Zompist Bboard Again

I also remember reading about "ducks", which were magnetic objects used to drag metal strips into useful curved shapes for moulding boat hulls, or something.

Man in Space wrote: ↑Thu Nov 10, 2022 10:52 pm How could we forget "ass" (as in "out the ass" or "my dumb ass")?

Different entomologies: the animal comes from Latin asinus, while the body part is a variant of "arse".

IQ measures how good you are at doing IQ tests, and very little else.

This is something weird which popped into my mind in the small hours of a recent morning: things which are given the names of animals. Off the top of my head I can think of: Horse : clothes-horse, and the thing you do gymnastic jumps over Dog : "a tool or part of a tool, such as a pawl, that pr...

C++? Lua? Unity? For wimps, all of them. Real games programmers use hand-crafted assembler!

quinterbeck wrote: ↑Thu Oct 27, 2022 3:17 pm Today I learned there are fonts that style '&' in a shape that resembles its origin 'et', like this:

That's a lot nicer than a lazy curly "E" with a vertical line through it, which I've always disliked.

I have someone who's really using zeptoforth for a project, rather than just glancing at it momentarily. And of course, in the process they came across a number of bugs, which I have since fixed, but I would not have caught these bugs otherwise - and users finding bugs is infinitely better than no ...

Raphael wrote: ↑Thu Oct 20, 2022 9:37 am So there are now reports that Boris Johnson will try to make a comeback?

Oh yes; he's the most popular choice with the Party membership, and the only one with a proper mandate, even if it's gone a bit mildewy by now.

Raphael wrote: ↑Mon Oct 17, 2022 3:09 pm If this is serious rather than sarcastic, isn't this, then, the wrong forum for this?

I wasn't actually sure.

Here 's some evidence for the beginnings of a new sound-change in English, whereby initial prevocalic /h/ > /k/ when the preceding word ends with unstressed /i/. We can look forward to hearing this gradually extending to other contexts and perhaps other phonemes, thus getting a well-documented exam...

bradrn wrote: ↑Wed Oct 05, 2022 6:14 pm

doctor shark wrote: ↑Wed Oct 05, 2022 4:27 pm Here's a gratuitous picture of a failed experiment.

What am I looking at here? How precisely did it fail?

It's a meta-failure.

Jonlang wrote: ↑Mon Oct 03, 2022 12:21 pm Jacob Rees-Mogg is a disgusting person, btw.

Although he has said he welcomes fracking in his back garden.

The world will now watch on with envy over the next few days as Britain does the only two things it does well: portentous pomp and pageantry, and standing submissively in queues.

For balance, the Socialist Worker is complaining about the TUC and other organisations cancelling their strike action in reponse to "the death of a monarch".

Which two countries (currently existing, widely recognized) are the most similar? Interpret the word "similar" as you wish. Luxembourg is a complicated situation, because many people see Luxembourg simultaneously as similar to each of its neighbors, but it's probably most similar to Belgi...

She's now going to unite her party, cut taxes, create growth, and fix the cost-of-living crisis for once and for all.

What do you do if you're running with the wind aft and you encounter two vesels coming the other way, one on port tack and one on starboard tack? My understanding is that because you are the windward vessel, you have to give way to both of them, but as I've never actually sailed, I don't know for su...

You see them a lot in discussions of language change; is there a technical name for them? Input oinos low vowel merger ainas Verner's Law ainaz WG loss of final syllables ain Diphthong reduction a:n Back vowel rasing before nasals o:n Replacement limb wo:n Further raising wu:n Vowel shortening wun F...

yay for unconscious self-revelation!

"End Matter" in publishing refers to the stuff after the main text, such as the appendixes, indexes, references, and so forth. The name of the forum is probably a reference to it being similarly placed at the end of the list of forums. Or so I think.