English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

tchrist

00:00

They haven't yet transcribed the Pittsburgh clip, but you can still listen to it. But you probably don't have that accent.

The Boston one sounds weird to me.

Laurel

I was complaining about Spotify commercial lady having some weird vowels but I guess I'm no better myself

Dannyu NDos

Koreans tend to pronounce "all" [ol].

tchrist

:64839942 As in Ol' King Cole was a merry ol' soul?

Dannyu NDos

Yeah

No idea how we ended up like that.

tchrist

I think my all vowel is closer to the Canadian one they have there than it is to the Chicago or NY or RP ones.

Dannyu NDos

00:03

This question might be hard to answer, but: How do you darken your L? Velarized, uvularized, or pharyngealized?

tchrist

@DannyuNDos Do you have anything like [ɔ] or [ɒ] in Korean? If not, maybe they make it tense before a liquid (=R or L) like we do in the States before R.

Dannyu NDos

North Korean dialects have [ɔ]. Jeju dialect has [ɒ]. I don't think the South Korean standard has either.

tchrist

Beyond all and full, the others from the sounds page with L in the coda are wool and cold, and also nail but that's with a front vowel not a back one.

And salt.

Laurel

I think I might be pronouncing wall similar to [wɔːɫ] sometimes, which is weird because that's what they have for RP, which is definitely not where I am. Other Americans tend to have vowels that actually sound like an "A" (which I guess is kinda tautological)

tchrist

They have stool and needle too.

Laurel

00:13

I may also pronounce wall like [wɒːɫ]

tchrist

@Laurel Well, I don't. I definitely have a rounded vowel there, but I'm not sure which one.

Laurel

I can't really hear the difference that the vowel diacritics make so keep that in mind

tchrist

I know I have [ɔ] in thought but [ɒ] in cloth. But it's really hard for me make a call on which is which in other words I say.

It's possible that I waver for wall, all, always, almond, fall, call, calm, palm.

But I do think whatever vowel I have, it's the same in all of those. And it's rounded.

Oh this is that weird vowel that the guy who does the super hard maps has data on.

I'll never find it.

Laurel

What region do you think your accent matches the most?

tchrist

Inland North.

Oh I cited him here.

Laurel

00:20

Other than the whole "wall" thing I feel like I don't really have too many local dialect pronunciations.

tchrist

Read his section on The Pronunciation of “-alm” and “-olk” and “-alk”.

Laurel

I'm located in an area that might be best described as in between several distinct dialects but not really centered on any of them.

Dannyu NDos

Interesting; the Korean transcription for those Ls seems to respect the green region there.

tchrist

I think you're in that larger magenta region out east. Notice the little magenta dot of my own regional accent, in the same color.

Dannyu NDos

"almond" to 아몬드, "polka" to 폴카, and "chalk" to 초크 — Note the ㄹ.

tchrist

00:25

But that's just for this phenomenon. It isn't isomorphic across all variants.

Laurel

@tchrist If I'm reading this correctly, some people say fok instead of folk? But I would assume it doesn't sound like "fuck"?

Like maybe the end of baroque?

tchrist

Almond and falcon have an L in them for me. But damn if falcon doesn't come out a whole heck of a lot like Vulcan if I don't make it that AE sound from cat!

@Laurel Yes, Americans have tense-o in baroque; Brits have lax-o in that same word.

My yolk sounds just like my yoke. But it's not always without-L in folk. Usually it is, perhaps. Unsure.

> I became aware in late 2011 that some speakers pronounce “my folks” without the “l”, but “folk song” with an “l”. Similarly, some speakers pronounce “corn stalk” (a noun) without the “l”, but “I stalk the deer” (a verb) with an “l”. If any of you who have already answered the survey find that you do the same, please let me know. 15-May-2012

My stalk and squawk rhyme. I think.

Laurel

@tchrist I might flip flop too

tchrist

> Most Americans apparently pronounce the “l” in the red words in the first column below, a smaller number pronounce the “l” in the red words in the second column, and an even smaller number pronounce the “l” in the red words in the third column, but like me some Americans definitely do not pronounce the “l” in any of them, nor do the vast majority of English speakers outside North America. 1-June-2011

> * Very few English speakers rhyme “bomb” with “arm” or “farm”. (Apparently only the Providence Rhode Island dialect does!) However, some Americans rhyme the red words in the first column above with “bomb”, not pronouncing the “l”. Distinctly, most systematic r-droppers, e.g. Eastern New England, Greater New York City, and Standard British rhyme them with “arm”, again not pronouncing the “l”. 18-July-2013

@Laurel All this wall/walk/wok stuff is your fault. :)

Yes, this always shocks the Brits, that "Most Americans apparently pronounce the “l” in the red words in the first column below".

