I used to work in management for a Fortune 100 company, and they’d send people around for little afternoon management seminars on one thing or another (usually sexual harassment stuff).
One day, one of the visitors mentioned that money wasn’t even in the top 5 reasons that people work, and tried to move on from that, but I stopped them, and made them repeat it, and then said “Well that’s not true at all. It’s literally the ONLY reason ANYONE goes to work.”
They tried to argue it, but I just said "If it’s a Payday Friday, and the boss doesn’t hand out the paychecks, and tells everyone that there won’t be any future paychecks, but they’ll see everyone on Monday, the boss will walk into an empty office on Monday. Nobody works for any reason other than a paycheck "
And that was a great job, that almost everybody reading this would enthusiastically grab without thinking twice, but nobody is going to do it for free.
That’s a great call-out, i would think about that for years afterwards and feel good
We expect our management to know when to use ‘an’ instead of ‘a’.
Would it be “an”? Does the a/an rule apply to whatever the next word is or does it apply to the word it is targeting? “An mindset” would be incorrect.
In American English, the article “an” is used for a vowel sound to separate the words so they don’t blend together when speaking.
Normally, “a” always precedes a consonant, while “an” precedes a vowel. But “an” also precedes vowel sounds - i.e., the sound of the letter of the beginning of a word.
- An apple
- A banana
- An hour
Hour starts with a consonant, but is pronounced with a vowel sound at the beginning. Thus, it is not “a hour” and rather “an hour”.
In the case of the example from the meme, id argue that either article works:
- A “I’m…” - Typically when speaking, a person has a brief pause before they begin the quote. Since that pause would be enough to distinctly indicate two separate words, this sounds fine when being verbally spoken.
- An “I’m…” - Looks great in text and would be the correct way to list it grammatically. However when speaking this aloud, since the person would have a brief pause when saying “an” and then the quote, it probably wouldn’t sound as great to some others.
My take - I like “an ‘I’m…’” best. Both in text and verbal form. Others may disagree as far as verbally said; however, grammatically in written form this is how it should be.
Edit: Fixed the inevitable autocorrects from typing this on mobile.
English being my second language, from why I’ve learnt, “a […] mindset” is correct.Edit: I stand corrected
The rule I’ve always used is that if the first letter of the word immediately following it is a vowel, it’s “an” and if it isn’t use “a”.
For example, “an apple” or “a potato”. If there is an adjective, go by that first letter, for example “a large apple” or “an average potato”.
For anyone scrolling, I’ve followed a similar rule. Except an is used anytime the following word makes a phonetic vowel sound. E.g ah, eh, ee, oh, ooh
Tell that to British midlanders: “Can I have a glass of wo’a?”
Or when they ask for a nonion.
Fun English facts: “apron” used to be “napron”, but “a napron” was eventually incorrectly split into “an apron”. Same with “adder” which used to be “naddre”, and “umpire” which was “noumpere”
Native English speaker here. This is incorrect, the “n” is added for phonetic help “a elephant” involves an awkward break between the two words, so enter “n” to help mouth muscles work around that.
This is the same reason for weird artifacts like: “a unicorn” because unicorn starts with. “Yoo” sound and so mouths don’t need the help of the “n” to break up the awkwardness.
So much badlinguistics in this subthread.
Edit: Instead of responding to individual comments, I’ll just put what’s going on with “a” and “an” here:
This alternation is a morphophonological process (specifically a sandhi alternation), whereby in native, fluent speech for most dialects of English, “a” is unconsciously placed before words beginning with a consonant, and “an” is unconsciously placed before words beginning with a vowel.
In contrast to what many people in this subthread seem to think, this is NOT to “ease pronunciation”. This is easily demonstrable since “a” and “the” have the same vowel sound in fluent speech (for most dialects of English), but while we get “a cat” but “an apple”, we don’t get “the cat”, but “then apple”. This alternation, therefore, is not a regular part of English speakers’ phonology (that is, part of the regular, unconscious processes that occur between sounds in all environments), but rather an idiosyncratic part of English’s morphophonology, in that it’s a phonological process that only happens in the presence of certain morphemes (simple words or word-pieces).
Why is this the case? Because “an” was originally just the word “one” that became reduced over time until it took on its own separate grammatical function, and later there was a regular sound change whereby “n” was deleted in certain specific unstressed environments before consonants, leaving an accidental alternation between “a” and “an” as a result of sound change.
This means that the “a”/“an” alternation in Modern English is not to “ease pronunciation” in any way - like with many phenomena in English (and all languages for that matter), it’s just a vestigial remnant of an accidental historical process.
We know this is the case because the exact same thing happened to “mine”, and in earlier dialects of English there was a similar alternation, “my cat”, but “mine uncle”. This alternation later collapsed in most dialects into our modern my/mine distinction, adding further evidence to the conclusion that this is not a phonological alternation, but a morphophonological one.
What all of this means, is that for a native English speaker that still has an “a/an” distinction (I don’t have one in my dialect, for example - I put “a” before everything when speaking fluently: “a cat”, “a apple”), if they don’t put a pause between “a” and “I’m” to signal the quoted speech, they would likely say “an I’m”, and if they do put a pause between “a” and “I’m” to signal the quoted speech, they would likely say “a I’m”.
