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Arsenic Lupin posted:I am lucky to live on a peninsula, because when in doubt I ask myself, "Toward the bay or toward the ocean?" I live next to a mountain range so I'm usually able to figure out cardinal directions pretty easily.
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Jan 4, 2021 00:28
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I'm sure I read once about a culture that uses cardinal directions casually in everyday speech (so like, 'hey bring me the jar to the northeast of the door') and as a result they all have really good senses of what direction is where at all times. Can't recall where it is though. It's just a nifty thing.
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Jan 4, 2021 00:50
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HopperUK posted:I'm sure I read once about a culture that uses cardinal directions casually in everyday speech (so like, 'hey bring me the jar to the northeast of the door') and as a result they all have really good senses of what direction is where at all times. Can't recall where it is though. It's just a nifty thing. Australia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guugu_Yimithirr_language
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Jan 4, 2021 01:47
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It's actually common in many native languages of Australia. (Not disagreeing with you, Leminscate Blue, just elaborating.)
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Jan 4, 2021 02:06
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Xiahou Dun posted:It's actually common in many native languages of Australia. Thanks, I remembered the same thing as HopperUK and it was the first example that came up in a Google search.
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Jan 4, 2021 02:34
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Lemniscate Blue posted:Thanks, I remembered the same thing as HopperUK and it was the first example that came up in a Google search. O word. That's a pretty esoteric thing that I only know cause a grad school prof was a specialist in Australian languages, but I thought it'd be fun to share. Big chunks of Northern Australian languages do* that sort of thing and it's really cool. Some of them also have nasal clicks! Which is also super cool but the one time I tried to do it I popped a vein somewhere. Also sorry I typoed your name, but it's too late to edit it so my shame shall live eternal. *Well, did. Cause a lot of them are dying rapidly which is super depressing.
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Jan 4, 2021 02:58
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Thanks for doing the research for me friends! Fascinating stuff. I love cultural quirks like this. Like how different languages designate colours and stuff.
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Jan 4, 2021 03:11
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In Chinese you have to use different grammatical words for nouns based off of their shapes and other qualities. So you can't say "this table", its "this [grammatical marker for flat objects] table". So like there's one for people, another for round things, one for animals, etc. Then it gets insane and there's like one for tears and three different ones for beards and one that can also be used for people in addition to pigs and coffins. Or the one just for wells. Japanese does basically the same poo poo with the fun wrinkle that rabbits count as birds. This has been random language facts with Xiahou Dun.
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Jan 4, 2021 03:20
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I'm not a linguist but my favorite example of how fascinating the field can be is the debate over the order in which languages develop terms for colors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate
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Jan 4, 2021 05:32
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Lemniscate Blue posted:I'm not a linguist but my favorite example of how fascinating the field can be is the debate over the order in which languages develop terms for colors. Haha. I am a linguist but I'm almost completely colorblind, so all those arguments were like talking about invisible particles. I speak like 8 languages but when it comes to colors I'm like, "uh sure this word means green or grey or blue and I totally know what those words mean." But colors vs. "linguistic relativity" is somewhere between open question and lol this is dumb and settled. However I might be taking the thread off-track.
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Jan 4, 2021 06:19
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Xiahou Dun posted:In Chinese you have to use different grammatical words for nouns based off of their shapes and other qualities. So you can't say "this table", its "this [grammatical marker for flat objects] table". So like there's one for people, another for round things, one for animals, etc. When I was taking Chinese in school, measure words were one of the things that threw me off the most. I never stuck with it, but man I remember being flummoxed having to memorize both the word and the measure word for vocab. I get now that there's a larger pattern, but at the time I very much didn't.
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Jan 4, 2021 06:47
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Carillon posted:When I was taking Chinese in school, measure words were one of the things that threw me off the most. I never stuck with it, but man I remember being flummoxed having to memorize both the word and the measure word for vocab. I get now that there's a larger pattern, but at the time I very much didn't. And they're secretly the same thing as gender in European languages but no one says it cause racism~*~*~*~*~*~*~* (But yeah they kind of take the wind out of your sails when you're learning.)