Also the green almond.

And falcon.

I think that I can go either way on dancing a polka, but never on polka dots. Weird.

It's that same folk thing again.

> One day my wife and I were talking about farming practices, something
I know almost nothing about, and she mentioned that they sometimes
use “stocks” of corn to make silage. At least, that’s what I heard
her say. I was surprised. “You mean they can’t just feed the corn
to the cattle straight?” However, she was actually referring to
“stalks” of corn, which never occurred to me, since I heard her say
“stocks”. In fact, she says them both the same (with a pronunciation
closer to the way I say “stocks” than the way I say “stalks”), so

@alphabet You should go read this. That's what I meant about how much more complicated all this is than is usually presented.

> † Some Americans actually pronounce the “l” in some
of these words, in which case pronouncing the pair
differently proves nothing about the vowels.

And that's yet another problem.

Laurel

00:43

I need for someone to listen to me talk when I'm not thinking about vowels and report back to me about this lol

tchrist

Just so very many little variants in the northeast.

CowperKettle

tchrist

Meaning east of the Mississippi River and north of the Mason-Dixon line.

@CowperKettle heh

@alphabet I'm always forgetting how wide the gulf is between those whose lifetime body counts routinely number in the three and often four digits versus those who can count these things on their fingers and probably don't even need their toes unless they're very very lucky. It changes everything.

Laurel

00:59

@tchrist uh

uh

Anyway

I feel like I could break down my region of the NE into more than they did on that map

tho it's kinda hard to read to see what they have

tchrist

Yes, and I can mine as well. Even though I sound almost exactly like a young friend of mine from Rochester NY, he still says torist and I say turist.

So there are still variations within the Inland North. He's also 25 years my junior, but I doubt that's it.

He doesn't have bismarcks and bubblers and gym shoes, either. :)

tchrist

01:21

@Laurel Yes, I used today's coarse slang term for this, despite the grim connotations of that recent holocaust which slew so many hundreds of thousands. Not a coincidental choice of terms.

Maine has bismarcks.

Robusto

@tchrist Where I grew up we played "fo'k songs" ... never "folk songs." But we were very calm about that, and they were a balm to our souls.

tchrist

@Robusto Thank you, Woodie.

So did we. It's what one did then.

Robusto

We ate egg yokes as well. Never egg yolks.

tchrist

01:38

The L in that position is so easily washed away: milked and filmed and halved and calved and wolved.

Laurel

@tchrist Either you're saying something kinda mean here or I don't understand what you're saying at all

tchrist

@Laurel A lot of people died. Young people using the term forget this.

@Robusto Think how often golfed becomes goffed.

Laurel

I don't think I follow. "Gays"? Is that the term?

alphabet

@tchrist I'm not near that many; my sex life isn't that interesting. The number also depends quite a bit on your definition of "sex."

Robusto

@tchrist I always said golfed, never goffed.

tchrist

01:45

@alphabet You're also still alive. Give it time.

@Laurel Nope. Body count.

Laurel

I was unclear if that was body count in the sense of sexual partners or body count in the sense of corpses, but I found a way to justify both in the context somehow :/

tchrist

@Robusto You don't have the wolf–woof merger then. :)

Laurel

Tho I was pretty sure you weren't calling him a murderer at least

tchrist

@Laurel No, merely reminding him that it wasn't long ago when high body counts always led to high body counts.

Different thing.

alphabet

@tchrist Fair enough. I wouldn't say it changes "everything," though.

tchrist

01:48

It changes what you spend your time on, what you think is important.

Laurel

I think most or all of my life happened after AIDS stopped being a death sentence. Nowadays, practically all of the gay people I know are on PrEP

And that's like the end of it I guess

Robusto

@tchrist I don't. But my brother grew up in the same household and does so. He also says /d/ for /ֻð/ and /t/ for /þ/ ... I think he was a changeling

Laurel

I didn't really grasp the AIDS tragedy until I learned that gayborhoods were becoming ghost towns back then

tchrist

@Laurel Unlike me, where practically all the ones I met when I got out of college and moved to a big city for a big job are all dead now. Every one of them. I think we lost six people at my first job in the 80s.

