@Silenus The Phrase Finder also has an HTML webpage listing all of their idioms It should be able to copy those over into a text file.

This is nice, Persian men protesting against whiplashes and prison sentences for women who don't wear headscarves.

Whiplash is something different than lashings with a whip.

@KitZ.Fox That's not necessarily true.

shrugs Whatever.

I'd argue it should have a hyphen though. =P

I'd argue that most native speakers would not immediately think you meant being struck by a whip.

But then, they might think you were talking about a Marvel character.

I dunno.

Seems clearer to say "protesting against the lash and prison for women".

Hmm, nah, if you're going to make a comic book reference to whiplash, it's probably going to be Gwen Stacy's death in Spiderman.

As can be seen here.

Maybe. Wasn't he also the main villain in Iron Man 2?

Gwen Stacy was Spiderman's love interest before Mary Jane.

@KitZ.Fox writing day?

I'm talking about Whiplash, not Spider-Man.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Oh right.

Ah, I'd know nothing about that unfortunately. Contemporary domestic entertainment isn't really something I like too much.

No, no, not Whiplash. You're thinking of that stuff that removes makeup from your mouth.

Lipwash? Ummm...no, no, you're thinking of that style of board that makes a good air barrier while still allowing the wood to breathe.

No, no, not whitewash. You're thinking of when you try to make your company sound environmentally aware.

green wash? hog wash? I was talking about shiplap.

dewlap?

washboard?

@MετάEd wait, that's nasty. how did you get makeup inside your mouth?

@Tonepoet that's 150 yrs or more (13thc = 1200's). But I don't trust that. good morwe, good morning are surely much earlier. Phaticisms like greetings aren't normally recorded in poetry or narrative writing which is much more formal. So my great suspicion is that they were used much earlier, and really the ancient germans probably had something cognate anyway.

but re mourn vs morn always check out both before jumping to conclusions: etymonline.com/index.php?term=mourn

no connection. lots of similar looking things aren't really cognate, and cognate things can really travel far and not look a thing like its neighbors.

There is always a lack of evidence in humankind history. I wonder how that will change when historians are studying us.

Cough, I didn't say they're cognate.

I just said they're homophones, which is accurate more or less.

They'd probably have too much data to work with.

@Tonepoet a good example of the problem with dictionaries. That first definition is not what 'whiplash' evokes in any native speaker. whiplash is what happens to your neck when you bump into another car, your neck snaps forward.

and then there's a lawsuit

[ SmokeDetector ] Bad keyword in body, pattern-matching website in body: Is Desert safari safe in the climate of Dubai? by safarideals on english.stackexchange.com …

@Tonepoet When anybody says 'I wonder why X and Y are homophones?' there's nothing else that it means other than 'are X and Y cognate?'

"Are they cognate?" and "They are cognate." are entirely different for one thing. Also it's more like "Isn't that funny?"

@TIPS Current event historians probably wish we'd all be buried under the sea in order to reduce the amount of information to study.

Or they'll find out about ELU and then quit.

@TIPS Not even all texts from Antiquity have been translated. There have always been abundance and scarcity at the same time.

@Cerberus The library at Alexandria!

Mhm

The library was lost.

I'm wondering what they'll think about something like this:

It's was mostly manga and anime and harlequin romances

@Mitch And a story about a man that ate potato

@Mitch It's supposed to be the first thing it evokes because it's obviously a metaphor. The context makes it rather clear what's meant and the definition is valid even if it is less common.

@TIPS ?? There's a story? Go on...

Well, um, much of a one-liner.

@Tonepoet depends on the dictionary.

@TIPS In context, it totally makes sense.

Well, also state of mind would help.

And a lot of cultural knowledge.

and also, blood concentrations of multiple pharmaceuticals.

Check.

and then you'd have to take into account the cultural context of the future historians, their ethnicities, their childhood traumas (or lack thereof, explaining a desperate need to surveil the lives of others), time of day (often overlooked).

Will languages become more complicated with time, or less?

