what the fuck is wrong with some europeans that they are so invested in “it’s better/safer here than america” that they’re going to argue that because they have better conditions for people on bicycles, they have no need for helmets??
Like, y'all, I hate to break it to you, but you can crack your head open just tripping on your feet, and you are almost certainly going to be going faster on a bike, even at a leisurely pace, so if you lose control of your bike, sure you could be fine, maybe just a scraped knee, but you could literally still crack your head open?
Listen I’m not going to be like EVERYONE HAS TO WEAR A HELMET RAWWWRGHSL:KSDJF because frankly even I don’t wear a helmet 90% of the time, but I’m at least capable of acknowledging that I should.
Bike helmets aren’t rated for the sorts of injuries you get on a bike anyway. They’re rated for a static drop of 1m to concrete. They prevent fractures, but not concussion.
They’re good if you need more confidence to asset yourself on the road, but in terms of actual protection… The jury is out.
Personally, I don’t bother when cycling around my small town, away from main roads. When I’m cycling around cities I need that extra boost of confidence to assert myself and make myself seen.
There’s also preliminary research to suggest motorists are less safe around helmet wearers.
Poor woman was crushed between the wheel and body of a truck recently near us. Helmet don’t stop that.
The issue with helmet fanatics, such as the American cycling community is infested with, is that they spent all their time arguing for helmets and not for better infrastructure. Better infrastructure is what prevents injury, not helmets
….cool so a concussion is still better than a fracture, tho?? and just because helmets can’t stop you from getting your head CRUSHED BY A CAR doesn’t make them useless??? wtf is wrong with you people? Infrastructure changes won’t prevent all accidents, and if wearing a helmet can minimize injury (the whole point is to do that, not to prevent any injury at all, bc you can’t prevent all injuries????) then why would you not at least acknowledge that it helps???
I’m not even a “helmet fanatic” (what does that even MEAN, someone who’s very concerned about trying to minimize serious preventable injuries???) but I can recognize that it’s better than not having one if you get pitched off your bike and hit your head????
Fucking hell, it’s not a zero-sum game, it’s not “you can only have helmets OR good infrastructure”, I just.
Go fuck yourself, frankly.
also if bike helmets aren’t rated for preventing concussions then this seems like an excellent reason to argue that bike helmets should be improved
in addition to improving infrastructure, which we ought to be doing for several other reasons anyway
Helmets are actually working on reducing concussion! Virginia Tech has a really cool helmet testing program that evaluates helmets on their ability to reduce concussion both from a cranial impact and from the sloshing around after. (Quick note that helmets also expire and should be replaced after an impact event/crash or after ~5 years.)
Better infrastructure is good, helmets are also good. Belt and suspenders, mask and vaccine.
I agree with all of this post, but @smallercommand I have to ask…
What do you mean by suspenders? ‘Cause neither of the definitions I know make sense in this context.
@ruffboijuliaburnsides this one I can answer! The phrase refers to holding up your trousers with both a belt and the elastic doohickies that go over your shoulders. In other words, doubling up on safety equipment.
This began as a guide to describing Afro/curly hair but of course, I got carried away. From look and texture of hair, colors and various styles, this guide serves as a thesaurus of sorts for hair, as well as pointers for use in your writing.
Culturally Significant Hair Coverings:
Know the meaning behind head wear and why it’s worn, when and by whom, such as a Native Nation’s headdress, before bestowing a character with it.
Appropriative Hairstyles: Keep in mind that Afro styles should be kept to those in the African Diaspora, such as dreadlocks,cornrows + certain and many braided styles.
Tread carefully describing Afro hair as “wild”“unkempt”“untamed”or any words implying it’s unclean or requires controlling.
“Nappy”and“wooly” are generally words to stay away from, the first having heavy negative connotations for many and the latter, though used in the Holy Bible, is generally not acceptable anymore and comes off as dehumanizing due to Animal connotations.
There are mixed feelings on calling Black hair “kinky.” I’m personally not opposed to the word initself and usage depends on the person’s race (I’m more comfortable with a Black person using it vs. a Non-Black person) as well as their tone and context (if it’s used in a neutral or positive tone vs. negatively/with disdain). Get feedback on your usage, or simply forgo it.
Combination Words: Try combining words to illustrate look of hair. A character with springy coils that dance across her shoulders with every movement, the man with thick silvery hair slicked back into a ponytail…
Mind Perspective: Depending on POV, a character might not know exactly what cornrows or a coiffure style is, at least in name, and it might make more sense if they described the hairdo instead. More defining terms might come from a more knowing source or the wearer themselves. One book I read described a girl’s afro puff as “thick hair pulled up into a cute, curly, poufy thing on top of her head and tied with a yellow ribbon.”