Laurel

That is horrible

I wonder to what extent that affects the perception that the older gens were significantly less gay (and the stats of recent surveys)

Robusto

01:52

@Laurel You obviously never had a great college friend who went to San Francisco after he graduated, contracted AIDS, and died horribly. I did, and visited him there several times through the '80s, watching him die by inches. He called it the "gay cancer."

tchrist

The few who are still alive lost almost every one they knew. There's a couple down the street from me who's from that generation, and was in hospice care gosh maybe 40 years ago. His partner today was the monk who was taking care of him now. He went into spontaneous remission long before there were any meds whatsoever. The monk left his order and joined the man after that miracle.

30 years? 35 years? I can't keep track. I just remember him saying there were no possible meds, he was full of cancer, and there was no hope at all.

@Robusto Yes. That.

Laurel

I hope it's clear that I'm not trying to make light of what happened. I just never lived through it because they started having treatments around the time I was born and things continued to get better after that

With treatment and stuff

It's hard to grasp what the numbers mean exactly when they're just numbers

Robusto

I hate even thinking about that stuff. It always brings me way down.

tchrist

It's not like we still don't lose double-digit number of thousands of Americans alone to the disease every year.

So while it's more or less treatable, thousands still die of it every year.

Just no longer hundreds of thousands.

Laurel

Yeah...

alphabet

01:57

Indeed. Today people think about it very little, beyond remembering the need to use protection and/or PrEP.

Laurel

This was helpful: hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/history/hiv-and-aids-timeline

We were talking about when gay/bisexual people started to be able to give blood (minus caveats like no PrEP) and apparently that was earlier this year

Wow

tchrist

@alphabet Because they didn't live through that holocaust.

You never get over losing people, no matter what occasioned their deaths. You never stop thinking about them. So it's with you your entire life.

alphabet

Exactly.

Robusto

I have to say, though, that the promiscuity was waaaaaay off the charts in SF in the early part of the '80s. Ron (the friend I mentioned) had a roommate who went out every night and mostly had double-digit encounters. Ron was more subdued than that, but it still got him. Really, it was like Carnevál every night in the Castro, but by the end it was a ghost town. Absolutely the worst time and place to have that kind of plague.

tchrist

@Robusto By the time they closed the baths, it was far too late.

Robusto

02:05

@tchrist Ron was such a brilliant guy, and I've never had conversations with anyone who I clicked with in the same way. We would see each other after months or even years and continue where we left off. Our senses of humor just clicked like that.

alphabet

Well that's depressing. I'm glad I was born after the worst of that.

Robusto

I think "depressing" is too light a term for what I feel. Maybe tragic covers it. I dunno.

Laurel

I guess I'm lucky that the only people I've been close with who've died have been old. Tho there is someone I knew who was like 12 or maybe younger who died in a gun accident. (Not close to her; I had been getting lessons from her mother.) Kids being kids, you know?

I think that people my age have different tragedies

alphabet

There was the monkeypox (apparently now "mpox") epidemic, though obviously very few people actually died.

tchrist

It's still a pandemic, you know. And always was such.

Robusto

02:09

After Ron passed there was part of me that refused to believe it. I'd see or hear things and get a rush of "Oh, I need to tell Ron about that, he'd flip." And then, right away, would come the gravestone remembrance that he was no more. And I'd die a little once again.

Damn, I'm getting morbid now.

Why did we start talking about this?

tchrist

I turned down a couple of funerals. It just gets to be too much.

The COVID pandemic has officially killed 7 million, although the real numbers are surely at least twice that.

The HIV pandemic has killed 40 million, officially.

Robusto

40 million Rons.

tchrist

@Robusto Because somebody said they had to live in a big city so they could find easy gay hookups. I was horrified because of how deeply ingrained into me it is to equate easy gay hookups with mass casualty events and lifelong sorrow. It burned into me.

Robusto

Yes. That.

alphabet

@tchrist Huh. I've never had that horrifying association, obviously because I was born after those years.

tchrist

02:16

@alphabet Everybody I worked with who regularly "went out to the bars" died horribly. Every single one of them.

I'm sure it isn't that way now, but the scarring remains.

alphabet

@tchrist Wow. I can't imagine living through that.

Robusto

@alphabet You probably wouldn't have.

alphabet

@Robusto Indeed.

Robusto

The worst thing was, by the time they knew they were sick it was already too late. And worse, the Reagan government had no sympathy for these godless sinners who got themselves sick and as a consequence faced "divine" punishment.

tchrist

If you didn't have enough reason to hate Ronald Reagan already, you did after that. (But you should have had enough reason, in spades.)

You jinxed me.

Funny how the same thoughts come to mind.

Robusto

02:22

Well, we lived through many of the same tragedies.

alphabet

I heard about how, when it was first discovered, it was occasionally referred to as GRID, for "Gay Related Immune Deficiency."

tchrist

Amongst many other things.