Because “a” and “mindset” aren’t in a local configuration to each other, they will have no morphophonological influence on each other whatsoever (just like in “an able mindset”, for example).
So, while I won’t say that saying “it’s ‘a’ because of ‘mindset’” is wrong (because right/wrong aren’t really useful terms when describing language), I will say that it does not conform to the linguistic behavior of native English speakers when speaking fluently.
Feel free to respond to this comment with any follow-up questions you have, and I’ll be happy to answer them.
I’m not disagreeing with your larger point but I don’t necessarily buy the part of your explanation saying
This is easily demonstrable since “a” and “the” have the same vowel sound in fluent speech (for most dialects of English), but while we get “a cat” but “an apple”, we don’t get “the cat”, but “then apple”
because in most dialects (at least of American English) “the” before a consonant uses ə while before a vowel sound it’s ē.
I don’t think that’s accurate, but I’d be happy to see a source proving me wrong. I looked briefly, but wasn’t able to find a paper dealing with that alternation specifically (though I didn’t look very long, and there may very well be one).
Also, I’m pretty sure that for the dialects that do use “strong the”, they also use “strong a” in exactly the same environments, which to my mind makes it a non-issue.
Either way, there are plenty of other ways to get a word-final unstressed schwa followed by a word-initial stressed vowel, and we never see an “n” repair in any of those other situations either - the important point is that this is a process centered entirely around a single lexical item, and it doesn’t make sense for a process affecting a single lexical item in a common environment to be “easing pronunciation”.
And all the prescriptivists just collapsed onto their fainting couches.
(I kid, nicely done. Also fuck prescriptivists.)
Then treat your employees like humans, not human resources. That means sick days at the very least. If you want to be respected more, then start respecting your employees more.
No one calms down by being told to calm down.
No one gets a better attitude by being told to have a better attitude.
And please show me where I didn’t say that.
I think they were adding to your comment not contradicting it… calm down!
What could the motivations of the owner be, if not to make money?
Please add to my list:- prestige
- tax avoidance
- boost retirement savings (in the USA, business owners can stuff their retirement accounts with LOTS of cash.)
- Create and disguise a “sex pad”
- improve the community by providing jobs and/or needed services (start a coffee shop so that there is a coffee shop.)
- time filler
Of those, I think a very healthy 401K contribution from the employer to the employee would be motivating to those already paid well.
Many employees already use the business as a sex pad. (Conference rooms can be gross.)
I would substitute “shock and awe” in place of prestige - but that is just personal flair.
Civic duty with a taste of all the above is my addition. I’ve worked in natural resource conservation of public land and municipal utility. It can be controversial, but its a net positive to me.
tax avoidance
that’s money bro
This gives me AI vibes.
A bit too stable to me for that
Kinda meta
Yes and no. Imprecisions is instability. Stable diffusion was named because the noise and the unstability were low enough you’d be able to kinda make sense of the result. However stability is far from being achieved.
The post is 100% fake but the lines are too straight, there are two fonts displayed at once and each time they are consistent. Thats what i mean by “too stable” for me.
Yeah I thought the same, can’t pinpoint it exactly (the kerning on the TT is odd but just about plausible), but even if it’s not AI it’s definitely fake as fuck regardless. “Messages from Management” is one of the easiest laziest forms of bait.
Fucking work moralism. Work to not to survive, not to have fun, but to stroke the ego of people, who are obsessed with “duty”. Thus corporations don’t have to pay you a living wage, just fulfill your duty as a human for working. Not working is literally worse than starvation, homelessness, etc. Unless you’re rich, which means you proven yourself to worked your ass off to the top.
Well. They’re right. There is no reason to be there other than money. All the passion for logistics or predatory bullshit or whatever is concentrated in the c-suite. All us wage slaves are just that. Slaves. We are there under duress. We live in a constant state of extortion. We’re forced to whore ourselves so we can pay various rents, taxes, and for sustenance.
Yeah and i didn’t expect to work this hard for an ever decreasing buying power.
But here we are so fuck off.
To a certain extent, this is why I am trying to stick with a mission driven career, choosing opportunities that I feel actually make some small part of the world a better place. Granted, yes, I’m ultimately doing the job because I need the paycheck since I prefer to have food, shelter, and some degree of freedom/control over my life.
Not everybody has that luxury, though.
And expecting people to play pretend all day as though it’s anybody’s life dream to be typing up OBMC reports because that’s their passion in life and that the people they work with are family and that the ultimate goal of being the dominant player in the disposable widgets industry is for the greater good of humanity – yeah, whatever that’s just subversive mind control games. Glad some people can live in that and deny reality, but for the rest of us, you want me to work, then pay me.
The goal of the sign is to normalise the fantasy and through that “change reality” for the folk.
(Individually looking is weird by design, the key is repetition.)I might like what I do, but take away the money and I’d not be here. So yes, money is the core reason.
Gotdang.
Do these people think selling some kind of proprietary software or some shit is game changing new age shit? Jesus. People just want a decent place to live.
Good, then I don’t expect us to be ‘family’, since my family would understand that treating me like shit would ruin our relationship.
Soooooo…
We can only assume that whoever posted that is working for free, then?
look closely, it’s AI slop yet again
