@Lambie Why can't I tell your and Mitch's icons apart? :)

I feel like he was once a taurine creature of some sort.

Maybe bovine.

@DannyuNDos Synaesthesia?

You got that wrong. It's aquiline...

@Lambie I think the Geoff Lindsey video explains it pretty well. There are two accents here: traditional RP and SSB (aka contemporary RP), which both get used across a wide range of registers; the former, which is what "BBC English" often/usually refers to, is associated with the older upper class and has become quite rare in the contemporary UK itself.

But certain EFL teachers haven't moved on from it and will still teach people silly things, like that you should pronounce the word air as a diphthong.

Or that law and lore aren't exact homophones.

Likewise tour and tore.

@Lambie More likely asinine.

@DannyuNDos you've used that sequence of letters before. What is it supposed to mean? I don't recognize it.

Sadge? Do you mean sad?

I've been using it to mean "sad, not emotionally, but for disappointment".

@Lambie I'm not able to distinguish very well between fancy and educated

@Mitch Sure you can! [ˈɛstjuˌwɛɹi] > [ˈɛstuˌwɛɹi] > [ˈɛstʃʉˌweɹi] > [ˈɛstjʊəɹi] > [ˈɛs̺t͜ʃʉ̞ɹi] > [ˈæʃt͡ʂɻʷi] Got a light? :)

How to convert your nearest estuary into an ashtray.

@DannyuNDos a Google search tells me it is 'internet slang' interesting new word to me

@tchrist like ashes in my mouth

Going from five syllables to two is efficiency in action.

My question for you: can you not ascribe some measure of "fancy" to "educated" to ... oh I dunno, less so, to those?

@Lambie 1) US English doesn't have the large distance distance in privilege between newscaster speak and regular people speak.

Except for rural accents...

So you're saying it's a matter of having gone to university?

And the big one that everybody ignores, AAE

@Mitch Color blindness.

Which is interesting since Ayesha Roscoe started on Sunday Edition (on NPR) who speaks with a very articulate but still noticeably AAE 'accent' (I can't remember any AAE grammar)

That she speaks dialect not broadcast?

@tchrist I unh owe

Maybe they're actually complaining about vocal fry?

@tchrist broadcasters but with AAE accenting.

She's not nonrhotic or th-dentalization or fronting or be-dropping. Just 'how it sounds'

I still think it's because she's a lady that people gripe. Nobody complains about Lester Holt's accent.

@Mitch I tried looking for this. I did not like what I found.

@tchrist Does she have that? I don't know.

Yes.

@tchrist Yeah, pretty uptight to be bothered by it.

Search for "complaints about Ayesha Rascoe accent". Maybe you won't get all the ugly bile I got.

I refuse to quote anything whatsoever from those search results that I got.

@tchrist holds back from copy-pasting

@Mitch Maybe you got to read measured, genteel commentary. I—did not.

I'm not sure what the problem with vocal fry is, even if you notice it

> I am a long time listener and contributor to NPR. Im also a liberal woman who supports the advancement of women of color. But Ayesha Rascoe is simply not capable of hosting Sunday edition. Her poor grammar, loud, inappropriate laughter and inability to connect with the people she interviews make listening to her impossible. The long pauses as she seems to have lost her place in the script are particularly annoying. Ive tried for a year but I just cant listen anymore.

"Chalkboards aren't dead after all."

Doesn't "loud, inappropriate laughter" sound like it's trying to put somebody in "their place"?

It's not awful but it shows a lack of awareness.

> It impacts me on the radio most, because my voice sounds a bit different. It’s obvious that I’m Southern and Black. It makes me stand out. The vast majority of the audience has embraced me and has been very positive. There are some people who don’t like the way I pronounce my vowels, or this or that, or the way I pronounce oil (one syllable). I think it also helps to have a little Southern hospitality.

Maybe it's "damned" yankees and other northerners uncomfortable with southern accents who are complaining?

@tchrist I mean it is Sunday Edition which while it has serious segments about tragedy around the world it has a higher share of lighter topics which calls for loud but appropriate laughter

@Mitch Tragedy, yeah.

Also the Sunday quiz is a groaningly punny as anything.

