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 I don’t care that the dictionary says that meaning is obsolete.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I read a Matt Helm spy thriller where the hero knows that his boss has been replaced by a double because the real guy would never use ‘decimate’ to mean ‘eradicate.’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.
Does English have sufficiently scary words that are also etymologically correct?
A population being halvsied just doesn’t hit the same, you know?
Bimate removal of half.
Decimate comes from decimatus past participle of decimar removal of 1/10.
“Those guys split us right down the middle, then finished half of us off.”
In battle, right?
Penultimate must send you into spasms as well
…how are people using penultimate incorrectly? Am I using it incorrectly? Does it not mean second to last?
Learned that the hard way when I got off a train in the fucking middle of rural Japan with fucking nothing nearby and no cell signal.
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?
Yes
At least the dictionary still lists the real meaning as valid.
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
😔
Don’t start, the other lemming just taught us it’s almost an isle; island is a completely different unrelated word that they shoved an s in by mistake
I see, I thought they were synonyms, english isn’t my first language.
In fairness, so did they!
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.
Bringing it back to the previous point: if I tried that bowl of soup and I didn’t like it, am I objectively incorrect? I found it to be a bad bowl of broccoli soup because I like my broccoli soup a certain way.
RIP Diane Keaton
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.
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.
I agree completely that people use it like this.
I always interpreted it as “break into ten pieces”
My biggest gripe about it is that it should mean sacrificing a tenth (or a small portion) in order to preserve the whole.
So many words that mean completely destroy, and we have to make the one meaning specifically not that to also mean completely destroy. The language is weaker for it.
My anthill is myriad. It’s the same as many. “Myriad stars”, not “a myriad of stars”.
If I fuck someone 10 times then havent i decimated them?
No, you’ve only gone and dekamated them.
“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.
Nice!
For years, growing up, there were signs saying “adopt a view point” in the highway we’d drive out to see family over the holidays.
For years, I thought they were saying something about road saftey, warning drivers to look at whats coming up instead of directly in front of them. Something akin to the picking a spot on the horizon to sail towards to keep the boat straight my dad had taught me for sailing…
At some point i realized the blue signs were all guidance or info, not rules or warning. At one point I thought they might be politically motivated, like the “please dont litter” signs along that same highway- where they pleading with us to form and opinion, any opinion.
I think I was in my late teens before I finally saw one that said “this viewpoint adopted by <company>” and realized they were literally asking people to sponsor the scenic pull-off spots along the highway.
I still prefer to read them as some poor civil servant waging a private campaign against nihilism, picking the nicest bits of scenery for his message, hoping to shock the american public out of their unfeeling malaise.
Go slow children ahead
A kilobyte is 1024 bytes. Yes, I know “kilo” means 1000 - I don’t care since it’s obvious from context.
Back in the day, using base-10 prefixes for base-2 stuff was considered fine. 1024 is close enough to 1000, after all. It only changed when some dickhead realised that, by insisting that a kilobyte (and the bigger units) was 1000 bytes, they could sell you less hard drive space without lowering the number on the box.
If you don’t believe me, look at your RAM. Nobody’s ever sold RAM by the “gibibyte”.
Keep spreading the good word, brother. Amen.
ty this always struck me as odd but yeah that makes prefect sense now that I see it written that way. Obviously it’s a marketing thing. Obviously!
Numerical marketing is nonsense all around.
Video, which was always counted by vertical resolution (lines on analog TV), suddenly became horizontal with 4K, 8K, and it’s not even close, 4K usually referring to 3840x2160.
There are three entirely different things that “5G” can refer to: the mobile network standard, 5GHz WiFi standard, or 5Gbps network connection.
If you want to be upset, look at internet speeds, they sell you mbps (megabits per second), but the standard measurement is mbps (megabytes per second), so they sell you a number 8 times bigger than the one you get.
You’ve actually got that a bit twisted. Not saying the bigger number doesn’t benifit the ISPs, but it actually is the industry standard to use bits per second when measuring throughput. This is because data transfer is a continuous stream, whereas data at rest is chunked so when talking about storage we use bytes. It’s a bit weird but you get used to it.
thanks for the answer, it would be nice if we just used a single unit, and it is annoying that both are mbps.
Ah, I see the confusion, and it’s understandable. Look for if the “B” is capitalized or not.
Mb, Gb, etc = bits
MB, GB, etc = bytes
Think the larger letter is the larger size.
yhea, once you know you know, like the difference between pyrex and PYREX.
however, is still bullshit and designed to confuse people.
See that’s where I think you’re still missing it. These are technical terms used by technical people. They were not designed to confuse people, they were designed to clarify the units IT people use in their work.
You might say this is confusing to the general public, and you may be right, but the people making this stuff weren’t thinking about average people at all. The idea these numbers would be plastered all over ISPs and SSDs weren’t even a consideration.
So it’s not bullshit, it’s not designed to confuse, it’s just a technical unit that is not well understood by most people, yet we live in a time when tech-specs are marketed by companies to average people.
i think we both agree but differently.
my point is that if a unit is used for public facing specs. it shouldn’t be confusing. doing so is confusing. experts in their field area one thing, but we can’t expect the general public to know mbps and MBps are different things.