Remember this was Tony Fauci's debut in public health. It shaped him as well. All his patients were dying.

Robusto

And remember the jokes callous people would spout? "How can you tell if your dog has AIDS? He won't heal! [heel]" "What's the worst thing about having AIDS? Trying to convince your mom you're Haitian." Jesus, how can people be so cruelly callous?

I think I need to think other thoughts now. Night all.

tchrist

@Laurel Remember Isaac Asimov.

@Robusto Bye. Yes, sorry.

@Robusto It was like being trapped in one of those Halloween Hell Houses, but for real, and forever.

> At one point the CDC referred to it as the "4H disease", as the syndrome seemed to affect heroin users, homosexuals, hemophiliacs, and Haitians.

Oh yes, lots of those jokes.

Asimov was a hero of mine as a kid.

alphabet

So the number of 60-year-olds on Grindr is, presumably, far below what it would be "naturally."

tchrist

02:30

> In 1977, Asimov had a heart attack. In December 1983, he had triple bypass surgery at NYU Medical Center, during which he contracted HIV from a blood transfusion.[102] His HIV status was kept secret out of concern that the anti-AIDS prejudice might extend to his family members.[103]

He died in Manhattan on April 6, 1992, and was cremated.[104] The cause of death was reported as heart and kidney failure.[105][106][107] Ten years following Asimov's death, Janet and Robyn Asimov agreed that the HIV story should be made public; Janet revealed it in her edition of his autobiography, It's Been…

@alphabet Yes, most of them are dead.

So what happened to Asimov, and to Ryan White, and to so many others, is why for decades only straight people could give blood.

Until like this past year.

alphabet

Indeed. The rule is now that you can't donate blood if you've had anal sex with new partners in the past few months, which (according to their studies) is equally effective as asking about the gender of one's partners.

tchrist

@alphabet And many of those who aren't dead have life partners. They've settled down.

@alphabet You just haven't met the right girl yet. :)

That's only half a joke, but the good half I can't tell or she'll kill me. :)

alphabet

It's a pill. /s

Laurel

@tchrist I think I knew that, though I'm not sure where I read it

This conversation did somehow get worse than at the start :/

It's almost 10 and I haven't managed to eat dinner yet :\

alphabet

03:00

Yod-coalescence may be a political issue

People keep mishearing "We charge you with genocide" as "We want Jewish genocide."

Actually, is that yod-coalescence? Something causes the end of "charge you" to sound like "Jew"; the /j/ in the "you" drops out.

Certainly alveolar plosive elision is part of the problem: in "want Jewish," the /t/ in "want" is likely not to be pronounced, making it sound closer to "charge you with."

Laurel

I thought that was a parody with how you worded it. Anyway, now that I think about it, I've never been able to reliably hear what crowds are shouting so I could easily see it happening

I'm also not great with determining the lyrics from certain songs, but I think that's more the singers' problem

alphabet

[t͡ʃɑɹd͡ʒ.u.wɪθ] versus [wɑnʔ.d͡ʒuw.ɪʃ] (without that elision)

Of course these only get easily confused if you hear ten people chanting simultaneously.

Incidentally, this also illustrates the connection between closing diphthongs and glides; there's a reason people hear a [w] in the middle of Jewish as similar to the [w] at the start of with.

Laurel

03:15

Don't you think Jewry and jewelry are pronounced very similar? Feel like this is very related to earlier

This might be a dialect thing to remove the second syllable tho

alphabet

The level of similarity depends a great deal on how you pronounce both the /l/ and the /r/ in that word, which can both be realized in a few different ways.

I think nearly everyone pronounces it as two syllables; the question is how you make the /l/ and the /r/ in sequence.

Laurel

Apparently the British spell it jewellery which I feel is excessive

All I can say is that jury is not pronounced all that similar to either, I don't think

alphabet

Indeed. The first syllable of jury has the NURSE vowel, which dictionaries like to write as /əɹ/ even though it's usually (in American English) a single sound.

...Oh wait. The first syllable of jury has /ˈdʒʊr.i/, for speakers who have a separate /ʊr/ sound. I say /ˈdʒər.i/.

Laurel

Apparently BrE has both of those vowels before the R

I should really learn IPA, sigh

Dannyu NDos

03:31

Regarding that... I wish the IPA wasn't based on Latin script, but rather Hangul.

