English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

1:19 AM

@Cerberus “We see fewer than expected vaccine breakthrough cases in children, 12 to 17, but more in older age groups,” she said. “We are seeing more vaccine breakthrough cases with the Janssen, or Johnson and Johnson vaccine, and the Pfizer vaccine compared to Moderna.”

Cerberus

@tchrist Hmm odd.

Moderna en Pfizer usually come out on top in studies.

Then Janssen a bit worse.

And A-Z worse yet.

tchrist

Yes.

But overall it works out to around 80% protective, given the mix we have here.

Cerberus

A few age groups have some A-Z here, a few Janssen, a few Moderna, but the large majority Biontech, especially younger people.

tchrist

Our cases and hospitalizations are rising, but not so dramatically as in the Republican states. Still, it's enough that folks are worried. At the store today, probably 5 people in 6 were voluntarily masked, and the staff were all masked again.

Cerberus

@tchrist It helps when people get scared.

tchrist

1:26 AM

That's exactly what they're saying in Louisiana.

Cerberus

It will. Let's hope that will be enough.

@tchrist Hmm I wonder why the rate of vaccinated infection has not risen, despite the successively worse variants.

tchrist

There's a bit of rise towards the right end.

Cerberus

Not as much as I would have expected.

It should be a climbing, then plateauing, then climbing line.

Or something.

So I think that shows none of the results we see from studies are to be considered definitive.

tchrist

We're only seeing 1200 cases a day still here.

Cerberus

In your state?

tchrist

1:34 AM

Yes.

Robusto

@tchrist We had another 600+ day here.

tchrist

Nationally, it's something like approaching 100x that.

The majority of cases are in the under 40 group.

Robusto

@tchrist Because least vaccinated, no doubt.

tchrist

Probably. 17% are under 20.

Cerberus

And most gregarious, probably?

Robusto

1:37 AM

I'm sick of this illness, and the stupidity that is keeping it alive.

Cerberus

I must admit I kind of like the quiet, though.

Robusto

Well, you're getting older.

Cerberus

Of course I haven't had any seriously ill people in my circles.

Or I would probably feel differently...

@Robusto Hey, I'm under 40!

tchrist

My county has a 7-day rolling average of like 43 cases per day.

Cerberus

I do miss birthday parties and late nights at cafés and those things.

tchrist

1:38 AM

We're around 80% vaccinated, of the eligible.

Cerberus

But family gatherings, less so.

Robusto

@Cerberus Not for long!

Cerberus

@tchrist That's not bad.

tchrist

I've seen more family than anybody else. In fact, that's very nearly the only people I've seen.

Cerberus

@Robusto Oh, two years is very long!

Robusto

1:39 AM

They'll be gone before you know it.

Cerberus

I just like not having to go places and do things.

I mean, we never had a full lockdown.

We always kept seeing friends in small to tiny groups here.

Or, again, I would probably feel differently.

tchrist

Well, you don't have winter there. It helps.

Cerberus

Why?

tchrist

Don't have to cluster inside around the fireplace.

Cerberus

Most of the year, we meet people inside.

Because it's too cold and/or too rainy.

tchrist

1:42 AM

You're just too underdressed. :)

Cerberus

Most gatherings are in the evening, when it is colder than at noon.

tchrist

Local family got those giant outdoor umbrella heaters like at sidewalk cafes, to extend the outside time.

Cerberus

We did have walking meet-ups in April 2020, when it was cold for the time of year.

Robusto

@tchrist They will if thermohaline circulation in the Atlantic shuts down. At that point, it'll be curtains for everyone.

Cerberus

Packed in extra pullovers and coats.

@tchrist Makes sense.

tchrist

1:43 AM

@Robusto Not sure how that affects us here, but yes, Britain and the nether regions will become Siberia.

Robusto

It'll affect everybody.

tchrist

Yes, but I don't know how.

Robusto

seattletimes.com/nation-world/…

Cerberus

Hardly Siberia.

We have a sea climate.