POC & Hair Colors: People of Color’s hair comes in all shades and textures. There are Black people with naturally blond and loosely-textured to straight hair, East Asian people with red hair, and so on. Keep that in mind when coding characters if you tend to rely on hair color alone to denote a character is white vs. a Person of Color.
Related Tropes: There are tropes and discussion related to People of Color, colored hair, and light-colored hair and features.
The word garbage sounds like it should mean clothing
It does! Or rather, it does come from garb. Garbage originally meant the small fabric scraps left over from tailoring–all the tiny bits that were too small to cut a pattern piece from.
Back when you generally bought fabric by the yard from a draper and then took it to a tailor to be made up, keeping the garbage was the tailor’s perquisite. Unscrupulous tailors were accused of deliberately cutting to maximize the garbage, which still had various uses in tailoring–as padding, or for backing buttons–and could also be sold for making paper.
That is DELIGHTFUL information oh my god!!! Oh that’s my new favourite bit of trivia thank you so much
Isn’t English weird in that there are multiple spellings of the same words? There’s a ‘British’ spelling and an ‘American’ spelling.. The script isn’t different, the word isn’t different, it’s just… spelled 2 ways? How weird would it be if that happened in other languages?
Has that ever happened in other languages?
There are some Portuguese words that can have a different spelling in Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese
For example, afetar (pt br) and afectar (pt pt), meaning to affect, or the word for 14 that can be spelled as catorze or quatorze
German orthography is generally the same in all German-speaking countries, with one little exception: In Swiss German, they don’t use the <ß> letter at all but use <ss> instead: Maß:Mass‘measure’,Fuß:Fuss‘foot’,Spaß:Spass ‘fun’, etc.
You could argue that Mandarin in the PRC and ROC is analogous (although it is certainly more usual to consider the traditional and simplified characters as distinct scripts instead)
Iirc there was also a period when most Russian language media outside the USSR rejected a great many spelling reforms (some of which were introduced under the Tsar, not the Soviets)
Interesting! I’m gonna have to look that up, haven’t heard of that before
Isn’t English weird in that there are multiple spellings of the same words? There’s a ‘British’ spelling and an ‘American’ spelling.. The script isn’t different, the word isn’t different, it’s just… spelled 2 ways? How weird would it be if that happened in other languages?
Has that ever happened in other languages?
There are some Portuguese words that can have a different spelling in Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese
For example, afetar (pt br) and afectar (pt pt), meaning to affect, or the word for 14 that can be spelled as catorze or quatorze
German orthography is generally the same in all German-speaking countries, with one little exception: In Swiss German, they don’t use the <ß> letter at all but use <ss> instead: Maß:Mass‘measure’,Fuß:Fuss‘foot’,Spaß:Spass ‘fun’, etc.
Whoa not using one entire letter seems like a major change!!
Isn’t English weird in that there are multiple spellings of the same words? There’s a ‘British’ spelling and an ‘American’ spelling.. The script isn’t different, the word isn’t different, it’s just… spelled 2 ways? How weird would it be if that happened in other languages?
Has that ever happened in other languages?
There are some Portuguese words that can have a different spelling in Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese
For example, afetar (pt br) and afectar (pt pt), meaning to affect, or the word for 14 that can be spelled as catorze or quatorze
There was a short-lived alternate orthography of Spanish that was used n parts of South America in the 19th century, with Chile using it the longest
Taiwan retains the use of traditional hanzi, while mainland china uses simplified hanzi
North Korea and South Korea also have some minor differences in spelling rules, and actually a different ordering for the letters (and there was a brief attempt at a slightly more radical change in hangul in North Korea that added five new letters)
I don’t doubt that there are other examples
Not English script but this regularly happens in Kannada language (it’s a language spoken in southern India) as well. Like ಗೋವಿಂದ (govim + da = govinda / ಗೋವಿಂ + ದ) vs ಗೊವಿನ್ದ (govin + da = govinda / ಗೋವಿನ್ + ದ)
the previous one is called sarala kannada (meaning easy kannada) and the latter one is called shuddha kannada (pure kannada)
This is all so interesting to know! Thanks for the addition!
‘ard’ is a real suffix in the english language just like ‘ly’ or ‘ify’, it just isnt common enough for us to notice its usage. ‘ard’ means ‘too much’ or ‘too easily’
so ‘mustard’ is something that is ‘too pungent’, just as ‘wizard’ is someone who is too wise, ‘coward’ is someone too easily cowed, and ‘drunkard’ is someone too often drunk
this implies that ‘bastard’ is someone who is too ‘bast’ and this needs experimentation and research
Are you fucking serious omg
This is pretty much correct. According to the OED bastard is from Old French and the bast- part means “pack saddle” which was used as a bed by mule drivers, giving the phrase fils de bast, a child conceived on the pack saddle instead of the marriage bed. In English it becomes bastard, the -ard being a pejorative. It is the same one as wizard and coward and drunkard.
