@Cerberus It appears that writing for an educated audience is now considered élitist and exclusionary. Who would have thought literature was meant for the illiterate?
It’s difficult to derive an “average reading level” when so many adults (nearly 25% in some areas) are functionally illiterate, because averaging in those zeros throws things off. Most newspapers aim for a 5th-grade level, although the New Yorker falls closer to 7th-8th grade.
Outside of peer-reviewed technical journals, the only periodical that targets an educated readership is the Economist.
There’s no need to burn books or ban them. You simply cultivate a population who are neither willing nor able to read them. This is not what the founders of our republic envisioned.
> 12. a sentence, especially a well-balanced, impressive sentence: the stately periods of Churchill. 13. a periodic sentence.
In other news:
> Mark Udall's Open To Releasing CIA Torture Report Himself If Agreement Isn't Reached Over Redactions
As we were worried might happen, Senator Mark Udall lost his re-election campaign in Colorado, meaning that one of the few Senators who vocally pushed back against the surveillance state is about to leave the Senate. However, Trevor Timm pointed out that, now that there was effectively "nothing to lose," Udall could go out with a bang and release the Senate Intelligence Committee's CIA torture report.
It is sad that one should have to lose an election to publish the truth.
We are come to a unique point in history in which being unlettered and unmannered, uncultured and unreasoning, is a condition that draws neither pity or contempt but is instead lauded far above the contrary conditions, which are universally scorned and ridiculed.
"The Marching Morons" is a science fiction story written by Cyril M. Kornbluth, originally published in Galaxy in April 1951. It was included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two after being voted one of the best novellas up to 1965.
The story is set hundreds of years in the future: the date is 7-B-936. John Barlow, a man from the past put into suspended animation by a freak accident involving a dental drill and anesthesia, is revived in this future. The world seems mad to Barlow until Tinny-Peete explains the Problem of Population: due to a combination of intelligent people not having...
and this small thing happens and that small things happens for a number of paragraphs, and only then does somebody die from drinking the popular snake-milk that comes for free in school lunches.
There was a good research paper on all this, about why the Economist aims at people who’ve managed to get through high school. I wish I could find it now.
They had some very detailed metrics.
I bet you could find the now-excised referenced article in the Wikipedia history of the Economist’s wiki page. It was once there.
@Cerberus "buzz loudly during a memorial service"? "unable to silence it at all"? hyperbole. There are ways under lollipop to silence it. You could disable the vibrate. You could set up a do not disturb. Should alarms puncture the "do not disturb"? That's debatable. What point in having an alarm if it doesn't ring, even when the phone is silent? What point in having do not disturb, if some alarm you forgot about disturbs you? etc.
Though admittedly the loss of the vol-down->vibrate->silent feature is dumb.
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Yes, it can be done, but 1.) you won't even be aware that you can't just use silent the normal way, so your phone may vibrate durinng the service; 2.) it is a lot more work to change all the settings to get it to be truly silent; 3.) you lose the intended function of the new Priority feature, because you can only do it by subverting the Priority thing to only let through alarms; 4.) Priority does not only silence notifications, but the LED won't flash any more.
And perhaps other things happens in Priority mode: I haven't used it, but how are notifications shown in Priority mode?
So if you have just updates to L, there is now warning that you can't easily mute your phone during the service, it may happen if you didn't read up. And, when it happens, you can't quickly turn off vibration with 1 hand in the dark.
You have to wade through menus that you are not (yet) familiar with.
> Mark Udall's Open To Releasing CIA Torture Report Himself If Agreement Isn't Reached Over Redactions
As we were worried might happen, Senator Mark Udall lost his re-election campaign in Colorado, meaning that one of the few Senators who vocally pushed back against the surveillance state is about to leave the Senate. However, Trevor Timm pointed out that, now that there was effectively "nothing to lose," Udall could go out with a bang and release the Senate Intelligence Committee's CIA torture report.
@Cerberus Hi. I was thinking that I would have worded one of your answers differently, or that maybe part of it was right and part of it was wrong (I don't remember exactly right now). And I wondered if any of us prefer to discuss such things in here or in ways that are better than disagreeing in comments to an answer or writing alternative answers....
But I will figure out some of that stuff if I hang out in the community a bit longer.