And global temperatures are rising anyway.

tchrist

Okay, it looks like the little kids are slingshotting up in cases in Boulder County.

Cerberus

1:45 AM

So far, they do not think the Gulf Stream will seriously weaken yet.

tchrist

Robusto

> If the AMOC does completely shut down, the change would be irreversible in human lifetimes, Boers said. The “bi-stable” nature of the phenomenon means it will find new equilibrium in its “off” state. Turning it back on would require a shift in the climate far greater than the changes that triggered the shutdown.

tchrist

The steep light blue dotted line at the right is the under-10s.

Robusto

@Cerberus This is one way to shut those off.

Cerberus

What do you mean?

Robusto

1:47 AM

Northern Europe will see arctic temperatures. It could happen very quickly.

tchrist

My honest opinion is that nothing will stop this freight train.

Robusto

Unfortunately, I concur.

It's depressing to entertain these thoughts.

Cerberus

@Robusto From what I hear, it is thus far considered unlikely to happen.

tchrist

> “The world has changed.
I see it in the water.
I feel it in the Earth.
I smell it in the air.
Much that once was is lost,
For none now live who remember it. ”

No, the whole thing. The Anthropocene is upon us. We have changed our world unwittingly, and there is no stopping it.

We are too hungry, too greedy, too uncaring, too selfish, too cruel to turn away from our own self destruction, and that of our world. All will change.

Cerberus

Self destruction?

tchrist

2:01 AM

Ecocide.

Cerberus

What's that?

Looks like a hybrid!

tchrist

Willful acts of mass destruction against the biome that supports us, against life itself. Against the only world we have.

Cerberus

Uhh.

tchrist

Ecocide

A few nations have codified ecocide as a crime. Activities that might constitute ecocide in these nations include substantially damaging or destroying ecosystems or by harming the health and well-being of a species, including humans. Ecocide has not yet been accepted as an internationally punishable crime by the United Nations. == Aspects of ecocide == As a concept, ecocide refers to both naturally occurring processes of environmental or ecosystem decline and destruction of the environment that is caused by human activity. For instance, the migration of invasive species to a given area which leads...

Cerberus

Ecosystems adapt.

The Earth's ecosystem will not be destroyed.

Just changed.

tchrist

2:14 AM

@Cerberus We won't stop until we've ruined everything that makes this a place for us to live.

Cerberus

Nah.

That won't happen either.

Even if temperatures rise and many disasters happen, we will still live on Earth.

tchrist

What the fuck do you call this sixth great extinction, the one we have ourselves caused?

Cerberus

That is yet another thing.

tchrist

It is an unspeakable crime.

Cerberus

Ecosystems adapt, and so will mankind.

It may be a disaster, but not the end of humanity in anyway.

tchrist

2:16 AM

Tell that to dinosaurs.

Cerberus

We are not dinosaurs.

And what will happen if we continue to heat up the Earth is nothing compared to what happened 65 million years ago.

tchrist

We do have models for the sudden changes in the overall heat, one much more recent than that.

Cerberus

What we are trying to prevent is serious damage to various ecosystems that are dear to us, and serious disasters that may kill significant numbers of people and do great damage.

But it's nothing existential for mankind.

tchrist

@Cerberus No, we are not. 97% of England's wildflower fields are gone.

Since the war.

Cerberus

Ecosystems that are dear to us.

tchrist

2:21 AM

We're too stupid. Those should have been dear to us. It matters. The pollinators are collapsing. Not like we need that ourselves, we can eat mushrooms. Too bad about the rest of the world. Incidental ecocidal casualties. We don't care.

theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/18/…

Cerberus

@tchrist They are dear to us.

Those are the disasters.

tchrist

This is my thirty-somethingth day running of bad air alerts. It's estimated that it's like we've all smoked three packs of cigarettes over the past month. I am angry.

I'm tired of feeling sick because of the air.

Cerberus

I would be, too.

That's pretty terrible.

Is there really nothing they can think of to prevent those fires?

tchrist

It's not just the fires. It's the cars.

