Venting thread

[Travis B.]

There’s a guy on Threads who is complaining that we call it “Havana” and not “La Habana” in English. People are replying to him talking about intervocalic lenition in Spanish and he is trying to deny it exists, citing his birth in Puerto Rico and doubling down when presented with evidence to the contrary.

Is this person one of those exonyms-are-bad people?

[Man in Space]

There’s a guy on Threads who is complaining that we call it “Havana” and not “La Habana” in English. People are replying to him talking about intervocalic lenition in Spanish and he is trying to deny it exists, citing his birth in Puerto Rico and doubling down when presented with evidence to the contrary.

Is this person one of those exonyms-are-bad people?

It appears so. He’s also from Cuba, where, according to him, /b/ does not lenite between vowels—despite evidence contradicting him. (He seems to believe that about Spanish in general.)

[Travis B.]

There’s a guy on Threads who is complaining that we call it “Havana” and not “La Habana” in English. People are replying to him talking about intervocalic lenition in Spanish and he is trying to deny it exists, citing his birth in Puerto Rico and doubling down when presented with evidence to the contrary.

Is this person one of those exonyms-are-bad people?

It appears so. He’s also from Cuba, where, according to him, /b/ does not lenite between vowels—despite evidence contradicting him. (He seems to believe that about Spanish in general.)

I wonder what his view is of the fact that we call Munich Munich and not München and Florence Florence and not Firenze in English...

[Man in Space]

I wonder what his view is of the fact that we call Munich Munich and not München and Florence Florence and not Firenze in English...

If you want to ask him, go ahead. I posted multiple YouTube videos of Cuban Spanish and finally got him to shut up about it.

[Raphael]

The current uncertainty whether the world will make it to the end of the year, or even to the end of the month, is very unpleasant for me.

[WeepingElf]

The current uncertainty whether the world will make it to the end of the year, or even to the end of the month, is very unpleasant for me.

I consider an end of the world within this year very unlikely. Sure, we have Trump's election victory, which is IMHO the worst political disaster since 1933, but the free world managed to stop Hitler, too, although at a monstrous price. So keep calm and carry on; this is not the end.

[Torco]

I think doomscrolling and paying attention too much to the news can have that effect of "omfg this is all going to blow up". i don't have any answers, except mentioning that ceasing to consume news is in fact an option and that i try to do it when it harms my mental health, but i totally understand how one might feel that keeping up with things is a duty or something like that. I think taking concrete self-protective or collective action is better: for example, when I got my europ passport I felt a lot more chill afterwards, even though I don't think I'll be using it a lot (just having the option to bug out is reassuring).

that being said, yeah, however many minutes to midnight we are, it's too close.

[bradrn]

I just realised that I wasted something like 18000 hours of precious CPU time on the supercomputer I use for my research simulations, due to messing up the input parameters in a stupid way. My supervisor is a lovely tolerant guy, but he’s also the one paying for this, and I’m not entirely sure how I’ll get out of this one…

[Travis B.]

I just realised that I wasted something like 18000 hours of precious CPU time on the supercomputer I use for my research simulations, due to messing up the input parameters in a stupid way. My supervisor is a lovely tolerant guy, but he’s also the one paying for this, and I’m not entirely sure how I’ll get out of this one…

Any time wasted on the 'bay' machines at my work is easily worth hundreds, thousands of dollars theoretically, since each of these machines cost millions of dollars individually, yet I have never seen anyone counting dollars wasted on things like my infamous pineapple scan.

[bradrn]

I just realised that I wasted something like 18000 hours of precious CPU time on the supercomputer I use for my research simulations, due to messing up the input parameters in a stupid way. My supervisor is a lovely tolerant guy, but he’s also the one paying for this, and I’m not entirely sure how I’ll get out of this one…

Any time wasted on the 'bay' machines at my work is easily worth hundreds, thousands of dollars theoretically, since each of these machines cost millions of dollars individually, yet I have never seen anyone counting dollars wasted on things like my infamous pineapple scan.

But these aren’t our machines — the supercomputer is in Canberra, and we pay them quarterly to get a certain amount of time on them. Once we’ve used up that time, we can’t use them any more until we pay more.

(Also… ‘pineapple scan’? Is this some story I haven’t heard?)

[bradrn]

Update: looks like I misunderstood the situation. The time we get every quarter is in fact free; presumably you can pay to get more hours, but we haven’t. Still not great, but not as catastrophic as I thought it was.

[Travis B.]

(Also… ‘pineapple scan’? Is this some story I haven’t heard?)

Well... they told us that our software wasn't safe to scan humans with one day, and I needed to scan something and didn't want my bay time to go to waste, and a phantom wouldn't do for this particular scan (too regular, too unnatural), so I went to the local grocery store and picked up a whole, uncut pineapple, and we stuck it in the bore and scanned that. Afterwards I took it home and ate it. It was delicious.

[bradrn]

(Also… ‘pineapple scan’? Is this some story I haven’t heard?)

Well... they told us that our software wasn't safe to scan humans with one day, and I needed to scan something and didn't want my bay time to go to waste, and a phantom wouldn't do for this particular scan (too regular, too unnatural), so I went to the local grocery store and picked up a whole, uncut pineapple, and we stuck it in the bore and scanned that. Afterwards I took it home and ate it. It was delicious.

Wait, what machines are these? I don’t actually know what you do for work.

[Travis B.]

(Also… ‘pineapple scan’? Is this some story I haven’t heard?)

