February First’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, February 1, 2023
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79 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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California police kill double amputee who was fleeing: ‘Scared for his life’
I don’t care if he did have a knife, how much of a threat can a man with stumps be? He’s certainly not going to get away.
Convenient that.
Yesterday Boeing delivered the last 747, a freighter model to Atlas Air.
Stupid human tricks:
Not anywhere near enough. Arrested for 2 misdemeanors, he was in Ivey’s jail on three of the occasions he put Gay’s picture up, and the 4th time he had already been “sentenced to probation under the same terms as before his January 2021 arrest, had been released from custody and was in no way considered wanted.”
Yeah, his own personal absolution of any responsibility.
One particular thing bugged me recently – how we chose to spell the word judgment.
There is no e in the middle. There should be an e in the middle. It should be judge + ment. What moron dropped the e and why?
Got me to thinking about Noah Webster and English spelling rationalization. Color instead of colour. Center instead of centre. Etc.
Think about how we spell school or thought and pronunciation versus spelling. English is insane, especially the spelling of it. ESL students must be so confused and rightly so.
My second language in high school was Spanish. It took a few years to realize it, but once your learn and practice the pronunciation rules, if you see a word new to you you know how to pronounce it. It’s damn easy and rational. You have to guess a bit on syllable stress until you hear it spoken, but once you get the hang of it it super godamn easy.
In English we have thought and through and tough and slough. English is an amalgam of West Germanic Old English, West Germanic Old Norse, Norman French, Latin and Greek borrowings, and loan words from nearby languages, plus other bits. It is insane. We have left-over spelling that includes remnants of how words used to be pronounced many hundreds of years ago.
Daughter is spelled that way for a reason that went away. It was pronounced differently way back when. The “gh” was a fricative.
When I went to college I took French which has an even more fucked spelling vs. pronunciation schema than English.
We need English spelling reform. Hard c, soft c – pick k for the hard c, ffs. It should be skool not school. City and kuntry.
I demand reform!
@OzarkHillbilly: “I don’t care if he did have a knife, how much of a threat can a man with stumps be? He’s certainly not going to get away.”
I know this is an outrage and a tragedy, but all I can think of is King Arthur’s fight with the Black Knight…
@de stijl:
Good luck with that. We can’t even get Americans to switch over to the metric system as literally every other developed nation has. That would be an incredibly simple task compared to spelling reform, because at least with the metric system we know what we’re getting–it’s already been created and is even known to many Americans already. What spelling reform would you propose? There are dozens, if not hundreds, of possible ways to do it. And which regional pronunciation would be used? And how would you deal with effectively cutting future children off from understanding past writing without extreme difficulty, not to mention decreasing communication with other countries? Spelling reform was something that may have made sense a couple of centuries ago, but today it’s a practical and logistical impossibility.
@de stijl:
In the UK, “judgement” is the accepted spelling.
Just do as we do, you know it makes sense. 😉
To start off your morning right, I give you:
The history of the world (according to student bloopers)
Yay, it’s February 1st! Daddy of the Month on my Chicken Daddy calendar is a quite handsome bearded and tattooed man wearing a pink tutu that matches the pink bow his cute little chicken, Melissa, is wearing. 😛 😛
It’s also ONLY -12 outside. Feels pretty good!
@de stijl:
It’s been tried before. Never worked.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/spelling-suggestions-that-didnt-stick
@JohnSF:
You lot gave us this mess!
@de stijl: English spelling can be pretty ridiculous. I often think about how much of it is pure memorization as the rules do not conform to logic in many cases. I pity those learning it from scratch.
But, as noted, we are stuck with it at this point.
@Steven L. Taylor: I bet most of you have heard this one already, but the old joke that GHOTI spells fish (the GH in “rough,” the O in “women,” and the TI in “dictionary”) is still a great illustration.