2

A: Topics for Topic Challenges

Modified Hangul As a South Korean myself. Let me have a solemn introduction of this propose. Abstract 온누리의 말이 나라마다 달라 문자가 서로 통하지 아니하니, 이런 까닭으로 사람끼리 말하고자 하는 바가 있어도 결국 각자의 뜻을 능히 전달하지 못하는 경우가 많으니라. 내 이를 가엾게 여겨 기존 스물여덟 자에 <???> 자를 더하노니, 사람마다 하여금 쉽게 익혀 날로 씀에 편안케 하고자 할 따름이니라. Because languages of the ...

tchrist

@alphabet Jewel is /dʒul/, just like its homophone joule. Jewelry is /ˈdʒulɹi/. Jewry is /ˈdʒuɹi/. Jury is /ˈdʒəɹi/ just like hurry is /ˈhəɹi/. Phonetically there is some l-vocalization combining with the [uw] diphthong in ways that vary between speakers. It is not possible to have the FOOT vowel before R in American English.

@alphabet want you is [wɔnt͡ʃuw].

Or [wɒnt͡ʃuw] or [wɑnt͡ʃuw].

@Laurel They can have lax vowels before R; we cannot.

@alphabet I cannot imagine the FOOT vowel before R.

@alphabet I would hate having to pretend to distinguish [ɚ] from [ɝ].

Dannyu NDos

@tchrist CURE /kjʊr/ ??

tchrist

@DannyuNDos Nope.

No FOOT vowel.

GOOSE vowel.

Dannyu NDos

So it's /kju:r/ to you?

tchrist

I don't have phonemic length.;

Dannyu NDos

03:46

Of course; it's actually a diphthong /uw/.

tchrist

It's simply /kjur/ phonemically.

Well, it's a triphthong [juw] but who's counting? :)

Dannyu NDos

In my pronunciation, it's [kʰʏɻ].

tchrist

It's just the word cue plus R.

Now you can to distinguish cure the queuer. :)

Dannyu NDos

Lemme show my full vowel pronunciation diagram, which I insist to be the ideal:

tchrist

Like hire the higher.

Dannyu NDos

03:48

tchrist

Well, I don't know those placements. THey confuse me. Where's your tense-E?

Dannyu NDos

Dunno what tense-E is?

tchrist

The FACE vowel, no diphthong, like in Mary.

Dannyu NDos

I guess it's [a] for me.

tchrist

You mean æ?

Dannyu NDos

03:50

Phonologically /æ/, phonetically [a].

tchrist

I think I'll give up now.

It's not possible to talk about these things.

Dannyu NDos

I don't require you to actually embrace it, but I presume this happens to most non-natives anyway.

tchrist

Those are the basic vocalic phonemes in the language I speak. Some are modified phonetically at times, like under Canadian raising, for example.

I know that the British have told you that you must write those differently. I don't know whether you actually say them the way they demand, or if you say them the way we do. I do know that their symbols are totally messed up and always have been.

This is part of what makes it so hard to talk about anything.

And that chart still pretends there are two different "uh" sounds. But there are not. We have only schwa.

It's possible that phonetically some of us have [ɐ] not [ə] for our NUT vowel.

Dannyu NDos

04:10

Well, judge it yourself: soundcloud.com/dannyu-ndos/pangram

tchrist

I would write boy as /boj/, bout as /bawt/, bite as /bajt/. But it might be /bʌjt/.

@DannyuNDos It won't let me see that. Sorry.

Dannyu NDos

soundcloud.com/dannyu-ndos/pangram/…

tchrist

Well, that's certainly very different from my own.

Dannyu NDos

To think about it, it seems I don't really distinguish /ʌ/ and /ɔ/.

tchrist

You have a CUT-CAUGHT merger!

I had thought you were a girl. I'm terrible at this.

Dannyu NDos

04:15

Interesting. Most people had thought I was a boy because of "Dannyu".

Laurel

I thought he was a guy, but I also thought his name was just Danny which isn't quite right lol

It's not great justification either way, especially when there are Danielles who go by Danny

tchrist

I've known girl Dannies before.

They're usually Danielle.

Laurel

Statistically speaking, you can usually just assume people here are all guys and be right most of the time. Probably because Stack Overflow brings in a mostly male audience. Of course, I also don't like when people make this assumption for obvious reasons too lol

Tho I can't help my own biases too much either

tchrist

No me hagas daño means don't hurt me in Spanish, because daño ("dah-nyo" not "dæ-nee-oh") means hurt or harm or damage.

Laurel

Anyway, his is not an accent I'd be able to place just by hearing it. But I'm also not very familiar with spoken Korean

tchrist

04:20

same

I think Dannyo might be some casual form in English for Danny-O.

