The town is overcast with snow, A counterpane of flakes, Through which the dweller struggles slow And sunlight slowly breaks; In which the traffic seems to halt And traffic lights to drown, Another winter day, in short, That covers with a fairy vault An ordinary town.
I read a passage from an LSAT:
"It seems likely that the earliest dinosaurs to fly did so by gliding out of trees rather than, as some scientists think, by lifting off the ground from a running start. Animals gliding from trees are able to fly with very simple wings. Such wings represent evolutio...
The only flying dinosaurs were the avian therapods that still grace our skies and pies.
The chart is from the "flying dinosaurs" link at Smithsonian.
> Whenever a story about pterosaurs makes it into mainstream news outlets, it is almost inevitable the flying archosaurs are going to be mistakenly called "dinosaurs" by at least one source. In this case the British newspaper the Telegraph and the venerable BBC were two of the main offenders, each declaring that pterosaurs were dinosaurs in their headlines.
> > It might be easy to brush off my complaint as a case of paleo-pedantry, but word choice matters. "Dinosaur" is a word for a specific group of creatures united by shared characteristics and which had their own evolutionary history—it is not a catch-all term for anything reptilian and prehistoric. Calling a pterosaur a dinosaur is an error of the same order of magnitude as saying that our species is a marsupial...
@CowperKettle I'm mostly joking, but it certainly means goal in any of Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese. The common Spanish -ma/-pa/-ta words (which I trust you’ll guess in every case) clima, tema, mapa, programa, cometa, planeta, and pirata are all masculine despite their look and so take el (unless it’s a lady-pirate). But when learning about those ones, you also learn that unlike them, it’s la meta for the goal and la tapa for the top.
@Cerberus Fewer and fewer, apparently.
So by the time we were singing the Latin drinking song at university, its bibunt omnes sine meta was one of those transparent lines that I already knew what had to mean before I'd studied any Latin, just from knowing it in Spanish. Funny how it's the songs of our youth that we remember ever after.
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…