@OzarkHillbilly:
“tis but a scratch…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eMkth8FWno
In some random reading I find this link to energy usage in Australia. No coal since 2017. Roughly 75% of their energy now comes from wind and solar. They have a lot of rooftop solar. While Australia might have some unique features that make it different and more amenable to renewables this is still remarkable and should remind us that there have been major advances in the coordination of different energy sources and improvements in the costs and efficiencies of renewables.
https://opennem.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=all&interval=1y
Steve
@OzarkHillbilly:
Florida; like Germany in the 30’s, only hot and humid.
Brevard County is a special kind of hell.
I once did a college paper about the history of English’s mess of a spelling system, and I recently revived it for a speech at a Toastmasters club. So I know quite a bit about this topic.
To summarize: After the Normans invaded England, French became the language of the aristocracy for several centuries, while English remained the language of the peasants. Since it wasn’t a language of prestige but of the largely illiterate masses, there wasn’t any uniform standard for the mass of dialects across England, and when the speech was written down, people pretty much spelled words however they felt like.
The invention of the printing press in the 1400s had the effect of freezing English spelling in time, yet in the centuries that followed there were substantial changes in pronunciation—most notably the Great Vowel Shift in which just about every vowel changed sound. Then there were all the letters that stopped being pronounced, but were retained in writing, such as the k in knee and know, the gh in words like daughter, and the e at the end of words like love. The way we spell English today is pretty much a reflection of the way the language sounded more than 600 years ago. That’s why if you’ve ever listened to reconstructions of how Chaucer is supposed to have sounded, it sounds like a foreign language, yet when you read it on the printed page it’s still pretty understandable.
Some examples of silent letters in English aren’t even due to pronunciation changes. The b in debt was never pronounced. The word was originally det, but some scholars got the bright idea to insert a b into the word to remind speakers of the Latin root (it’s related to the word debit). That’s just another illustration of how many conflicting motives there have been for imposing spelling changes on the language.
Once, I was so desperately trying to flirt with a super gorgeous Venezuelan woman at college and my brain was so discombobulated I asked her the equivalent of “What is time?” instead of “What time is it?”
Que hora es? Not, Que es el tiempo? Two very different questions. I blanked out and asked her a very deep cosmological question.
Yes, I am that lame. Still am. I might be the worst flirter you have ever met. I am horrible at it which I found out that some people find endearing and cute so I leaned into that. Being unsmooth can be oddly attractive.
She shot me down immediately, btw.
@Steven L. Taylor: After 55+ years of readin’ and writin’, I still only have a 50% chance of correctly spelling any word with an ‘ie’ or ‘ei’ in it. My family insists I am nuts and the “i before e, except after c” is the only rule that I need, but I guess I use different words than they do. In other words, I’m a sufficiently different species, according to science. And don’t seize on the idea that I’m some kinda foreigner, with weird spelling just running in my veins. Despite what my foes say, I’m too feisty for their heinous deprecations, but neither am I too humble to make my obeisancies to the grammar gods.
(There’s one word in there that breaks both rules!)
@Jax:
-12F with no wind is really no big deal if you are geared up properly. I took a long walk a few days back at -9 and was totally fine (with proper outerwear and appropriate layering.)
The Norwegians have great saying that translates to “There is no bad weather, only bad clothes”. I like that a lot.
Bad weather is sometimes the best time to go for a walk. Good boots are a must.
With wind, different story.
@CSK:
Rage Against the Masheen!
@Steven L. Taylor:
A PLAN FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF ENGLISH SPELLING
(often attributed to Mark Twain, but the actual source is likely a letter to the editor of The Economist by M. J. Yilz)
In the TNG ep with the Tamarians, “Darmok,” at one point Troi points out to Picard the peculiarities of English spelling. I imagine it written like this:
Troi: You spell nife with a K
Picard: I spell knyfe with an N.
As to Spanish, there is much inconsistency in the use of the letter X, particularly as applied to transliterations of indigenous terms (which are also mispronounced most of the time).