Laurel

Whereas I probably would know if someone is speaking Chinese or Japanese, and have a better than average chance of identifying those native speakers when they're speaking English

My neighbors are Korean but they're basically native English speakers now (no accent). And they don't speak Korean unless their parents are around

tchrist

I work with a Korean Chinese guy, but he was born in California so is English sounds like he's from San Diego.

Dannyu NDos

@Laurel Since you asked: soundcloud.com/dannyu-ndos/a9ghgtmtcxo7/…

tchrist

So his family is Chinese, but they lived in Korea before emigrating.

So it's Korea he goes back to to visit most of his Chinese cousins. It's odd.

Dannyu NDos

키스의 고유 조건은 입술끼리 만나야 한다는 것이고 특별한 기술은 필요치 않다. What's vital in a kiss is the touch between lips, and no special techniques are needed.

Laurel

04:25

Maybe I can only classify Asian languages into Japanese and not Japanese lol

Japanese is really distinctive

tchrist

Also try listening to Thai and Vietnamese.

Then try Mandarin vs Cantonese, etc.

Korean sounds a little different in that it has neither lexical pitch accent nor lexical stress.

Dannyu NDos

@tchrist I think I don't. "Caught" has the GOAT vowel to me.

Laurel

What's bad is that I've read some stuff that was translated from Korean but they kept the Korean names (and sometimes a few words, like honorifics) and reading it hasn't helped me with anything lol

tchrist

We vary our pitch for lexical stress in English, BTW.

@DannyuNDos COAT-CAUGHT merger.

Dannyu NDos

¯\_ツ_/¯

GUT-GOT merger, it seems.

alphabet

04:47

@tchrist Dictionaries (Collins, Dictionary.com, and Cambridge) all seem to think that the first syllable of jury has the CURE vowel, not the NURSE vowel.

tchrist

@alphabet OH I know. They are NOT talking about American English.

alphabet

@tchrist That's in their AmE transcriptions.

tchrist

Jury rhymes with hurry amd furry, not with bury.

alphabet

Merriam-Webster acknowledges both pronunciations.

tchrist

@alphabet I know this will come hard to believe, but I guarantee you that they are wrong. Ask any three other Americans here of your choice.

alphabet

04:52

@tchrist I pronounce bury like berry; I think that that's actually the more common pronunciation of bury.

tchrist

JURY does not have the vowel of FURY or BURY, but that of FURRY and HURRY and SCURRY. It is not a homophone with JEWRY.

@alphabet Certainly. The others sound weird.

alphabet

For me, JURY and FURY both have the vowels of FURRY and HURRY and SCURRY.

tchrist

Burial starts out like bear and bare.

@alphabet fyuri

It's the Furies not the Furries. :)

alphabet

For me, the only difference between fury and furry is that the former has a /j/ before the vowel.

Laurel

Jury and bury rhyme for me

But berry is a different vowel

alphabet

04:58

Jury [d͡ʒɹ̩i], fury [fjɹ̩i], furry [fɹ̩i], hurry [hɹ̩i], scurry [skɹ̩i], bury [bɛɹi], berry also [bɛɹi].

I have heard people pronounce bury the other way--i.e. not as a homophone of berry--but I'd assumed my pronunciation was the more common one. Dunno.

(Neither bury nor berry are homophones of Barry because I don't have that merger everywhere.)

tchrist

You don't have tense /e/ in Barry and Larry and Sherry?

I never have the DRESS vowel there. Nor TRAP. Only FACE.

Like I said, I just never have a lax vowel before R.

alphabet

05:17

For me Mary and marry are homophones, but merry is different. We've discussed this before.

Barry is in the Mary/marry class. Both berry and bury are in the merry class.

Recently I've started to notice all the times when people pronounce terrible like tearable.

Even Merriam-Webster does it.

Or very like vary, though it seems to be much less noticeable in that pair for some reason.

CowperKettle

06:25

Vikas

Article 370 Verdict LIVE: SC directs Centre to restore J&K statehood, conduct elections by Sep 2024

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One reason could be politcally motivated.

HippoSawrUs

07:46

@tchrist The highest convenience fee we paid was to a funeral home during the lockdown, I think $90-some, but the total cost was incredibly low (<$2k) so we didn't complain. A similar service would've been $3.5k in 2015. Some trades (roofing, tree service, etc.) use a service that charges a $350 fee, ridiculous, but I guess that's considered something else, like we're paying for their bookkeeping too; IDK.

HippoSawrUs

07:57

And AmEx is the best card to use for hotels; if it's not as described, you just leave and they credit it back.

Xanne

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CowperKettle

10:31

How does one distinguish rejection sensitivity in ADHD and rejection sensitivity in borderline personality? additudemag.com/…

All these descriptions are so hazy, I can see how numerous people can apply them to themselves.

