Zompist Bboard Again

I think I would use "an IRL friend"

Just saw someone abbreviate "once" to "1ce"

Imagine a language which 1) is pro-drop; 2) extensively uses auxiliary verbs. Could those auxiliary verbs come to be reinterpreted as tense-marked subject pronouns?

Possibly my favorite show of all time, Leverage has a new revival, Leverage: Redemption on imdb tv. Of course, I binged all eight episodes that have come out so far. So now, on recommendation from just about everyone I've met who liked Leverage , I'm now watching White Collar , and quite enjoying it.

On a travel-related note: the Amtrak train (the Coast Starlight ), which I had been planning to take a few weeks from now to visit a friend in Portland, has been canceled, due to a bridge on the route being damaged by the Lava fire (side note: who names these? It's not like the fire was started by a...

I don't think I'd naturally produce "hot top", but I think I'd understand it in context. A similar term, which feels a bit more familiar to me is "black top". But "asphalt" is definitely the only term I would normally produce for that.

I think prior to looking it up in response to this thread, I pronounced it /slævɪʃ/, to rhyme with "lavish".

For me, a mug is a kind of cup ('cup' includes ~all open drinking vessels), and the distinction that a mug has is that it a) is comfortable to use with hot beverages (so it should have a handle or otherwise be thermally insulated), b) somewhat resilient to being (e.g.) dropped on the ground (so a te...

Why not /ar/ START vs /or/ NORTH? Or is /ar/ used for one of MARRY MARY MERRY (which are all the same to me)?

Is that an originally French license text translated into English, or vice-versa?

(cw: COVID-19) In my apartment building, there are two other apartments with people in my general social circles, "A" and "B". For most of the pandemic, they have been podding together, but since "B" hasn't been willing to take certain precautions, like maintaining a cl...

There's also the myth of the equal opportunity asshole — the TL;DR is that even if the toxic men are equally toxic to men and to women (or similarly along any other axis of marginalization), women on average have to put up with more toxicity in their lives, so the equal amounts of toxicity are more ...

I've only watched season 1 plus random assorted episodes of TNG, and I think the "watch random episodes when they're on" method of watching it is a lot more enjoyable than the "watch the whole series in sequence" method. It's very episodic (especially compared to the more recent ...

Do you lean towards constructions like 'x past y' and 'x to y' or number-quoting like 'xx:yy'? E.g. is 5:10 "ten past five" or "five ten"? Do you prefer numbers only or do you use the phrases 'half past', 'quarter past' and 'quarter to'? Do you ever abbreviate "half past x&...

From twitter's "what's happening" sidebar:

Biden Cabinet picks face confirmation hearings ahead of the inauguration

I initially parsed "picks" as the verb, and was curious about what a "face confirmation hearing" was

I think I'm definitely a lot less likely to produce 'apartmentmate' in speech or casual text, generally using 'housemate' to refer to the other people who live in my apartment. But in a non-real-time medium like this forum, I for some reason decided I needed more specificity, hence 'apartmentmate'. ...

Upon recommendation from several of my apartmentmates, I've recently started reading The Wandering Inn , a web novel about a woman from earth who gets transported to a fantasy world in which people have classes, levels, and skills à la D&D. It is currently on-going, with updates twice a week (an...

Typically I've done (2) if I can, otherwise falling back on (6)

Palatino was my go-to font for homework assignments for most of college (typset in LaTeX, of course). I found it a bit more pleasant to look at than the default Computer Modern. My résumé is in Roboto Slab, altho I generally dislike slab serifs — I think sans-serif fonts feel a bit too plain when pr...

I'm a big fan of Helvetica. I also like Iosevka , or more specifically, my customized version of it (using the extended width, and a couple of specific glyph variants). It's a monospace font (a must, since I spend most of my time in a terminal) and it has excellent unicode coverage (another must for...