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Jan 4, 2021 07:17
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Xiahou Dun posted:And they're secretly the same thing as gender in European languages but no one says it cause racism~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Well I'm poo poo at French/German gender as well so there's a trend!
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Jan 4, 2021 10:55
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Xiahou Dun posted:And they're secretly the same thing as gender in European languages but no one says it cause racism~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
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Jan 4, 2021 15:32
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Yeah it’s like a harmful mnemonic, where you spend more effort trying to connect items to their ‘gender’ than it would to just memorise them by rote.
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Jan 4, 2021 16:54
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Platystemon posted:Yeah it’s like a harmful mnemonic, where you spend more effort trying to connect items to their ‘gender’ than it would to just memorise them by rote. Exactly!
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Jan 4, 2021 18:35
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Xiahou Dun posted:In Chinese you have to use different grammatical words for nouns based off of their shapes and other qualities. So you can't say "this table", its "this [grammatical marker for flat objects] table". So like there's one for people, another for round things, one for animals, etc. Awesome. Thank you. Borges was right!. IIRC he always claimed that his translator had found it in an actual Chinese work, but I'm skeptical.
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Jan 4, 2021 18:43
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Platystemon posted:If I’m paying fifteen dollars for a burger, it had better be a specific conferred or inherited title of medieval German origin and legally defined preeminent status granting exclusive constitutional privileges and legal rights. I too wanted to 
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Jan 5, 2021 07:36
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Ynglaur posted:I swear if 18-year-old me had been given any term other than "gender" when trying to learn German it would have been far easier. Only years later did I think about in terms of "mode", and then it made sense. Gender was just too loaded a word for me at that age and immature stage in life. It's from "gender" in the sense of like "genre", just a category, and it so happens that this kind of is associated with biological sex in some European languages. Like how dudes are in the "masculine" group in French or whatever. Then we have to ignore all the exceptions like that in German girls are neuter. There are ways languages care about gender like our whole discussion about pronouns in English recently or how Arabic conjugates verbs, but most of the "genders" in languages are distinctly just poo poo like bridges and forks are in the same category cause idk they are.
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Jan 5, 2021 07:47
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wesleywillis posted:I currently live at the other end of that lake, and work in various areas around that end. Even after many years, i still get confused when I go around to the other side, and all of a sudden the lake is to the north, not the south. I got lost in Michigan once as a Chicagoan because Lake Michigan is to the east, obviously. Felt v smart.
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Jan 5, 2021 20:55
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The Boomer thread has reminded me of a thing: fruitcake. Complaints about how inedible fruitcake is are a staple joke of the winter season. But the modern fruitcake - especially the kind you can buy in a store - is a very different beast from the kind of fruitcake that was originally being mailed by grandmas and aunts to relatives. The original fruitcake had a lot of alcohol in it - traditionally rum, I think - and also real dried fruit. The fruit is where the name comes from, but the alcohol was used as a preservative, since there wasn't any other way to mail a cake across the country and have it arrive in a form that was still edible. The modern fruitcake is a sad, pale imitation. The store-bought ones often don't even have anything that resembles real fruit in them, just shreds of green and red 'fruit' that don't have a distinct flavor and add nothing of their own to the cake. And the rest of the cake is a dense, sticky loaf that wanted to be a carrot cake or a banana bread when it grew up, but never got any flavors added to it beyond 'sweet'.
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Jan 6, 2021 17:52
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JacquelineDempsey posted:The other day a co-worker at my restaurant asked what the special of the week was. A dude (who's about 40) said "2 all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun". I laughed; the guy asking looked confused as hell, and suddenly a bunch of us felt old. Did he just say it, or did he SING it? I remember it being an ad jingle in the late 70s, when I was in 10th grade.