And industry.

Cerberus

Right.

The air is far from clean here.

I hope burning fuel will be forbidden close to population centres soon.

tchrist

2:28 AM

I don't know how you can "stop" fires.

Cerberus

I don't know either.

Create very wide corridors?

tchrist

It's climate change.

Corridors?

It's too hot. Things dry out. They burn.

Cerberus

Strips of lands without any trees or bushes.

tchrist

Um.

Cerberus

Very wide strips. As wide as it takes.

tchrist

2:29 AM

That won't stop anything.

And it is not possible.

How would you stop the fires in Siberia?

It's like that.

It's an entire continent of western forests.

These fires are thousands of miles from me.

Cerberus

The smoke travels that far hmm.

tchrist

West of me. And I know people a thousand miles east of me who are now on oxygen because the air is so bad there from all this far to my west.

Cerberus

Then lots of barren strips throughout all the forests, so that any fires can be stopped quickly?

I'm no expert.

tchrist

More than ten million acres burned here in 2020.

It's too big. It cannot be done. The scale of this is more than I have ever been able to communicate to you.

That's 40,000 square kilometers that burned if that helps you. I believe that's the size of your entire country. But it is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the overall size of the North American forests.

Mitch

So what areas of the world will get wetter and more vegetation?

Mexico?

I've heard Spain will (more) desertify

tchrist

2:39 AM

@Cerberus Not counting Canada, the U.S. Department of Agriculture controls 179 million acres of forests.

@Mitch More, indeed. It used to be forested coast to coast.

That means they manage 724,000 square kilometers of forests. Can you see how big that is? And those are just the federal lands, not state or private lands.

Mitch

Maybe...

Nope probably dryer

Siberia that is

tchrist

I'm trying to convey the enormity of our forests to Cerb. Yes, Siberia.

And that also doesn't count national parks and such. That's just national forest land.

Mitch

The east coast of the is is not affected by the gulf stream is it?

tchrist

It is.

Mitch

Maybe the Hudson bay coast is good real estate for the future

Maybe Australia will become the new bread basket

tchrist

2:44 AM

> The Gulf Stream influences the climate of the east coast of North America from Florida to Newfoundland and the west coast of Europe. Although there has been recent debate,[1] there is consensus that the climate of Western Europe and Northern Europe is warmer than other areas of similar latitude because of the North Atlantic Current

@Mitch Australia? Have you been there? As soon as you move in from the coastal rainforest, it becomes desert.

Mitch

So if the gulf stream stops (because of this north Atlantic salt water mixup... Then both sides will be affected?

tchrist

@Mitch So it appears.

Mitch

I just need to plan my next move

tchrist

Notice Rob moved from Boston. :)

Mitch

@tchrist sure but with the changes from global warming some places will get dryer and some wetter so maybe Australia will get wetter

tchrist

2:47 AM

I recommend against a move to Florida.

Mitch

I'm using the scientific method of choosing a place I think I like based on their accent

tchrist

Then go to New Zealand.

> The Gulf Stream is influential on the climate of the Florida peninsula. The portion off the Florida coast, referred to as the Florida Current, maintains an average water temperature of at least 24 °C (75 °F) during the winter.[29] East winds moving over this warm water move warm air from over the Gulf Stream inland,[30] helping to keep temperatures milder across the state than elsewhere across the Southeastern United States during the winter.

Mitch

@tchrist that's going under -as we speak-

The alligators there will benefit

tchrist

Isn't it just.

@Mitch No, alligators are freshies.

Mitch

Isn't the everglades mostly salty?

tchrist

2:48 AM

As they call the freshwater crocs in Oz.

Brackish?

Brackish.

Gargleable?

But only near the sea.

> Alligators are primarily freshwater animals and they do not live in the ocean. ... While alligators can tolerate salt water for a few hours or even days, they are primarily freshwater animals, living in swampy areas, rivers, streams, lakes, and ponds.

But saltwater crocs, they'll getcha.

