English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

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12:45 AM

The bony-eared assfish (Acanthonus armatus) is a bathypelagic species of cusk-eel found in tropical and sub-tropical oceans at depths of from 1,171 to 4,415 metres (3,842 to 14,485 ft). It has been found as far north as Queen Charlotte Sound off British Columbia's coast. This species grows to a length of 37.5 centimetres (14.8 in) SL. It is the only known member of its genus Acanthonus.The bony-eared assfish may have the smallest brain-to-body weight ratio of all vertebrates.Like many other creatures that dwell in the depths of the sea, assfish are soft and flabby with a light skeleton. This is...

CowperKettle

1:13 AM

> The B. 1.1529 variant – which is expected to be dubbed the Nu strain – was first detected in Botswana, Africa, on November 11.

> the strain could “escape from most known monoclonal antibodies”, indicating it could potentially cause fresh outbreaks across the globe by dodging the body’s defences.

news.com.au/world/coronavirus/global/…

4 hours later…

tchrist

5:02 AM

> > Now, in normal times, companies pay influencers to 𝕙𝕠𝕔𝕜
their merchandise on the soc meads, but the issue now
is that brands don't necessarily know if they will have
enough stock to fulfill orders if a product ends up
going viral, so some brands are using influencers to
promote a wider breadth of producdts, rather than
focusing on a few items, and keep the messages (read:
messaging) more general.

Last night Stephen Colbert talked about companies paying people to HOCK their junk (hock is like by taking them to a pawn shop). He should surely have said companies were paying them to HAWK their wares (hawk like a street barker or common costermonger).

Michael Cohen Is Kanye's Fixer | Roger Stone, Alex Jones In Hot Water For Roles In Jan. 6th Attack

►

At that time point.

And no, he doesn't have a hock–hawk merger either. I think he just said the wrong word.

Unless he was being incredibly multilevelled in his humor.

If you're broke, you hock your junk; you put it in hock at the pawn shop.

If you're trying to turn a profit, you send out barkers hawking whatever crap you're trying to sell people.

Did I somehow miss a memo about this?

> From the phrase in hock, circa 1855-60, from Dutch hok (“hutch, hovel, jail, pen, doghouse”). [1] Compare also Middle English hukken (“to sell; peddle; sell at auction”), see huck.

Verb
hock (third-person singular simple present hocks, present participle hocking, simple past and past participle hocked)

(transitive, colloquial) To leave with a pawnbroker as security for a loan.

Yet hucksters are peddlars.

The OED keeps these quite separate.

> hock v.3
Etymology: < hock n.7
slang (originally U.S.).

transitive. To pawn.

The other one is a lot older.

> hawk v.2
Forms: Also 1500s hauk(e.
Frequency (in current use): Show frequency band information
Etymology: Apparently a back-formation < hawker n.2

> 1. intransitive. To practise the trade of a hawker.
2. a. transitive. To carry about from place to place and offer for sale; to cry in the street.

huck is hundreds of years earlier than hawk, which in turn is hundreds of years earlier than hock.

Huckster as a noun is from around 1175. We verbed it in the 1500s.

> huck v.
Forms: Middle English huk, hukke, 1500s–1600s hucke, 1500s– huck.
Frequency (in current use): Show frequency band information
Etymology: In form, the base of huckster n., but the chronological evidence makes their actual relations difficult to determine.
Huck has iterative derivatives, hucker v. and huckle v.1, which favours its being an old word; it agrees also in form and sense with German dialect hocken, höcken, hucken to huckster: see Grimm.

> Obsolete exc. dialect.

a. intransitive. To higgle in trading; to haggle over a bargain; to chaffer, bargain. Also figurative. To haggle over terms, to stickle.

2 hours later…

CowperKettle

7:43 AM

CowperKettle

7:54 AM

> Around one in six people (15-20%) report addictive patterns of eating or addictive behaviours around food.

For some reason I dislike this usage of "around", although it's handy

4 hours later…

CowperKettle

12:05 PM

CowperKettle

12:20 PM

> Civilian gun ownership per capita in 2017. Data from Small Arms Survey.

CowperKettle

12:39 PM

Ladies' suit in a Romanov Imperial Train, 1910

There's even the emergency brake handle visible.

In modern Russia, they look different.

СТОП КРАН (STOP KRAN)

The word KRAN is borrowed from Dutch kraan

> From Middle Dutch crāne, from Old Dutch *crano, from Proto-West Germanic *kranō, from Proto-Germanic *kranô. The senses “tap” and “crane” as a machine are both based on resemblance with the bird's neck.

> Emergency brakes were introduced in the United Kingdom by the Regulation of Railways Act 1868.

CowperKettle

1:39 PM

CowperKettle

1:52 PM

Word of the day: gore (a sector of a curved surface [1] or the curved surface that lies between two close lines of longitude on a globe and may be flattened to a plane surface with little distortion.)

2 hours later…

CowperKettle

3:39 PM

Current weather

Minus 9°C

user532270

3:49 PM

using Celsius, I already like you xd

user532270

fluffy snow perticipation would change this photo's scene to cosy and a lot more pleasant!

CowperKettle

I'm in Russia, we use Celsius here. We used to use the Réaumur scale, but that was up to the 19th century ))

user532270

wow, it's the first time I ever hear about Reaumur, and Wikipedia tells me it once was a big thing! shame on me for my ignorance xd

M.A.R.

9:10 PM

@CowperKettle whoa there, spare me the gory details

@CowperKettle Are-country is a city in the United States of JFK Jr.

@CowperKettle well, you have antibodies, and molecules that aren't antibodies, and molecules that are halfway there. You have special places your lymphocytes need to be, how well they respond to things that stimulate them, how big their responses, and how many of them are being recycled. There's also a bit of 'luck' involved.

Measuring immunity accurately is impossible. Measuring antibodies is more reliable, because for the most part that's what vaccines do and the other weird effects are supposed to average out in a large population, but you don't know that, for some of those things.

It's all about thingies and stuff.

Cerberus

@M.A.R. For the record, vaccines do stimulate (the formation of relevant) t-cells, don't they?

M.A.R.

@Cerberus it's all very confusing. But yeah, it's safe to assume when B cells are stimulated, they will stimulate T cells too.

Now, you have TLs that secrete lots of stuff (pro-inflammation etc.), like TH-1, and you have cells that kill. CTLs (cytotoxic, kill cells). The ratios of these T cells to each other and to other types of T cells is regulated, specifically, TH-1/TH-2 probably determines whether the immune response will be harmful and how much.

TH-2 are jerks, they activate ICBM-ish immune cells, like eosinophils, that secrete so much of very potent stuff that wreaks havoc on alveolar cells

And Covid is sometimes dangerous because of the virus, and sometimes because of what the immune cells do to the tissues

There are drugs being developed that target TH-2 cells. Often for asthma (They're responsible for allergies too)

@Cerberus T cells do not recognize antigens on their own. They're presented antigens by cells conveniently called antigen presenting cells (APCs). Macrophages and B cells can be APCs, but there are cells whose main function is only to present antigens to T cells. Which is why it's safe to assume that if B cells are activated, so are T cells.

Unless there's some unique genetic defect in an important part of that process (all of which are rare AFAIK)

Cerberus

9:39 PM

A complicated system.

M.A.R.

Well, so far the only thing I've accomplished in my course is confusing myself further

Cerberus

That is science.