Long story short, it can sound like the Spanish J, SH, S, Z, and X.
@MarkedMan:
I’m gonna need a receipt for that.
(Why is there a p in “receipt”?)
That word looks so wrong it hurts my brain.
@de stijl:
IIRC it actually was spelt as “receit” in Middle English.
Googles: aha!
If all y’all want some actual answers on regarding English words, spelling, and pronunciation, I recommend following “RobWords” on YouTube. Fun, short videos explaining a lot of this stuff.
Trump proposes genocidal national ban on transgender existence if he wins 2024
I don’t think we’ve addressed the elefant in the room. The English use of “Zed” instead of the proper and correct “Zee”.
Zedbra, I think not.
/Bald Eagle screaming intensifies…
Another datapoint in the “Heinous Crime” or “Unimportant Oversight” debate with respect to classified documents. I just came across a users manual for a product. It is commercially available to just about anyone in the world. There is also a Defense Department version of the product, with a few minor differences, mostly cosmetic. The users manual for the Defense Department document has a Classified marking, and the specific manual in question has been sitting on a shelf in an unsecured area for the past 20 years or more. What is the person possessing this document supposed to do with it? And is it really a heinous crime if the answer is, “nothing”?
@de stijl: Yeah, it’s been -30 to -40 and colder with the wind chill the last couple days, this -12 and no “air movement” is downright balmy.
We’ve started calling it “air movement” so we don’t jinx ourselves by saying it’s name out loud. 😛 😛
@wr: “It’s just a flesh wound.”
“I cut your bloody arm off!”
“I’ve had worse.”
@Kylopod: @MarkedMan: @de stijl: @JohnSF:
Would you like my receit for “roste pecok”?
February is Black History Month
@Jax:
I once attended a mandatory HR seminar where the presenter used the phrase “talk exchange” instead of conversation or talking. At one point she stressed the need for “frank talk exchange”. I was on board with the content (although it was pretty remedial).
But the repeated, conscious insertion of the phrase “talk exchange” instead of a perfectly cromulent word annoyed me. Had someone been to a seminar lately and gotten overly invested in the shibboleth instead of the content? Signs point to yes. Shitty, quasi-academic neologism that recaps the definition.
Frank talk exchange is like saying air movement instead of wind.
Am I really the first person to comment on the fact that last night Jimmy Kimmel had Mike Lindel on from a remote: the inside of a carnival claw machine at an arcade across the street from the studio. I am not making this up.
@Mu Yixiao:
RobWords rocks! Another person I like is Dr. Geoff Lindsey. Also, Simon Roper. Roper tends a bit towards academic, but he is genius.
Ecologist is fun, too.
RobWords is probably the most etymologically focused of that bunch. Interesting and enlightening.
@de stijl:
Spell correct changed Ecolinguist.
The College board censors their AP African American Studies class to cater to Republican demands:
The College Board revises new AP African American Studies class after criticism
The revisions also eliminated reading selections by Kimberle Crenshaw, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Roderick Ferguson.
Yet again, I know this isn’t as bad as making a moderately successful writer a bit sad, but on top of the total removal of books from some Florida schools to avoid felony charges, the AP AA history curriculum was just watered down to make desantis stop his attacks on them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/01/us/college-board-advanced-placement-african-american-studies.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
For more about the Florida classroom library situation:
https://mobile.twitter.com/john_jpollock/status/1617012807689551872
Here is the wapo story: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/01/31/florida-hide-books-stop-woke-manatee-county-duval-county-desantis/
The title says it all:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-in-even-more-legal-hot-water-after-lying-to-judge-arthur-engeron?ref=home
And don’t miss Trump’s attack on Ron DeSantis as a “RINO globalist” also at the DB.
Trump calls DeSantis “disloyal” for daring to run against him.