Mitch

Ok. Sorry alligators

Cerberus

2:49 AM

@tchrist nationalgeographic.com/science/article/…

Perhaps, if they scaled this up by big time, the situation could be greatly improved.

Mitch

Hm. Mars not looking so bad now eh @Robusto

Cerberus

What's the total budget for fire prevention in the afflicted states?

Mitch

We'd be happy to have perchlorate in our soil

Cerberus

Can it be raised by 1000% or 10,000%?

If the problem is perceived as huge, they should spend huge sums of money to deal with it. Is that being done at the moment? I believe not?

tchrist

There are certainly prescribed burns in places around here. It usually works. Sometimes it doesn't, and people die.

But it just won't happen in the huge places. They are roadless.

Mitch

2:54 AM

So northern Europe will get cold in winter. It's not like the scots have seen the sun in normal times anyway

tchrist

But the places near where all those rich Californians have built homes in the urban wildland interface, where they've penetrated and then suppressed, sure. That's part of it.

Mitch

🥶

tchrist

PACMAN!

Cerberus

It may need to be scaled up big time.

All I'm saying it, maybe if you increase resources by a huge amount, the problem can become manageable.

But have already said that.

tchrist

There's certainly a long history of doing the wrong thing there.

But most of these places are not those ones.

That wasn't what was happening in Colorado last summer, for example.

I haven't looked at the Canadian disasters from this summer yet. That's a pretty moist place, too.

Mitch

2:57 AM

We should start planning for an Olympics on the Moon

Sort of as a PSA for getting people to colonize there

Cerberus

I'm sure it can't be fixed in a year.

Mitch

Everybody gets a job

tchrist

@Mitch Wrong planet for Olympus Mons.

Mitch

@tchrist I'm not crazy. The moon stuff is just a practice tryout for Mars

tchrist

Ilium/Olympos

Ilium/Olympos is a series of two science fiction novels by Dan Simmons. The events are set in motion by beings who appear to be ancient Greek gods. Like Simmons' earlier series, the Hyperion Cantos, it is a form of "literary science fiction"; it relies heavily on intertextuality, in this case with Homer and Shakespeare as well as references to Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (or In Search of Lost Time) and Vladimir Nabokov's novel Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. As with most of his science fiction and in particular with Hyperion, Ilium demonstrates that Simmons writes in the soft...

Clearly, you've been reading again.

Mitch

3:01 AM

@tchrist I am sadly underread

tchrist

@Cerberus The fire season is much, much longer now, and much more intense. That's a big part of all this. We saw sudden blowups last year like nothing we've ever seen before, so furious and rapid. And Canada hit 121 this year. CANADA!!!!

Mitch

I've heard of Ada, I read the first two pages of recherches multiple times always ending in a deep sleep

tchrist

You don't have to have read those ones. But knowing something about the Iliad would help.

Mitch

The last sci Fi I read was.... What was the nine volume encyclopedia by Stephenson?

tchrist

Fuck him.

Yeah, let's not talk about it. Waste of my brain.

Cerberus

3:03 AM

@tchrist Is it good?

tchrist

He can't finish a plot.

Cerberus

I have heard of it.

Mitch

I think I broke my reading organ after about 600 pages (of 5000)

tchrist

@Cerberus I enjoyed it. And have reread it twice. So yes.

Mitch

I don't think I ever read the Iliad or have seen the movie

tchrist

3:05 AM

...

Cerberus

Noted.

Mitch

There's the Trojan horse and Achilles dies and Helen is hot and therefore some kind of sea captain? And I think some guy guy called Agamemnon has PTSD?

tchrist

Achilles rages. Paris steals Helen from Agamemnon. Nobody listens to Cassandra. Every death is named.

No, actually.

Mitch

And the car chase is awesome

tchrist

Achilles slew Hector in the Iliad.

Mitch

3:07 AM

That's what I've heard

Hector sounds like he had it coming

tchrist

He doesn't get killed in it himself.

@Mitch Whence the tradition.