You shouldn’t expect the average unstudied English monoglot to know the word, but the OED gives as the primary sense of the adjective colubrine:
Of, belonging to, or characteristic of a snake or serpent; snake-like.
One citation for that sense is:
1883 P. Robinson in Harper’s M...
> A una Culebra que, de frío yerta, en el suelo yacía medio muerta un labrador cogió; mas fue tan bueno, que incautamente la abrigó en su seno. Apenas revivió, cuando la ingrata a su gran bienhechor traidora mata.
Not mine.
However, culebra is why I knew it.
The Google translation is close enough for you to get a sense for what it means even if you cannot read or rhyme it.
“Thrice-welcome!” sounds like something Stephen Fry says when he plays the Master of Laketown in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies.
Oh, and lest this be flagged, I hereunder record it for posterity:
Newer OED additions with the solidus (slash) in them include nav/com and the crappy s/he, which I dislike for leaving out the poor neuters of this world and which should therefore be spelled s/h/it just like it sounds. :) — tchrist2 mins ago
Interestingly, Jackson stole that line from the Elvenking’s mouth in the book to place it in the Master’s for the movie:
> The Elvenking looked at Bilbo with a new wonder. "Bilbo Baggins!" he said. "You are more worthy to wear the armour of elfprinces than many that have looked more comely in it. But I wonder if Thorin Oakenshield will see it so. I have more knowledge of dwarves in general than you have perhaps. I advise you to remain with us, and here you shall be honoured and thrice welcome." "Thank you very much I am sure," said Bilbo with a bow.
@Cerberus I can’t figure out what Greek word or pieces eusuchian (for crockish) comes from. Eu- is good, but is there some larger root there?
Was is just a gator?
Modern Greek seems to have ερπετά for crocodilians, so that doesn’t help.
Hm, that’s reptile in general.
At least chelonian for turtlish is clear.
Oh.
Greek should have (Latinized) souchus for crocs. Maybe the Eusuchians are “true” crocodilians.
Can’t find συχος, probably because I don’t know the diacritics or mis-reverse-transcribe the Latinized form back to Greek.
> Plesiosuchus is derived from plesios (πλεσιος), "near" or "close to" in Ancient Greek, and suchus (συχος) which is the Latinised form of the Ancient Greek word for the crocodile god of ancient Egypt.
Well, there’s one instance.
But that it should have come from an Egyptian crocodeity is a surprise.
I suspect that Eusuchian and You suck, Ian! are homophones.
There are doubtless easier ways of typing this than murine catch-and-release, but at least that much was possible:
Sobek (also called Sebek, Sochet, Sobk, and Sobki), in Greek, Suchos (Σοῦχος) and from Latin Suchus, was an ancient Egyptian deity with a complex and fluid nature. He is associated with the Nile crocodile and is either represented in its form or as a human with a crocodile head. Sobek was also associated with pharaonic power, fertility, and military prowess, but served additionally as a protective deity with apotropaic qualities, invoked particularly for protection against the dangers presented by the Nile river.
== History ==
Sobek enjoyed a longstanding presence in the ancient Egyptian pantheon...
Suggestion: don’t try to make out hieroglyphs at 7 points.
At least with CJK glyphs (what the Japanese call kanji) there is a database where you can look up the Romanization in any of several East Asian languages. Not here.
Here’s a vulture and a snake:
> 𓅒 13152 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH G016
There, that’s just in case anybody from the future doesn’t have a font for Egyptian Hieroglyphics installed — although I can’t imagine how such a lapse could long endure. :)
The naming system is weird. H008, I001, I005A.
Ok, so there are (or were) both pseudosuchians and eusuchians. So as I had suspected, they appear to be opposing pseudo- with eu- here.
This happens in taxonomy.
Consider the Eutherians — the good beasts, the placental mammals.
@tchrist modern Greek has κροκόδειλος for crocodile but that is probably a direct translation from crocodile or similar words. Makes sense, there ain't too many of them buggers in Greece. We also don't have an ancient Greek word for kangaroo.
@terdon Probably because once Troy fell, Achaeanize, Argivize, Danaanize, and Cretanize just never caught on the way Hellenize did — at least for that sense.
I always get a kick out of the closeness between crétin and chrétien in French. They sound extremely similar and I've always wondered if it's on purpose. Left over from the revolution perhaps?