Right, and it’s sort of a historical quirk, as well. You always need to compare your speed to what came before. That logic stretches back to computers that did not use 8 bits per byte, but still communicated over various channels to other computers.
And then there’s just plain marketing. Not just that it makes the number 8 times higher, but that any one ISP that chose to advertise in MBps rather than Mbps would suddenly look like they’re slower. It needs to be mandated for everyone as a regulatory rule or it just won’t work at all.
That ones actually fine IMO because they advertise Mbps which is fairly clearly different from MBps (b vs B, bit vs byte), and very easy to convert between.
yhea, we can assume that the vast majority of the public don’t know the difference
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.
I once gave a coworker a bit of prosciutto. She told me it was spicy.
Overall, this may also be related to a persistent refusal to distinguish between spicy and spices.
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 grew up eating what most people consider very spicy food. I don’t care what level of spicy other people are comfortable with, but I’ve found that amongst certain types of people I have to be discreet about my preference for spicy food. Some people find it a novelty to gawk at which is just awkward.
I feel you. As a kid I thought I hated steak. Turns out my mom always cooked it well done. The first time I had a properly cooked steak it blew my mind.
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.
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.
People shouldn’t be able to be told what color to paint their house. More people should experiment with wild colors inside and out.
Are people told what color to paint their house? By whom?
i see they are pressured into painting colors that are similar to neighborhood houses, to "maintain some arbitrary value.
Don’t tell Santorini that.
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.
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.
I personally love the story of spec ops the line, in the end you’re not exactly a villain but you certainly dont feel like a hero
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
Pineapple on pizza is fine. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to eat it.
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!”
$ grep or$ /usr/share/dict/words|sed -r 's/t?or$/trix/'|lessbrowses
-
bacheltrix
-
moderatrix
-
predatrix
-
seamstress -> tailtrix
I refuse to believe Bacheltrix isn’t in the Asterix and Obelix universe.
-
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
And yet the only ine we ever use id dominatrix.
Quantum leap means the tiniest jump and not at all what it’s (internationally) used for.
Ziggy’s done messing around.
People rip on US electricity standards all the time, from voltage, via frequency, to the NEMA plugs, and for good reasons. But the most disgusting thing about it all is this:
US breaker panels are fugly. Sure, they work just as well as those from the rest of the world, but they’re aesthetically displeasing.
Two representative pictures I found of an average panel just now;
US:
EU:
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
This is the kind of unimportant but fascinating thing I wish we had a community for.
Just… hundreds of people around the world posting their breaker panels.
Wait… what do they look like elsewhere? They’re the same where I am in Canada…
US and Canada largely have the same power generation/delivery standards.
Wait, does that EU panel have extra space for labels? That is sexy and now I’m jealous.
Is that EU picture supposed to look more aesthetically appealing than the US one? Because I flip a switch on the US panel and feel super serious, like Kurt Russell about to flip the switch on all power on Earth. I look at the EU picture and think of the electrical outlets behind the teacher’s desk in the 80 year old school building I attended.
Yeah, we quit using Frankenstein levers two centuries ago.
wait, how do you route cables in there? is there just a massive bundle right through the middle?
I’m Australian, but some of the older switchboards in industrial installations are similar in appearance to the top image.
The middle would have a busbar (or three if it’s a three phase panel) that connects the circuit breakers to the main switch. The cables are connected to the far left and far right sides of the breakers.
It could be different in the US, though, if anyone with more relevant experience wants to chime in.
Edit: looking back at the top image, I’m reminded that the US uses split phase in some places, so that top panel likely has two busbars down the middle.
Varies with installation type, age, and scale, but one common approach is to daisy chain the breakers via rails that carry each phase. I couldn’t find a good picture, but basically the rails and breakers are standardized so that a row of breakers will line up with the-rail terminals, so when you connect the rail to the mains you’re good to go. On the output of the breaker it’s common to use cable ducts to keep everything nice and tidy.
EDIT: Found a picture:
american version would probably only have two phases at best, and possibly just one
Every building receives 240V and splits it into a pair of 120V phases. Three phase power is basically only installed at large industrial sites or very specialized shops.
here if you need anything over certain power (6kW; depends on country i guess) you need a three phase installation, and even if you get single phase, it’s really handled as three phase split between single phase customers (a block gets three phase supply, then splits flats in three groups, each group gets connected to one phase). this gets supplied by a distribution transformer that might serve somewhere around 200 people per (in residential areas)
i understand that sometimes americans also get distribution like this, with 208/120 three phase coming from substation, without 240v available
Your mom’s not that fat.
OP’s mom matters to all of us
🥰 🥰 🥰
🥰 🐷 🥰
🥰 🥰 🥰
Sometimes a game being a little unbalanced can make it more fun.
Sometimes you just want to sit down and feel like a god damned hero.
Jank and weird voice acting just adds charm
Truth. The end stage of Half Life 2 is my example of this. It’s not especially difficult, but grabbing a jackbooted thug with the enhanced gravity gun and throwing them at another jackbooted thug is damn good entertainment.
Horsepower is a stupid way to measure how powerful a car is. What is this the 1800s?
It’s “by accident” not “on accident”, you uneducated fools.
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.