CowperKettle

12:39

Why are studies on athletes so laughably small? Why do them at all, if there are just a handful of participants? It's so much effort, so much time, all leading to nothing. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37815006

M.A.R.

13:25

@CowperKettle beats me. I suspect there's quite the bridge between psychiatry and medicine

I can rely on a statin's proven efficacy to reduce adverse outcomes. I say a small prayer to some inscrutable divine whenever someone says their insomnia was resolved.

And borderline personality disorder seems a purely psychiatric finding with a very diminished role for drugs we barely understand

@CowperKettle In this case caffeine is a very complex compound and theanine is a bullshit non-drug. You can chalk it up to the herbal medicine char . . . Colleagues trying to "prove" things with chance correlation

I'm sick of the herb peddling.

Soy or dill or caraway or herb-of-the-day are pretty estrogenic when estrogen is desirable, yet somehow totally devoid of any adverse effects of estrogen.

@CowperKettle I have no idea what he's saying. Possibly because I disagree with him

Laurel

13:51

@CowperKettle Because for one you have to have adhd and for the other BPD?

CowperKettle

@M.A.R. Some people on a schizophrenia forum say they feel better on L-theanine.

I wish it were researched in well-sized populations.

For some reason vitamin D has been researched on millions of people already, and keeps getting researched, while some other stuff has been left without proper research for decades.

I don't believe in the existance of "borderline personality"

From reading private chats where psychiatrists are chatting, I get the impression that they tend to label "hard" patients as borderline. Never did I come across a description of how they really looked into their symptoms to support their labeling. It's usually "she is so negative about treatment, nothing seems to work, she keeps reaching out via phone/email, I'm afraid she's just borderline"

I would believe that psychiatry really exists as a branch of healthcare only when there are biological tests available.

Humans have too many cognitive biases to really be able to "diagnose" anybody by their behavior or complaints.

Robusto

14:54

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alphabet

15:25

@CowperKettle If rejection sensitivity is your only symptom, I don't think you'd get diagnosed with either; if there are independent reasons to think that you have ADHD or BPD, though, then it might explain that symptom.

@CowperKettle Part of the issue is that the name of the disorder comes from a since-discredited theory. Some have proposed "emotionally unstable personality disorder" instead.

Robusto

15:37

Los días se están haciendo más cortos. Pero sólo hasta el solsticio de invierno dentro de diez días. Entonces el señor Sol va a comenzar su regreso.

jlliagre

@CowperKettle Rural atheists avoiding global variables? This Tolstoy guy should contribute to this question where God and the Universe are not mentioned:

424

Q: Why is Global State so Evil?

Before we start this, let me say I'm well aware of the concepts of Abstraction and Dependency Injection. I don't need my eyes opened here. Well, most of us say, (too) many times without really understanding, "Don't use global variables", or "Singletons are evil because they are global". But what...

Robusto

@CowperKettle Clearly Tolstoy was not a programmer if he was polluting the global namespace with global variables.

jlliagre

I'm a peri-urban atheist anyway.

Robusto

15:53

@jlliagre We would call that "suburban" ...

But suburban classes still can have urban dependencies.

jlliagre

@Robusto No, I'm not a banlieusard :-)

Robusto

@jlliagre Then we would call that "ex-urban" ...

jlliagre

What's wrong with peri-?

Ex-urban would mean who left the town to me.

Robusto

Nothing. It just isn't part of the regular nomenclature for city proximity.

There is little to distinguish ex-urban from rural, by the way. The two merge.

jlliagre

It's a continuum.

French indeed:

Peri-urbanisation

Peri-urbanisation relates to the processes of scattered and dispersive urban growth that create hybrid landscapes of fragmented and mixed urban and rural characteristics. Such areas may be referred to as the rural–urban fringe, the outskirts, or the urban hinterland. == Etymology == The expression originates from the French word périurbanisation ("peri-urban" meaning "around urban"), which is used by the INSEE (the French statistics agency) to describe spaces—between the city and the countryside—that are shaped by the fragmented urbanisation of former rural areas in the urban fringe, both in a...

Robusto

16:08

> Apart from the structural definition dominating English-speaking literature, the concept is sometimes used to fill the gap between suburbanisation and exurbanisation, and thus relates moreover to the movement of people in space. In this case however, peri-urbanisation is seen as the expansion of functional rural-urban linkages such as by commuting.

I rest my case.

It seems peri-urbanisation is at least a term of art or, worse, a Britishism.

jlliagre

Even worse, a Gallicism.

