always blows my mind as a european when people talk about states like “yeah theres nothing in ohio/montana/wyoming/etc” because i look at a map like but. but theyre so big. every state could qualify as its own country what do you mean theres nothing there. and then i ask people from those states and theyre like “yeah theres nothing here” what do you mean theres nothing there!!!
What’s in the steppes of Russia, or the northern forests of Scandinavia? What’s in the Sahara desert?
id like us to sit here and identify some key differences between the sahara desert and ohio for a moment
as a former Ohio resident I think that the key difference is that the sahara probably has more jobs unrelated to meth
untapped meth market in the depths of the sahara desert
Today I learned: some people think “aero” and “arrow” are homonyms.
Baffling.
Uh…how do you pronounce aero, if not like arrow? No obvious alternative comes to mind.
“aero” is “air-oh”.
“arrow” is “ah-row”, with the “ah” a little darker than in “cat”.
As I said in the comments, I’m pretty sure this is another example of the Mary-marry-merry merger, which is a common source of dialect confusion. Most Americans will pronounce all three of those words the same; many of the rest merge two of the three.
I mostly but not entirely have a full three-way split. (“Mary” and “merry” are fully distinct in my head, but it’s subtle and doesn’t always come through out loud.) So I pronounce “aero” like “merry”, and “arrow” like “marry”.
A while back I came up with a dialect test and made all my friends online take it:
How many distinct rhymes do you have in the following 14 words:
marry hurry wary cherry blurry dowry
jury quarry eerie starry gory fiery Siri
couri(er)
For example, I (northwest England) have 13/14 of them—bc of the North’s foot=strut I have the same vowel in hurry and courier (many England dialects would have all 14 distinct).
Americans tended to have much fewer—I think the record was something like just 7:
marry = wary = cherry (the aforementioned marry/Mary/merry merger)
quarry = gory
starry
hurry = blurry = jury = couri(er)
dowry
eerie = Siri
fiery
Okay, “fiery” rhyming with any of those blows my mind; in my dialect it doesn’t have the same number of syllables.
I think for me I have
marry
hurry blurry jury
wary cherry
dowry
quarry gory couri(er)
eerie siri
starry
fiery
Which looks basically like the American sample you gave, but without the marry/merry merger.
With a couple of caveats. One is that sometimes “courier” rhymes with “gorier” and sometimes it kind of half-rhymes with “blurrier”.
Second is that vowel space is continuous in the world, but discrete in our brains. But that can create a sorites paradox. I want to say that “Mary” and “wary” are the same, and “wary” and “cherry” are the same, and “cherry” and “merry” are the same; but “Mary” and “merry” are not! But I could argue that “cherry” and “wary” aren’t quite the same, depending on how I stress and emphasize.
Similarly, I could pronounce a difference in “quarry” and “gory”, but I’m pretty confident I don’t actually do that.
I’m genuinely surprised at dialects that don’t rhyme hurry/blurry/jury.
Interesting, I’m from Northwest England as well, though I have a pretty standard southern accent (probably picked up from my mum) with the FOOT-STRUT split. I’d say I have all of these different, though Siri-eerie and jury-courier are very similar with the same quality and only a small length difference between them (So /sɪɹi/ /ɪːɹi/ /dʒɵːɹi/ /kɵɹiə/ respectively)
@jackhkeynes Hmm actually yeah of course /ɛ/ and /ɛː/ are just length distinctions, for me at least there’s a lot more difference in length between those than with the others, especially /ɪ/ and /ɪː/ which sound extremely similar in these example words, though I’d say the difference is much more pronounced in other contexts, like bit /bɪt/ and beer /bɪː/ are much more different, probably the /ɹ/ doing weird things again
So this is one reason I pointed out that vowel space is actually continuous but we treat it as discrete.
In a lot of these words, there are maybe slight length or stress differences. But they don’t rise to a level where I’d consider them “not rhymes”.
So like, “Siri” is shorter than “eerie” for me. Enough that I think it’s noticeable if you listen for it. But it doesn’t feel like an important distinction to me, and I wouldn’t call it not-a-rhyme.
