Zompist Bboard Again

As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a den and laid me down in that place to sleep; and as I slept, I dreamed a dream. I dreamed, and behold, I saw a man clothed with rags, standing in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a book in h...

The rise is far right came in the 2010s. The rise in smartphones also did. Both are linked to increased anxiety. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy082dn7rkqo https://www.jeantwenge.com/igen-book-by-dr-jean-twenge/ . Also, smartphones are literally making people dumber as in the Reverse Flynn Effe...

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sun Aug 03, 2025 6:40 pm I can confirm that I indeed can read the Zeeb while logged out right now.

Ditto. I noted 90 guests just now.

kosen444 wrote: ↑Wed Apr 16, 2025 6:55 pm There are words in English that can mean their exact opposite – like oversight, which is either careful watching or a mistake; sanction, which can be to allow or to punish; or dust, which is either to add fine particles or to take them away

And cleave, which means to cling together or break apart.

This may be slightly OT, but has anyone seen this Daily Kos story? MAGA has helpfully provided a map of fascist supporting businesses to AVOID [wicked laugh] It's got links to both the Huffpost story and the "anti-woke" website itself. :roll: And as of this posting, the website is *still* ...

Well, Mao was, I think, a librarian by training, which is not exactly an industrial proletariat profession. Anyway, if that's true, it might partly explain his popularity among upper class students who wanted to be Marxists. Some more possibilities: 1. The Soviets had nukes and gulags. And they wer...

Is "yippy" even a word? - oh. That's where it came from. Never mind.

However, it's a very old word, and the early uses ("towndweller", "middle class") still survive, and affect Marxism as well. Unfortunately this makes "bourgeois" a weasel word. Even in your own paragraph above, to say nothing of the leftists you're criticizing, are you...

As Zompist said after 9/11:

I also believe that everybody is allowed to say something stupid this week. Nerves and emotions are going to be running raw.

Well, I suppose if the plant species died out, maybe through over-cropping. That's what actually happened to the medicinal leech species in some areas.

The ablaut reduplication rule I-A-O doesn't seem to hold *within* words: rabbit, blarney, over, tuna, wallet, loony, only, etc are all counterexamples. None of those are reduplicated, so why would it? Neither is Big Bad Wolf. I may be wrong about this, but I have the impression that "English&q...

The ablaut reduplication rule I-A-O doesn't seem to hold *within* words: rabbit, blarney, over, tuna, wallet, loony, only, etc are all counterexamples.

Has anyone seen this article?. A work colleague showed it to me, but it seems to have turned up in a number of blogs over the last couple of years. Interesting.

Now, can anyone think of any similar rules in other languages? Or any exceptions in English?

Rounin Ryuuji wrote: ↑Mon Feb 28, 2022 8:53 am I'm more of a fan of [y].

Good point. Or [ɯ].

I don't like the human-alien cross-breeding stuff for the same reason Justin B Rye doesn't - it's biologically impossible, obviously, blatantly, in-your-face impossible. But I've thought of a workaround. Let Spock be a full Vulcan, but let Amanda have been orphaned as a baby and brought up by humans...

The Viksen gendered endings are masculine -u and feminine -i , which they could either combine ( -ui , but that might still be seen to "put males first" so the most progressive might go for -iu instead) - this would still work phonologically - or to replace with a "neutral" vowe...

He's probably not as bad or as atypical as he thinks That could well be true. Perhaps the others in the class have had extra drawing tuition, so their better skill just means they have had several more months of practice with the pencil in their lives. Deru's parents either didn't know they ought t...

Something more subtle: have you thought about Deru's parents yet? Perhaps he is an only child, or an only son, and his parents spoiled him without meaning to - without either him or them being aware of it. Perhaps also, he was the star pupil of the small dame school he attended before coming to the ...

zompist wrote: ↑Sat Aug 14, 2021 5:30 pmWhat I need to work out is what Itep saw in Deru to start with. So far Deru is kind of a jerk.

Simple ideas first: maybe he's just very handsome, with dark eyes and thick curly hair.

Off topic, but just out of curiosity: do Almeans get male pattern baldness?

In the period of the Prose Wars (3230s), people were a lot more zealous about Revaudo and the feeling was still that royalists were villains. Oh, and that reminds me - when can we expect to see JotPW?The Xurnese grammar whetted my appetite. For one thing I'd like to know how Deru and Itep get on (o...