Zompist Bboard Again

This week, I discovered the joys of mixing a little bit of pure lemon juice and a lot of mineral water. For some reason, I had never gotten that idea in my life before. This is good.

How Oxford university shaped Brexit — and Britain’s next prime minister I'm not sure how accurate that is, as a representation of British politics and Oxford. (I feel some schadenfreude -- I'm happy to learn France isn't the only country to train its politicians in an hermetically-sealed bubble of ...

It wasn't his politics I was calling rotten, but his serial backstabbing and self interest. He spent years formenting trouble in Labour in a semi-open rebellion that mostly seemed aimed at satisfying his own need for position and importance, and has now backstabbed his "friends" who presu...

- the acceptance of female rulers in general. Commynes obviously thinks (to the point of not having to bother saying) it's women's place to do what their husband tells them, and he doesn't question that inheritence is systematically biased against daughters. So, in his world, it's rare and unusual ...

Salmoneus wrote: ↑Fri Jun 14, 2019 4:17 pm[...]But if you're disgusted even by Labour MPs, [...]

I completely agree with you on this point, Sal, but it's interesting that you're now back to calling him a "Labour MP". I remember when you were calling everyone in The Group That Keeps Changing Its Name crypto-Tories.

I got that kind of feeling when I first heard of the Siege of Petersburg during the US Civil War. Large-scale trench warfare! In North America! Fifty years before World War 1! I don't think it struck me as surprising when I heard it, but the people who basically seem to believe that sex was invented...

This is getting sort of away from linguistics into philosophy, but selfishness and altruism. People usually assume that you're either selfish or altruistic, and in some places and contexts, there are intense, passionate debates over which attitude is better, but IMO there's actually no contradiction...

Olive as a color word refers to a greenish-beige like this . I think using "olive" to refer to people is alluding to the medium luminosity, while ignoring the greenish hue. Some olives in fact are more of a light beige and not deep green. I doubt it has anything to do with agricultural ou...

Parallel to the "Pronunciations you had to unlearn" thread, is there a thread about ideas about the meanings of words that you had to unlearn? Apparently there isn't. Anyway, one example I'm thinking of right now is that for an embarrassingly long time, I thought that in English, the phras...

When my Mom watches movies or TV shows and a character dies under circumstances that may or may not involve foul play, she sometimes says "Der ist gestorben worden", usually with a short pause between "gestorben" and "worden". It's a bit difficult to translate into Engl...

Another one of my newbie questions: what exactly is stress in pronunciation, physically? That is, what exactly do our mouths and throats do differently when we pronounce stressed syllables compared to when we pronounce the same syllables without stress? Depends on the language. In English, stress i...

Another one of my newbie questions: what exactly is stress in pronunciation, physically? That is, what exactly do our mouths and throats do differently when we pronounce stressed syllables compared to when we pronounce the same syllables without stress?

The reason why this is an issue in the first place is that my main conculture has a strong taboo, both cultural and legal, against given a young person any serious amount of power. If it's not about egalitarianism then it's easier. You can make junior officers ineligible to be a commanding officer,...

Sort-of status update: I hit a wall as soon as I tried to start working on sound changes, and I haven't gotten any farther yet. However, in an attempt to help my inspiration, I've given all my characters "provisional" names - that is, names in the proto-languages from which the modern lang...

Thank you, that's all very informative! The reason why this is an issue in the first place is that my main conculture has a strong taboo, both cultural and legal, against given a young person any serious amount of power.

Thank you, too!

Thank you!

I have a question about how to run my main conculture's military, and since I have no military experience myself, I have no idea how to answer the question. In modern armed forces on Earth, it's generally the norm to have two completely, or almost completely, separate career tracks for officers and ...

Newbie question: if lenition, or "softening", is one of the most common sound changes, then how do languages ever become "hard" in the first place? (Yes, this could have gone in the Linguistic Miscellany Thread, but I'm asking it here because the reason why i'm asking it is relat...

let's leave being from new york to people from new york, and being a kangressi to the already excessive supply of Indian communists Ah, the "everyone to the left of me is a communist" move. How original! How innovative! A very convincing point, though, especially coming from someone who, ...