Something I learnt recently and which is rampant on gay social apps: sphallolalia - flirting that doesn’t lead to meeting irl.
Something I learnt recently and which is rampant on gay social apps: sphallolalia - flirting that doesn’t lead to meeting irl.
UK. Cold and hot water coming from separate taps. WTF? I was once told that it is because hot water boilers used to have their tops open to the outside, which meant the hot water could contain some debris, so it was important to use it only for washing and not let it mix with cooking water. But in bathrooms in some modern builds that definitely don’t use that kind of boilers you still get separate taps. I told one of my British colleagues about how it’s been bothering me since I moved here and she said “oh yeah, I never realised that I’ve never seen that in any other country”. She also told me that kids are just taught to wash their hands quickly under the hot tap, so that they don’t run the water long enough for it to turn scolding hot. WTactualF?
You can pretreat flour to make it safe but obviously the question is, did the cookie maker bothered. And raw eggs can be a concern, apparently 1 in 20,000 eggs contains salmonella (inside, not on the shell).
If you travel a lot, Toilet finder.
Edit: and not an app, but a website: Pairdrop - really useful for cross-platform file sharing, especially when you just need to email to colleagues something you snapped with your personal phone, but yoe have overly tight IT systems in place at work that stop you from connecting your personal phone to your email or OneDrive.
As a kid, it was a cartoon - The Little Mermaid. As an adult… It is a cartoon - Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse.
New cars. After a car has been owned by one owner, for however short a period of time, it dramatically reduces its price. At least in the UK.
Oh I didn’t take it as such 🙂 I just disagree.
Although using “data” as both singular and plural is acceptable in modern English, I once sat through an online training stating “[there can be] negative consequences if data are misused or falls into the wrong hands” which is just so cringe!
Edit: typos
“be” is an irregular verb in all languages, so it’s not unique to English. Bonus fun fact: Russian doesn’t have the verb “to be”.
A vowel is the core of a syllable. Y is not always that, as in “yes” - it works as a consonant in that word.
Sardoodledom
What linguistic rules does it break? 🤨
Non-native English speaker here. Disagree.
I still think your promoting the view of “this is obvious to me so it should be obvious to everyone”. Even your explanation would be confusing for someone who’s not an IT guy - what does it mean “end my user session?” People rarely go to the start menu to deal with their computers’ “on-ness”, they just press the hardware button that has an incomplete circle with a line on top or often no marking or label at all. Or they close the lid and that makes them think of their laptop as “off”.
I can’t really sympathise with you here. You’re clearly an IT guy, so the difference between log out, restart and shut down is as natural to you as breathing. For the average person is not that intuitive. For many people the computer is “on” when they press the power button and enter their username and password. And the blurring of the distinction is increased by most people having a smartphone where just lifting it up to your face wakes it up and logs you in (technically) at the same time.
I know you’re explaining it to them, but if that’s not something that they live and breathe, they’re just going to forget the explanation. I’m a molecular biologist, so to me the differences between genome, transcriptome and proteome are bleeding obvious, but I have a colleague who’s not a scientist but needs to become familiar with these terms. I explained them to her last week in an meeting that lasted an hour, but this week I had to do that again. She’s not stupid, it’s just all very abstract to her.
Whenever my colleague at the neighbouring desk left her laptop unlocked, I would go in, and create a new Word document saying ALWAYS LOCK YOUR LAPTOP in huge red font. She vowed she would eventually get back at me.
I once took a screenshot of some random text in a Word document with “CONFIDENTIAL” as the background watermark and then I used that screenshot as my lock screen wallpaper. When I locked my laptop and left my desk, she clocked the content of my screen and thought it was finally her moment to get back at me, but… it wasn’t.
I see you never got a reply to your question. I am obviously biased in favour of Pinker, but my perception is that “liberal hack” (and other epithets) is a mindless insult that people throw at him when they don’t like to uplifting message that he’s communicating, but can’t find anything logically or factually wrong with his arguments or his presentation of data.
The closest I saw someone trying to have a legitimate case of showing Pinker misrepresenting reality, was the criticism of this passage (also from “Enlightenment Now”):
What proportion of pairs of ethnic neighbors coexist without violence? The answer is, most of them: 95 percent of the neighbors in the former Soviet Union, 99 percent of those in Africa.
(i.e. only 1% is at war)
Critics pointed out that, at the time of Pinker’s writing, the number of countries in Africa at war was X, and X divided by the number of all countries in Africa is much greater than the 1%, so clearly Pinker is lying. But firstly, the passage talks about ethnic neighbours, not countries, of which there is much more in Africa and the former Soviet Union, and secondly, there is almost always more neighbours than there is countries in any region. For example in Australia, there are 5 states, but 6 borders (pairs of neighbouring states), so if Queensland went to war with New South Wales, 60% of the states would be at peace, but 83% of pairs of neighbours would be at peace.
Edit: grammar
Haha luckily yes!