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Jan 7, 2021 22:09
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This might not quite fit the theme of the thread, but maybe it does. It seems like the most appropriate place. In the movie Stand By Me, there was that one scene where the bad kids were "tattooing" each other with the word "Cobras" on their arms. In the Simpsons episode where Homer gets a motorcycle, he was watching an old movie from the 50s(?) and one of the characters in the movies was all "You'll never defeat the cobras, no one can defeat a motorcycle gang" or something along those lines. Then the old guy from the movie was all "He's a rebel i tell ya, a rebel without a cause, just like the boy from that movie". Question is, what movie is that a reference to? I figured it'd be Rebel Without A Cause, because of how it was referenced in the Simpsons, with a sort of weird what I call an "unaware self reference" but its not. I don't think its The Wild One (1953, Marlon Brando) either. I've searched a bunch of different terms on Google, IMDB and such but can't seem to come up with anything. Any ideas?
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Jan 9, 2021 19:14
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https://twitter.com/Microsoft/status/1347698349789618178 This reference is already lost on many. It was on its way out in 1997.
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Jan 9, 2021 20:58
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tinytort posted:The Boomer thread has reminded me of a thing: fruitcake. On the other hand modern fruitcake is still pretty gross so the joke basically still works.
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Jan 9, 2021 23:17
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Claxton fruitcakes are okay if you get them in Claxton. But yeah the old school ones with rum or bourbon are really quite good.
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Jan 10, 2021 02:51
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Leperflesh posted:And the word "most" is very relevant. Some cars used the same key. Police cars have an option to key every patrol car the same. Most police departments pick this option when ordering. I suspect that the excuse is to minimize having different keys, but every dude who bought a Crown Vic Police Interceptor can get into almost every other Crown Vic Police Interceptor in the US. RCarr posted:Every car I’ve had with keyless entry didn’t have lock cylinders on the doors. That’s the whole point of keyless entry... Xiahou Dun posted:Japanese does basically the same poo poo with the fun wrinkle that rabbits count as birds. Japanese uses "counters" when using numbers. I think one of the last equivalent in English would be "head" of cattle. One of the counters is for "long thin things" like books (old books were scrolls), telephone calls (the lines hanging from poles) and baseball trajectories. This was one of the annoying things when I was studying Japanese. An interesting book about categories in linguistics is Women, Fire and Dangerous Things.
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Jan 10, 2021 09:04
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Huttan posted:Police cars have an option to key every patrol car the same. Most police departments pick this option when ordering. I suspect that the excuse is to minimize having different keys, but every dude who bought a Crown Vic Police Interceptor can get into almost every other Crown Vic Police Interceptor in the US. It’s a feature of anything with an interceptor package and I’ve used it to have many a cop park the medic fly car somewhere while my partner and I go to the hospital on a weird call.
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Jan 10, 2021 09:42
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tinytort posted:The Boomer thread has reminded me of a thing: fruitcake. I feel like this is only an "older audience" thing in the US and (most of) Canada. Growing up, there was always a distinction between plain fruitcake and Christmas cake (aka wedding/christening/etc cake). Plain fruitcake is pretty light, and a little dry. Christmas cake is dense and sticky, with masses of fruit in it, on top of the brandy or rum soaking. Properly done, it's also topped with marzipan and then iced with royal icing. It's a decadent cake. The ingredients are expensive compared to an eggs-flour-butter-sugar sponge cake. I made one a few years back, and it cost CAD$40. There's a reason why it was (and is) reserved for special occasions. It's still pretty standard as a wedding cake in my wider family. I don't really know what the whole meme of hating it is about. I guess maybe it's too healthy? Too expensive and involved compared to sugary sponge cakes? People just weirded out that it keeps so long?
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Jan 10, 2021 12:08
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In my life I've never seen or known anyone to have seen or consumed a fruitcake.
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Jan 10, 2021 14:50
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My 2016 VW has keyholes even though it has keyless entry, they're just hidden beneath removable plastic covers so it looks like it doesn't have any.
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Jan 10, 2021 15:18
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Cemetry Gator posted:In my life I've never seen or known anyone to have seen or consumed a fruitcake. I consume at least one lovely grocery store fruitcake brick every year and enjoy every minute of it
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Jan 10, 2021 18:37
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Cemetry Gator posted:In my life I've never seen or known anyone to have seen or consumed a fruitcake. I've seen plenty of fruitcakes. Someone in my family usually gets one for Christmas. I have never seen one actually opened and consumed. They just get put in a drawer for a while then eventually thrown away.
