Zompist Bboard Again

What vowel do people have in the first syllable of "Halloween"? LOT or TRAP?

Strangley, I have LOT in "Halloween", but TRAP in "hallowed" and "hallow".

What is the usually re-phrasing of the verb "to vomit" that contains the word "sick"? "To be sick"? "To fall sick?" "To get sick"? The colloquial way to say "to vomit" is "to throw up". "To be sick" means to be ill, and...

Behold! The techbros' latest glorious idea: Uber, but for drug trafficking.
- https://x.com/superalbs/status/2081291778116747611

Russia will not sit idly by. I expect them to replicate, innovate, and mass produce the technology, just like they've already done with drones. Of course both sides are trying to make advances. The Ukrainians seem to make them faster, though. And if Russia's oil export capacity is devastated, so is...

Yes, Ukraine's kill ratio is positive, and Russia's ability to export oil is so degraded that they're now having fuel shortages *inside* Russia, but I see little chance for Ukraine to gain back the land that it's lost, except by grinding forward the same way that Russia has, and Ukraine can't affor...

Let me ask you this: do you think Ukraine could win a war against Russia? Rather than 3x the population of Russia, it's 1/3. It had little military experience and a large number of Russian speakers. Yet it's winning. I wouldn't say that Ukraine is "winning". It's very slowly losing ground...

Do you think that Europe could win a war against Russia? While obviously European countries all have their own armies, it has been eighty years since their last major war. They will have to face millions of battle-hardened fanatics with nothing but basic training and their grandfather's fading memo...

So if neither the radical analysis nor the conservative analysis is right, then what? Do we chalk the concept of phonemes and phonemic awareness up to the influence of literacy? Do we dismiss any notions of phonemic awareness having any reality and declare supposed evidence for the conservative ana...

I admit I'm a bit confused by this: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwvgy1mj4yqmo Assuming that he has neither been cloned nor resurrected, it turns out that Mitch McConnell was alive all the time. So why, then, did so many of the people around him or in his party act in such suspicious ways? The...

For me, being has two syllables, centering , wondering , doubling , heckling , wandering , thundering etc. have three, and belittling has four. Sampling could have two. When I was younger, I pronounced your three syllable words with three syllables, but as I've aged, I now pronounce them with two s...

Etymonline says it's first attested in the 1580s, so the answer to "was it borrowed too late" is no. However, it also mentioned the form was "talke", so if that final "e" wasn't silent, we'd have two syllables, "tal" and "ke", which could explain. J...

That doesn't mean that climate change is the only thing parties should talk about. WeepingElf is right that leftists need to provide a positive vision too. Yes, this is basically what I'm saying. There's a grain of truth in what jcb is saying: there's a lot of focus on individual lifestyle changes....

I guess we just have to accept things such as driving massive internal-combustion-engine SUV's on hour-long (each way) commutes each day then, lest we offend someone with the notion that they may have some part in what is being done to the environment. I think this scenario is just as silly as you ...

The "cat" word is a known wanderwort, so the rendering of the stop as voiced or unvoiced may reflect something in the (unknown) source language. But the other examples hint at least at a sporadic sound change in Romance. Are there any known Romance varieties that have consistent voicing o...

(1) Lecturing about the dangers of climate change in the *future* is going to fall flat to somebody who is struggling *now*. When are we allowed to talk about destroying the ecosphere? A lot of changes are needed to our lifestyle... when were you planning to do that? I guess no changes need to be m...

I can only say that it's awful, if not unexpected (you could sort of see that coming eventually...) Yes, it is awful, and I have to say that the progressives communicate suboptimally: they warn of the dire consequences of business as usual, but do not present an attractive alternative future. Write...

Probably because it was so devastated by WWII, Tokyo has been able to build far more housing than Europe or the US, and thus is more affordable. So Japan has had no choice but to get used to smaller living spaces instead of sprawling suburbia, lest large swathes of its population go homeless. It's ...

I'm surprised at the last remark. Cities are pretty densely built - Inner Paris is comparable to Manhattan. Other cities I'm familiar with (Lyon, Marseille, London, Munich, Berlin, Brussels) are less spectacular in that respect but still very densely populated; and outside inner cities there's a lo...

Point taken. If we rule out everyone getting a car, though, what about everyone getting an electrically-assisted bicycle? Yes, of course. As I've pointed out, the median world income happens to match the median income in Brazil, and that is pretty comfortable even by American standards: home applia...