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Paraneoptera @sopuli.xyz
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Comments 17
Vesuvius
  • "Anglicized" is probably not the best way to think about it. The Latin letter "v" was pronounced "w" through the classical period, but had shifted to β or v (fricative) by the third century, long before English existed. V was pronounced v (voiced labiodental fricative) for many centuries. And though we do tend to give the classical period a lot of prestige, it was just one phase for Latin.

  • It's amazing so many people are able to use English as a second language.
  • A number of Slavic, Baltic, Norse, (and also Finnic languages like Finnish and Estonian) use some form of this word for market. It originated in Proto-slavic and passed through Old Norse into descendant languages.

    https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/търгъ#Old_East_Slavic

    The most interesting thing is that the root appears to have borrowed into Finnish twice, once probably from Slavic (as turku) and once from Old Norse (as tori).

  • A cool guide pay attention to your grammar
  • It should be "after King Arthur had laid his sword down, he lay in the tall grass, resting" since "lain" is the intransitive participial form and "laid" is the transitive participial form. If he's doing it to a sword he needs the transitive.

  • Why are Stop Lines (in the US, at least) often set too far back to see any crossing traffic?
  • This answer is spot on. I know this varies by state but in my state every intersection is legally a crosswalk, regardless of markings, and drivers are required to stop at them and yield right of way to pedestrians. This applies whether the pedestrians are in the crosswalk or appear to be attempting to enter the crosswalk. The area legally designated as crosswalk is the space between the stop sign and the road, and in the vast majority of cases in suburban areas is unmarked. There is no way in most of these that a driver will be able to see pedestrians or cyclists coming, especially from the right, unless they stop at that stop sign. The correct procedure is to stop at the sign, determine that the pedestrian way is clear, and then pull forward to the road. There's almost 1 pedestrian death an hour in the US and most of these deaths are avoidable from the driver's point of view just by following this and other legally mandated procedures.

  • Why do Americans measure everything in cups?
  • I think it goes back to Fannie Farmer in 1896, who wrote the first major and comprehensive cookbook in English that used any kind of standard measurements. European cookbooks mostly used vague instructions without any standardized weights or numbers before that. At this point in the industrialized world standardized cup measures were relatively cheap and available. Scales were relatively bulky, expensive, and inaccurate in 1896. So the whole tradition got started, and most of the major cookbooks owed something to Fannie Farmer. Cookbooks that used standardized weights probably got started in other countries much later, when scales were becoming commonplace.

  • Male to female suicide ratio by country
  • This is true. And in communities around the world where suicide is stigmatized, there is heavy pressure on authorities to record deaths as "accidental" rather than suicide. In fact, this is borne out by statistics in which you see higher rates of death attributed to accident in such communities, once you control for other variables. This is especially the case in societies in which there is social shunning of entire families who have lost someone to suicide. The coroner in these communities may worry with good reason about serious mistreatment of families if there is a public record of suicide. It's also not unreasonable to think that this misreporting may play into the gender divide in suicides. If different sexes tend to use different methods, some of these methods are much more ambiguous and easier to record as an accident than others.

  • Most US sandwich baggies contain toxic PFAS ‘forever chemicals’, analysis says
  • Ziploc is definitely the most popular and known brand. It seems really weird that they waited to put that information at the very end of the article. I'm guessing it's just to get people to keep reading - most people would have stopped reading if the first paragraph made it clear that this applies only to off-brand bags.

  • I bet the Vulcans never tried to "Save Daylight" by changing the clocks twice a year
  • This is a good point. These position statements treat standard time as though it is synonymous with circadian alignment, which makes some bad assumptions. Fundamentally the bad assumption is that if there is light in the morning people will be exposed to it. Most people go from a curtained bedroom to a windowless office or classroom, and don't get much sun exposure in the morning whether the sun is up or not. It's arguable that the only thing that matters is whether the sun's up during free time, which for most people occurs only in the early evening.

  • TIL The term "joystick" does not originate from video games, and was first coined in 1909
  • Yeah, it's bogus. This is some speculation that someone put in Wikipedia but there's no published source. It's just a folk etymology that some enthusiast thought was endearing. Not a single reputable source will substantiate this, like most folk etymologies.

  • Your day can't continue until you confirm it yourself
  • You are potentially both correct. But since we can learn to improve articulation at any age, it's likely that you will pronounce the sound more clearly and correctly if you train yourself not to allow your lips to touch.

  • TIL that in 1848 a railroad worker survived an accident where an iron bar pierced through his head, destroying most of his left frontal lobe. However, his personality and behavior changed considerably
  • Thanks for bringing up MacMillan. Manon Auffret has more recently researched the newspaper coverage of Gage, and her research adds a great deal of evidence supporting MacMillan's arguments. Basically, there's a lot of sensationalist and verifiably false stories about Gage. There's no evidence from the time period of personality changes, and a lot of the wild stories appeared decades after his death, probably fabricated. Allegedly Gage was a drunk, but the evidence shows he abstained completely. Allegedly he beat his wife, but evidence shows he was never married. Allegedly he was a circus performer but there's no evidence from the time period to support this.

    https://n.neurology.org/content/98/18_Supplement/1560

  • What's the most annoying Costco behavior you experience regularly?
  • Cart stealing! I left my cart for thirty seconds by the clothing and it was gone. The Costco worker nearby said it happens every day. Apparently people don't think they will need a cart, walk all the way to the back, realize they need a cart, and just grab one that someone else has walked away from. People are apparently too lazy to walk back to the front to get a cart.