Zompist Bboard Again

‘Clichéd’ is a weird word when you think about it. The original French verb is clicher ‘to copy/stereotype’, from which is derived the past participle cliché ‘stereotyped’, or as a noun ‘a stereotype’. This was then borrowed into English as the noun ‘cliché’, which was then verbed, making the past ...

At my job, a lot of the codebase is made of functions like prepare_breakfast_and_vacuum_the_room() , where both tasks are intricately woven together. It means that if you want to vacuum a rug... well, you can't really re-use this function unless you (1) initialize some dummy breakfast data, or (2) d...

I often heard it the claim that the Greek of the Gospels is, in fact, pretty bad Greek and obviously non-native. I'd love to know enough Greek to be able to see that for myself! I don't know Greek either, but from what I've heard, it depends on which one: Mark is the most obviously non-native, whil...

Well, they're common enough in police procedurals.

Related, and just as minor. I wish my colleagues would learn to use a parser for command-line applications, instead of relying only on argument order. Every time I have to use one of their programs, the command has to be something like ./whatever source.txt 1 0 true config_file.txt false 1 output.bi...

I caught myself saying piece of shits instead of pieces of shit. Has anyone heard that from native speakers?

I haven't watched a French dub in a long time, but here are a few things I remember about "dubbing French". When to use "tu" or "vous" is often a problem. Often, we see characters that start with "vous" (they've just met and the situation seems to warrant it),...

Apparently my brain has nothing else to do than think about a message from nearly two years ago. Oh well. So why not simply put a Blu-Ray quality video file on a DVD, instead of using a whole new different medium? Remember that Blu-Ray discs are already 15 years old. Video encoding formats have kept...

("Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.")

There also apparently is an impeachment procedure in France (Article 68 of the Constitution), but I have no idea if it's ever been considered or what the conditions are. It has never been used so far. The conditions are really high: it can only be applied in case of "a breach of his duties pat...

Does it change the date of either a) the next presidential election No, it's still scheduled for 2027. It's almost impossible to remove the French President, though a hostile Assembly can render him relatively harmless. Unless Macron personally decides to resign, which he probably won't. or b) the ...

Some people with too much money on their hands want to use their money to speculate. If they do so with things real people may use , like real estate, it can have bad consequences, like making housing unaffordable to normal people. I'd rather let them speculate on something nonexistent like NFTs. Th...

Point taken. But remember, Lindsey is also interested in teaching EFL using SSBE as a model. For EFL learners, it can be confusing to see GOOSE transcribed as /uː/, which in IPA means a back monophthong, when in SSBE this vowel is neither back nor a monophthong. You can't ask beginners to keep two d...

Also in Hebrew, the Tanakh is an acronym of its three parts: Torah (the Law or Teaching), Nevi'im (Prophets) and Ketuvim (Writings).

I think people say modern IPA to mean "Lindsey's transcription of modern British English in IPA", and traditional IPA to mean "the traditional transcription of Received Pronunciation in IPA". Both use the standard IPA.

Welp... Both my grandmothers died within weeks of each other. This wasn't exactly a surprise: both were over ninety, and had severe health problems. One was such a basket case of medical conditions that doctors were surprised she was even alive. But... it still hurts. Now I have no grandparent left.

English pest (animal causing nuisance) and French peste (the plague)

English pestilence (a devastating infectious disease) and French pestilence (foul smell, stench)

Those who think that nuclear power was the solution to the climate problem miss two things: And those who think solar and wind are the solution miss one thing: both are unreliable. We saw this last winter, when production fell to near-zero because of the weather, precisely when houses needed heatin...

I think I have little to add to the conversation, but one of Raphael's questions hasn't been answered. What else renders equally large swaths of land uninhabitable for a human lifetime or longer? Fugu accidents? Rampaging elephants? Sinkholes? Of course fugu and elephants can't make a large swath of...

I'm one of those curmudgeons who insists on 2e. It's interesting, really. I've never played AD&D 2e, since I started with 3rd Edition. From what I've gathered, AD&D 2e had the best campaign settings ever: Spelljammer , Dark Sun , Planescape ; and also some great video games like Baldur's Ga...