. The original trilogy shows this off well, and acts like a horror game when you’re getting swarmed from all angles by them.
343 era games are like “bad guys are robots, Flood too scary and gorey we removed them.” All for that lower Teen rating just to sell more copies to a broader audience. They remove the bloodiness and the gore. Hell, you could make a lake of Covenant and human blood in CE. Now you might get a couple splashes of blood to not tip that ESRB scale.
Pathetically watered down in many other aspects, but this was one that always bothered me.
343 have no idea what the fuck they are doing and never have
Probably stereotypical, but I find well done steaks to be a total waste.
I rarely cook steak, but when I do I go to a butcher and get something quality and fresh. Normally I don’t care how other people enjoy their food, but when I take the effort to get quality steak and someone at a family get together asks me to cook until the steak is grey in the center it just deflates me. Logically I know that if everyone is happy with their food it doesn’t matter, but personally having to mangle a steak so it has the taste of ground beef just goes against every cooking instinct I have.
I’ve learned that when certain people are coming to a holiday cookout to just cook burgers or BBQ instead. Everyone is just as happy with what they get.
I consider myself openminded and tolerant.
I once heard a fellow say he was from Minnesota and he thought ketchup was too spicy.
Outwardly I stayed calm but in my heart I wanted to burn the heretic.
I’m in Minnesota, and I can confirm there are people who think ketchup is spicy.
The first time I encountered “ketchup is spicy/a hot sauce,” I thought it was a joke. Then I also learned that there are truly bland people who think salt and pepper is “too much”.
I live in a very weird state.
What leads to this… genuinely curious.
If you go back far enough, there’s a lot of Scandinavian heritage in Minnesota settlers, especially Sweden and Norway. Historically, Scandinavian foods lacked spice because there weren’t a lot of spices that grew there. The settlers brought the palette that comes with that with them.
I’ve known a few midwesterners like that, they likely grew up on “natural flavor” and never add anything to their food and eat the blandest possible interpretations of real foods, and since their taste buds aren’t used to any real flavor anything cooked with flavor is extreme to them
I once heard a US Southern expression.
“Food so good it’ll make you slap your mama.”
You comment brought that to mind.
That’s the name of a cooking spice I use often!
I simply do not find well done steak to be an inferior taste, just different. I don’t really care it’s like eggs. I like them all ways.
I usually do medium rare when I’m the one choosing.
I don’t eat meat at all anymore, but growing up, whenever we had steaks I would always prefer it well done. It wasn’t really that I enjoyed it that way though, just that I did not like the flavor and texture of steak even cooked perfectly, my father did and kept making me eat it, and cooking it to a crisp and then covering it with ketchup and paprika was a way to make it not taste like steak anymore.
Latin root words that end in -or should use the suffix -trix when applied to women. So a woman aviator is aviatrix, administrator is administratrix, etc.
Our town has a Maytrix.
Ok I’m convinced
Contractrix sounds like a supervillain
A supervillainess
We don’t need gender specific words for things that aren’t gender specific. Does the aviator use their penis for flying the plane? If not why do you need to tell me with their title if they have a penis?
I hate the word widower. It sounds like a verb. A widower kills married men and makes widows. Widow works fine for everyone.
Does the aviator use their penis for flying the plane?
It would be a lot cooler if he did.
All jokes aside, it does have a purpose; it sets up the other person for using the correct pronouns to refer to the newly Introduced person in conversation.
“The aviator has been flying for decades”
“Oh yeah? I bet he’s really good at it then!”
“Actually, shes a woman, but yes, shes one of the best in the show!”By properly using aviatrix, and having gendered terms like it, that faux pas is avoided.
I agree with you on widower though, sort of. To me widower always sounded like its should refer to the deceased husband. He made her a widow by dieing, so he’s her widower.
“Oh Janie’s a sweetheart, always helping out in the community since she became a widow.”
"Oh yeah? "
“Yeah! Bob, her widower, had a heart attack working as the auctioneer for the school charity, and ever since, shes vowed to volunteer for the both of them!”
I see what you’re saying, but the problem is better solved by getting rid of gendered language instead of creating more of it:
“The aviator has been flying for decades”
“Oh yeah? I bet they’re really good at it then!”
“yes, they are one of the best in the show!”
Oooo, I like this. Aviatrix sounds so cool.
I’ve seen the term before. Antiquated but it’s a word.
A really cool word.
I like this
“Road Works” usually means it doesn’t.