Well... they told us that our software wasn't safe to scan humans with one day, and I needed to scan something and didn't want my bay time to go to waste, and a phantom wouldn't do for this particular scan (too regular, too unnatural), so I went to the local grocery store and picked up a whole, uncut pineapple, and we stuck it in the bore and scanned that. Afterwards I took it home and ate it. It was delicious.

Wait, what machines are these? I don’t actually know what you do for work.

I work on software for image reconstruction (i.e. turning the K-space data we get from the hardware into human-viewable images) for MR scanners.

[bradrn]

Well... they told us that our software wasn't safe to scan humans with one day, and I needed to scan something and didn't want my bay time to go to waste, and a phantom wouldn't do for this particular scan (too regular, too unnatural), so I went to the local grocery store and picked up a whole, uncut pineapple, and we stuck it in the bore and scanned that. Afterwards I took it home and ate it. It was delicious.

Wait, what machines are these? I don’t actually know what you do for work.

I work on software for image reconstruction (i.e. turning the K-space data we get from the hardware into human-viewable images) for MR scanners.

Ah! I see.

(I’ve used NMR a lot in chemistry, but I don’t know much about the imaging side of things.)

[Starbeam]

I haaaaate educational or journalistic texts being written in ornamental language. Especially verbatim repeats of others' ornate language, as I'm against official phrases by default. But moreso, I wish people knew education is for the student; not expressing yourself like you're writing a poem. You can make art instead. I value direct, flat, casual speech. IME, less ways to misinterpret it and less ways for people to co-opt it. If you can't rephrase it, you did not learn. Most of it reads like advertizements, which tells me what I need to know about their commitment to actual change or documentation.

"I can learn from that language and I like reading it". Great, the majority of non-creative texts are written for people like you. I'm not asking to have them taken away, but for people to not make that some standard.

[Travis B.]

I haaaaate educational or journalistic texts being written in ornamental language. Especially verbatim repeats of others' ornate language, as I'm against official phrases by default. But moreso, I wish people knew education is for the student; not expressing yourself like you're writing a poem. You can make art instead. I value direct, flat, casual speech. IME, less ways to misinterpret it and less ways for people to co-opt it. If you can't rephrase it, you did not learn. Most of it reads like advertizements, which tells me what I need to know about their commitment to actual change or documentation.

"I can learn from that language and I like reading it". Great, the majority of non-creative texts are written for people like you. I'm not asking to have them taken away, but for people to not make that some standard.

Do you know what register is? (You are essentially saying "higher registers are bad, everything should be written as if it were directly quoted speech".) If it weren't for my posts about English dialects and that here, you would have little idea that I don't speak very much like how I write in my posts here.

[bradrn]

I haaaaate educational or journalistic texts being written in ornamental language. Especially verbatim repeats of others' ornate language, as I'm against official phrases by default. But moreso, I wish people knew education is for the student; not expressing yourself like you're writing a poem. You can make art instead. I value direct, flat, casual speech. IME, less ways to misinterpret it and less ways for people to co-opt it. If you can't rephrase it, you did not learn. Most of it reads like advertizements, which tells me what I need to know about their commitment to actual change or documentation.

"I can learn from that language and I like reading it". Great, the majority of non-creative texts are written for people like you. I'm not asking to have them taken away, but for people to not make that some standard.

Do you know what register is? (You are essentially saying "higher registers are bad, everything should be written as if it were directly quoted speech".) If it weren't for my posts about English dialects and that here, you would have little idea that I don't speak very much like how I write in my posts here.

No, they’re saying ‘there is a time and a place to use certain registers, and this is not one of them’. Which I agree with.

[Travis B.]

No, they’re saying ‘there is a time and a place to use certain registers, and this is not one of them’. Which I agree with.

They specifically said that educational and journalistic texts should be written like "casual speech" (to quote), i.e. in a low register. How we are writing right now is not like casual speech at all, rather it is a rather formalized written register. Probably the only allowance for lower-register features in our writing here is common, rather standardized contractions (and this is not really lower-register either, as many of the very common contractions found in everyday speech do not typically feature in our writing here).

[bradrn]

No, they’re saying ‘there is a time and a place to use certain registers, and this is not one of them’. Which I agree with.

They specifically said that educational and journalistic texts should be written like "casual speech" (to quote), i.e. in a low register. How we are writing right now is not like casual speech at all, rather it is a rather formalized written register. Probably the only allowance for lower-register features in our writing here is common, rather standardized contractions (and this is not really lower-register either, as many of the very common contractions found in everyday speech do not typically feature in our writing here).

I’m not so sure. I wrote my Master’s thesis in a style which my supervisor described as ‘conversational’, and everyone seemed to like it a lot. IIRC, the feedback from reviewers was that it was easy to read.

More generally, I feel that the English ‘high register’ admits a considerable amount of variation. We just don’t see a lot of it because, frankly, most people are terrible writers. (This applies especially to papers in the sciences.) But it is definitely possible to remain in a formalised register while keeping the text easy to read. It doesn’t necessarily involve importing features directly from casual speech — or even using contractions — but rather in avoiding features which are exclusive to high register, which I presume is what Starbeam meant by ‘ornamental language’.

EDIT: I should give some examples of those ‘features which are exclusive to high register’. Off the top of my head, they include: replacement of common words (especially verbs) by uncommon ones; greater frequency of the passive voice and other impersonal constructions; greater use of acronyms and symbols; highly embedded clause structures. I’m sure we can think of more if we try.