I'm guessing that whatever it is that to use her own words makes her voice "sound a bit different", that it isn't being described in a way that describes what characteristics causing the "grating" nature people find with it, but I'm pretty sure that this is racist, sexist, or regional bias at work, and quite likely all of those.

@tchrist Probably. Also old people.

@Mitch Old people?

@tchrist Old people.

Because old people don't want to listen to young people? Surely the voice of a young woman laughing is a delight to hear across all ages? :)

It's not sexist because as long as I can remember Sunday Edition has had a female anchor.

@Mitch Yes.

lulu Garcia Navarro and before her ... Rachel.... Somebody

But imagine if she were a young man with that accent.

@Mitch Even many (most?) old BBC newscasters don't speak traditional RP. Listen to this guy. He clearly pronounces years and feared as monophthongs, [ɪː] rather than the old fashioned [ɪə].

Rachel Martin

The black CNN anchors do seem to weigh in on the older side, all things considered.

Yes it's just Rascoe people have been complaining about

Surely in the 70's people complained about female newscasters because they weren't 'authoritatice' enough

authoritatrix

'authoritative'

We all have different autocorrect daemons guarding us.

I'm glad Audie Cornish landed well... I bet she's being paid quite a bit more than at NPR

@Mitch That does seem odd.

@Mitch I was just thinking those same things.

@tchrist mine seems to be doing the opposite of guarding

The fox guarding the spelling house

When the genius loci becomes the idiota domi?

I have the feeling she chose to jump ship before being .. made redundant

They laid like a hundred people off a year ago.

I thought it was a difficulty with NPR culture rather than money

nytimes.com/2023/03/25/us/npr-layoffs-podcasts.html

@Mitch For Cornish? I have no insights there.

@alphabet that's a difference I have a hard time telling among all the rest of the similarities

@tchrist yes, just vague half remembered intuition

> As the MedUni Vienna research team shows, ME/CFS patients can be divided into subgroups based on the function of their immune system. The study was able to identify various biomarkers in the patients that indicate immune system disorders or reduced intestinal barrier function. meduniwien.ac.at/web/en/ueber-uns/news/2024/…

"Leaky gut" in a subset of chronic fatigue patients

QED

Because of the Moon and planets

Word of 10:16 am: fuller

@CowperKettle The fuller is the grooves on either side of that knife. The idea is to make the blade lighter. You see it more in swords.

Notice how the fuller is along most of the length of that cavalry saber?

And there's a fuller on a bayonet.

The authorities are not giving away Navalny's body to his relatives, despite multiple requests, and morgue managers refuse to answer whether his body is stored in their facility t.me/bbcrussian/60847

Yesterday a gang of policemen stormed the office of the Yabloko party, because they organized a meeting, inside the office, on their premises, dedicated to Navalny's death. Not a street meeting, not a rally.

‘Over 400 Detained In Russia’ as Country Mourns Death of Putin Critic Alexei Navalny

@Robusto Yes, I know; I just added it to Anki :)

In Russian it's dol, which I never knew too.

@Robusto Yeah that's a fun little thing that really doesn't matter much except for maybe a couple of physicists.

That 1+2+3+4+... has an interpretation that equals -1/12 seems extremely counterintuitive (and is) and is mostly not very useful, but the algebraic derivation (as givne in that video and many others) is what I would call 'accessible'.

@alphabet RE this, the key difference between my position and EA's is that he thinks questions here should require an expert to answer them, but I think that we should allow questions as long as it's possible to answer on a deeper level, even if there are other ways to address the question

You are probably aware that 1 + r + r^2 + r^3 + ... (the geometric series with ratio r) is 1(1-r) (check with r = 1/2... go one step, then a 1/2 step, then 1/4,... and you'll only get to 2 and 1/(1-1/2) = ... bleep bloop bleep... 2.

But what if you let r = 2 (you double the distance every time)? Obviously the sum is infinite and the usual interpretation, the basis of almost all convergence theorems, is that that the series diverges. But 1/(1-r) = -1.

That seems crazy, or, as is often done in mathematics, it means you're doing something different than convergence, and there are weird circumstances where you want to do that (I personally don't know of any but I hear that some people (like some physicists) do.