“Rage against the Masheen!” “Tis but a scratch.” Today’s forum has made me actually laugh out loud (alol?)
@MarkedMan: I wouldn’t know, but I never watched Carson, Letterman, or Leno either.
@Thomm:
To stop Florida Man’s attacks on them for the time being.
@Thomm:
Personally, I’d like it if Pritzker stood up and told the College Board that their AA Studies class violates IL law and that it’s not going to be taught unless they fix it. Fight back and shove their cowardice back in their face.
@de stijl:
Honestly, it sounds like your presenter was more interested in “displaying her colors” to others in her field (who probably were not even present) then in concerning herself with her actual audience and whether or not they were understanding the material.
@de stijl:
Thermal gradient driven displacement of gaseous, aerosol, and particulate atmospheric contents.
I’ll show myself out.
@CSK:
“First, catcheth thy pecok…”
😉
@de stijl: “Talk exchange” seems to me to be too close to “verbal exchange” — which tends to mean argument.
@Kylopod: Plus for the Great Vowel Shift. Must have been hell to live through the e at the end of cane changing from pronounced to unpronounced and being relegated to a signal that the a had changed from short to long pronunciation.
Now do how English lost gendered articles.
@JohnSF:
Well, almost. I’ll translate from Middle English: Take a peacock. Break his neck. Flay him. Draw him clean.
And then throw him on the floor and stomp on him to make sure he’s dead, I guess. It’s the most violent recipe I’ve ever read.
@CSK: @de stijl: I’m sure I’ve told this story before–it’s one of my bo or ring stories from the past–but one of my grad school professors was part of an evaluation team for a series of books written in what would be phonetic-spellings English for early readers. The goal was to see if a push for tranforming spelling would be justifiable as a way to raise literacy, given that phonetics and phonics rules are a known stumbling block for early readers.
Alas, it didn’t work because while readers who don’t struggle transitioned to phonetic spellings just fine, the readers who had pretested as struggling found themselves just as at sea–because the words looked funny. Children who struggle with reading seem stranded at the intersection of damned if you do and damned if you don’t. 🙁
Work has suddenly, and very likely temporarily, slowed down. Fortunately typing at the PC appears to be work of sorts.
I fixed the potatoes au gratin. The basic recipe was sound, but I erred in using fresh jocoque and chihuahua cheese. The former is like in between sweet and sour cream, with a yogurty consistency (it is made with lactobacilli like yogurt). It works well in some recipes, but after a long time in the oven it kind of congeals. Chihuahua cheese does melt, but doesn’t stay melted long even when the dish is still hot*.
So this time I used sweet cream to which I added minced garlic, and marbled Monterrey jack. I also placed some red onion slices among the potatoes.
Now I’m wondering if I should slice the potatoes much thinner. I’ve a gadget that can make slices only slightly thicker than potato chips. That’s too thin for pan or oven roasted potatoes, but it might benefit a potato casserole style dish.
On other things, I got one kilo of shelled pumpkin seeds. These are raw, and they taste rather differently than pumpkin seeds should. Years ago someone gave me a large bag of raw peanuts, and I manged to make them edible by placing them in the oven a few minutes to roast. I wonder whether to do the same with the seeds, or to try it in a pan on the stove.
If the latter, I can add a little olive oil (like, drops of it), and season them with, I’m thinking, garlic powder, zaatar, and paprika.
*This might have something to do with the fact that it was frozen and thawed.
@CSK: All that stuff* is done down at the Foster Farms factory near the Kelso Airport. It’s just not illustrated on the bag the chicken comes to the store in. Clear instructions require including all details given that one can’t count on the reader having any background information (such as the negative outcomes from cooking a bird that hasn’t been drawn (gutted)).
(*At least for the skinless chicken parts bags, I’m not enough of an expert to know if simply removing the feathers is “flaying.”)
Rich Lowry on the revised AP African American Studies curriculum.
Let that sink in.