Yes

You're wrong

Wait.. what does 'language' mean?

Incomprehensible again, are we?

That's presumptuous of you

presuming I spelled that correctly

@Mitch langue

parole

@Cerberus One can only hope

The One?

and only?

Why do you spell that as though it came from on and ly.

It should be onely.

@Cerberus Good movie

And why do you pronounce that as though it were about owning.

Stop that.

It's about oning

@TIPS I thought it was a deity.

Onanism?

I don't know what the langue/parole distinction is, but whatever it is, what is it in Dutch? or German?

What's what?

Sprache..??? Zünge??

I am become cognate, destroyer of tongues.

Sprache is language in German.

Dutch taal.

Related to English tale and tell.

@KitZ.Fox bite it

@Mitch Eeeh, which ones don't?

And probably also related to tally?

@Cerberus zahlen

Yes.

Zahlen is betalen.

Zahl is tal or aantal.

@Tonepoet OED orders them by date of first appearance. Others data by supposed popularity now. Others... by what they think?

if you order them one way, you really have no idea about the value the other way.

Hence anthology (anthos is flower, also as in the choicest part).

@Cerberus that's so metaphoracist

@Mitch Talk is the metaphor.

@Cerberus is 'talk' cognate to 'tal/zahl'?

@mitch I just checked all the usual online suspects over. Aside from the Cambridge learner's dictionary, all the others list the lash of a whip definition first. Besides, since when did we start being picky about how common a definition is?

In Latin, lego also means collect, but the metaphor was about collecting written words as a reader, rather than collecting spoken words as a speaker as in Greek.

So lego means to read in Latin, hence lecture.

@Mitch Hmm I don't know, but I would guess yes!

@Tonepoet since it provides an idea of how something will be understood, if at all.

The -k is probably Scandinavian, so it may have been borrowed from the Danes?

Like walk.

Neither Dutch nor German have -lk verbs from those roots.

Actually, what is the root of walk?

I can't think of any German or Dutch cognates.

They use laufen and lopen instead.

@Mitch I don't think that's a problem here.

What's the problem?

"I got 500 whiplashes" sounds like a foreigner. we don't know whether they mean they were in 500 car crashes and hurt their neck (because that's the natural understood meaning of 'whiplash') or 500 lashes of the whip (which would make more practical sense because 500 car crashes is pretty unlikely to happen), but that sounds strange, you wouldn't say it that way, you'd say '500 lashes of the whip'

Etymology is so satisfying.

Heck, if it were said aloud, it could easily be interpreted as separate words.

@Cerberus I asked an ELU question about that awhile ago, claiming that 'walk' and 'talk' had no IE cognates (I thought I heard that somewhere).

@Tonepoet no native speaker would pronounce it that way.

and if they were forced to, it would sound really weird.

@Cerberus etymonline.com/index.php?term=walk

Well we don't discuss lashing whips very often anymore because they're obsolete. The only reason somebody might want to use them after the advent of guns is to keep slaves and the English speaking nations abolished slavery.

Well, unless they're Indiana Jones.

as far as you can trust it, it seems PGerman did have a 'wealken' (and Dutch has a cognate)

@Tonepoet Nope.

Or a jockey. =P

@Tonepoet That's a good explanation of why no modern speaker would understand 'whiplash' as the first definition in that link you gave.

@Tonepoet that's a 'crop'

It's close enough. =P

@Mitch Hmm I see.

I didn't know that Dutch word.

@Mitch Well yes, I'm not trying to argue it's the most common meaning of whiplash. Just common enough.

@Mitch People are generally capable of picking a sense that is appropriate to the given context other than the no. 1 most common sense.

Need need to dumb everything down to the lowest and dreariest level imaginable.

@Tonepoet Really not all that common. More like, sounds like a non-native speaker.

Besides, whiplash in the sense you describe probably isn't a count noun. One broken neck and you're d-e-a-d.

Extreme conformity is the death of art.

It's not a broken neck. Plenty of people get whiplash and don't die.