Oh, the connection between 1+2+4+8+... and 1+2+3+4+... - the video does that, it's very 'accessible' (some simple algebra if you can get past accepting manipulating the entire sequence at once)

OK that was my math lecture for today. Anybody up now for cliff jumping?

Me 🙋🏻‍♂️

It's a small cliff

more of a ledge

maybe a tall step

No bungee cord?

Oh

That's why I chose a less impressive jump site

It's more exciting if you close your eyes.

It's my turn 😂

@Mitch The issue with Roscoe for me is not the accent. She's smart, articulate and well spoken. Her problem is something that affects some presenters. She is a nazalizer. One Spanish presenter on a football (soccer) TV station does the same thing. She's smart and articulate and knows her football. But her voice is completely nasal. And I am not talking about "hypernasality", which is considered a disorder. It's nothing that a speech therapist can't fix.

And whoever that longtime listener you quote says, she just sounds (in writing) like a grumpy New England byitch.

Be wise and linearize.

@user85795 Yeah that's a classic of actual math presented that is accurate as math and accurate as social interaction but also translates to non-math people well (ie dramatically).

@user85795 Or be a pirate and damyerize.

I have one cavil about the scene... the big curve she draws at the end to look snake-like is not at all an intuitively drawn figure for what is being discussed (also the circular motion she makes with her hand at one point is totally wrong). All the dynamism in the diagram is left to right.

So what I'm saying, based on my distaste, they'll have to reshoot that scene.

Or recall the entire movie.

They should get on that as soon as they can before more people see this.

A lot water has passed under the bridge since 1980.

@user85795 Pretty much everything is linear (or we act like it is)

but...

"Saying that a system is non-linear is like saying all animals are non-elephants." - Stanislaw Ulam.

Wait that's not right is it?

how about this one...

Stanislaw Ulam: "The study of non-linear physics is like the study of non-elephant biology!"

That's closer to it.

All these people rewriting what they half heard and half remembered.

@Mitch The seasons are linear. Like a sine wave, actually.

One that is twisted around itself, like the symbol for infinity.

♾️

^not linear

@MetaEd Be silent and openyerize

@Lambie that is definitely the case

I mean I don't care for every voice.

Physicists made the mistake of thinking that light travels instantaneously from on point to another.

I find Michelle Wolf pretty funny, but I have a hard time hearing her voice for too long, very ... grating.

@user85795 That's a very reasonable thing to think (on Earth)

They couldn't measure the time so why not.

Also, the Earth is pretty flat if you live in Topeka.

@user85795 Also, it is very intuitive to think that vision comes -out- of your eyes. It took a lot of experimentation to realize that light bounces off stuff and goes -into- our eyes.

@Mitch In the case of the Spanish presenter, I found a speech therapist near the TV station and sent them a message on Facebook, telling them she needed one but that her content was great.

Thinking about that makes me want to shut my eyes.

So v = d/t implies for light c = d/0

@Lambie Sometimes just hearing recordings of yourself makes you realize what's up.

Like I've heard some people with lisps didn't realize they were doing that but hearing themselves they were able to consciously avoid it.

d/0 = ∞ = c

@user85795 All that water has promulgated a poor (I would say erroneous) intuition of the Snake Lemma.

If it is not corrected soon bridges may fall.

Or rather people will begin to mistrust the reliability of bridges.

steps gingerly

Physics has made infinity a number by writing c = ∞

@Lambie But telling that to someones face probably wouldn't go over very well.

The truth is not beautiful.

555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555

Sprrut

@Robusto jajaja!

Sorryu, cat sitting on keyboard

@user85795 infinity (actually infinities) can be well defined and given rules for its manipulation but somehow that never happens in HS math (it'd be a kind of distraction), and teachers end up saying things like 'the limit is undefined' or 'the limit doesn't exist'.

Keyboard not comfortable enough. Cat gone now.

@Robusto and the amount of pleasure afforded by annoying you was not enough to counterbalance.

@Mitch Cats is cats.

Is infinity as well defined as the real numbers.

@user85795 Sure

Then include it in the definitions

@user85795 it's a tiny bit... messy... with a handful of exceptions

@user85795 And frankly, most people get by with not having real numbers or integers 'defined', so that in order to define an infinity for those, you kind of have to start from scratch with all the 'defining' rigamarole.