@Kathy: I’ve never successfully done it, but pumpkin seeds can be roasted in either a pan in the oven or a pan on the stove. It simply takes more patience and concentration than I’m willing to give to the project. The spices you want to add sound great!
@Kurtz: What? I’m supposed to realize that Lowry is just another RWNJ rather than the “principled and moderate conservative voice” he’s been cast as? That train left the station for me a long time ago.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I’ll be sure to report when/if I do it.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Yes, but you never see similar instructions in a standard cookbook, except maybe one of those surviving-in-the-wilderness volumes.
I think “flay” in this context might mean “remove feathers.”
@Michael Cain:
@CSK:
From the Great Vowel Shift to the Great Fowl Shift?
🙂
@JohnSF:
Oh, please.
Some years ago, as I recall, I sardonically suggested right here that in order for the wealthy to really create tons of jobs, their taxes should be cut to nothing and the government should instead pay them money.
The second part, it seems, is already happening.
In fairness, treasury/savings bonds have been around for a long, long time. And the wealthy have always parked some of their money in such instruments. Further, this is how just about all governments borrow money, at least in part.
The issue would be how much money not paid in taxes by wealthier people and corporations winds up in such bonds. In particular, how much more money has been parked in bonds after the Bush the younger and Benito tax cuts.
I know determining this wouldn’t be easy. But that’s at least how much taxes should be raised on the wealthy.
@de stijl: English is actually not that bad. About 50% of English words are spelled phonetically. Another 35% are not spelled phonetically but still have consistent spelling patterns (such as “igh” in sigh, might, thigh, etc.). That leaves 15% of words for which the spelling makes little sense.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I give you two:
For Lowry to form an opinion about history, it needs to be blessed by Stanley Kurtz, a person who is not an historian, before Lowry can call it final.
It doesn’t require any teasing or analysis of factors implicit to explicit statements to recognize that these public
intellectualspropagandists want a white person outside a given field to tell experts how to do their jobs.Yes, I know the last few years have rendered dog whistles less necessary, but I am curious how many apologists will pour Clorox in their eyes before admitting one side has been right all along.
I think I’ve found a general measure of, well, not stupidity, but of something stupid-like: can a person follow a very simple instruction?
Here’s the thing, for expense reports I need to upload 2 files for every invoice. To simplify finding the file that corresponds to the invoice, I rename the files using the invoice number.
So, when someone gives me an invoice for reimbursement, they also need to send the files. I’ve told them all to rename the files with the invoice number only. Nothing else.
IMO, this is as simple as instructions get.
9 times out of ten, I don’t get that. I get things like the word “invoice”*, the name of the business that issued it, the purpose for the expense, their name, their dog’s name**, as well as the number. The tenth time, I get all the crap but not the number.
*Seriously, when sending dedicated invoice files, is it very important to put “invoice” in the file name? Ok, one of the files is a PDF, which is generic (can contain anything). But sent along a reimbursement request, it’s only an invoice file.
**Not making this up.
This is a great move by Hunter Biden, whose private photos were stolen and posted online without his consent.
Hunter Biden asks for criminal probe into Trump allies for ‘theft’ of data from laptop
I have to take exception to this (and am sure Jax would agree) but it is one thing to walk around in -10F degrees or more with layer upon layer, and another thing entirely to work in it. For starters, gloves are a no go. 2nd of all, things react differently to stress in extreme cold than they do in more reasonable temps. I once had a step ladder with no apparent flaws collapse on me at -12 and fell on the rock hard frozen snow covered ground and thought I had collapsed both my lungs (I’d collapsed one before) and thought I was on death’s door for 15-20 seconds and was certain after I had regained lung function that I was still bound for the ER. Turned out I wasn’t. But falling 8′ onto rock hard ground is not for the weak.
Neither is working in extreme cold or extreme heat.