Well, plenty of people get broken necks and don't die too, I suppose.

I guess this is all about that picture I posted.

@Tonepoet I'm sure the horse has other concerns

@Cerberus Me neither. I still don't.

It is interesting that nobody should find the women and their position interesting, nor those men's response.

Still 500 whiplashes couldn't possibly be interpreted any other way unless somebody made a hobby of going to roller coasters every day.

I really like that kind of solidarity.

@Tonepoet True. I don't deny that. It's just an odd way of putting it.

Because it is so utterly appropriate.

500 lashes (of the whip) would be a more likely expression, I should think.

@Tonepoet Not common at all. at the point of a gun a native speaker would say 'Do you mean that literally like the lash of a whip? or is it 'whip of a lash'? Here, why don't you loosen these shackles and I can show you.'

Probably because there aren't really other kinds of lashes. I mean, eyelashes. And the kind of lash you tie things with. But not really.

I'm not so sure. We'll have to talk to people who whip and (literally) get whipped.

@Tonepoet that's not what whiplash does to you. That's not what whiplash means

@KitZ.Fox maybe not plenty.

Maybe not plenty.

@Cerberus From now on, we'll just blame you.

Global warming? Cerb.

Give it up Mitch. You've been hoist by your own petard. All of the major dictionaries list this sense first. =P

Impending asteroid destruction? Cerb

People using whiplash to mean 'lashes by the whip'? Cerb.

Of course there are the Tuareg men who cover their hair:

@Cerberus I wonder if it's just a case of fatigue. The women's predicament seems like old news.

@Tonepoet I know, but what? Seriously, I don't know a single person who would think 'getting struck with a whip' as opposed to 'got into a car accident'.

@Cerberus I hesitate to follow up on this, but are you talking about a picture that the rest of us haven't seen?

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Could be...but the men's campaign is fairly new, I believe.

Don't forget the Sikhs.

@Cerberus Yes, that's good news.

@Mitch I'm not sure what you mean, haven't you seen the pictures?

@Tonepoet and maybe some native speakers of English.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 It's also very gender neutral and stuff.

Perhaps our men should wear high heels to work in order to protest against the pressure that lies on many women to wear them.

@Cerberus oh hah hah ahahha. yes. you started it all. Also, al those women look like they have whiplash.

@Cerberus Builds up your calf and butt muscles too

I'm sure.

At least we have a bit more equality now that most men wear skinny jeans...

At least much skinnier trousers, of all types, than ten years ago.

With the advent of the thigh-length t-shirt, now often worn by younger men, perhaps the dress will return to male fashion.

Horrible though it be.

@Tonepoet You have two native speakers here who disagree with that. Both of whom have given a good descriptive argument on how to read and understand the word, and interpret the entries in the dictionary. Who're you going to trust? Your reading of the book or ours?

@Cerberus I do not approve of this, since . . . well . . .

I digress.

@Mitch My point with that is that if we are going to be polling which construct is more likely to be used, we need to ask people who actually use the sentences in question. Other than people who actually use whips, you've also got fantasy writers.

@Cerberus What about 'comfort fit' or 'husky' sizes?

@TIPS He doesn't want to keep the wind from mussing his hair?

@TIPS Since?

Well the reading book honestly. There's a reason I don't ask questions on this website. XP

@Tonepoet e.g. native speakers?

@Mitch What about those?

@Tonepoet There are other problems with this site.

@Cerberus Since none of these "protests" are honest. They're just a means of belittling the Iranian government. IOW, mere politics

@Cerberus those are 'loose fit' as opposed to 'form fit' or skinny jeans style. SO not everyone wears skinny jeans

We've already established that most native speakers don't use sentence constructs like that because the whip is obsolete.

maybe they do in your neck of the woods.

@TIPS Why are they not "honest"? And why is it bad to be involved in politics, if you're fighting against oppression and violence?

@Mitch What about it?

Standard trousers one sees nowadays are skinny, although of course no fashion ever entirely forces out other cuts.