But I think this is as much about how we analyze the sounds as it is about the physical sounds we’re making.
jackhkeynes Oh absolutely, BrE has a much stronger phonemic vowel-length distinctiom than AmE does
Oh that’s fascinating. I never knew that! (Even after living there for a year.) I wonder if that’s part of why Americans have trouble getting British accents quite right?
One weird thing I, personally, have going on, is that because of singing training I am unusually aware of non-phonemic distinctions. So that, like, I don’t consider the Siri/eerie vowel length distinction to be phonemic, but I still hear it really clearly.
(This comes from lots of singing instruction saying things like “make this vowel slightly darker”. That’s not phonemic—it’s “the same vowel"—but it’s a real change and you can learn to produce and hear it. Also useful for singing in other languages, where the phonemic boundaries don’t lie in the same places.)
This came up in a vicious internet fight once, where I pointed out that most Americans pronounce the word "strength” with an “sh” sound at the front. And a linguist told me I was definitely wrong, and after some back and forth they said, okay, yes, the initial “s” is often aspirated, but it’s not an “sh” sound because it’s not a phonemic distinction; everyone is analyzing it as an /s/.
Fascinating the different mergers people with similar numbers have
Got sticks of white sage and palo santo in that incense sampler and yeah I see how people associate burning them with “cleansing”, they don’t seem to scent the air so much as descent it
Every day when I wake up my house is nicer than it’s ever been before and every night looking in the mirror before bed my body looks better than it has in my adult life.
Well, felt a little wiped today so I guess I yard worked hard enough yesterday I need an indoor day to grow muscles; finished sorting and filing all my records since college
dude who has been obsessively following the pandemic for the past two years but got distracted over new year: hey I wonder how the pandemic is going
Since death rates don’t seem to be spiking very seriously, is this… basically a good thing? Is the whole country getting a minor infection and developing natural immunity, and the virus stabilizing into a stable equilibrium like the common cold virus (utterly endemic, every single man woman and child infected multiple times a year, but also largely harmless)?
the common cold viruses, and the (four?) other endemic coronaviruses that closely resemble their effects, yeah.
also all the kids shrugging it off today should be less vulnerable to it as adults.
…. except that isn’t how this virus works…
People are becoming worse with each reinfection.
are they though? why doesn’t that happen with colds and flus and the other endemic coronaviruses?
My working hypothesis is this is what the introduction of the other coronaviruses to the human ecosystem was like and after 200-1400 years of coevolving with it, the genetically vulnerable being felled before reproduction and the genetically defended left in stronger relative positions to support heirs, it’ll have about the same place
Never really valued the glitter of diamonds and I’m too aware of the “marriage = diamond rings” thing as a 20th century DeBeers psyop, but I thought a cut edge of the hardest material on earth was actually a kinda neat thing to go around with permanently mounted on the base segment of a finger
I do have some objections - I don’t know how you can write a history that goes “In recent decades, in competing with Marvel DC found strength in mining their legacy, eliminated their multiverse and then immediately brought the same ideas back, introduced themes of cosmic myth, and became obsessed with recapturing ‘80s Miller/Moore-era magic and aiming at ‘mature’ audiences” and not ONCE mention Sandman and the Vertigo stuff - but it’s pretty solid.
It’s true, Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns marked the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of whatever the ‘90 to today are. On the one hand grim antiheroes with Liefield pouches everywhere, but more thematically (and respectably) comics about comics with a sense of “okay, what if this shit were real”.
I’ve said before, the basic conceit of Watchmen was “okay, say there were superheroes, and they followed trends where there was a Golden Age of pulpy musclemen, and a Silver Age of scientific wonders, and a Bronze Age of social tension and self-questioning how and why would that have happened?” And then they explore how actual people might feasibly have behaved under those conditions.
The omnipitent, omnipresent figure associated with America would have been used as a Cold War superweapon, and also would have had a distant relationship to petty mortals. ‘70s disillusion with power would have redounded against superheroes as tools of the man, excoriated them as unchecked authorities, prompted calls for government control, and celebrated them as free men and vigilantes, even though these things are all in complete conflict. The woman who wore a skintight bodysuit and worked with a bunch of macho types would have been harassed and treated as a sexual object, the kind of woman who would decide to wear a skin-tight bodysuit and chase fame going on well-publicized adventures with a bunch of macho types would probably have a complex relationship to this fact, the daughter she raised in loose post-60s fashion into the shoulderpadded ‘80s would have a complex relationship to THAT fact, etc., etc.