Robusto

I wasn't going to mention that, but since you brought it up ...

By the way, you do have a lot of gall.

;-)

jlliagre

Culot?

@Robusto ¿Dices que tengo mucha cara? ¡Qué cara tienes! ;-)

Funny that Spanish uses 'face' where French uses 'ass'. English 'bile' is somewhere between...

Robusto

16:56

@jlliagre The British would say "cheek" there.

An oldy but still a goody.

jlliagre

@Robusto Effronté then.

Robusto

17:11

Effrontery is familiar to English speakers.

jlliagre

@Robusto I'm not surprised!

Robusto

Ouch!

Brat.

jlliagre

Hey, I was just expressing the concept :-)

Robusto

17:44

Uh-huh.

MetaEd

17:56

Anybody who hates global variables must really despise systems programming

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Robusto

18:25

@MetaEd Do you mean global constants? Because those are fine.

MetaEd

@Robusto Global variables. For example, if you're a filesystem utility, the filesystem is a global variable.

Robusto

In most cases, there won't be problems. But there are conditions where filesystem state will be changed out from under the utility's recent reference.

Vikas

TIL monochromatic and black and white are not same.

Robusto

18:50

Milk: The White Lie We've All Been Sold

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Xanne

19:09

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alphabet

20:21

@Robusto Big NMF propaganda shills.

@Robusto In certain kinds of systems programming, you need to avoid dynamic memory allocation; global variables are the most sensible way to do that allocation at compile time.

M.A.R.

@CowperKettle I say I would feel better on heroin. Doesn't mean it's better for my body or my brain

You will have no mouth, and you will need to scream. — philipxy Dec 6 at 7:12

Incidentally, a common way of adultering herbs is to add CNS stimulants to them. Caffeine being the prime suspect. The buyer 'feels good', so whatever reason they bought the herb for, high cholesterol or blood pressure or whatever, it must be working!

alphabet

20:41

Here, as I recall, there have been issues with OTC "male enhancement pills" (which claim to have Horny Goat Weed or some other BS) being adulterated with actual sildenafil. So they actually work--but are illegal to sell OTC.

Also: most OTC diet pills contain a bunch of herbs that do nothing, and then 200mg caffeine as an appetite suppressant.

M.A.R.

Bingo

alphabet

Hydroxycut - America's #1 Selling Weight Loss Supplement Brand

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These ads were everywhere when I was a kid. Apparently they used to contain ephedra, but now it's just caffeine (and BS herbs).

They also had to reformulate it after the BS herbs made someone die of liver failure.

And yet my local pharmacy still carries it.

MetaEd

21:09

yeah I was tricked into taking coffee as a stimulant and it turns out it just contains caffeine and various flavor chemicals that trick me into feeling like it's working

Laurel

21:32

@alphabet People are ready to kill themselves over superficial things like that

Robusto

@alphabet OK, that makes sense.

Laurel

The other type of example I know of is that some women have literally poisoned themselves trying to do hair removal

Like it's literally cancer

In the sense that radiation makes you lose hair (and is used when treating cancer) and that's one of the things that was being used just to have less leg hair

Robusto

21:45

I just told a friend I bought a new laptop. She said, "Is it a Dell?" I said, "No, this one can't sing a lick."

tchrist

@Laurel I just now accidentally wrote I do think that it needs fixed to the Pittsburghers at work. I am so ashamed. They, of course, saw nothing amiss.

Robusto

@tchrist I've been hearing that more and more lately. Most recently in a Scottish TV series.

Michael Rybkin

Hi, guys. Could you please tell me if this sentence sounds fine to you as native speakers?

The Congressional Budget Office believed that up to 3.4 million jobs would be lost post fiscal cliff due to a slowing economy with layoffs stemming from cuts in the defense budget and other things.

Laurel

22:13

@tchrist Did you then say "I'm done my work" and storm out of the virtual office?

alphabet

22:26

@Laurel It's insane, this view that body hair is somehow unfeminine.

Laurel

23:01

@alphabet "More than 99 percent of American women voluntarily get rid of their hair." theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/02/…

There's a lot of pressure even tho almost as many women think that pressure is unfair

I don't know anyone in the 1%, and even in the 99% most women seem to remove all the hair from their underarms/legs/etc when those are going to be visible in public

The one exception is arm hair, which is often close to skin color and therefore can stay

alphabet

@Laurel Insane.

Mitch

23:33

@Laurel I hear arsenic makes your hair nice and shiny

MetaEd

23:57

@Mitch Vinegar will do that. I had no idea it was because of high levels of arsenic

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