@Tonepoet OK. Then you agree with us that 'whiplash' almost always means an injury from a quick turn of the neck? and rarely if ever literally means a lash of a whip?

@Cerberus It's not bad to fight against oppression. I'm no supporter of the Iranian government's actions either. But I bet you some million reputation points none of these men gives a shit about women rights.

Why not?

@Mitch I was never appealing to commodity, so yes.

Well, you need to see my side of the story to understand what I mean, but that is impossible to get across by words.

@Tonepoet Some people think that readers are only capable of understand definition 1 of the dictionary. And that deviation is bad.

@Cerberus extreme lack of conformity is the death of understanding.

Oh. You were referring to the picture?

It is to be an inconceivable fallacy to confuse frequency with style, but it's no use arguing.

it's just a fashion

I think deviation is bad too, but I prefer the traditionally held definitions. I'm a member of a dying breed, so to speak. =P

everyone wearing scarves, or everyone not. both are conformity

but so what.

@TIPS Then I will have to just shrug, because your assumption seems very strange to me, so you cannot convince me this way.

@Tonepoet Tradition is important. Many people don't see that.

@Tonepoet Oh. It seemed entirely like you were, since you appealed to your interpretation being the most common understanding.

Yeah, it's frustrating since words are a tool of recollection. So many of our best metaphors are dying because people take them literally.

Just because some people used to follow tradition blindly in the 19th century, that doesn't mean tradition is bad. On the contrary. You just have to make sure bad traditions are killed, and keep honour the good ones.

@Cerberus unless it's fun to argue.

@Mitch I was just responding to you. I would've never mentioned that if you hadn't first.

@Tonepoet Oh, really? When do people take metaphors too literally?

The recent global mental wave of distrusting your government is much, much more worse and prevalent in the case of Iranians @Cerb. They do a million funny things everyday to "make some point".

@Mitch Grrr!

@Tonepoet Oh. In that case, I defer to Cerb. It really was his fault. That and ISIS

@TIPS What if they make a good point?

@Cerberus Heh, well, by many standards, the globe is strange to Iranians and Iranians are strange to the globe.

@Tonepoet people are even taking 'literally' literally these days.

@Cerberus Well, I suppose I misspoke. They interpret the metaphors as if they're literal.

I don't find Iranians strange?

Crazy

@Cerberus Then they can go on making it. But instead, mean what they do and say. This is not a game.

Ugh, don't remind me Mitch. =(

@Tonepoet Okay, but what kind of situation did you have in mind? Just curious.

@Mitch @Cerb doesn't find me strange. I need to fix this ASAP.

@TIPS Why would they not mean it?

@TIPS at some point in the past (before early 80's, no one in Iran wore the hijab (except maybe out in the countryside). So the fashion changed. It could change again.

@Cerberus Because they don't. They don't really care. If the Iranian government instead spoke of women rights, they would've put pictures of women with hijab.

@Mitch Mhm

@Cerberus are you kidding? That's the source of most discussion here. Pot calling the kettle black!

Which reminds me...tea time.

@Cerberus Here boy, here's a bone!

@Tonepoet I don't mourn over metaphors.

We can make more of them everyday.

What we can't make, however, is all the time we lost while mourning.

@TIPS Do you really think it is convincing to just say "they don't" to someone who believes the opposite?

@Cerberus I recollect seeing this question recently which has an interesting passage written by George Orwell.

@Cerberus I do not. So I was looking for a way to change the subject.

@Tonepoet haha. i was tweened. I was saying crazy about taking literally literally

That's literally insane

I would've appreciated what they do if I were convinced they believe in what they do.

Just really, they don't. How can I possibly prove this?

@TIPS But to someone's point not necessarily here, most of those people are super old and will die soon. But then all the young women are going to get sick and tired of wearing the hijab during the hot hot summer.

@TIPS You should mourn over dead metaphors.

@Tonepoet That quotation is good. But what does it have to do with taking metaphors too literally? Example?

