Zompist Bboard Again

Ever dreamed about being in school naked? Well, I had the 2020 equivalent: I dreamed I was in the middle of a store without a mask.

there's a place called Death Mountain in upstate New York but the Google Maps photo collage is just screencaps of Zelda games: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Death+Mountain/@44.3211591,-73.6462476,3a,94y,90t/data=!3m8!1e2!3m6!1sAF1QipOn9Qg-gvHuH4Eff_8ZL5HRsv5sIKL7_N7_yr8a!2e10!3e12!6shttps:%2F%2...

I don't know much about linguistics beyond traditional grammar, but if I understand you well: it seems to me that, in French (or Romance in general), mood and modality are orthogonal. Mood (or at least verbal mood) is expressed through verb morphology ( je sais / je saurais / que je sache / sache / ...

I tend to agree. Traditional French grammar distinguishes verbes auxiliaires (of which there are only two, avoir and être ) which are usually followed by a participle; and verbes semi-auxiliaires ( vouloir, savoir, pouvoir ...) which are followed by the infinitive. These "semi-auxiliary verbs&q...

Even better with a Texas drawl: [ˌzɪiˌzɪiˈtʰɑɒp]. But French people speaking English consistently use [ɔ] for LOT, and it's close enough to the SSBE vowel anyway. I'd be happy with [zi.ziˈtɔp].

(Maybe people don't like this pronunciation because of zizi, a childish word for penis...)

If I run into Peter Doodson, remind me to smack him for calling the regular CD box a jewel case, not noticing that for some people it's homophonous with dual case.

Thank you guys. I was asking because I heard several non-native speakers call it a pen drive in English, a phrase I had never heard from native speakers before (and it confused me the first time I heard it). I would probably call it a USB key , as a calque of the French clé USB . In French, we say /...

I somehow managed to confuse Matthew Yglesias with Milo Yiannopoulos. No wonder the article I was reading made little sense...

Last night, I was hanging out in a flat with a few Marvel characters, including Black Panther (I don't remember the rest), and also one Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle (I forgot which one). An alarm system said someone was coming: they gathered around the door, ready to attack if necessary. It was actua...

What do you call this?

Just store them in any order then sort once. Yep, that's exactly what I did and it works like a charm. I've seen people store data with CSV files and query it by loading the entire file into a pandas dataframe. Guilty as charged. Any reasonably intelligent person with good instruction can learn wha...

In my case this is a purely personal project that probably won't be used ever again, so I'm not sure if it's really important.

So, I have to read some values from a file, filter them, then sort them. Hmm, given that I have to load them one-by-one and that's probably the slowest part, a simple insertion sort should work. Let's make a quick implementation and test it... OK, it works. Now, let's use a real data file... man, th...

If we're talking about wide-ranging changes: I suggest we change all language names that come from a country's name. If the country has several languages, it gives undue prominence to the one that has the same name ("Spanish" is only one of the languages spoken in Spain, so we'd better cal...

Maybe we could start by not using the word Dutch for the language spoken in the Netherlands and Belgium (because it's confusing when the word Deutsch refers to their neighbors), and call it Netherlandish instead?

Apparently, nobody knows what the name 7 Up means, because the inventor died before telling anyone. Today in "Words that Ryusenshi got wrong": I present millenarian . When I encountered it, I thought it had something to do with the new millennium, maybe? Like, with people hoping the year 2...

I thought Sioux was pronounced /sjuːks/, instead of /suː/. So I used to pronounce Siouxsie (and the Banshees) as /sjuːksi/, instead of /suːzi/ (which is actually pronounced like her real name, Suzie).

https://what-if.xkcd.com/80/ suggests "something in between pus and meat slurry".

Henry V by Shakespeare mentions tennis balls.

The name tennis would have been anachronistic for the actual King Henry V, though he could have played its ancestor, jeu de paume (and contemporary Kings of France were indeed fond of the game).

I have the same interpretation of quoting as you do, in general. Here, I was extending the meaning a little bit. I was thinking about scare quotes, when you use a word because it's the one in common use but still want to distance yourself from it. In this case, we're extending the meaning of "m...