@Mitch It's infinities all the way down.

@Robusto uh actually...

The set of even integers is a subset of the set of real numbers, ne?

Both are infinite.

But they are not the same.

Infinitely many is the same as infinitely many.

∞=∞

Is the infinity of red the same as the infinity of blue?

Their sums may be the same, but not their values.

What is the value of red.

Value=number

@user85795 What is the value of love? Love ≠ Number.

Not all that can be counted has value.

Not all that has value can be counted.

When in doubt, look about.

@Robusto Yes. That just shows if you define things explicitly and coherently, the idea of quantity, or some measure of size, is not the same as the idea of subset.

Number is the result of measurement and measurement refers to the value of a quality

When that value has been ascertained by counting, measuring, or estimating.

You can define ;infinity' by saying that a set that has a subset of itself that is also equinumerous (what ever the definition of size/number is), then tha set is said to be infinite.

eg the set of numbers 1,2,3,4... is in one-to-one and onto relation with 0,1,2,3,4... (just add 1 going one way, subtract one the other way. so there are exactly as 'many' in the first set as in the second even though the first set is a strict subset of the second. So you say that the second set is 'infinite'.

(you can do very similar reasoning with your example of even and all integers)

Worth showing again.

@Mitch I'm not disputing that those are two infinite series. They're just not the same series is my point.

@Robusto yes. They are distinct series. one is a subset of the other. Both are infinite (or to be more precise but not fully precise, they both have the same number of numbers, that number being infinity (to be precise this infinity (and there are more of them) is the infinity that is the number (or cardinality if you prefer) of the natural numbers)).

This particular infinity, the number of natural numbers (0,1,2,3,4...), is usually called aleph_0.

There are a lot more infinities.

drops mic

@Robusto picks mike back up again

@Mitch Mike has fallen down infinitely many times already.

Another commonly named infinity is 'c', the number (or cardinality if you prefer) of numbers in the continuum, the number of numbers on the real line between 0 and 1.

@Robusto He's seeing someone about that.

@Mitch But if Mike's falls have been infinite in number, this cannot be the last time.

One might think that wow since the number of evens is that same as the number of all natural numbers, then the number of real numbers is probably also the same.

But that thought would not be right.

And of course there's a proof that, following all these definitions, the number of reals is strictly greater than the number of natural numbers.

@Robusto well, I suppose he could have fallen infinitely many times in the past and that this is just the end.

Terminal infinity? How does that work?

It only works if time works backwards.

-or- he fell once in one second, then once in half a second, then once in a quarter, etc etc. and he'd do all his falling, an infinite number of times, and finish up in 2 seconds.

OK, Xeno.

@Robusto yes, if you absolutely insist on physical realization.

haha you make me chuckle.

physics

snort

As Jean-Paul Sauvage, philosopher detective, put it to Xeno: "I shoot you, therefore you ain't."

Xena, infinite warrior princess.

@Mitch I kinda sorta do. I live in a physical world, however mental that makes me.

@Robusto There's no infinity in real life, but our ability to manipulate mental concepts involving infinity make it easier to manipulate the real world.

There ares philosphers of math who are called ultra-finitists who deny the existence of any kind of infinity.

Norman Wildberger

They have their place in the academic world and are often considered in the crackpot direction (when they're being weird about it), but they still teach undergrad calculus successfully.

@Mitch In that respect, I find that poetry works better for living in the real world.

@user85795 haha yeah he's one...well, he's not a logician (one who ha thought long and hard and written papers in logic journals showing the logical consequences of ultrfinitism). He's more of an informal (for a mathematician) finitist using intuition.

"The function of a poet is to help people live their lives." —Wallace Stevens

@Robusto Sure sure sure but I wouldn't want to use poetry to design a cell phone packet switching network.

Mathematics is the poetry of logical ideas.

@Mitch And how do those things comfort you. In fact, poetry is more infinite and more useful to the soul than your cell phones or packet-switching networks.

@user85795 But reality is illogical (some have called it absurd). So put that in your pipe and smoke it.