@Mitch When you say tween, the first thing I think of is the name of the animation technique elided from between.

@Mitch I wouldn't consider the women I see on the street these days as "with hijab".

I think rejecting all these objections by saying They don't care or They're not sincere in what they say is misunderstanding them.

@TIPS You could explain the reasons that lead you to believe that. But never mind, we don't have to talk about this.

@Cerberus a dead metaphor is a dead metaphor. If you get my drift.

Umm...

My reasons boil down to people being people, and the grass is brighter on the other side, but I don't feel very comfortable discussing them.

Hmm, well i just mean the metaphors are interpreted as if the literal meaning of the metaphor is the alluded one and so the metaphors lose any qualities of allusion, alongside the thought processes which made the metaphors so effective in the first place.

@Tonepoet The first thing I think of is someone who is 11 or 12 years old

@Færd I don't reject anything. But they could be doing better than just wearing some cotton over their heads.

@Tonepoet Example?

BUt that is a neologism somewhere here on chat for getting a chat message preceded by message from other interleaved conversations, thereby possibly renegotiating the meaning based on the new context

I'm not concerned about what better they can do now. There are hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of people who sympathize with those objections if not participate in them. Should they all be called insincere?

Orwell makes a good one: Achilles Heel = Weakness instead of the sole weak point of the otherwise invincible Greek hero Achilles .

How is that different from just using a metaphor in a lazy, slightly incorrect way?

@TIPS sue, chador. they show a lot of hair above their forehead. I use hijab to mean headscarf even though it is literally a lot more than that. a lot more cloth

Or is that what you meant?

Truth is . . . Iranians have been oppressed for so long, a sudden spark of liberty may have horrifying results. Like leaving someone in the desert without food for some days, then taking them to a neat kitchen.

They were oppressed differently by the Shah.

@TIPS I don't feel confortable discussing other people either. How about movies? 'Jason Bourne' was disappointing.

@Færd Why do you drive the conclusion that my disapproval would indicate I don't appreciate any women rights act?

@Cerberus The gist is the same. It's more or less exposing people that have never been outside.

Did I say so?

@Mitch Oh? Why?

Because of the screeching soundtrack?

Or because it made too much reference to the previous trilogy (?)?

@TIPS Also, because of the lack of recent rain here, and because I've been secretly watering my grass, for once, really, the grass is greener on my side of the fence.

@TIPS They were exposed to those things under the Shah.

They remember.

Suck on that, Mr. WIlliamson!

And also under Mossadeq.

@Cerberus As much as a guy living here is concerned, that doesn't sound like it.

@Færd Yeah, it just seems like a strange assumption. But he said he didn't want to talk about it any more, so meh.

There could be another reason they behave like this.

Oh my. Wait.

@TIPS And your parents?

I just self-reflected and realized, I've been picturing a darker picture of where I live in than it really is.

Hmm, it's hard to say really...

@Tonepoet I think Orwell was just esthetically displeased by them because they were over used, and that those who (over) used them really didn't have a clear understanding of what the new metaphorical meaning was, which led to empty bombast in speeches which seemed to impress voters who weren't thinking real hard.

That's my interpretation.

@Cerberus They're also part of the world I see, and it doesn't change my train of thought.

@TIPS That must be a pleasant thought, then.

@TIPS But they remember the Shah.

I just wanted to say if you want to approve or oppose something you should get a good understanding of what it is and what are the intentions behind it.

@Mitch I saw Ghostbusters. I loved it. I have the entire dialogue of the original movie memorized, I've seen it so many times, but I think the new one is better than the original in every way.

True.

@TIPS hmm..didn't notice, but now that you mention it, augh, it's that much worse.

This should just be a mere criticism of the way Iranians I see generally only adapt the worse behavior regarding any recent global move or change.

@TIPS one of many possible complaints. referring back is not necessarily a bad thing, but it's stupid if done stupidly. and they did it.

Oh, but is that not how we all see our fellow countrymen?