I think my favorite part of this is finding out wizard is a pejorative.
Hm, Interesting. I would have guessed that “bastard” was not “too bast” but “too base” – as in “base-born”
‘Inclusion’ in the classroom involves all students’ needs, however diverse, being understood and met. These diverse needs should be addressed and responded to through increasing participation in learning, cultures and communities, and reducing exclusion within and from education. In English Language Teaching there has been a focus on the importance of promoting differentiation within educational policies and school organizational structures. However, in the classroom, although teachers may already be trying to fulfill all student needs, they still face challenges in being able to achieve this entirely.
The article ‘Inclusion’ by Sandra Stadler-Heer is free to read online.
what are some words that sound like they mean something other than their actual meaning? i’m obsessed with “pulchritude” which means “beauty” but sounds like it’s a measurement of how quickly an animal dies when you poke a hole through it
“lugubrious” describes something that looks sad but sounds like it describes a thick, slow-moving liquid
“bucolic” which sounds like some kind of hacking plague cough but which actually means, like, soft, lovely, pastoral. like when something is called bucolic my instinct is to recoil and then i’m like oh wait that’s like country life or something innocuous. i’m not about to catch something and die horribly.
well I mean you probably will, but at least it will be in bucolic surroundings.
“Natty” sounds like it should mean run-down and shabby, but in fact means neat and tidy.
I always thought hirsute means something like, vaguely intellectual. Like the kinda adjective you can apply to an opinion.
No, it’s hairy. It always was hairy why do I never learn
I’m still convinced it’s spelled hirstute
“doughty” sounds like it means fussy or maybe frumpy (like “dowdy”) but it actually means “brave and persistent”
“dreadnought” is what, “afraid of nothing”? but usually we put “dread” in fantasy names to make them sound scary, like “the dreaded nothing”.
Pusillanimous.
It means cowardly.
It sounds like it should refer to something somewhere on your body that absolutely should not be there and requires medical attention.
Vermillion should be a shade of green, not red (maybe it sounds too much like viridian, which does mean green).
And when I learned that puce means a shade of grayish red/purple, that also felt wrong. Puce should also be green.
“Crepuscular” means of or resembling twilight, but always looks to me like it means something to do with a blood infection or other debilitating bodily condition. (Probably my brain is making a false connection to “corpuscles”.)
“crepuscular” makes me think of geometry, for some reason.
“effervescent” means bubbly, but it makes me think of a cross between sparkly and iridescent.
A more concrete word for the subjective ‘line’ that exists in people’s minds. The whole 'you’ve crossed the line now’. Usually it refers to when something goes from being ok to being unacceptable. Varies depending on the person.
I’m writing an article on children’s songs and nursery rhymes in English, if your native language is English and you’d like to help me out please reply to this post and tell me one (or several) very popular nursery rhymes which most people (if not everyone) in your country knows! Also please tell me what country you’re from :)
Okay, but like - I was reading the final draft of my English coursework through before submission and Jesus Christ the conclusion is so confident, like it feels like all the gayness inside me was poured into that single paragraph
Itliterally radiates gayness
Hold up let me quote an excerpt:
‘When given the benefit of hindsight, it can be said that the attitudes Wilde presents in his letters are unique in his time. Victorian attitudes are known to be harsh and strict towards homosexuality, and Wilde was one of the few, perhaps the only, high society character of the time who was so outspoken about his sexuality. Certainly, this may be expected because of his flamboyance, but it should be noted that the association of flamboyance with homosexuality has only emerged in recent times. If anything, the irony lies in the fact that Wilde’s knowledge of fashion trends at the time made him exceedingly popular among women. Nonetheless, the bold and direct language that Wilde uses in his letters is certainly suggestive and specific enough to cast off any doubts about his sexuality. Though his letters are arguably private correspondence, and subsequently the perfect place for hiding any secret desires he may have had, few men of his time likely dared to be as bold and direct as Wilde was, instead opting to carry such a secret to their graves. It can further be argued that, even in his private correspondence, Wilde as a first-person narrator made poor or no efforts at concealing his feelings, and paints a reality in which any subsequent readers (aside from his obvious audience of Alfred Douglas) would assume homosexuality is widely accepted - indeed, even more so than the present day. While his choice of language could arguably be explained by his flamboyant nature, wherein language is exaggerated and highly dramatized, perhaps closer scrutiny can point to the actual passion exhibited by Wilde towards Douglas. Instead of excusing his language as mere flamboyance, in the more liberal society of today, we may actually embrace his language for his intended purpose - to pour out feelings of passionate and intense love to his lover.’