He did die at the end of the Trojan War, but it isn't in Homer.

Mitch

Achilles steps on a broken glass on the beach and gets tetanus

tchrist

Tetanus was a Roman.

Whither Aeneas had not yet fled. Latium, IIRC.

Mitch

Ulysses changes his name to Odysseus so he wouldn't get mixed up with that Irish guy

tchrist

The 1990 Fagles translation isn't bad.

Mitch

3:10 AM

@tchrist and Lornadoon was a Scottish musical about dry cookies

Cerberus

@tchrist From Menelaos.

tchrist

@Mitch So listen, this is a thing. Simmons says sometimes you have to play with just the green guys, so he only used Greek names.

Mitch

@tchrist what?

tchrist

@Cerberus A pox on the entire house of Atreus!

Mitch

I thought that was the big finish in the Iliad

tchrist

3:11 AM

@Mitch You need to read more.

I need to read more

But yes, it was M.

Jinx

Is pox singular?

It's a mass noun

3:12 AM

9

Q: Why has the "plague" on our houses become a "pox?"

There is a famous phrase in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, spoken by Mercutio: A plague o' both your houses! This phrase is often alluded to in contemporary writing. But in the 20th century, many of the allusions replace the word plague with pox. Reaching for quick examples is not hard....

Cerberus

One pock, two pox.

It's pok and pokken in Dutch.

tchrist

Compared to the Odyssey, the Iliad is a flood of names. There are no nameless deaths, but deaths there are in plenty, and many more beisdes.

@Cerberus Aye.

Cerberus

> pock noun:
a pustule on the body in an eruptive disease, as smallpox.

See.

I must admit the last time I read the Iliad in its entirety was as a child, in translation.

It was pretty fun, though there were some boring parts.

tchrist

> When my kid brother and I used to take our toy soldiers out of the box, we had no problem playing with our blue and gray Civil War soldiers alongside our green World War II guys. I prefer to think of this as a precocious example of what John Keats called “Negative Capability.” (We also had a Viking, a cowboy, an Indian, and a Roman Centurion flinging grenades, but they were in our Time Commando Platoon. Some anomalies demand what the Hollywood people insist on calling a backstory.)

With Ilium, however, I thought a certain consistency was required. Those readers who teethed, as I did, o…

He's funny, too.

> Hektor versus Akhilleus and the Akhaians and the Argeioi—the more faithful version sometimes sounds like a cat coughing up a hairball.

Cerberus

Note that classicists use traditional names, not phonetic renderings.

tchrist

3:18 AM

That's what he does in Ilium and Olympos.

Cerberus

And their pronunciations sometimes act as shibboleths.

tchrist

He sticks with the traditional names, how they're spelled.

Cerberus

No, I mean our tradition.

tchrist

Ah.

Cerberus

For example, I doubt whether many non-classicist Dutchmen would able to pronounce Alcaeus 'correctly'.

tchrist

3:19 AM

Let alone non-Dutchmen.

Cerberus

Or 'Phoebus Apollo'.

English classicists have their own tradition.

tchrist

On sight? No. But with training, sure why not?

Cerberus

The idea is that they have no classicist training, so they don't know where the stress lies, how c is pronounced, etc.

tchrist

Just the way we pronounce a simple word like Menelaus is crazy.

Cerberus

Of course they could easily learn the pronunciation, if it were told them.

Why crazy?

Note also that classicists are often sloppy: they might use traditional and phonetic names at will.

tchrist

3:22 AM

Μενέλαος ≠ Mɛnɪleɪəs

Where did the "ei" come from? Sigh. Great Bowel Shift my ass.

Cerberus

It's just a regular a?

tchrist

Yes.

Cerberus

So what is unexpected?

In Latin words translitterated from Greek, au is not (normally?) a diphthong, but two separate vowels.

I mean, when it's from ao in Greek.

But you know that.

tchrist

Yes.

I guess Minny-louse would have been worse.

Cerberus

And maybe there are exceptions in English pronunciation...