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Jan 10, 2021 18:49
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Son of a Vondruke! posted:I've seen plenty of fruitcakes. Someone in my family usually gets one for Christmas. I have never seen one actually opened and consumed. They just get put in a drawer for a while then eventually thrown away.
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Jan 10, 2021 18:59
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buncha fruitcakes in this thread
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Jan 10, 2021 21:49
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I feel like "ugh, fruitcake!" jokes had their heyday in the 80s and 90s, the joke being that they're heavy, hard, and taste bad, which is definitely true of the mass-produced ones people would buy as a lovely last-minute Christmas gift, and is arguably still true for people who don't like the flavor profile of dark cake, dried fruit, and brandy.
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Jan 10, 2021 21:55
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I do not like fruitcake, but I also did not have anyone try and foist it upon me until last year, so I grew up hearing how it was badDave Barry posted:You can always tell the Christmas season is here when you start getting incredibly dense, tinfoil-and-ribbon- wrapped lumps in the mail. Fruitcakes make ideal gifts because the Postal Service has been unable to find a way to damage them. They last forever, largely because nobody ever eats them. In fact, many smart people save the fruitcakes they receive and send them back to the original givers the next year; some fruitcakes have been passed back and forth for hundreds of years. Additionally, I can't say I was biased against it going in because I was just offered a slice of "cake" one night shortly before christmas in my office and was presented with a slice of fruitcake---which just looked like regular cake but with some nuts in it or something. It was horrid.
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Jan 11, 2021 01:15
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Huttan posted:Japanese uses "counters" when using numbers. I think one of the last equivalent in English would be "head" of cattle. One of the counters is for "long thin things" like books (old books were scrolls), telephone calls (the lines hanging from poles) and baseball trajectories. This was one of the annoying things when I was studying Japanese. They're called "counters" or "measure words" when you learn them in like a class but all of the actual research shows they're the same poo poo as grammatical gender in European languages or Bantu or whatever. "Counter" is not a technical term in formal Linguistics ; it's like saying a "long i sound" or something where everyone is going to ignore you. It's fine as a teaching tool (I had it when I learned Japanese), but it's functionally meaningless cause, shocker, there's a difference between being able to speak language X and knowing about how languages are processed in your brain. Also that Lakoff book is wildly derided (because it's trash).
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Jan 11, 2021 03:06
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Xiahou Dun posted:They're called "counters" or "measure words" when you learn them in like a class but all of the actual research shows they're the same poo poo as grammatical gender in European languages or Bantu or whatever. "Counter" is not a technical term in formal Linguistics ; it's like saying a "long i sound" or something where everyone is going to ignore you. It's fine as a teaching tool (I had it when I learned Japanese), but it's functionally meaningless cause, shocker, there's a difference between being able to speak language X and knowing about how languages are processed in your brain. Trash because of the conclusions? The methodology? I'm certainly not in the linguistics world so would love to hear more about the consensus and where it falls short.
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Jan 11, 2021 03:19
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Carillon posted:Trash because of the conclusions? The methodology? I'm certainly not in the linguistics world so would love to hear more about the consensus and where it falls short. I don't want to be lovely to Lakoff cause he's legit a pillar in many regards, but that book is him just going totally off-base and advocating for a wildly discredited theory from like 80 years ago that has always ended up being super, super racist. And then he bundled it into a pop-science book as a fait accompli spreading the aforementioned racist bullshit so the scholarly consensus (outside of the small group that huffs his farts) is like how you treat your racist grandpa. The conclusions are assumed and then the methodology is trying to work backwards to show it. Which, you know, that's great science. And the methodology is predictably a burning porta-potty in a crashing train. I don't want to derail the thread so we can either take this to the Linguistics thread over in SAL or PM's or whatever if this goes beyond like 3 replies, but the whole premise of the book is basically non-White people having different brains because of ugh the mysterious Orient and poo poo and it gets as bad as you'd think real fast. He's depressingly not the worst person to do this, but it's still sad as hell. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis does bad things to your brain and if someone brings it up just spritz them with a water bottle until they shut up. (Cause it's intrinsically racist as gently caress)
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Jan 11, 2021 03:38
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