lvxferre

joined 3 years ago
[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago (5 children)

Most "rules of thumb" become awful advice when used indiscriminately.

People assign slightly different meanings to the same words. You need to acknowledge this to understand what they say.

Words also change meaning depending on the context.

When you still don't get what someone else said, it's often more useful to think that you're lacking a key piece of info than to assume that the other person does.

Hell is paved with good intentions. This piece of advice is popular, but still not heard enough.

Related to the above: if someone in your life is consistently rushing towards conclusions, based on little to no information, minimise the impact of that person in your life.

Have at least one recipe using leftovers of other recipes. It'll reduce waste.

Alcohol vinegar is bland, boring, and awful for cooking. But it's a great cleaning agent.

Identify what you need to keep vs. throw away. Don't "default" this indiscriminately, analyse it on a per case basis.

The world does not revolve around your belly button and nature won't "magically" change because of your feelings.

You can cultivate herbs in a backyard. No backyard? Flower pots. No flower pots? Old margarine pot. (Check which herbs grow well where you live.)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

It’s Latin and it says we must all die

There's no "must": it states for a fact that you're to die, not that you should/need/must.

A rough translation would be "remember that you'll die", or "remember that you are to die" (keeping the infinitive). Or even "remember death", it's close enough in spirit.

fons: egomet, latine loquor.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

I usually twist this into "memento mori, quoque uiuere" (remember [that you'll] die, also [that you'll] live).

Like, not trying to become worm food full of regrets is nice and dandy, but remember that you'll suffer the consequences of a few of your actions while you're still alive.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 10 months ago

Another from chemistry: "small dangers are still dangers, don't underestimate them".

This was in my first uni. The person saying that mentioned how he never saw students harming themselves with cyanide, nitration solutions (sulphuric+nitric - highly corrosive and explosive) or the likes. No, it was always with dumb shit like glacial acetic acid skin burns, or a solvent catching fire.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Not common in general usage nowadays. Perhaps it avoided the shift?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago

It isn't "Hangul" that is saving the language, but the fact that it's getting an orthography. That orthography could be theoretically in any writing system - not just Latin or Arabic (both already exist for Cia-Cia, contrariwise to what the video claims), but even a native one or Cyrillic or even, dunno, the Cherokee syllabary.

Abidin looks informed on the matter; the same cannot be said about whoever produced this video. I'll highlight a few issues.

[0:33] - pretty much all languages are "syllable-based". They organise sounds into syllables. The video is likely trying to convey that it's a CV (consonant, vowel, repeat) language, unlike, say, Russian or English (that cram quite a lot of consonants in a single syllable).

[0:36] The video is trying to use "transliterated" as a posh synonym for "spelled"; both are not the same thing. Transliteration is to convert text from a script from another; for example, "Quis credis esse, Bellum?" (Latin, using the Latin script) → "Кўис кредис ессе, Беллум?" (Latin, using the Cyrillic script instead) is transliteration.

And you can spell pretty much any language in any writing system. The association between grapheme and sounds (or phonemes) is arbitrary.

You might say "but the Latin alphabet doesn't have a letter for /ɓ/!" - well, it doesn't have a letter for /ʃ/ either. Italian handled it by spelling it ⟨sci⟩, English as ⟨sh⟩, Polish as ⟨sz⟩, Portuguese kind of repurposed ⟨x⟩. And the current Latin spelling for Cia-Cia - that you can check here - handled /ɓ/ just fine, using a similar approach as the Hangul one.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (2 children)

PEBKAC

Every time that I see this acronym I'm tempted to pronounce it as ['rʲefkas], then I remember "ah, it isn't Cyrillic".

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Isn’t lol short for “laughing out loud”?

Wiktionary lists both "laughing out loud" and "lots of laughs". Nowadays though it's neither; on a pragmatic level it doesn't convey "I'm laughing" / "I laughed", it conveys amusement and/or lack of seriousness, depending on the context.

  • [Alice] The Sun is a star.
  • [Bob] yeah sure the sun only appears at night lol (implying: "I'm amused at what Alice said, and I don't take it seriously.")
[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

I don't even recall pronouncing it in loud voice. In English I simply say "what you see is what you get", and in Portuguese or Italian I rephrase it. (Although I remember at least one person calling it ['vizi 'vige] in Portuguese. And I was, like... "what?")

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

What else is it supposed to be?

  • fear the whales - because sharks are not enough.
  • ferry the warriors - how else will they reach Hades?
  • fuck the West - yes, I had to politicise this.
  • feed the woodpeckers - hipster version of granny throwing popcorn to the pigeons.
  • feel the wetness - this is sounding like porn already.
[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (10 children)

Mine are "lol" and "lmao". I get what they originally meant, and I get why most people use them nowadays. It's just that they often signal "I have nothing to contribute, but still expect people to read my crap".

As a second (third?) place, "WYSIWYG". If you're going to coin such verbose acronym, might as well sub it with an actual word, like, dunno, "transparent".

EDIT - "lol" = "lots of laughs", "lmao" = "laughing my arse off", "WYSIWYG" = "what you see is what you get".

EDIT2: as another poster correctly pointed out, "lol" also originally meant "laughing out loud". Perhaps even more than "lots of laughs".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

It's used so frequently for offences that I'm not surprised at that.

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