Santaclaus ought to be Santa-clay-us.

But no!

tchrist

3:26 AM

@Cerberus It's hard to get used to Santa for a man. :)

Cerberus

There is that, too.

Probably a phonetic adaptation of Sinter-?

tchrist

Think so.

Cerberus

That is, I assume the American word is from Dutch.

tchrist

@Cerberus That's correct.

> Dutch dialect Sante Klaas (Dutch Sint Klaas)

Cerberus

Hmm a dialect.

We do have santekraam as a (different) word.

Maybe that is also from sanctus.

tchrist

3:30 AM

Kraam, isn't that the waybread of the Dwarves?

Cerberus

Uhh.

tchrist

Bad joke.

Gimli was here.

Cerberus

A kraam can be a booth, but it is one of those words that sound as though they could hold a treasure of ancient senses.

A santekraam is ehh.

De hele santekraam = all that stuff.

A large number of assorted things, maybe.

tchrist

> The passage describing the bringing of the Elvish cakes and Gimli's
delight at discovering that they were not cram is at once almost exactly
as in FR, the only difference being that the words 'But we call it lembas
or waybread' do not appear. The description of the cloaks is however
much briefer than in FR - and there is no mention of the leaf-shaped
brooches that fastened them.

Cerberus

But belonging to a certain person or situation.

Hmm I did not remember cram.

tchrist

3:33 AM

It's from The Hobbit, mostly.

Cerberus

There is also kraamzorg, which is care for a mother and child immediately after birth.

And kraambed, the bed in which she lies.

tchrist

But Gimli knew only the yucky stuff his folk made, not lembas of the elves.

> In the Etymologies (V.365) cram, defined as 'cake of compressed
flour or meal (often containing honey and milk) used on long
journeys', appears as a Noldorin word (stem KRAB- 'press'). - In FR
the fire-wood, alone of the stores found on Weathertop, survived,
but it had been left by Rangers, not by Gandalf.

mac(tchrist)% grep -nw cram The_Hobbit_-_JRR_Tolkien.txt
6917:had such a breakfast as they could, chiefly cram and water. (If you want
6918:to know what cram is, I can only say that I don’t know the recipe; but it
7366:weeks with care—chiefly cram, of course, and they were very tired of it;
7367:but cram is much better than nothing—and already the gate was blocked
7547:“and it makes me sick. And cram is beginning simply to stick in my

Cerberus

Sounds lovely.

Like...Chinese rice cake.

Very dense.

tchrist

@Cerberus The bed she gives birth in?

Cerberus

I'm not sure.

I think so.

tchrist

3:37 AM

I'm too tired to remember what that is in English, but I think there's a word for it.

Cerberus

She gives birth in it and she remains in it after birth.

tchrist

Or term. Couple of words.

Cerberus

> Mogelijk via Duits Kram [12e eeuw; Kluge] ontleend aan een Slavische taal. Kluge noemt daarbij Servisch-Kerkslavisch gramŭ ‘herberg, kroeg’ en črěmŭ ‘tent’.
Ohd. kram ‘tent, marktkraam’ (nhd. Kram ‘rommel’); nfri. kream.
Oorspr. duidde het woord een tent of tentdoek aan, later ook een hele marktkraam. In het bijzonder kreeg ook de met doeken of gordijnen afgeschermde plaats waar een bevalling plaatsvond de naam kraam.

tchrist

I wonder if he pinched it from Germanic.

Cerberus

He says "KRAB- 'press'".

tchrist

3:40 AM

Don't know he did Slavic at all. Just Celtic and Germanic and Romance and Greek and Latin.

Cerberus

But cram already means 'press' in English, doesn't it?

Like Dutch kraam 2.

tchrist

Oh yes, it does.

Cerberus

So that would seem an obvious influence?

tchrist

Mostly he knew Germanic and classics.

Cerberus

As do most writers.

tchrist

3:42 AM

He knew German and Dutch and Norse/Scandinavian rather well.

And Gothic. He wrote poetry in Gothic!