(Yes this is super long I’m so sorry)
But the minute I re-read this I was like well.I was on a rollthat day.
But then again this wasa love letter to Wilde so honestly, what did I expect -
**Another example of something I’ve looked at thousands of times without understanding what it meant.
The Latin adverb sic (“thus”; in full: sic erat scriptum, “thus was it written”) inserted immediately after a quoted word or passage, indicates that the quoted matter has been transcribed exactly as found in the source text, complete with any erroneous or archaic spelling, surprising assertion, faulty reasoning, or other matter that might otherwise be taken as an error of transcription.
The notation’s usual purpose is to inform the reader that any errors or apparent errors in quoted material do not arise from errors in the course of the transcription, but are intentionally reproduced, exactly as they appear in the source text. It is generally placed inside square brackets, to signal that it is not part of the quoted matter; and is traditionally printed in italics, as is customary with foreign words.
Saving the thorn from obscurity Is surely a laudable aim But if this letter deserves our praise The eth should receive the same.
The scribes of the Anglo-Saxons interchanged the eth and thorn until the first one fell from use and the second was left forlorn,
But for the modern Icelander their roles are more defined and could improve our English texts if we were so inclined.
The thorn (Þ, þ) denotes a voiceless dental fricative as in the English ‘think’ or ‘thresh’ but not the ‘th’ in ‘hither,’ whereas the eth (Ð, ð) is a voiced dental fricative perfect for ‘this’ and ‘that’ and most especially for ‘thither.’
So I propose ðey boþ be used in the Icelandic manner; ðen students won’t be loaþ to learn our spelling and our grammar.
To þink we’ve never fixed ðis mess is really quite astounding. One letter cluster for two sounds? Ðat’s damnably confounding!
Stop Trying to Figure it All Out / Deja de Intentar Comprenderlo Todo
Think about it. They say that learning a new language comes more easily when you’re young. That’s because a child has no choice but to accept the language just as it is presented to him. He doesn’t need some rigorous explanation about why something is conjugated irregularly or why a letter makes a certain sound.
Piénsalo. Dicen que aprender un idioma es fácil cuando eres pequeño. Esto sucede porque un niño no tiene otra opción más que aceptar el idioma tal como se le presenta. Para el niño, no es preciso dar una explicación rigorosa sobre la conjugación irregular de un verbo ni el por qué cierta letra hace cierto sonido.
One plus one will always equal two. But “two” is not equal to “too”. Or even to “to” for that matter. You see. You have examples of this in your own language. This isn’t math people! So be kind to the new language you’re learning.
Uno mas uno siempre será dos. Pero ser número uno y el ser uno solo, no es lo mismo. Y aún más diferente, ser yo quien los uno. ¡Ya ves! Tienes ejemplos de esto en tu propia lengua. ¡Estas no son matemáticas amigos! Entonces sé gentil con el idioma que elegiste aprender.
This is a major stumbling block for many people. Many language courses like to teach hard and fast rules. When students come across exceptions, and they’re always there, they immediately want to wrap their heads around it. I’ve got news for you. You cannot control a language, but you can accept it with all its beautiful exceptions just as they are.
Esto bien puede ser el mayor tropiezo para alguien que está aprendiendo. Muchos cursos de idiomas enseñan reglas concretas e inmutables. Cuando estudiantes encuentran excepciones, y sí que las hay, siempre quieren descifrarlas. Déjame contarte algo. Tú no puedes controlar a un idioma. Pero sí puedes aceptar el idioma con todas sus bellas excepciones tal y como son.
I have found that when you need an explanation for everything, even when there is no explanation, it causes frustration. This, inevitably, makes language learning boring and more work than it has to be.
Me he dado cuenta que cuando necesitas una explicación para todo, aún cuando no existe una, sólo causa frustración. Inevitablemente el aprender un idioma se convierte en algo aburrido y más trabajoso de lo que debe ser.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Love your new language the same way you would want your partner to love you. Unconditionally.
Simplemente no tiene que ser así. Ama tu nuevo idioma como quisieras que tu pareja te ame. Incondicionalmente.
Read this article in both English and Spanish, then compare and contrast the two forms of communication.
I see the original post going around every so often and it saddens me a little that it’s never accompanied by this thread explaining why it’s completely understandable how a child would arrive at these spellings in accordance with english phonetics