🚬

::cough cough::

Albert Camus on why accepting absurdity is the start of a fruitful life

> While the idea that life has no inherent meaning can be jarring even to the point of despair, many philosophers who studied the problem think it doesn’t have to be that way. Albert Camus event went further, arguing that “accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.”

But I don't wanna think big, I wanna think I'm right.

That is a very small ambition.

Some might say it's infinitesimal.

✓

1÷∞

@user85795 except of course that ∞ is not a number

@MetaEd Sure it is. It's a lazy 8.

@Robusto 8−−

@Robusto an energetic 8 would of course be 8++

@MetaEd That's fine nine with me.

@MetaEd you just missed my TED talk from an hour ago.

@Mitch I recorded it. Here it is in toto.

Here's @Mitch on Jimmy Kimmel:

Voting to reopen this for reasons stated in the comments.

@Robusto I resent that connection. How can you think my eyebrows are that big?

To be fair, I've been letting them grow out ever since Covid started.

@Robusto My first thought was 'Tiffany' and 'Brianna'

'Tammy' on the other hand... the only two Tammy's I've known were not. But I suppose I can see that on average maybe it is more common among the 'common folk'.

@Laurel It might be good to respond to that thread to clarify things, so that EA and I are no longer at an impasse. As MetaEd noted, this site's tour says it's for "for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts," which does seem to rule out grammar questions that aren't sufficiently difficult. IMHO the language in that "tour" page is a bit overly strict.

@alphabet It asks you to define "serious English language enthusiasts"; I always have defined it as the set of users that includes me. YMMV.

@Robusto I'm sure it describes our best answerers, but I don't think all our askers need to be in that category.

@Mitch: So ... laddy is not in NYT SB word list.

@alphabet Deliberately strict. The site was always conceived of as a Q&A site for professionals in the field of the English language. It was a direct analogue to how Stack Overflow is a Q&A site for professionals in the field of computer programming.

@Robusto We should create an open source word game platform which is multilingual, you can replace it with our own dictionary.

To be fair to the lexicographers, curating a dictionary is a lot of work though.

@Mitch Sure. Trouble is, laddy is still English. Scots English, sure, but that's still English.

Fixing one word is one thing. Fixing all of them is more than one thing.

@Mitch Oh, boo-hoo. Lexicographers should be happy just to have a job in this day and age.

@Robusto the definition of 'word' has fuzzy edges.

@Robusto "Quitcher whining and keep digging for more word ore."

@Mitch Not unless it's crocheted into a sampler it doesn't.

@Robusto that's even fuzzier than I was thinking.

I'm impressed that such a thing exists that is fuzzier than you could be thinking.

Some words are obviously words.

The vast majority of things we say are obviously words

Hmmm.

The vast majority of things we don't say are obviously non-words.

It's that nasty set along the boundary where I am obviously right and the NYT SB are blind or insane or both.

Zotz.

Pfff.

Nothing against insane people, to be sure.

Mmm

Mmhmm

Nnmm

Nuh-uh.

Uh huh

Eep.

Sorry, eep is French, I think.

'uh' as everyone should know is a language universal.

I mean people say it in some crazy accents around the world but

@Robusto oh really? It feels like a cartoon expression, but not particularly French to me

Ditzel

For a little spot

That's German. I think it's spelled Dützel.

Ope (sort of a synonym of oops but no actual mistake has been made)

Rhymes with Prützel.

@Robusto maybe in German it is, but in good ol America it's ditzel

What about in bad ol' America?

@Robusto we'll see in about a year

OIC

Which, one could argue, we've been in for quite a while

I wonder what Indians think about 'All creatures great and small' the James Herriot stories (and BBC series)?

Like "Poor Yorkshire farmers? I'll show you poor!"

Or Oliver Twist?

"Working 18 hours a day for thin gruel? At least they had a roof over their heads. Which by the way was paid for by profits off of a similar factory in Calcutta where they'd be happy to have such gruel"

@MetaEd At present, the vast majority of our users, both askers and answerers, are not employed as (say) copyeditors or writers or linguists or English teachers. So I don't think that that's really our standard.

@alphabet I get that, but it's sort of like saying, democracy crashed here in Absurdistan, at present we're a military dictatorship, so that's really our standard.