Linkmeister @ 2: Wow. Thanks for the link.
I find it dismayingly poignant that her father was killed by the generals in their ascendancy; she has now been killed by the Islamist extremists in theirs.
Tania @ 20: Groan...
Re: the cellphone thing (ahem): an A&E (ER) doc of my acquaintance makes it very clear to all her friends that items inserted about one's person should have a flared base, so one of those old Motorola bricks would have qualified (and left enough of an antenna outside for ease of use/cell reception).
Talking out of my arse? *drumriff*
Koneko @ 43: As much as I'd love a London Hauptbahnhof in the German tradition, it wouldn't be practical unless built underground (Hyde Park, Green Park, or St James' Park, perhaps), although that would be very expensive and realised over far too long a time period to be politically viable.
However, I can't help thinking that there has to be a better way than the current sixteen stations. Crossrail will help, and it's good to have the Eurostar on the Circle Line, but still, transferring in London is pretty frustrating compared to, well, anywhere else in Europe.
Neil @ 19: re: train times: if you're unlucky and have to change trains in Plymouth, it takes longer from Cornwall to London now than it did before WWII.
re: London buses: Mmm. Mmmm. Mmmmm. (This is my sceptical face.) I used to live around the corner from Paddington, and it took me ages to figure out where the buses for the Marylebone Road/Euston Road went from (hint: it's opposite Peking-Seoul, a surprisingly excellent Korean and Chinese restaurant, on Praed Street. Highly recommended).
How anybody who's not a Londoner is supposed to (a) find their bus route, (b) find the stop that's used for that route in that direction, (c) find a working bloody pay-point because they all only take Oyster is supposed to do it, I'm not sure. My mother always gives up and gets in a taxi from the station to wherever she's going in Zones 1 and 2.
Andrew @ 20: Supersized MTA for rail might not be such a bad idea -- when I lived in Westchester, north of NYC, the train service was the best I've ever experienced. Once or twice a year there might be a delay due to landslides or flooding along the Hudson, the fares were reasonable and the service reliable. Sure, it'd be nice if they turned on the damn a/c before you got on the train in Grand Central, but hey. I quite like the idea of the MTA running a Boston-NYC-Washington shuttle.
Oh, blast, I forgot to mention that, in the UK, the train can often be faster than the plane. Take London to Edinburgh, which I used to do on business, for example, assuming flying BA from Heathrow and GNER from King's Cross, best case scenarios.
From Paddington, 25 minutes to Heathrow. 15 minutes to extricate yourself from the bowels of Heathrow, and charitably another 30 minutes to check in at Terminal 1. 1.00 of waiting time, and I'll split the "security" section between check-in and wait time. 1.20 of flying time. 30 minutes from the airport into the centre of Edinburgh. Total: 4 hours.
From King's Cross to Edinburgh Waverley (central Edinburgh): 4 hours. Walk into the station, walk onto a train, siddown, walk off the train.
Now, the first class rail fare was cheaper than the plane. Given that I was generally lugging an overnight bag and a laptop with assorted gubbins (occasionally a projector) around, plus whatever papers I needed, it was the train hands-down. I could spread out on a table and work, watch the scenery go by (the Northumbrian coastal section is stunningly beautiful), enjoy a pretty damned good restaurant car service...rather than dashing from train to terminal to plane to terminal to bus with luggage.
Incredibly impressive. I think I might take the train to visit my friend in Strasbourg. Oh, wait, that's five hours from Cornwall to London, then another five from London to Strasbourg -- which includes a Paris transfer.
Part of the UK issue is that everything is London-based, London's not in the middle of the country, and there's not a main London station -- there are sixteen, each of which deals with a different segment of the country. There is only one trans-London rail line, Thameslink, which connects London Bridge, Blackfriars and the King's Cross Thameslink station. Connectivity between London stations is by taxi (incredibly expensive) or Tube (still expensive and without step-free access between the majority of the London stations).
To some extent, France, Japan and Germany have an easier time of it geographically. Paris is more central, though skewed north of the French hexagon. Japan is easier since it's basically a big spine without bits l, and the German rail system is decentralised because of the way the Cold War changed its map and population/economy centres.
Oh, yes, and it's all privatised, and fares are absolutely, utterly insane.
Xopher @ 98: Sorry, I wasn't clear, it seems. (Also, unusual terms in linguistics is rather like shooting ducks in a pond. Of course, I can never deal with Sapir-Whorf without seeing Klingons in my mind.)
Okay, back to Chinese. Let's say I'm standing on the customer side of a cafeteria line. Li is standing on the other side, and there are two trays between us: one of pork and one of rice.
Physically:
folk | pork | rice | Ling
In Chinese, assuming that the , the rice is nei ge, and the pork is zhei ge. However, in meaning, the "nei" means "inside", as in "nei guo ren", which means "inside-country-people", "not foreigners". So, semantically my deixis is reversed from English. Does that make more sense?
