Zompist Bboard Again

There's no right answer in these things... "Gally" is not terrible, and according to the translator's note the Japanese name is intended to sound not very feminine. It's rather unusual, so far as I know, for manga/anime names to be modified quite that much. Keep in mind that Japanese arti...

Man, the codebase I'm working on is so ugly . I could spend months just to clean up this ugliness. Of course, I won't, because I have deadlines to meet. My colleague tends to call everything a "memory leak": problems with uninitialized memory, or misaligned memory, or out-of-bounds access...

Félicitations!

Here, my special playlist for the 14th of July.
Renaud - Hexagone
Georges Brassens - La Mauvaise Réputation
Serge Gainsbourg - Aux armes et caetera
Renaud - Où c'est qu'j'ai mis mon flingue ?
Rush - Bastille Day

Does anyone else have a partially non-rhotic pronunciation of order ? I often have [ˈɔːɾʁ̩ˤ(ː)] for this word, and have heard others here with the same pronunciation, and actually find it hard to give a fully rhotic pronunciation of the word in quick speech. (Note that the vowel in the first syllab...

I've seen "biled" for "boiled" in old sources, though I forget which. But I definitely boggle at "jine" for "join." The old song "Oh My Darling Clementine" has jine for join . https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/College_Songs/Oh_My_Darling_Clementine

It's not the AIs that will kill us, it's the techbrocracy built on AI hype. Seconded. I wasn't surprised by the latest developments in AI, but I was surprised by how eagerly people embraced it, going as far as firing people to replace them with AI tools. "A.I. turns this single bullet point in...

Recently, I learned that English dinner can also be a midday meal. It can be traced to Old French disner (lunch). I wonder how common it is words for mealtimes to be false friends. Actually, it's worse than that: the meaning of dîner is different between various dialects of French. For me, speaking...

An old physicist joke: "I should have won the Nobel Prize in Physics. After all, Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize. At least I never did any crime against Physics!"

Babylonian or post-Roman Exile? Babylonian. Some later parts of the Tanakh suggest that their authors were true monotheists. Also, the deuterocanonical Letter of Jeremiah explains in detail that the other gods are mere idols and only the God of Israel is a real god, i.e. a pure expression of monoth...

I'd note that this is what the Tanakh actually describes! The kings were establishing shrines to other gods in the Temple (2 King 21:4). There's also evidence that people thought of Yahweh, like other gods, as having a consort: Asherah in Canaan, but Anat-Yahu in Elephantine. Ezekiel tells of women...

Is there anything Germanic is particularly conservative in? Well, at least, it's more conservative than Latin and its descendants in preserving some forms of ablaut, like sing/sang/sung . But then Greek and Sanskrit have also kept ablaut forms. Why today? Press the red button to find out ;-) Well, ...

For a long time, I didn't know of monolatry, and thought of it just in terms of henotheism. (are of the opinion that many gods may exist, but only one is deserving to be noticed and worshipped) I wasn't really thinking about the difference between "monolatry" and "henotheism". P...

That said, I think your observation is correct. I don't remember Clint Eastwood anywhere near a farm animal. In the series Rawhide and the film Hang 'Em High , he is actually driving cattle. But overall Raphael is right: the word cowboy drifted from "cattle worker" to "Old West gunsl...

Yep. Also used for chopsticks, conductors' batons, and of course bread. Also drumsticks. I once saw a music store right next to a bakery. A sign said "Buy three baguettes , get one free". I wondered whether the sign belonged to the bakery or the music store. (Spoiler alert: it was the bak...

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sun Mar 19, 2023 5:11 pm What about the Talmud, Chinese geomancy, etc?

Well, there are a lot of Jewish and East Asian people in IT!

I think you're referring to the use of the infamous article 49.3 of the French constitution. This allows the executive ( not the President) to commit its responsibility in front of the National Assembly: it means the bill goes through without a vote, unless the Assembly makes a vote of no confidence...

In French, we take the longer form de gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum and translate it literally, des goûts et des couleurs, on ne discute pas ; or we abbreviate it to les goûts et les couleurs ("tastes and colors") leaving the rest of the proverb unsaid. Another expression with ...

The question "why is this thing popular?" has, almost always, the same answer: random chance. Studies have shown that success is essentially random: the worst rarely becomes famous and the best rarely disappears completely, but apart from that, there is little correlation between quality a...

In heroic fantasy, dwarves tend to all be the same ... at least, male dwarves do. Dwarf women, on the other hand, tend to vary. Tolkien said that dwarf women looked almost identical to dwarf men, including beards. Gimli's speech in the film version was taken straight from the Appendices. It was said...

Scott Alexander said the same thing in another article, with (I think) slightly better phrasing. If you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled ci...