Zompist Bboard Again

alice wrote: ↑Sat Jun 01, 2024 2:41 pm Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was (traditionally) released 57 years ago today. This date will soon become like D-Day: nobody alive will be able to remember it.

Does that mean it was now 77 years ago today that Sergeant Pepper told the band to play?

Does anyone else have the impression that pool has a weird kind of cross-class appeal? That is, it seems to be stereotypically associated with both a certain kind of upper class person and a certain kind of working class person. OK, upper class pool players stereotypically own their own tables somew...

but I understand that minorities called upon as they are to assert a right that opposes the majority, that the concept of activism is no longer suitable to depict them, the truth, and its dick, is probably elsewhere... I'm not sure I understand correctly what you're saying there, but - are you sayi...

A world under Trump, Putin and Xi Jinping isn't really multipolar; what ideological difference there may be isn't terribly important. THIS. This, this, this. It's completely ridiculous to support that trio, or any one or two of that trio, and claim that you're doing it because you want a "mult...

There were a lot of dishes to do today. And now they're all clean.

Ah, thank you!

Now I'm wondering why, among Christian or Christian-descended speakers of English and also some other European languages, "Michael" has traditionally been so much more common than "Raphael". I mean, both are names of Old Testament archangels, right?

The priest who baptized my late husband in 1946 refused to accept the name "Cameron" unless it was hyphenated to "Cameron-Joseph" because there is no saint or martyr named "Cameron" recognised by the Catholic Church. Sixty years later, at my nephew's baptism, the pries...

Wow. I didn't see that coming - Tory backbenchers were trying to un-call the election:

https://davidallengreen.com/2024/05/tho ... to-an-end/

The Democrats may not be ideal, but anyone who thinks that the Republicans are somehow better than them (including the people who think that the Republicans somehow favor the working class or that the Democrats should not be voted for because they are "elitist") [...] I don't have the imp...

Ah, thank you.

This finally went online ! (Took long enough...) Great! Do I get this right that in "It is found that perfluoroalkyl diacids and pillar-[5]-arenes rapidly and strongly complex with each other at aqueous interfaces, forming solid interfacially templated films.", "complex" is the ...

This finally went online ! (Took long enough...) Great! Do I get this right that in "It is found that perfluoroalkyl diacids and pillar-[5]-arenes rapidly and strongly complex with each other at aqueous interfaces, forming solid interfacially templated films.", "complex" is the ...

Glass Half Baked wrote: ↑Sun May 26, 2024 6:22 pm Perhaps we could add to the heap the practice of US legal English using "whereas" to mean "here begins a sentence."

I had the impression that in US legal English, "whereas" means basically "because".

xxx wrote: ↑Mon May 27, 2024 3:08 am globalization, including of information, has reduced the need for systematic translation, which was once the norm...

Isn't it the opposite? Hasn't globalization increased the need for translation, as there is now more information from different parts of the world?

There might be some truth in what you say, jcb, but I don't think your timeline makes sense. The rural white working class jumped ship from the Dems before the betrayal you complain about happened. They voted, three times in a row, first for Ronald Reagan himself, and then for his VP, while the Dems...

The explanation I have read is that he has given up on winning the general election and instead is focused on winning the Tory leadership election by pandering to the far right. Hmm… OK, yeah, that sounds quite plausible too. (Very sadly.) I don't see even that working, though. Isn't the Tories' fa...

I also started learning English at 10 - and like you, I am thus not a native speaker. My point was an attempt at a reductio ad absurdum of the idea that Europe, during the centuries when Latin was a widely used language of liturgy and scholarship, had native Latin speakers. Or that modern Copts are...

Looking at the main zompist.com page, I just stumbled across this pretty old piece:

http://zompist.com/spoke.html

If Europe had native Latin speakers in the Middle and Early Modern Ages, wouldn't that mean that, by the same logic, I'm a native English speaker? Were you raised bilingually in German and English? No, I started to learn English at 10. Which is probably not that much later than when medieval Europe...