Now, you want some interesting deixis, ask the people who live up near the Arctic. QI, the Stephen Fry panel quiz, tells me that they have different deixes for, e.g., "that thing we can't see", "the one up there", and so on.
The Chinese word for "thing" is "dongxi", which literally means "east-west".
In space, no-one can hear you scream in Chinese.
Spike @ 140, I seem to recall that the Economics meaning of widget predates the Guinness version. Economists were not inconsiderably put out about it at the time, apparently.
Ajay @ 84, Thinking about it as a person manufactured in NY of 100% British parts, the usual context for # meaning pound is on telephone keypads. I wasn't sure of the historical reasoning for the # being called the pound sign in the USA, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. Apparently:
In some regions of the United States and Canada, the symbol is traditionally called the pound sign, but in others, the number sign. This derives from a series of abbreviations for pound, which is a unit of weight. At first "lb." was used; however, printers later designed a font containing a special symbol of an "lb" with a line through the ascenders so that the lowercase letter "l" would not be mistaken for the number "1". Unicode character U+2114 (℔) is called the "LB Bar Symbol," and it is a cursive development of this symbol. Ultimately, there was the reduction to a combination of two horizontal strokes (cf. skewed "=") and two forward-slash-like strokes (cf. "//"). In this respect, names like fence or square — as well as the representation of the sign containing two vertical strokes (rather than slanted ones), as on many keyboards — are misleading.
Its traditional commercial use in the U.S. was such that when it followed a number, it was to be read as "pounds," as in 5# of sugar, and when it preceded a number, it was to be read as 'number', as in #2 pencil. Thus the same character in a printer's type case had two uses.
Nangleator@73, isn't that end result why the WGA is striking? ;)
theophylact @ 68, unless my memory is faulty and there's a Wikipedia conspiracy, the tittle is the dot over i and j and the jot is the cross through a t.
@69, a frenulum/frenum is any such fold that attaches one part of the body to another in the same way. There's one attaching the each lip to its respective gum as well. And, without wanting to make naughty references twice in the comment to the same post, we all have one below the belt, whether we're homo sapiens model XX with full internal bits or model XY with the nifty extendable hose.
Nix @ 60, # is normally a "pound sign" in the USA (which is, of course, £ in the UK; I've also heard # called "square" in the telecom context here in Blighty).
Bridget @ 28 re: "speaking girl": I was more referring to the tendency to use "thingy", as in "pass me the thingy and I'll put it in the thingy", as a subject or object even when the name of the thingy itself is known.
re: name-switching: my dear late grandmother used to have an awful time calling us grandchildren by the right first name (and only six of us in total!). She did the same with her sons-in-law, and as we grandchildren have grown she's started confusing us with our fathers and uncles too.
re: the momentary lack of ability to recall a specific word: the opposite of logorrhea, I suspect. (Logostipation?)
Joel @ 33: Interestingly, "this one" and "that one" in Chinese (Mandarin, at least, and I assume the other dialects) are reversed: "this one", zhei ge is closer to me, and "that one", nei ge is nearer to you. "nei ge" is also the Chinese word for "um", and can be pronounced confusingly close to an unpleasant racial epithet.
Emma @ 15: many gay men, myself included, do this. I call it "speaking girl". Part of speaking girl also includes that thing some women do in conversation where they continue a train of thought from earlier.
Is there a term for this "thing we don't know there's a word for"?
The dot over a lower-case i or j is called a tittle. I wish that the bar that crossed a lower-case t were called a tattle.
Oh, yes, Patrick, I hear you on the belt-loop thing. Interestingly, at my parents' house in Cornwall, which dates back to the 1700s, I never have the problem because the strike plates are lower down. You might have luck hammering the strike plates backwards, depending on how thick or ornamental they are.
I've got a "what's that thing called" for you: I can never recall what the name is for that lump on the back of the skull we all have. Wikipedia seems to tell me that it's the occipital bone, but the old Grey's Gray's Anatomy (curse you, Shonda Rhimes...) pictures aren't particularly helpful.
I remember also being surprised several years ago when encountering the word "snib", which turns out to be the little button on a Yale lock that one uses to lock it open ("leaving it on the snib") or closed.
Some may also find it useful to know the word "perineum" exists. I'll leave the (likely NSFW) research to the curious.
@ Bill, #4: Now that's a half-hawk monster I don't want to see.
Lila @11: You starting? ;)
Is it me, or does Boingboing attract an equal number of wonderful things and Internet nutjobs? I'm glad to see comments back there, but (without wanting to get all brown mustachey) they're nothing like as interesting or informative as ML's.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2008 | 1 |
| 2007 | 16 |
Total: 17 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by folk on LJ:
Show all comments by folk on LJ.