@de stijl:
Regarding receipts, at one time I had to be so all over that shit and had to be a part time accountant on top of my actual job. Gotta save all the receipts, keep ’em chronological order.
For everything: flight, car rental, hotel, lunch, gas, dinner with clients, dinner alone, drinks with clients…. well most everything, some don’t count. It was very confusing and annoying.
Every month. Expense report was required. It was always a major pain in the butt.
I was a super cheap when it came to incidentals. I ate at the company cafeteria, or KFC, or Arby’s. Clients loved that. Some had flat per diems which made life way easier.
The trick is to deal with it daily. Don’t lollygag. If it is at all questionable just eat that and don’t try to expense it. Be responsible and professional. Don’t be an asshole.
I never gouged or overcharged anybody. I went out of my way to be as cheap as possible. I was honor bound. I ate many expenses that rightfully could have been expensed per the contract but brushed a bit too closely against the line. I chose not to always.
Hey, pay for travel, lodging, food and we are square. Still have to submit receipts, though.
I would hate to be an accountant that had to parse contractors’ expense reports. That would suck. A per diem system is way easier for both of us.
@Mikey:
I was wondering when Hunter would get along to doing something like this, it is overdue that he goes public saying he was the victim of theft. I suspect this is just the start of Hunter pushing back. I would love to see him drag some of the Congress Critters who want to investigate him into a room to be deposed by lawyers.
The White House needs to have Hunter’s back and with quiet menace point out to certain members of Congress it is not a good look to treat the son of the U.S. President like shit you scrape off your shoe, especially when Hunter is the victim here. Drag all the weasels who want to jerk off to his dick pics into a courtroom, they deserve no less from Hunter and his legal team.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I did not intend to insult or belittle. My sincere apologies.
In my circumstance -12F is not a big deal (depending on wind) because the only thing I do is walk. If you work in it you would respond quite differently.
No insult intended.
@Monala:
I’m not trying to be passive aggressive or a jackass, just actually curious.
Where did those stats come from? I would love to view that.
Is it by word count or usage? Written or spoken?
@OzarkHillbilly:
I’ve wondered about work or exercise in cold weather.
With all the insulation provided by warm clothing, don’t you get very hot rather fast? Strenuous activity can build up a lot of body heat fast. I wonder if it’s faster than it can dissipate through layers of warm clothes even in cold weather.
If you do get hot, what happens if you remove a layer or two? I figure eventually you’d get cold.
@de stijl: I’ve read this in several places and I’m currently looking for the source for you.
One observation: other languages make use of accent marks to help distinguish words with different meanings that are spelled or pronounced the same. English doesn’t use accent marks, so we’ve used different spellings instead.
@Kathy: You’re onto it. Rule when backpacking in frigid weather is DONT SWEAT. If you can stay dry, you can stay warm.
The layering is so you can take stuff off.
@Kathy: I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m in and out of a tractor all day. No heat, and missing a major window in the back. At -35 I don’t peel my layers off until I get home, and sometimes it takes two hours with 5 cats on my feet or a hot shower before my feet finally warm up, even with the finest wool socks and expensive Muck boots. My face feels frozen and my body aches like I’ve been frozen.
A lot of metal that experiences stress breaks at that temperature. Bearings you thought were fine, drive shafts snap unexpectedly, tires go low and you don’t notice until you’re flat. Air compressors don’t like to work at -35, either, so you’re hit or miss on airing the tire up you noticed was going flat.
BUT….it was only -12 today, and it might be 23 by Sunday! Hoo rah!
@de stijl: I found this article, where someone searched for the source of the figures and wrote:
It’s very interesting that the writer of the article points out that the Stanford Study’s conclusions are flawed and outdated, but still cited frequently with few people knowing where the information came from.
@de stijl: The English Spelling Society is concerned with the problems you write about. There is a financial penalty that the English Speaking World incurs for them self as the system generates semi-illiteracy and school failure.
See: http://www.spellingsociety.org