Cerberus

I'm not surprised.

tchrist

And in Old English, of course.

Cerberus

The first works of fantasy I read as a child were Tolkien and Vance.

Now I still regard both as masters of language.

Is that just because I grew up with them?

Of course Vance lacks the erudition.

But he has a wonderful sense of sound and melody.

Almost none of his names are tacky.

Unlike e.g. Game of Thrones.

The one name from Vance I remember that I later found tacky was the kingdom of Beaujolais.

tchrist

He had some sort of maid/housekeeper/tutor/nun/I-froget who was from Spain when he was quite young, and came to like the "sound" of it quite a lot, all the ways it assimilated consonants to soften them to make it sound nice. He never liked the sound of French at all though.

Cerberus

Tolkien?

tchrist

3:45 AM

Yes.

Cerberus

Hmm.

tchrist

I don't know if that was really linguistic though, or whether he resented the Conquest so bitterly.

Cerberus

Some of the language of the Dark Lord has a harshness that might remind one of Spanish or Arabic?

tchrist

No, not of Spanish.

Cerberus

Semitic, then.

tchrist

3:46 AM

Arabic or Hebrew perhaps. He used Hebrew traits for the Dwarves' tongue.

Cerberus

Ah, for the dwarves as well.

Shouldn't it be dwarfs, by the way?

I always forget.

Not that I care much.

tchrist

Long story, but no, not in this case.

Dwarves was very very rare before him, although it was found. He unconsciously made it an "old" morphology like elf/elves and wolf/wolves.

To make them seem ancient.

But it should have been Dwarrow in the plural if it had been allowed to change normally over time. Hence Moria gets called the Dwarrowdelf at one point.

Cerberus

Ah, yes.

tchrist

Where delf is the normal terminal devoicing of delve and dolven and all that.

Cerberus

Does modern English still have that?

Dutch still has delven for mining.

tchrist

3:52 AM

Yes.

Cerberus

And e.g. delfstoffen for stuff one takes from the Earth.

tchrist

> Origin: A word inherited from Germanic.
Etymology: A Common West Germanic verb originally strong: Old English delfan ; dealf , dulfon ; dolven ; corresponding to Old Frisian delva , Old Saxon (bi-)delƀan , Middle Dutch and Dutch delven , Low German dölben , Old High German (bi-)telban , Middle High German telben < Old Germanic ablaut series delƀ-, dalƀ-, dulƀ-: not known in Norse, nor in Gothic; but having cognates in Slavonic. The original strong inflections were retained more or less throughout the Middle English period, though with various levellings of the singular and plural forms, d…

Cerberus

Oh, of course: one can still delve deeper into something in English.

tchrist

Yep.

Cerberus

It was so close to Dutch that my brain missed it.

tchrist

3:53 AM

hah

Cerberus

And it's nearly 6.

tchrist

please sleep

So too must I.

Cerberus

Do it.

I've finished brushing my teeth.

CowperKettle

4:21 AM

Republican Scott Apley died of covid several days after reposting an anti-vaccine post on Facebook.

Friday he did the anti-vaccine post, Sunday he was hospitalized, Wednesday he died.

CowperKettle

5:10 AM

Thatcher effect

Kidney transplant recipients have impaired immunity after second SARS-CoV2 vaccination: jci.org/articles/view/151178

Xanne

One might do better encouraging people to vaccinate if there were fewer images of needles, either extracting vaccine from a bottle or jabbing into an arm. Needles, needles, needles.

Be creative! Vaxxed man takes on evil spiny creatures, decapitates, renders it impotent, feels powerful, masterful. Ready for savior status if not sainthood. Or vv., whichever.

CowperKettle

12:35 PM

Robusto

12:59 PM

> The likely scenario, if the Big Freeze/Big Heat theories hold good, is two polar cold zones with hot tropics. That means available living space is directly affected by two double whammies. In short, it’s exactly a scenario for which the current distribution of people and resources are totally unprepared.

digitaljournal.com/world/…

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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…