Zompist Bboard Again

"Unionist" in Scotland means "in favour of remaining part of the United Kingdom", while "nationalist" means "in favour of an independent Scotland". alice is using "onionist" as a subtle jab at what I assume is the position she disagrees with. Nationa...

Travis, I generally agree, but I don't think that's what the word "apologizing" means. Wiktionary marks it as dated, but apologise can absolutely be used in the sense "make an apologia or defense; act as apologist". (I wonder what it says about us that a word meaning "make ...

For a while, I've had this nagging suspicion that, later this century, global warming will lead to all kinds of bad things that might otherwise not have happened, and lead to a lot of bad things happening more often and on a larger scale than they might otherwise have done, but the world won't end ...

Sure but that doesn't necessarily mean they've moved away from right wing politics. Perhaps they no longer believe that Trump is capable of killing the "woke mind virus" or turning back the clock on women's rights. They may well still support the Manosphere and all that and are simply wai...

Of course Yes, Minister got there first, as always. The episode "The Economy Drive" has a gag where the department had spent a bunch of money investigating how it could become more efficient and determined that it was actually understaffed.

Trump has responded to Europe sending tripwire forces to Greenland with a 10% tariff which may become a 25% tariff depending on if Mars is in retrograde and whether or not the pickles fall out of his Big Mac when he picks it up. This has resulted in Keir Starmer, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage agree...

As for PIE *a , I think it originally existed only as an allophone of *e next to *h₂ (I think the Early PIE values of *e , *a , *o and *h₂ were [æ], [ɑ], [ɒ] and [χ], respectively), but there are some items with *a that can't be explained by laryngeals, such as *gʰans- 'goose', which are probably l...

It's not my opinion. Widely used bias monitors consider the Guardian to be a fringe source. [The Guardian] is considered a newspaper of record in the UK [… Its] readership is generally on the mainstream left of British political opinion. Ground News is a Canadian news aggregator which uses bias rat...

I've been hearing worrying news about a bunch of Somali daycare centers in MInnesota getting caught engaging in rampant fraud. Here's some context. As I understand it, there was some fraud which was handled by the DOJ under Biden in 2022, but there was some procedural ugliness which drew the proces...

Columbus was an Italian, not a Spaniard. Did "Italian" even exist as an identity at that time? Columbus was Genoese by birth, and Genoa was effectively a Spanish satellite; his expeditions were done in the name of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, whose marriage was de fac...

Doesn't the golden snitch render the rest of the game rather pointless? The purpose of the snitch is narrative: it lets the protagonist unambiguously win the game, but because it's merely a huge points windfall and not the equivalent of the gun in rock-paper-scissors there's room to write stories l...

I entirely agree with Torco here. I'm not sure you do, given what you seem to be saying is "what if the agricultural industry employed several times more people" whereas what they said was "the planet could eat on a system where each farmer has a small-ish plot", i.e. everyone d...

the planet could eat on a system where each farmer has a small-ish plot, food is mostly produced for local consumption, and relatively more people are in the business of producing said food. How do you solve the following problems? One "small-ish plot" is not equal to another. A plot of l...

Might the confusion be that what Foxcatdog wants is not a translation relay but a localisation relay, passing a text through a series of con-cultural rather than con-linguistic lenses?

I know Zomp has read other work by Graeber in the past (e.g. an article on Smith's just-so story about the barter stage of economics , Debt: The First 5,000 Years , The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity ) and I just found out about this book which sounds interesting as a perspective on t...

(Yes, OK, some of the more hardcore anti-oppression types might be in favor of that, but they're hardly representative.) My understanding is this sort of thing is generally brought up as a thought experiment or a hyperbole to emphasise that the equality that people are actually asking for is alread...

Confusion caused by the language happening to have homophony is one thing, but the fact Foxcatdog said they "put in intentional homophony" suggests they made substantive alterations to either their language or the story for the sole purpose of creating bear traps for people further down th...

There is a longstanding war in English between those who would prefer to pronounce the H in words like herb and hospital , but not words like hour and honour ; and those who would drop the H in words like herb and hospital , but not the name Herb. Both sides accuse the other of inconsistency, which ...

ʌ is properly a back vowel in IPA, but it's used in the US (I can't say about the UK) for a more central vowel. I remember reading something at one point that said there's a conceit among English-language lexicographers that there's no such thing as a stressed schwa, when the STRUT vowel is often j...

It's perfectly compatible with conservatism to have a wish to destroy the newfangled innovations of recent times. This may be observationally true (and constitute evidence for the ideological slant of American politics that you can be "conservative" while advocating the kind of widespread...