The “End Construction” signs you sometimes see on the side of the road aren’t actually protesting growth.
Dear Australia, I utterly love you, but please tell me how many vowels do you need to shove into the word No? It’s almost become the longest word in Australian English.
Do you mean no as in yeah nah, or nah yeah?
There is only one R in the word familiar.
Stop saying fermilliar.
Ermagerd
I’ve never once heard someone say that. Axe a question however…
This verges on actually mattering, but knives on magnetic strips should be blade down.
Pros:
-
when grabbing the knife you are holding it in the safest way possible automatically with the blade pointed down rather than blade up like fucking Chucky.
-
If you botch grabbing it, it falls away from your hand/arm rather than toward/on top of it.
-
the handles hook over the strip and are more secure
-
the handles are all on the same plane, and again if you dislodge a separate knife unexpectedly it falls away from your hand/arm
Magnetic strips give me the heebie jeebies. I like a nice solid block instead.
-
Steak is overrated. I’d take a smash burger over a steak 9 times out of 10, and that 1 time out of 10 will just be because I’m in the mood for peppercorn sauce.
Never had a steak that was better than a snitzel, or a stew, or smoked, or braised.
Steak is the most uncreative an flavourless way to cook beef. It is fine if you want to check the taste of the ingredient by itself, but it is a waste of meat
That’s the whole point of steak. You need to try something that’s grass fed, dried aged, and a nice medium rare. Now, using those cuts for a stew would absolutely be a waste of money. Those cuts have a lot of connective tissue and would make some pretty awful steaks.
This right here. Your average sirloin slapped on a grill and cooked by some drunk asshole all wrong is just beef that isn’t quite beef jerky yet.
But take a good porterhouse, cut it right, trim it right, dry age it right, cook it right. That’s a whole different thing.
That being said, I will sometimes buy some cheap steak and slather it in A1 because I fuckin love A1
Bang for buck the burger is superior. I’ve had a few steaks that were much better than a burger but were all anniversary dinner $$$ and not priced in a way that I’d be willing to eat like that on a regular basis.
The way the US spells things is stupid
The letter “u” belongs in neighbour, harbour, savour, etc.
No u!
Today, I know what true enlightenment feels like
I prefer the US spelling of these words. The U doesn’t do anything phonetically and was not present in the Latin from which many of the words derive.
You’re probably right but this is where might makes right kicks in.
The native English-speakers that I work with are pretty evenly split between those who speak American English and those who speak British English. I have found that while I have mostly adopted American English spelling myself, I always write “behaviour” because a particular Brit I work with often talks about software behaviour.
As a non-native speaker I tend to mix the two. School taught me british spelling, internet taught me american. Colour is one of the words where I’ve always stuck with british spelling.
I think I was just a rebellious teen but I (an american English speaker from my earliest) always spell colour with the u. No idea why
I do that too, and I blame Neopets.
If a state isn’t at least partly in Central Time, it can’t be in the Midwest.
Obviously not all states in Central Time are in the Midwest, either, that’s just the lowest bar.
I think Indiana is solidly Midwest but on Eastern time
Parts are in central. Have a sister or bear the western edge
To me, that’s a contradiction in terms.
Growing corn isn’t enough; it takes a certain kind of attitude, and a certain kind of weather.
Then where do you consider ohio to be?
The Middle East, obviously
The Rust Belt
So is Milwaukee
If you’ve never worked on a holiday you shouldn’t be allowed to go to stores and restaurants on holidays.
Folding laundry is a complete waste of time and effort. If it’s been through the wash it’s clean, it’s not going to be any cleaner just because you spent half an hour doing laundry origami.
Folding laundry is supposed to be to prevent wrinkles isn’t it?
And it helps to fit it into your storage.
That’s another take of mine tbh, if clothes hold obnoxiously visible wrinkles, the fabric is too stiff to be comfortable in my view anyway. I try to avoid buying and wearing anything that needs to be ironed if I can get away with it.
I’ve never been under the impression folding laundry makes it cleaner? Or am I not understanding the point.
Half an hour ⁉️ You… might be over-doing it. The goal is to put it away neatly, not open up a hole in the spacetime continuum.
You inspire me. I love banana-flavored things, but I don’t like bananas.
I’m the opposite, except for banana cake, can eat that all day every day. But banana flavour sweets, milk/milkshake etc. you can keep, tastes disgusting to me, even a hint of it in a milkshake ruins it.
Sometimes a game being a little unbalanced can make it more fun.