And that was revolutionary! And around the same time, Dark Knight Returns made the point, “if Batman was real, he’d basically be a psychologically damaged para-fascist”. Which is almost conventional wisdom now, but that was revolutionary!
Of course before all that was Crisis on Infinite Earths which even established the idea “what if all this mythology was part of one coherent world”, and it was more mainstream and had an accordingly pulpy definition of “coherent”, but it was still a stab in this new direction, and set up the idea of a “generational” progression of heroes.
Sandman was, for all the goth brooding, not all that psychologically introspective or realist, but it was all in on attempting to tie stories in together. Dream was basically the embodiment of Story, and the Sandman universe was basically a meta-story for telling stories about storytellers and the stories they tell, which managed to weave into one coherent universe not only a bunch of early pulp-era comic books but basically the entire sum of Western and Near-Eastern history and mythology.
Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen did the same stuff with the Victorian literature from which the pulp tradition originated, then Grant Morrison and The Invisibles, and then if that wasn’t enough The Filth, which was kind of a riff on the very act of maintaining a comics continuity, only written with the subtle grace of a fucking sledgehammer - it literally features the characters gazing upon the giant hand of the (dead) Author/God holding a pen towards the end - with all sorts of juvenile-“mature” vulgarity along the way, basically a 13-issue adventure in crawling up his own asshole. I hear his recent run on Batman did an admirable job of integrating the character’s mythology, even the silly ‘60s stuff, into a respectable whole though.
One thing you rarely hear of these days is Marvel’s 1994 Marvels series, even though the “superpowers at street level” stuff presaged the feel of Powers, Astro City, and Top 10.
OK, I’m seeing some bad posts from some of the usual suspects, which, whatever, but in these bad posts I also see a couple intelligent and well-meaning people getting tripped up, and so I’m here to help.
Whenever the issue of Taiwan comes up, you are guaranteed to see pro-PRC people saying that “well the ROC also claims sovereignty over China, so they’re just as bad”. This is an vile and disingenuous claim, for two reasons:
First, nobody in Taiwan– not the KMT, not the Greens, nobody– expects or even wants to reconquer China, now or any time in the future. It’s not just that they know they obviously can’t, it’s that they no longer even want to. Anyone who tells you otherwise is bullshitting you. Formal independence and statehood is the most radical thing anyone in Taiwan wants, and most people don’t even want that; their preferred option is indefinite extension of the status quo. Claiming sovereignty over the mainland is a dead letter symbolic gesture with no intent behind it, and everybody everywhere knows this.
Second, and more importantly, the PRC forces Taiwan to keep claiming that it will reconquer the mainland someday. No I’m not being stupid: I’m serious, and it’s true. The government of Taiwan is required to keep saying that it is the legitimate ruler of China, no matter how ridiculous that is, because formally renouncing this claim is equivalent to a declaration of independence, and that is the PRC’s immediate red-line to go to war.
So now you see what an evil catch-22 it is to say “look, Taiwan says it is the rightful ruler of China and they’re going to invade someday!”. If the ROC does make these claims, they’re accused of imperialism. If they don’t, they immediately get invaded.
Don’t fall for this trick. When you see this claim, you now know how to shut it down completely.
It’s hard to believe if PRC had a better navy in 1949, they wouldn’t have chased KMT across the strait. Taiwan could have renounced their claim to the mainland and declared full independence in 1949 without consequence… or 1950 or 1951 or 1952 or… It’s only after PRC fully eclipsed them on the world stage by getting the US to be willing to adopt their one China policy did Taiwan opting out of the perpetual frozen civil war fall of the table.
America had a One China policy! Taiwan was the one!
True fact: US Secret Service protection details carry SMGs in leather bags so they can be ready at hand while not giving off a hostile appearance. These are called FAG Bags, and they’ll tell you that stands for “Fast-Action Gun” but that’s really a retronym, the first users thought they looked like handbags and made them look gay.
